2009 | Vegas Geek

2009 – a year in photos

December 31, 2009

2009 was an awesome year for me. I did a ton of traveling, I met dozens and dozens of really great people, I learned a ton of new stuff and, in general, I had a really great time. When I sat down to try and write a recap, the only way I could really remember all the cool things I did was to go back through my blog archives and my flickr feed. Photos seemed like a lot more fun, so here’s a recap of 2009… with photos.

January – WordCamp Las Vegas

I was absolutely blown away be the response I got from putting together WordCamp Las Vegas. That smirk on my face is definitely me thinking, “Did I really just pull this off? Yeah, I think you did.” The success of that event is something that I’m very proud of and the list of people I would need to thank for their support would take too long so I’ll just say a collective ‘thanks’!

January – Beer ‘n Blog

One of the best parts of running WordCamp was sparking the interest of a group of Las Vegas bloggers to get together on a weekly basis to talk tech over a couple pints. I think this was taken at the first event. We had nearly 50 people in attendance. What a blast!

February – Twestival Las Vegas

One of the great things about social media is the ability to bring people together offline. When you tell people that they can come out and have some drinks and all the money goes to charity, well, I’d call that a no-brainer.

February – Photo Safari Noobs

Take 4 guys, throw them and all their camera gear in an FJ Cruiser and point them towards Denver. Stop everywhere along the way that looked like it might make for an interesting photograph. That’s exactly what we did. It. Was. Awesome.

February – WordCamp Denver

WordCamp was the thinly veiled disguise that we used in order to sneak away for the Photo Safari trip. Here we are at lunch with Micah Baldwin, Ben Huh, Austin and Jeanna during a break at WordCamp. The lady in the foreground has kicked Todd out of his seat so she could get a photo with Micah because he’s awesome. Yes, we made fun of him for it.

March – Redondo Beach

My family has owned and operated a fish market called Captain Kidd’s in Redondo Beach for the past 30+ years. I grew up working there and even after 10 years of eating there 5 days a week, it’s still my favorite place to eat. This is us with 4 generations of our family getting together for some seafood.

April – WordCamp Reno-Tahoe

Yeah, I know. This isn’t a photo. But, it WAS the first time I got to stick a badge on my website that said I was speaking at an event. WordCamp Reno was one of my first public speaking events. I wasn’t as nervous as I was expecting to be. I am very appreciative of Colin Loretz for the invite to to speak.

May – WordCamp San Francisco

The granddaddy of them all. WordCamp San Francisco. There were nearly 800 people at that event! It was so big that there were people there I was TRYING to find and wasn’t able to. That’s a pretty big event in my book. While we were there we took some time to play the part of tourists. We went to Alcatraz and the Height/Ashbury district, but can you believe that we didn’t get to see the Golden Gate Bridge? Next year, I guess…

June – Paxton graduates

One of the proudest days of my life, that was. Watching my Son cross that stage as they called is name and handing him his diploma. That’s something I never did. I dropped out of school long before graduating. I don’t regret the decision I made all those years ago, but, I am sorry that my parents didn’t get to experience what I got to experience that day.

July – Whuffaoke in a trailer park

When Tara Hunt decided to move cross country, she didn’t just pack her stuff and drive. No, she sent her stuff with some movers and she drove a Winnebego from one side of the country to the other stopping at very spots to bring karaoke to the masses. Thanks to some last minute changes of plan, we ended up singing karaoke in the RV park at Circus Circus in 115 degree heat. As crazy as that all sounds, we had a great, great time!

September – Breakfast in Utah

Have you ever asked your spouse “Where would you like to go for breakfast tomorrow?” and have
her respond with a restaurant in a different state? Me, too. One Friday night we decided that having breakfast just outside of Zion in Utah sounded like a good idea. We got up early, threw the kids in the car and off we went. The best part is, we didn’t even go to Zion. We had breakfast and basically turned around and came home. This was a bench a stopped to photograph on the way back out of town.

September – WordCamp LA

Lots of travel this month. We headed back to Los Angeles for WordCamp. We all crashed at my sister’s house and then spent Saturday on the Loyola Marymount campus which was really nice. The night before we introduced some friends to the family restaurant where we BS’d for hours. This photo was taken during Shayne’s presentation a few hours before I spoke at the event. I had plenty of time to get him back… but I’d save that for later…

September – WordCamp Portland

Since moving to Las Vegas, I have said many times that I don’t think I could live anywhere else. Portland changed my mind on that one. I instantly felt like I fit in perfectly with the tech scene they have up there. When I mentioned that to some people back here in Vegas they reminded me that the sun comes out only a couple times all year up there… That may be an issue since I hate being cold… The move is currently on hold. This is a shot of the amazing streaming video that Portland provided. From what I was told, this was the best live feed of any WordCamp to date. Kudos to them!

October – BlogWorld / WordCamp Las Vegas

Running WordCamp as part of BlogWorld was certainly not as smooth as I would have liked it to have been. But, for all the troubles, there were some really great sessions that came out of that event. One other great thing about the event was that Shayne was planning on attending. Time to plot my revenge. The shot below is a 9 foot tall, 8 foot wide mural we made out of Shayne’s avatar. We hung it on the wall in our photo studio and then had him drop by for a tour.

November – WordCamp Phoenix / New York

Many months earlier I was offered the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Phoenix. I gladly accepted. A couple months later I was invited to speak at WordCamp New York. I accepted that, too. It wasn’t until I was booking airline flights that I realized these two events were on back to back days… nearly 3000 miles apart. I made both events but vowed to check calendars BEFORE agreeing to future events. And here’s a shot of the store directly next to the hotel we stayed at in New York.

November – Jamaica

The internet access was expensive and terrible so we didn’t bother using it. The resort offered a bunch of activities but we didn’t take part in any of them. For the first time in I can’t begin to think how long, I did nothing. To borrow a line from the movie Office Space, “I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.” Even though we took the trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, this trip was in honor of my wife’s and my 20th wedding anniversary.

December – Chicago

My company was kind enough to send me to Chicago for a conference. I can’t really blame them that the conference was scheduled for December in Chicago. I want to blame somebody, though. Look at that photo above… Now, look at the photo below. These were taken only about 10 days apart. This just isn’t right, folks. For the record, the day I left Chicago it was 4 degrees with a –18 wind-chill factor. :-/

December – Holiday party

For the past couple years my company has really nailed the holiday party! No sit-down dinner needed. Just some snacks and an open bar at a club in one of the Las Vegas casinos. This year was at the Palms. We were responsible adults and rented ourselves a room so we wouldn’t have to try to drive. That turned out to be a good thing since there are parts of the evening that I can barely remember. That’s when you wake up and dread the “You were tagged in a photo on Facebook” notices… Thankfully, we didn’t have that issue… this time.

I’ve already got my camera ready to document 2010 as it unfolds!

Happy New Year!

- John

Filed Under: Entertainment Tagged With: 2009, review

WordPress and the need for canonical plugins

December 8, 2009

A few weeks back I attended WordCamp New York. While there I was asked to take part in a discussion on canonical plugins for WordPress. I had heard of the concept but not the terminology. In case you are in the same boat, to make a plugin canonical would be to mark it as the suggested plugin for a given genre.

Why do we need canonical plugins?

Currently there are around 7500 plugins in the WordPress repository. If you are looking for a plugin related to Twitter, you’ll currently get 36 pages of results. Without going through and testing a bunch of them, how do you know which ones are good? The voting system isn’t a great indicator of a plugins value because it’s too easy for a developer to game that system simply by having a group of friends all log in and give it a 5 star vote. What’s worse, a developer who creates a plugin today may not have any interest in submitting an update to the plugin in the future. If a future WordPress update causes that plugin to no longer work, users of that plugin are stuck.

I’ve heard it dozens of times over the past year, “I’m afraid to update WordPress because I’m not sure my plugins will work.” So now we have people who are willing to continue to use a version of WordPress that may have known security issues because they can’t be sure their site is going to work properly once they update. Put bluntly, that sucks!

How would it work?

Even though it’s in the early stages of planning, here are some thoughts on how WordPress might implement canonical plugins:

Find the current “best in breed” plugin for a given genre
Ensure that the plugin works with the most current version(s) of WordPress
Ensure all known security “Best Practices” are implemented in the plugin
Turn the plugin in to an open source project (ala WordPress itself), with the original developer’s OK, of course
Prior to any new WordPress release, all canonical plugins would be tested to ensure they work properly
When a user does a search for a plugin in a genre with a canonical plugin, it would be listed at the top of the search results and indicated as the “approved” plugin

Who benefits from canonical plugins?

First and foremost, the end users benefit the most. Especially those who might be scared to update WordPress for fear of breaking something. If all the canonical plugins go through a round of testing prior to the release of a software update, the chances of your site having issues after the update goes way down.

Developers should also benefit from it as well. Consider this: going back to my mention of 36 pages of Twitter plugins. That’s nearly 400 plugins that probably all have a base set of the same features with only slight feature differences. Rather than creating an entire plugin from scratch and flooding the repository, what if instead they produced a child-plugin that attaches to the canonical plugin and adds in the specific functionality they need. This may not be a perfect solution in every instance and a whole plugin may need to be developed from scratch. But, that’s OK. The repository isn’t going anywhere. You can still create from scratch if you wish.

So, what’s the downside?

Honestly, I can’t really think of a downside. I’m sure there will be people out there who will come up with a list of reasons canonical plugins are bad. I just can’t think of any.

When are canonical plugins coming?

As I mentioned, this is in the early stages of planning. There are definitely a ton of options to consider. Taking a complete stab in the dark, I’m guessing it’ll be summer time before this sees the light of day. There is still plenty of time to throw your ideas in the ring. If you have thoughts on how to make the system kick-ass, you can leave a comment below and I’ll see that it hits the proper channels. Or, check out this coincidentally timed post in the WordPress development blog…

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: canonical, plugin, WordPress

Whirlwind WordCamp Weekend Wrapup

November 16, 2009

Warning: Long Post Ahead!

As I’m sitting on the plane heading back home, it’s hard to sort out all the great parts of the past 3 days. I started out on Friday by flying to Phoenix for WordCamp and then hopping right back on a plane to head to New York to be part of another WordCamp. These marked my 8th and 9th WordCamp events this year, and as far as I can tell, these are the last ones of 2009 for me.

WordCamp Phoenix blew me away. I had no idea how big the WordPress community was in Arizona. When I arrived at the venue, I was amazed to walk in to a room and see upwards of 500 people sitting and listening intently. Come to find out that WordCamp was only one of the tech events going on that week. WordCamp was being followed by a 2-day Podcasting event that I’m really bummed I wasn’t able to attend. I’m hoping that next year my schedule works out a little better and I’m able to stay longer and connect with many more of the great people in what looks like a thriving tech scene.

I completely rewrote my plugin that I used for my presentation during the week leading up to Pheonix. I wasn’t able to do a real run-through ahead of time to see how long it would take me to present it, so I was a bit nervous I wasn’t going to be able to cram it all in to a 30 minute session. Turns out, it wasn’t a problem. I finished with time to spare. I wasn’t sure how well the presentation went over with the crowd, but after leaving the stage I checked twitter to find a very large number of positive messages. That made my day!

Thanks to some nice timing, I hitched a ride with Matt Mullenweg to the airport. We chatted about a ton of WordPress ideas. Not specifically 2.9 or 3.0 features, just thoughts on where things -might- go. That’s probably a post of it’s own.

Big thanks to Chuck Reynolds for inviting me to speak at your event. Also to GoDaddy for helping to put on one hell of an event!

All save you the bulk of the details, but let me just say that my trip from Phoenix to New York was a bit of an adventure thanks to a 5 hour delay in Charlotte, NC that caused me to arrive in NY at 5am, my hotel at about 5:45 and falling to sleep at about 6:30. None of this would have been a huge deal except I was scheduled to do my presentation at 9am. I tried to reschedule by swapping spots with a presenter going on later in the day, but since I was first up, we weren’t able to make that happen. So Shayne woke me up by saying, “You have to go on at 9 or else your session is going to be canceled.”, “No problem. What time is it?” I asked. “8:30″ -sigh-

I made it on time and got everything set up and gave my presentation to a crowd of about 50 people. I must have been talking a lot faster than I did in Phoenix, because I finished up in about 18 minutes. If somebody recorded it I fear it’s going to sound like the video is sped up… But finishing early turned out to be a good thing. The crowd had a bunch of great questions and we were able to walk through a few examples. While I hope I don’t have to do it again, presenting on only a couple hours of sleep was pretty entertaining.

After leaving my session I ran in to Jane Wells. She invited me to be part of a canonical plugin talk later in the day and she also asked if I had any plugins I wanted to demo during another session. I had to laugh at the timing because 3 days earlier we released a new plugin called LOLPress. On top of those two extra sessions, I was also taking part in the Genius Bar. This was going to be a busy day! We headed to the store and grabbed an energy drink. I started feeling human a short time later.

Since my partner Shayne was scheduled for a different time in the Genius Bar, I headed up there with him to check it out. The place was hopping! I was thrilled to see so many people taking advantage of being able to sit face-to-face with somebody who could answer their questions about their blog. Some people just wanted to get an outside opinion while others wanted help making changes to themes, upgrades, backups, etc, etc. I also loved that so many people volunteered to help out. Even when it wasn’t their scheduled time to be helping out, it didn’t matter. People needed help and the geniuses stepped up to provide it.

As I was heading to the plugin demo presentation, honestly, I wasn’t expecting much. I was thinking, “Who wants to see somebody demo a plugin?” Turns out a TON of people wanted to see it. The room was PACKED. Every seat taken, people standing in the back, people sitting in the aisles and people laying on the floor in front of the projector. The session was only 45 minutes and I heard from several of the attendees that they would have loved for that session to go on for 2 hours. During this session I met Raphael from After the Deadline for the first time. Not only has he written an absolutely awesome plugin, he may very well be the nicest guy I’ve ever met. His passion for what he does is unmistakable.

The last session I was in for the day was the talk about canonical plugins. If you aren’t familiar with the term, don’t worry. Neither was I, by name. The idea is this, with so many plugins in the repository and so many that cover nearly the same functionality, how do you choose which to use. What if there was a process where one of the “best in breed” plugins became the suggested plugin in that genre? This plugin would have been reviewed by the WordPress braniacs to ensure it’s security, and rather than being developed by only one or two people, it would be opened up to development by the community in much the same way that WordPress itself is. This idea is still in the fledgling stage, but I couldn’t agree more with the idea behind it. While it wouldn’t take away a users ability to sort through the dozens of plugins available, it would at least be a place for somebody to start where they could be comfortable that the plugin will play nice with their WordPress install. I’m going to write a separate post with several of the concepts thrown.

After we finished up at WordCamp we headed back to the hotel and freshened up before heading to the after party. We quickly had to escape the second floor bar and head to the roof where the open-air bar wasn’t as crowded and hot. We were able to kick back and chat which would have been impossible inside due to the noise and heat. But outside was awesome. I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to be out late thanks to the lack of sleep, and I was right. After a short time my body said it was time to crash. We made it back to the hotel and I was sound asleep by 9.

Jane didn’t have a lot of sympathy for my lack of sleep since she had actually had ZERO sleep as she put together the final preparations for the day. Her hard work really showed! 8 tracks and 50+ sessions is a massive undertaking. The event went off without a hitch (nothing visible that I could tell, anyway.) Of all the WordCamp events I’ve been to this year I’d have to say that I personally got more information out of this event than any other I’ve been to. That probably has to do with being involved in 4 sessions, but still, it was a great event and I hope to make it back next year.

Oh wait, that was only day 1.

Shayne and Abbie were kind enough to let me crash in their hotel room. Since their flight was at 9, that meant an early morning wake up and exit from the hotel. The weather was cool but not cold and it made for an excellent time to walk around before day 2′s events started up at 9. I walked several blocks in each direction snapping photos as I went. I’m sure the locals were pointing out the dorky tourist as I went by with my luggage and camera, but I could care less! One really funny thing that happened, as I walked through Madison Square Park, I got the “shake-down” by two squirrels. They ran right up the path directly at me and stopped and just stared at me as if to say, “Yo, gimme your food.” They weren’t afraid of me at all. They let me off with a warning and headed in to a nearby tree. Phew, that was close…

After a quick breakfast I headed back to the college. The day 2 schedule was very flexible and was up for a vote. People threw out ideas for discussion topics and then rooms were assigned for each. I sat in on a great talk about WPMU that gave me some interesting ideas on how I could use one install of WPMU to run multiple unrelated blogs using domain mapping. I can’t wait to dig in and sort that out! In the second group of sessions, there was a lot of interest in having another genius bar session. Brandon Dove and I volunteered to lead it. The session went really well and I had a great bit of personal satisfaction when a lady used my example plugin from my presentation to learn how to build a shortcode and was able to write a plugin using it to solve a need for her client in a matter of minutes. Not to be outdone, Brandon pulled out some magic to solve an issue a lady was having with her Thesis theme that nobody else had been able to solve.

After lunch the group moved across the street to Mason Hall. Jane invited me to be part of the presentations going on over there as well. I did a quick 5 minute (more like 3 minute) intro to the canonical plugin topic with the hopes that more people will take an interest in coming up with ideas on how to make it all work. I was also surprised to find out that I had been included as part of Brandon’s team in the plugin competition. My involvement was strictly in a beta-testing and feature suggesting role, but I was glad to be included. I was very excited for Brandon when it was all over and his Conversation Starter plugin won the competition. His use of all the standard WordPress design elements in the admin section and some fancy menu action were the deciding factors to his victory. Hopefully he’ll finish up a couple small edits and then release the plugin to the repository.

At that point I had to skip out to the airport and head on home! I was bummed to be missing Matt’s speech, but was very excited to get back home and see my family.

One last shout out to Chuck and Jane. Thank you again for inviting me out. I had a great time in both places and look forward too seeing you guys again real soon!

Filed Under: WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: #PhxWC, #WCNYC, WordCamp

WordCamp Phoenix and WordCamp New York

October 24, 2009

I can’t begin to tell you how much fun I have had this year being part of WordCamp events. I’ve attended 2 (Denver, San Francisco), organized 2 (Las Vegas in January, Las Vegas as part of BlogWorld in October) and have spoken at 3 others (Reno, Los Angeles, Portland). I thought that was it for me for 2009. Not so fast! Two more dates have been added to my schedule!

Friday, November 13th
I will be speaking at WordCamp Phoenix.

Saturday, November 14th
I will be speaking at WordCamp New York City.

In both places I’ll be doing a really quick introduction to building your first WordPress plugin.

I’m really excited to be taking part in both of these events. It has been a few years since I have been to Phoenix, and more than 20 years since I’ve been to New York! I’m definitely looking forward to meeting the WordPress fans in both cities. If you see me walking around either event, please do come up and say hello!

Filed Under: WordCamp Tagged With: new york, phoenix, WordCamp

Blog World Expo: The Party Edition

October 22, 2009

One of the greatest parts of any conference is the after parties. Have your conference in a town like Las Vegas and it’s not hard to imagine that the amount of parties available to you is mind boggling. We definitely did our share of partying, too!

Here’s what our weekend looked like:

Wednesday Night
We had friends arrive on Wednesday, so after I went to the Track Leader Orientation, we all headed out for dinner and a nice long chat. We followed that up by surprising Shayne with a 8′ x 9′ mural of his Twitter avatar in our photo studio. If you ever want to make a mural yourself, let me tell you that this was 120 sheets of paper and 4.5 hours of cutting/taping/hanging. But it was worth it!

Thursday night
This was the first official day of Blog World Expo. I spent a few hours at the convention center, but mainly just to meet up with and say hello to a few friends in from out of town. The fun began around 5:30 when we met up at Bar Louie for our weekly Beer n Blog meetup that was set to kick off the WordCamp weekend. We had a turnout of about 60 people including a few people I had beer really looking forward to meeting; TechnoSailor (Aaron Brazell) and Ted Murphy from Izea (pictured with me here). Both of which, as expected turned out to be really nice guys. After spending 4 hours downing Blue Moons with the group, we headed home to rest up for the marathon day we expected on Friday.

Friday Night
After a full day at WordCamp/Blog World, we headed out to the Hard Rock Hotel. You know it’s going to be a good night when you are pulling in to the parking garage and the guy in front of you is towing a Jeep on a flat bed and you get to watch the Jeep hit the “7′ clearance” sign followed by the next 3 concrete beams. Ahh, welcome to Vegas. (sorry the photo isn’t better on this one!)

Once inside the Hard Rock, we headed to the poker room where Blogs With Balls crew had organized a charity poker tournament for Ante Up For Africa. Pro poker player Annie Duke co-hosted the event and brought along a dozen big name poker pros to play in the tournament as well. Each table had 1 pro poker player and 1 pro blogger. They had put bounties on each of the pro bloggers, so if you knocked them out of the tournament you’d win a gift basket. I’m happy to say I knocked out our table pro and took home 7 xBox 360 sports games! We had a great time it was all for a great cause! HUGE thanks to Dan Levy for getting me and my friends in to the tourney and for putting on such an awesome event! Check out the video on YouTube.

Saturday Night
After WordCamp/BlogWorld ended it was time to strap on the party boots just one more time before sending everybody home. We started off hitting up the official BlogWorldExpo BBQ that went on poolside at the Hilton. They had an open bar and a HUGE spread of great food. The party was well attended by tons of speakers from BlogWorld which was nice since I was busy running WordCamp all weekend, I wasn’t able to chat with many of them during the previous 2 days. I really enjoyed getting to chat with Darren Rowse in person since I’ve been reading his blogs for such a long time. It’s was also nice to be able to chat face-to-face with people I don’t get to see in person too often like Jim Kukral, Aaron Hockley, Shayne Sanderson, Austin Passy, Darin Hardy and at least a dozen others.

Once the BBQ was over we had to make a tough decision between two events that both sounded like a lot of fun. In the end we opted for the one that required zero driving. We walked inside the Hilton and headed over to the spot where they were doing #TechKaraoke. Nobody from our group sang, but we amused ourselves by watching the drunk geeks singing (I use that term loosely) and by having a “Fake ReTweet war”. Don’t know what that is? Well, the bar had a large screen (10′ x 10′ -ish) where they were showing Twitter messages that people had tagged with #bwe09. So, what you do is write up a tweet in the form of a retweet of your buddy. For example:

RT @my_buddy: Wow, I sure hope this rash goes away! Another great time in Vegas! #bwe09

This would then scroll across the screen and we would laugh our heads off. There is nothing like childish humor plus alcohol to make for an incredibly fun evening!

After a few hours of Karaoke and fake tweets, it was time to head back home and spend Sunday resting up! We were a tired crew after 4 long days and nights. But, we are looking forward to doing it all again next year!

Filed Under: Entertainment, General, WordCamp Tagged With: #bnblv, #bwe09, #wclv09, poker, techkaraoke

Blog World Expo 09 wrapup

October 18, 2009

Blog World Expo 2009 is in the books. The parties have all ended and most people in attendance are either home already or heading in that direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who lives right here in Las Vegas, so my trip home is quite a bit shorter (20 minutes) than most. I do not envy those that have to spend today or tomorrow traveling back to your families. While it great to be at events like Blog World, no matter how you slice it, traveling sucks. I wish you all a quick & safe trip home with no delayed flights!

As for the show itself, I’m going to need to write two different posts to cover it all. This one will focus more on Blog World as a whole. I’ll write a follow-up chronicling my experience as the organizer and track leader for WordCamp Las Vegas.

I have now been to all 3 of the Blog World events, and I had attended one of the New Media Expo event a while back. I seem to remember there being at least one or two more aisles of vendor booths at last year’s event. This is not really a surprise as all conventions in Las Vegas have seen a drastic reduction in vendors and attendees as the economy has been in the crapper. Even still, there was a decent collection of booths and I enjoyed walking the aisles and checking out their wares.

Since I started recording the Weekly WordPress Podcast a couple months back, I was really looking forward to checking out some of the hardware and software vendors in that space. I was really hoping to find a company that had mixing boards on hand that I could get an idea how they may solve some of my technical issues I’m having. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one to be had. I think the podcasting community has such great potential and I would like to see more involvement in that community at Blog World.

If you know me at all, you know that I’m a WordPress junkie. So it should be no surprise that I was quite bummed to hear that the Automattic team, as a whole, would not be on hand for the event. I understand that they have a yearly retreat where the entire company works together from one location for a week, but, the timing of it is pretty darn incredible. I can’t help but feel that there is some sort of “office politics” that kept them from being on hand this weekend. The biggest problem I have with them not being there is that it robs the Blog World attendees of the opportunity to walk up and say hello to Matt and thank him for the amazing contributions they have made to the blogging world. I know it means a lot to Matt to hear a heart-felt story of appreciation for the product that he loves and I also know, from experience, how nice it is to say thanks, in person, to one of the people who makes it all possible.

OK, that’s enough complaining. With those two negatives aside, I really did have a great time at the event. A huge part of that is getting to speak face-to-face with people that I’ve met over the past 3 years of Blog World and all the WordCamp events I’ve been to this year. The networking opportunities this weekend were abundant! Before the start of the day, between sessions and at the after parties on Thursday, Friday and Saturday… Although it makes for a very tired set of feet and vocal cords when it’s all over, it is absolutely 100% worth it and I’d do it again next weekend if I could!

Since I was running the WordCamp event, most of the show content that I was able to hear was from those presentations. I think I can safely say that I took more notes and got more actionable items out of this weekend than I did at last year’s Blog World or any of the WordCamps I’ve been to this year. Not taking ANYTHING away from those other events, it’s more a function of being able to actually sit and listen! Since the Blog World team was in charge of all stage, lighting, projector, etc…, it meant I could introduce the speakers and, for the most part, have a seat and listen. It was a great experience!

It has been an extremely fun and informative weekend (can you call Wednesday afternoon through Sunday at 1am a ‘weekend’) and I am already looking forward to next year’s event. Big thanks to the organizers who spent countless hours putting this together! Rest up. You get to start planning again in a few weeks.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: #bwe09, Blog World Expo

WordCamp Portland – A Love Story

September 20, 2009

I have lived in Las Vegas for the past 7 years and I have said on many occasions since then that I don’t think I could live anywhere else after living there. One weekend trip to Portland later and I believe I may have to amend that statement. In a word, Portland is awesome!

This trip to Portland, like so many of my trips this year, was based around attending a WordCamp event. When I stepped off the airplane and headed for ground transportation I found the first gem of the weekend. They call it Max. Max is the light rail tram system that will take you all around the Portland area for pretty darn cheap. You can buy a day pass for $4.75. I hopped on the tram and it dropped me off 1 block from the WebTrends offices where WordCamp was being held.

WebTrends definitely stands out as the second gem of my trip. They have a nice office on the 16th floor that they graciously donated to WordCamp to host the event. Apparently they are very active in the local Portland tech scene and are the hosts for a great number of local events. I have a hint for companies looking to get some exposure in the tech field, take a look at what WebTrends is doing. They are doing it right!

Then there is Aaron Hockley. This is his second go-round as the head organizer for a WordCamp event. Though I wasn’t at the event last year, I can say that he sets the bar high for other cities looking to put on a WordCamp. He has an amazing group of people who help put together the event and the local community of businesses really step up with food and service donations that help to make the event a comfortable and welcoming environment for everybody. Having two kegs just inside the door certainly didn’t hurt, either.

If you only look at the list of presenters posted on the site, you’d be missing more than half of the content available at the event. While I have seen the idea of “Unconference” style presentations at other WordCamp events, never have I seen a group of people take to it so well. I sat in on an excellent group discussion about WordPress and affiliate marketing.

I was able to get out and walk around a bit in Portland and check out some of the surrounding area. There were several groups putting on demonstrations in Pioneer Park including belly dancers, a group of people dancing with colored trash bags, a guy preaching to anyone who would listen (at full volume, I might add), several hacky-sack players and some guy who had a cat on a leash that looked like a cougar. All were cool/interesting in their own way.

But the biggest gem of them all has to be the people I met this weekend. Tons of amazingly nice people at WordCamp itself, the people I met at Pioneer Park, the shop keepers in the area… Everybody was friendly. At the end of my presentation somebody asked if I would move to Portland and become @PortlandGeek. “We don’t ask just anybody”, she said.

So as I sit in the airport waiting on a plane to Vegas, I’m excited to get home and see my wife and kids, but I’m sad to be leaving such a great city and the amazing tech scene up here that has made me feel so welcome.

Thank you, Portland.

Filed Under: WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: #wcpdx, portland, WordCamp, WordPress

WordCamp LA recap

September 16, 2009

This past weekend I hit the road and traveled to Los Angeles to attend and be a presenter at the first ever WordCamp LA. It was held on the campus of Loyola Marymount University which was a great place to visit, and the room we were using was well equipped to handle the nearly 200 people in attendance plus all the electronic equipment needed for the presenters at the podium.

The event had two tracks, but Me, Todd and Abbie set up shop in the back corner of the room where Track 1 was being held and we didn’t move all day. So my recap is only going to cover those speakers on track 1.

First up Austin made a couple morning announcements welcoming us to WordCamp.

The first presenter was Beau Lebens from Automattic. He gave an overview of several of the products built by the Automattic team. Most of this was review except for when he talked about a new project called BackPress. This will be a set of functions that you can include in any PHP codebase that will give you much of the WordPress functionality inside your non-WordPress project. As a developer, this was very exciting news and I’m looking forward to learning more about it.

Next was Shayne Sanderson talking about using the WP e-commerce plugin with a WordPress MU install. If you have ever wanted to run a network of sites and give all your users the ability to sell products from their own site, this is a match made in heaven. I know I have some ideas for how to use this on some future projects.

Following Shayne was Ben Huh from the Cheezeburger network. If you don’t know who Ben is (like the lady sitting in the 2nd row), let me just point you to FailBlog, some LOL Cats or one of my new faves, Hawtness. Ben talked about how his company uses as many free services as they can to run their company. Why pay for it if somebody offers it for free? That’s a good question! Plus, you have to love their company’s mission statement: Make people happy for 5 minutes a day.

After a break for lunch Micah Baldwin took the stage. He spoke about how failing is not an end point, but just another step in the process of succeeding. If you continue to try and succeed, you may find a few hundred ways that don’t work before you finally hit that magic mix. If you stop trying, you’ll never get there.

Next was Jim Turner who talks about blogging for a living. Jim knows what he’s talking about here as he’s been making money blogging for several years now and he shows what skills you need to do it yourself. This is always a popular session with the WordCamp audience as making money is a really hot topic. Especially these days.

Following Jim was Andrew Warner. This was my favorite presentation of the day. Andrew did a real-time hands-on demonstration of how to record video from your computer and add it to your site. My description isn’t doing justice to his awesome presentation. You’ll have to trust me here, he was excellent.

After Andrew finished up, I took the stage as the last presenter of the day. I gave a demonstration on how easy it is to create a plugin for WordPress. I was pretty happy with my presentation and I’ve received a lot of positive feedback about it, so that was very exciting. I had a lady come up to me right before my presentation and tell me that she had been looking forward to hearing my presentation the most. I have to tell you, that absolutely made my day. Giving such a technical presentation at the end of the day is difficult because people are already starting to get tired. That was evident by the lady in the front row catching a few ZZZs during my talk. I didn’t mind. Heck, I’d have probably been doing the same.

Austin and the crew from InMotionHosting did a fantastic job organizing the event and after party. I felt very honored to have been invited to have been a part of it and I look forward to attending next year’s event in LA when they do it all again.

Filed Under: Technology, WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: wordcamp la, WordPress

Has #FollowFriday on Twitter jumped the shark?

September 4, 2009

For the uninitiated, #FollowFriday is an Internet meme that goes on every Friday on Twitter. The concept is simple, each Friday you pick a person (or group of people) who you think is interesting, informative, funny, or in any other way remarkable. Then you construct tweet telling people why they should follow this person. At it’s core, the concept is very cool if you think about it; somebody who you respect enough to follow on Twitter is now suggesting somebody that THEY follow and respect. That is a pretty powerful endorsement, right?

I’m not so sure anymore.

Since first learning about the #FollowFriday concept, I have personally tried to remain true to it’s original intention. When I send out a #FollowFriday message, I select only 1 or 2 people to include in the message and I explain a reason WHY you should follow this person. My biggest gripe about #FollowFriday these days are the people who send tweets that start with the #FollowFriday hashtag and then they fill the rest of the space with as many Twitter user names as will possibly fit. They give no reason why to follow them, just the demand to follow them. This makes no sense. You are telling me to do something but giving me no reason as to why I should. Without a reason, I promise you, I’m not going to start following.

So, the question is, has #FollowFriday jumped the shark? For me personally, the answer is an emphatic YES!

To me, the #FollowFriday tweets have become white noise. They are filler between the rest of the filler on Twitter. Have a look at the current search stream on Twitter for #FollowFriday. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

If you think I should follow somebody because they have solid information to share, please, don’t wait until Friday to tell me about it. Send a tweet telling my why I may be interested to follow this person and chances are I’ll check them out and I’ll follow them if I’m interested.

Let me ask you this, when was the last time you followed somebody new on Twitter simply because of a #FollowFriday recommendation? Leave a comment a comment below and let me know what YOU think.

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology Tagged With: #followfriday, twitter