WordCamp | Vegas Geek

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

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

Upcoming Speaking Gigs

August 27, 2009

This year I have been extremely lucky to have been a part of some amazing conferences. After organizing WordCamp:Las Vegas in January, I had the pleasure attending two more excellent WordCamp events in Denver and San Francisco. To top it off, the amazing people behind WordCamp:Reno-Tahoe saw fit to invite me out to be a presenter at their event. If you a regular reader of my site you probably also heard that I’ve been asked to organize a WordCamp event as part of Blog World Expo coming up in October. It truly has been an exciting and eventful year so far and we haven’t even reached the 4th quarter yet.

There are two other events coming up that I’m extremely proud to be a part of.

WordCamp Los Angeles
September 12, 2009 ~ Loyola Marymount College
This is the first ever WordCamp in Los Angeles and it’s shaping up to be an amazing event. Since this is my old stomping ground, I’m really looking forward to being back in LA and checking out the local WordPress scene. I know LA is going to have some amazing talent on hand. My presentation will be about creating a WordPress plugin.

Wordcamp Portland
September 19, 2009 ~ WebTrends
After the success of last year’s Portland WordCamp, it’s no surprised that they sold out all the tickets more than a month in advance. This goes to show that Portland’s tech community is thriving! I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to spend two days mingling with all the sharp minds attending this event. Once again I will be speaking about creating a WordPress plugin.

If you are within reasonable driving distance of either event, definitely come out and support these two fantastic events. I hope to see you there!

Filed Under: WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: los angeles, portland, presenting, WordCamp

WordCamp Las Vegas @ Blog World Expo demystified

August 26, 2009

Last night on the Blog World Expo website they announced that WordCamp Las Vegas would be part of the Expo this year. Based on some of the responses I read about the news today on Twitter, it became obvious that there was some misunderstanding with regards to how much it would cost to attend WordCamp Las Vegas as part of Blog World Expo. So let me attempt to get all the mystery and confusion out of way once and for all!

WordCamp Las Vegas @ Blog World Expo will take place in the exhibit hall on Friday and Saturday, October 16th and 17th. To attend WordCamp, you need to be a registered attendee of Blog World Expo.

Blog World Expo Packages
There are 4 different packages you can purchase for Blog World Expo that range in price from $75 to $895. No matter which package you choose, they will all grant you access to the exhibit floor, the keynote speakers and WordCamp. Visit the Blog World Expo site for descriptions of each package.

WordCamp Discount
When you register to attend Blog World Expo, use promo code WordCampVIP to receive a 20% discount on your registration. You must use the code at the time of purchase and you need to register before September 14th to take advantage of the discount.

Hopefully that answers any questions you might have had about WordCamp Las Vegas. If not, you are more than welcome to contact me directly and I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you might have.

Filed Under: WordCamp Tagged With: Blog World Expo, WordCamp

Favorite WordCamp SF moments

June 4, 2009

Each time I go to a WordCamp, there are certain moments that stick out as great memories. Some have to do with who you meet, some are just right place/right time and others are just personal. This past weekend at WordCamp San Francisco, I had a few of these moments and thought I’d share them with you.

The first one happened at the WordCamp after party. I was chatting with Joseph Scott from Automattic and my friend Todd and I asked Joseph what projects he’s been working on. He then spends the next few minutes talking about a ridiculously cool feature that is going to make handling videos for your blog easier (i.e. from your dashboard) and without having to give away all your rights to the video by placing it on other services… When he was done, Todd and I agreed that this sounded freakin’ awesome. So I did what any true geek would do when presented with something so cool information, I threw my arms out and said, “Bring it in.” Joseph, being the cool guy that he is, opened his arms and leaned in for a quick hug.

Later that night when we were back at our hotel and grabbing some food in the pub, the thought of hugging Joseph came back to me and I cracked up. Thanks Joseph for being such a good sport!

The second moment requires a little bit of setup. My wife is very much non-technical. Even still, this past weekend was her 3rd WordCamp event thanks to hanging out with me. Though at her first WordCamp she worked the registration desk and at her second she spent much of her time playing games on her iPhone.

While at the Reno-Tahoe WordCamp, we heard Matt Mullenweg talk about a cool WordPress theme called P2. P2 gives you the ability to post directly from the front page (like Twitter’s home page) and then updates automatically when new comments come in. This can be used for groups of developers to discuss a project they are working on collectively and will store all the information for viewing later if needed…

Fast forward to this past Saturday. We were sitting in the Q&A session hosted by Matt. Somebody in the audience stood up and started asking a question. As he was describing it, in my head I already know that Matt is going to tell him he needs to check out the P2 theme as the answer to his need. Just then, still before the guy has finished his question, my wife leans over to me and says, “He needs P2, doesn’t he?” I can’t tell you how proud I was at that moment!

This final moment I’m going to tell you about also needs a little back story. Last Halloween Todd and I set up a photo booth at the party we were at. As the evening went on, people had more and more to drink. This made the photos later in the evening just that much sillier. One of the photos is of my wife holding up her fingers as if she’s holding a couple six-shooters, and though you can’t hear it, she’s saying “Pyew Pyew” as she’s shooting them. And, for the record, “Pyew Pyew” has stuck around and is still something we laugh about.

On Friday, Todd, Chris and I decided to visit Alcatraz. As we went through the line waiting to get on the boat, there was a photographer there taking photos of couples and groups that they would then sell you upon your return for $22 for two 5x7s. I was certain there was no way we were going to purchase these photos, so I told Todd to go ahead and join Chris and I in our shot. Right before he snaps the shot, I hold up my hands and make the pyew-pyew noise. This makes the photographer laugh and in turn Chris and Todd, too. So I make Chris and Todd join me and we all throw our six-shooters in the air. When we got back, the photo was just too good to pass up.

You can find the original photo on this page for comparison.

Filed Under: Family, WordCamp Tagged With: alcatraz, san francisco, WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco Wrap-up

May 31, 2009

I just returned home from WordCamp San Francisco and wanted to write my wrap-up right away so I didn’t forget any of the details I wanted to throw in. I’m exhausted from a day of travel that included our flight being delayed (twice), landing in Vegas and sitting on the tarmac for 20 minutes and then another 20 minute delay as they failed to let us know which carousel our luggage was going to come out on. Ahh, the joys of travel.

Anyway, on to the good stuff.

My wife and I made our way to San Francisco a few days early to do some sightseeing prior to spending all day at WordCamp on Saturday. This is 3rd time this year I’ve traveled to attend a WordCamp but the first time I saw something other than the inside of a conference hall. I gotta tell ya, it’s the way to do it! We had a blast being tourists on Thursday and Friday!

Oh, right, this is a post about WordCamp. OK, I’m back on track now.

After the morning welcome by Matt Mullenweg, we headed downstairs to check out Andy Peatling‘s talk about BuddyPress. Andy is the lead developer on the BP project and his passion for the project shows through. He gave a bit of an overview on how you can integrate BuddyPress in to a site to let people contribute and interact, but stressed the fact that BP doesn’t automatically turn your website in to a social network type site. He provided some links to resources that will help designers and developers customize their BP installs. I’m definitely looking forward to researching this further.

Here are the resources if you are interested:
- List of BuddyPress loops
- BuddyPress hooks
- The Skeleton Component
- Vote for new BuddyPress features
- BuddyPress dev community

We stayed in our seats downstairs after Andy wrapped up and got ready for the next presenter. Dave Moyer who was going to give an intro to Podcasting. At the ripe old age of 16, Dave is a “been there, done that” guy in the podcast community. He’s been podcasting since 2004. He passed on some info about the tools he uses (Skype and Audacity), places to find free/inexpensive tunes for your podcasts (penmachine, freeplaymusic, soundsnap) and an easy way to make your podcast ready for iTunes (hint: publish via feedburner). Again, this is something that I’ll be researching more over the coming weeks as it’s a topic that I’ve been interested in for ages and just haven’t dove in to yet. Soon, though!

Next was the State of the Word. This is when Matt Mullenweg gives a past, present and future view of WordPress. One of the big announcements was that WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user) are going to merge. Undoubtedly this means that a site admin would have the ability to turn on/off the ability to add multiple blogs to a single install of WordPress right from the dashboard. No real time-table given on when that would be happening, though. He also spoke about the P2 theme. A very cool theme that turns your blog in to a twitter-like site. This would be a great tool for a team working on a project. New posts and comments are shown in real time and the page doesn’t need to be refreshed to show new content. I’m interested in getting my company to use this for development groups.

In a stroke of genius, rather than having a Q&A session immediately following the State of the Word, instead we broke for an awesome BBQ lunch and then headed back for an hour-long Q&A. I say it’s brilliant because I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any part of either, but not sure sitting for nearly 2 hours straight would have been all that much fun.

Next we checked out Tara Hunt‘s “Makin’ Whuffie” presentation. Tara gave some great information on using social media to build your business. She talked about how it’s ridiculous for companies to say “We need a twitter campaign” when what they really need to do is find out why their customers use/like twitter and how they should become part of the community.

We headed downstairs again to check out Ann Oyama giving an intro on WordPress Themes and Plugins. For those of you who read my blog on a regular basis, you know that plugin development is something I’ve been in to lately. As I’ve said before, it’s impossible to teach an entire subject like building custom themes or plugins in a 40 minute presentation, but Ann gave a nice overview and people should have plenty to follow up with once they get back home.

Steve Souders was up next. For me, this was the highlight of the day. Steve is a performance guru who works at Google (after many years of working at Yahoo) and he gave a VERY informative talk on how to speed up your website. Some of the stuff sounds incredibly advanced and may intimidate you at first, but, with some info from Steve and a couple hours of time, you could drastically improve the performance of your website and it could make all the difference in the world to your visitors.

I wouldn’t even begin to do justice to Steve’s presentation. Instead, I’ll tell you to download his powerpoint presentation and as soon as the video is available on wordpress.tv, watch it.

We wrapped up our day by listening to Scott Porad from Pet Holdings (the geniuses behind FailBlog, LolCats, etc…) as he spoke about user-generated content. It was interesting to hear how they do everything they can to make it super simple for people to create and submit content. Then, rather than having people from their company being the judge of what does or doesn’t make it to the website, they leave it up to the community. If enough people say it’s funny, it makes the site. If not, well, sorry.

Even though this wasn’t the last session of the day, it was for us. We headed back to the hotel, grabbed some dinner and made our way to the after party. You just can not pass up the opportunity to have this kind of access to the staff from Automattic and the passionate WordPress community. Guys like Joseph Scott and Jake Spurlock make the entire trip worth it. Where else are you going to be able to bend their ear for 30 minutes and get the inside scoop on what projects they are working on. Plus, it’s a great way to drop a feature request directly in the laps of people that can make ‘em show up without having to code them myself.

There are two very unfortunate things about my experience at WordCamp San Francisco;
- As much as I love the idea of having multiple tracks, I’m really bummed that I wasn’t able to see all the presentations. Yes, I know I can watch the presentations online at WordPress.TV in a few days/weeks, but it’s not the same as being there.
- A second day got added to the event that was more geared towards WordPress developers. This was hosted at the Automattic offices and I’m sure would have been exceedingly cool to attend. Unfortunately it wasn’t announced until well after we had booked our flights and I didn’t hear about it until it was too late to make other arrangements. This was definitely a sad trombone moment for me.

Kudos to all the presenters and everybody who had a part in putting together WordCamp SF. I had a great time and I’m already looking forward to attending again next year!

Filed Under: Social Media, WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: conference, san francisco, WordCamp