Earlier this month, over a hundred WordPress enthusiasts headed down to the Museum of Vancouver on one of the first summer days of the season to spend the day learning about WordPress. I was one of the organizers and we were all amazed at how smoothly everything went.
I gave a talk about using MAMP/WAMP for offline WordPress development. My slide deck was pretty short due to the live demo nature of the topic but you can view the PDF if you’re so inclined.
Justin Carlson recorded the sessions for us (head over to his site for the rest of them – some of them may even appear on WordPress.tv soon) so if you want to watch me get nerdy for about 1/2 an hour, hit play:
One of my tasks as a WordCamp organizer was to sort out internet access for the attendees. Thanks to Miranda & Melanie at Rogers Communications, I was able to borrow a few of their Rocket Internet Hubs which Dale Mugford & I setup in the various rooms at the MOV.
I’m still surprised how well these units performed considering the number of users sharing them (some of whom were streaming World Cup games). Dale connected them to a couple Airport Extremes along with some Airport Express extenders so that we could have one big wifi net and I didn’t hear anyone have issues with the internet so I’m grateful for Roger’s helping us out in a big way….having solid internet is a common issue at many conferences that we didn’t have.
As with all the previous WordCamps I’ve attended, I had a great time and met a bunch of new people that seemed to enjoy our little conference. Next year when talk starts up again, I’ll remember those folks I met and not think about all the effort that goes into pulling off a conference like this which usually seems too daunting.
Thanks to all our sponsors that helped make the event affordable and the speakers that volunteered their time to make it the success that it was.
Special thanks to my pal, Dave Olson, who not only brought down the house at the end of WordCamp, also put me up the night before and made sure I got back from our speakers dinner, um, safely. It seems that whenever we get together, we have some amazing adventures.
See you next year!
Today, Duane helped get the ball rolling with the announcement that WordCamp Vancouver 2010 planning had begun with June 12th, 2010 the current tentative date.
I’ve attended a lot of WordCamps over the years…in a lot of different places. I’ve even had the honour to speak at a few of them too. This time around, I’m on the organizing committee…it remains to be seen if I’ll be speaking as it’s early days so we’ll see how things play out.
WordCamp has been a pretty fantastic place to meet some pretty awesome people, share information about the WordPress platform and have a great time. I learn something new every time I attend one.
If you’re interested in anything to do with blogging or WordPress, I encourage you to sign up for the email updates and/or follow us on Twitter. We’ll share more information as soon as we have more details!
Tomorrow is the last day for early bird registration for WordCamp Fraser Valley taking place on August 22, 2009. The registration prices go up as of August 1st.
I’m going to be there speaking in the development track about using MAMP/WAMP for WordPress development. MAMP is the version of the software that runs on Apple computers and surprise, WAMP is the Windows version…but what is it?
While it’s in the dev track, it could easily be in the beginner or intermedate tracks as it (MAMP/WAMP) is meant to be a fast, somewhat non-geeky way to get a web and database servers up and running with all the tools you need so that you can create and install WordPress (among other things) on your local laptop or desktop.
This is a big benefit to (theme & graphic) designers who need a quick way to get their laptop running WordPress for local design and development, client demos, etc where they don’t need or necessarily want the site to be online in any way (at least not yet).
I’ll go through the steps of getting the (free, open source) software, installing and configuring it to the point that WordPress is running on your computer and discuss a number of options for the setup and install.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
I’m back at home after a whirlwind weekend in San Francisco to attend WordCamp SF 2009. It’s a one day conference for users of WordPress which is what this site is built with.
I’ve talked about WordCamps before and even gave a talk at WordCamp Whistler earlier this year. Like Whistler, I was joined in San Francisco by John & Rebecca from Sixty4Media and Duane & Dale from BraveNewCode which I referred to more than a couple of times as Team Canada.
During Matt Mullenweg’s ‘State of the Word’ talk, it was cool to hear BraveNewCode’s plugins (WordTwit and WPTouch) getting mentioned as two (out of 3) of the most popular plugins for WordPress users based on a Twitter poll Matt ran before the event.
This year I was asked by Lloyd to help out in the Genius Bar – basically a bunch of passionate users/geeks helping others with any questions or problems they have about using/installing WordPress.
During my shift I only answered a handful of questions due to a ‘genius to customer’ ratio of about 10 to 1… admittedly it was towards the end of the day and smack in the middle of a couple of well attended sessions. We did manage to come up with a few terrible WordPress themed pickup lines.
After a day of geeking out at the conference, it was time to head to Automattic’s space at Pier 38 for the WordPress 6th birthday party featuring WordPress themed cupcakes and a whole lot of awesome food and drink:
If you’re interested in any of the topics covered at WordCamp SF, keep an eye on WordPress.tv as most, if not all, of the sessions were videotaped and should appear online as soon as they are edited together. Rebecca also covered a lot of the sessions with her excellent day blog.
Considering the amount of camera gear I brought down there with me, I didn’t take a lot of photos…mostly because there wasn’t a lot of time between trips to and from the airport. I think next time I do a quick weekend trip like this, I’ll scale back my gear a lot more. I didn’t even get any decent photos of Team Canada….of course I blame the tequila.
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