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!

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!

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’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.

Here’s the stabilized version of the fisheye video I shot with my D90 at WordCamp Whistler:

and here’s the original:

The color differences are just my output settings in iMovie and then uploaded to Flickr (and compressed down to flash)….I just wanted to focus on the movement, rather than color matching/correction.

It does seem to stabilize the shaky-cam-ness of the original but at a cost…it seems to me that the video looks like I had it mounted on a tripod that was slightly off kilter…as opposed to straight on. As well, just like the straighten photo option in iPhoto/Aperture, it’s done a slight zoom in to properly rotate the video…which means that the wide fisheye effect is diminished a little (a good thing?).

I’ll continue to play around with this and see how it works with other things like video shot from a moving car.

I wanted some video to use as part of my talk so I shot this quick fisheye video of the conference room and all the attendees before things got started. This is easily my favorite lens to play with:

Dave Olson ended the day with his talk and had the entire audience hanging on his every word. He invited people to sit up front and close since he wasn’t using the projector…and lots did. It was a great session to end the conference with:

I also wanted to play around with my Lensbaby Composer (especially in video mode on the D90) so here’s a quick video I shot during lunch where Lorraine was interviewing Dave for the live stream she was doing on FearlessCity.ca:

Watch it in HD on Vimeo too.

Some more fisheye fun at lunch:

See all the photos/video from WordCamp Whistler in my Flickr photoset.

For pulling in your Flickr photos into your site as a themed gallery, I use FAlbum. You can see it in action on my photography page here on this site.

For managing many different types of media, especially video, check out pb-embedFlash Media Manager. It lets you fully customize how video is presented on your site, whether it’s locally hosted or on an external site like YouTube or Vimeo.

Unfortunately, not all video sites are supported in pb-embed Flash. Like this timelapse Flickr video I made of the drive up to Whistler for example:

We’re just about to have lunch at WordCamp Whistler so follow along on Twitter and on Flickr and see how the rest of the conference goes.

Big thanks to Duane, John & Rebecca for pulling together an awesome event.

UPDATE: Just heard from kk that FAlbum choked on his Flickr stream when he tried adding it to his site….he does have over 20,000 photos so perhaps if you’re a prolific photog like Kris, you may have some performance issues with FAlbum.

I’m going to be giving a talk up there about how to ‘Sex up your blog’ (thanks for embellishing that Duane!) so bring your questions about integrating photos and video in different ways into your site as well as the pitfalls of some of the options out there. Be sure to check out some of the other stellar speakers that I have the pleasure of presenting alongside.

I also hear that there will be some cool, one-of-a-kind WordPress swag for all attendees…like a much cooler version of my ‘unofficial’ WordPress touque (with apologies to Zeldman) :

The format was not unlike a BarCamp where people could submit topics they would present on. Unfortunately I was laying on a beach in Hawaii when it all happened (the advance submissions that is) so I missed the opportunity to participate as a presenter. Fortunately the plan is to have these frequently so there should be more chances to participate. Judging from the turnout, it could have possibly been a day long affair as there was no shortage of interesting topics and people interested in learning more about WordPress.

As much as I like the Network Hub, it’s not the best kind of venue for this kind of event – it’s just not big enough to accomodate the number of people that were interested in attending. There wasn’t nearly enough chairs for everyone and it was pretty tropical in there once people started showing up. There must be some place in Vancouver that can fit a large number of people, has decent wifi and supports some kind of food/drink service. Aside from UBC, SFU or one of the other school venues, there isn’t much that works.

I won’t recap the whole event because as she usually does, Rebecca liveblogged the entire event – well almost all of it since she was also a presentor, Raul covered for her during her segment.

The one presentor that I was surprised by was John Chow. He gave a presentation on making money from your blog. I had heard some (negative) stories about him and was expecting some kind of slimy, Tom Vu-like salesman and was impressed with his openness about how he became successful from blogging. He outlined how much money he makes from his blog, detailed the pricing structures and many key mistakes people make when trying to monitize their sites. His candor and self-deprecating humour was refreshing.

While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tactics he uses, I don’t see them being much different than what you would see people in other types of business do to be successful – figure out the system and exploit it. I’m also not sure that his approach would work for many bloggers I know but he certainly has an interesting story and I thought he told it well. The audience was certainly hanging on his every word although some folks were definitely not impressed by his methods.

As with many of the local tech events, the evening wrapped up in a local restaurant for drinks with some old and new friends.

I’m looking forward to the next WordCamp for sure. You can see some of the other pictures I took in my WordCamp Flickr set.

I’ve had the chance to see Matt speak twice now: at SXSW last year and at WordCamp last summer. Like Larry Lessig, he knows how to give a great presentation. He also happens to have one of the coolest personal domain names : http://ma.tt although it sounds like it was a bit of an ordeal to acquire. Someone beat me to the one I should have gotten.

This year’s conference is shaping up to be a great one! See you at the Waldorf for the opening party!

Charles over at Bloggingpro.com has one of the best recaps of Day 2 of WordCamp (the day I attended) I’ve seen so I thought I’d share it. I’m always amazed when people can take notes with this level of detail while attending a conference….I certainly can’t unless I videotape it or something. Matt Mullenweg also mentioned that another great resource for notes from the event is the in the trackbacks on each session in the schedule as each one is a separate post.

While I found all the events of the day interesting and useful, here are a few of my highlights as Charles and others have covered everything very well already:

• Barry and Matt talking about HyperDB and High Performance WordPress – install WP-Cache even if you don’t think you’ll need it – this prepares the system for seemingly infinite scalability and as Charles wrote in his post, the benefits equal something in the realm of being able to handle 25 million pageviews per day – all on an untuned (off the shelf) server setup



• the efforts currently underway by Happy Cog shows that WordPress (Automattic) is serious about improving itself and is willing to spend the necessary time and effort to really take it to the next level. A number of the screens that were shown during Liz Danzico’s presentation on WP Usability were very impressive and addressed a number of long standing ‘wishlist’ items for me as a WP user.
• Matt’s State of the Word talk was also very interesting. There’s nothing better than hearing what’s going on in something you use all the time directly from the source. Plus Matt’s presentation style is entertaining and inspiring
• the BBQ lunch from Memphis Minnies was great…reminded me of the great bbq I had in Austin at SXSW.
• I wish the event was longer as one day (4-5 hours really) just isn’t long enough to get deep into some of the developer topics. This may have been better if I was in San Francisco longer as there were a number of events and gatherings outside of the actual event that would have been fun and probably useful to attend

Not sure if I’ll be able to make it next year but if the planets align, I’d definitely like to go again.

Check out all my photos from WordCamp 2007 – many taken with my iPhone and uploaded to Flickr during the event which I guess sort of makes me a live blogger like Rebecca.

I’m most likely only going to attend the developer day as many of the topics on the other day I’ve already seen covered at SXSW or other conferences I’ve attended lately. Plus I want to be a tourist too while I’m down there….and of course visit a Fry’s or three.

Should be a fun week ahead and I’ll be taking a ton of pictures.