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!
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.
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.
Finally back home from Whistler after a great weekend up there for WordCamp Whistler where I met a ton of new people and was able to spend time with many friends. It was nice to get out of Vancouver for a change of scenery and yet have so many familiar faces around. I thought I’d post some photos and video I took during the course of the conference and weekend.
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:
During my talk at WordCamp Whistler, I mentioned a number of plugins you can use on your WordPress site. I created a demo site to show how these things work…don’t know how long I’ll leave it up but it’s all in use on my main site here.
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.
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.
