The WordCamp Report

I was told when I was in college, that there will be times that its best to take a step back and allow yourself to make a better article. Now I’m not sure that this is a better article then some I’ve seen (I’ll link to them), but what I’ll to make up in writing quality I’ll try and make up with link quality. For example Stephanie Booth did a great series of Live Blogging on the first day (and gave herself RSI) And Charles Stricklin wrote some great Daily Wrapups that I’m going to link accordingly.

WordCamp for me started days before the actual event. I had brought up The WordCamp Report in the hopes of providing as much information as possible, so that people arrived, participates, and left feeling that they learned or got a lot out of it, and I was able to help. So yes, it was somewhat a selfish reason. But one of the main things I found about myself, is that blogging can be somewhat of a selfish thing. We need to be sure to talk about something we love, but its selfish in that we want return communication back. But enough on that, lets start to wrap-up.

Friday saw WordCamp not start with a bang per say, but more a tsunami. Some may not look at it this way, but one fo the big things about WordCamp is the chance to communicate; meet, greet and exchange war stories, with a large number of fellow bloggers and WordPress Developers.

And that all started with lunch at The WordPress Podcast Meetup. In retrospect I wish I could of ditched work and made it. Talking to Charles Stricklin the instigator of the meetup, it sounded as though it became a large Q&A gripe session on WordPress. It had started with people just stalking about common things like “long flights, the problems of hailing a cab, bad hotel WiFi, blog monetization, elevator pitches and how much Aaron hates to give them, and we were discussing the failure of the current advertising paradigm to deal with syndication and how scrapers and other ways of “losing control” of our content might not actually be a bad thing.” And one the Automattic crew arrive and more then quadrupled the group it got interesting. Matt took control and had everyone explain who they where and so forth prompting chuckles and in cases, and outright laughter when John C. Dvorak stood up and said, “I’m John Dvorak and I’m an Alcoholic.” But it turned somewhat serious as Matt asked what everyones favorite plugins where, with Anti-Spam being top favorites. And then Matt asked what gripes people had with WordPress. This in itself was the genius moment of the meetup. Matt had a captive audience of WordPress users and the Devs around to take notes, offer insight and let leak a few tidbits. (You’ll have to read the whole writeup that Charles did, to get it all.)

That evening was my first chance to join them at the Pre-Conference Dinner, and of course I arrived early. Planning originally to get there very early and enjoy the shops there. I had missed my Ferry, so took BART in and grabbed a Fat Tire and sat down to relax, and read my Newspaper. I hadn’t been sitting for very long until Niall noted my old laptop courier bag I had brought with me, festooned with WordPress stickers and introduced himself. Grabbing a long table that had just cleared we sat down and proceed to talk while waiting for the others to arrive. Now I’ll state at the beginning, what I’ve stated numerous times. I’m bad with names. Sometimes when looking at the person the name will pop into my memory, but afterwards and most the time everyone becomes “hey.” So I cannot remember the names of the first people arriving, but we soon filled the table and started branching out. The talk was less of WordPress itself persay and of many other things. The conversations a bunch of geeks getting together come up with. I heard and participated in talks about the iphone, databases, web horror stories, motorcycles, tattoos, other events, and general life. It was a refreshing hodgepodge of ideas and talk. Sitting there in the wonderful weather, drinking and enjoying the good food the time slipped fast. Soon the evening was there and the groups started breaking up. Tagging along with Matt and Lorelle I got engrossed in conversation with Lorelle and next thing I knew I saw it was almost 11, I was a number of blocks from the nearest BART station and I knew I had to be up at 6:30 the next morning. So I left them to continue partying, and made my way home.

Now when one normally wakes up at a certain time, and then tries to get going at an earlier time, his body sometimes doesn’t fully function. In my case I had the start and then return home and get something and restart, but soon I arrived. The first year had been put together in 3 weeks, so felt hectic and troublesome in places. This year I was able to walk up, get my name tag, wander up and grab a nice spot and then go find Coffee and Danishes available (oh yea and a “little” water). After some refreshment, some good talk with the nearby bloggers and some adjustment on chair that looked to have padding, Matt got things started. Charles Stricklin talks about Days 0&1 in his wrap-up here.
The first day was touted as user day… and the presentations where definite bang busters. We started off with Dan Kuykendall, author of PodPress doing a presentation on Podcasting. Quite a bit light on why people should podcast and the bits behind that. He did go into good detail about what you need to do a podcast, what equipment and software, and some little tidbits. He then went into detail about his wp-podcast plugin. He didn’t go into depth about some of the issues on how he worked out the integration with itunes (he he got help and such), but he did quickly go over it, and why its such a help if you are posting media to your blog somewhat regularly. Besides the above link, Stephanie Booth wrote an excellent write up titled: Dan Kuykendall, Podcasting and podPress

The next presentation after a small break was Blogs vs. Journalism with John C. Dvorak and Om Malik. I loved this blog because of the controversy it actually created inside it. The very first comment from Dvorak was “There is no difference between Bloggers and Journalists, wanted to start right off with that. But mainstream journalists are refusing to see that.” This was said with the Person in charge of the New York Times Blogs sitting right there. The energy in the room was palatable, and the discussion between Dvorak and Malik was great. The went into how Big Media just wasn’t getting it. The authors in those cases didn’t have the control over their material, the editors did. Where with bloggers the author and editor quite often is the same person. Plus as a blogger you can go back and correct yourself. You may state something is wrong, but can go back and correct it; where Big Media refuses to do that. there was much more to the presentation, but you can read about it at the above link or at Stephanie Booth’s Wonderful write up: John C. Dvorak and Om Malik: Blogs vs. Journalism

After an eh Subway lunch (I personally don’t like Subway), Lorelle started working the audience. If you have never seen Lorelle talk, imagine a woman with shorter red hair and an infectious smile coming up and asking you questions… Her personality means she was able to get the answer she wanted from everyone. She’d go up and ask what their name was, what their blog was, and what they talked about. Her goal? Make sure you wrote inviting conversation. Her presentation started there, but it also returned there. She hit several great point about how to nudge readers into getting into he conversation. Part way through it, Lorelle mentioned her new book Blogging Tips, that blogger won’t tell you you about blogging, she had copies for all attendees scheduled to be delivered. But UPS messed up, and in return the Printer was going to eat the cost of mailing copies to each of the attendees (Lorelle emailed to make sure and let you know that all attendees will be receiving an email asking for the deliver address, please keep an eye out for it). For those that couldn’t attend she arranged a short term deal: For those who would like their own copy, or another for a friend, but were unable to attend the conference, they are still available for the introductory price of USD $12.95 plus shipping from the Blog Herald Bookstore. That is a steal considering it’ll sell for quite a bit more on Amazon. Again to get a good grasp of the presentation I encourage you to glance through the notes linked about, and Stephanie’s wonderful Live Blogging of it: Lorelle VanFossen, Kicking Ass Content Connections

In the next session Jeremy Wright talked to us about blog monetization. Now this was more then don’t get stuck in the Google Adsense trap. This was changing things so that instead of hundreds a month, you can make thousands. Jeremy invited 3 random people up to take seats on a panel. He took 1 from the categories of Large site/well monetized, a settled site/somewhat monetized, a site that had just added ads. Well it was ironic, but the well monetized site was ICANHAZCHEESEBURGER. A site originally started when a couple guys wanted to post funny pictures of cats with captions that has boomed into a site that gets hundreds of thousands of pageviews daily. The reason I say ironic is that they didn’t start the site for money. The panel also included Foot Noted and a Cottage Blog… so the panel had some interesting variety. As Jeremy directed questions he also spelled out the numerous ways blogs can make money, and also how times have change and the money has changed. Again Stephanie Booth did a good job with a readable write up (perhaps just not as many notes as the above writeup): Jeremy Wright, Im in ur blogz grabbin’ ur kash! Blog Monetization

With Getting Involved with WordPress we saw Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith put out the call for help. They where making good points about how ANYONE can help with WordPress. Also they went through the many ways that people can help from programmers to anyone with a free second. Also numerous times Lorelle jumped up and noted the codex and documentation needed help in editing and cleaning up.

The next was a promising presentation on Designing the Obvious, by Robert Hoekman. This presentation was interesting because he took his original presentation and threw it out the window after seeing the earlier presentations. Instead he worked off of notes he had written in the 2 hours before. So needless to say it was rough at points, BUT the actual ideas where interesting. Basically pairing down your interface to only what was needed. So that the site itself doesn’t take away from the experience of the reader. What exactly is needed for the content you are posting? Do you need the blogroll, the archives, the comments, the RSS feed… And then we went over what each thing contributed… and how you’d have to take each element of the post, and decide if it was necessary. All in all very interesting

Now you have heard the old phrase saving the best for last? Well the last presentation of the day was Matt Cutts of Google giving us the Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers. There are way too many tips for a short overview (not without leaving off a ton of good tips) but in short he went over the Google Webmaster Panel, gave some great example of how to increase your SEO, some good examples on how to lose your Pagerank (Google Bombing and Sponsored Links ala TLA) and generally kept us entertained to the point we didn’t care the day was over, and kept wanting him to talk. Entirely too nice he answered a ton of questions that where caught in the write-up up above and also Stephanie Booth had her RSI down enough to do another good write-up here: Matt Cutts, Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers

After the end of the presentations a number of us hit the local restaurants and continued our talking until meeting back up an hour or so later at a local bar called The Lucky Number 13. That’s where it got fun. It had been nice before, but as usual with alcohol involved the stories rolled. We compared web hosts, talked about people that we had hoped to see at WordCamp and hadn’t made it (yes you). And also talked more about why we blogged… this went on for hours with myself having to bow out to grab one for the last BART trains out of San Francisco and others not heading home until the bar closed.

Now with the end of Day 1 and the start of Day 2 things where a little different. Dragging out of the house that morning was a bit more painful, and the crowds at the Hall wasn’t as bad. The WordCamp organizers had positioned Sunday as the Developer day, and in a lot of ways it was. But at the same time people who weren’t developers to a person said that they learned things and thought it was an interesting day.

The first presentation was HyperDB and High Performance WordPress. But in reality Barry went through a lot of trouble to run some numbers. Numbers showing how even minor tweaks improved loads times. How a couple more tweaks improved the number of pageviews a server could handle. And then he talked about how you can do some amazing thing, all with OpenSource Software. This led to Matt stepping up and explaining his play toy, HyperDB. HyperDB is a drop in replacement that adds support for distributed databases. Using a very simple setup for writing the config, you are able to spread a WordPress site or MANY WordPress sites across how ever many databases you want. Plus it can automagically scale as needed. All in all it was an interesting lecture. But that wasn’t all, Matt and Barry shoehorned in Jeremy Zilar to do a short talk about how it was to develop the New York Times Blogs.

After that last presentation, Iterative Design in Agile Environments must of seemed like it just didn’t fit, so Rashmi Sinha changed the name too Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems. In it she went over the points on how to create and deal with a Social site. She used many examples including her SlideShare site which allows users to upload and share slideshows (All the slideshows currently on the site where uploaded there), including a sneak peek at a feature they released today, which allow people to tie in an audio file with the slideshow (she said we could mention it on Tuesday…). All in all it was an interesting look and the solutions she talked about where creative. Also the issues she brought up with how popular _____, it doesn’t matter what, will remain popular since its so hard to displace them. So in some cases the social voting for things… the most popular will grow even more so and the not so, will drop fast.

After that Presentation we were fed some real good BBQ from Memphis Minnies and Andy Skeleton (I’ll make a post when I find the songs have been posted) put a borrow guitar to use and gave us an excuse to relax for a little. I also took part in podcast interview on Apple Universe with Daniel Brusilovsky as a wrap up of the weekend and then Douglas of PreviewCast podcast interviewed me quickly on this blog (podcast includes a couple of Andy Skeletons songs).

Now perhaps because of lunch, or perhaps my personal taste. But the next presentation from Dave Winer called the Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing just didn’t do me. Mind he did make some decent points about the survivability of knowledge on the web and such. And to make sure and make copies. But all in all it wasn’t on the top list.

It was probably a good thing that Liz Danzico followed the last presentation with Usability Analysis of WordPress, because it grabbed our attention. I am sure I wouldn’t think a usability analysis would normally be exciting. But she went through and ripped apart the WordPress Admin. She explained how she went to numerous homes and watched users using WordPress. Looking to see what they did, how they did it. She also looked at other software admins to see what the other companies/developers where doing. And in response the Admin in 2.4 is going to be sleek, adjustable, and configurable. Wait… what do I mean adjustable and configurable? Well we’ll be able to set it to see only what we want to see, plus sectioned like the dashboard will allow us to drag boxes around so that we can tailer it too our liking. All in all it was an interesting talk that was a good lead uoff to the next presentation

Last time Matt had done the State of the Word, it had been somewhat hurriedly thrown together and was more a Q&A session. And this year he started with explaining exactly what all had occurred over the previous year. What new things had been released, what new features had made it in. He also pointed out the things that they hadn’t done (with a nudge nudge for volunteers). He also laid out some exciting news with things to look forward too in the 2.3 (tags, plugin auto-updates, etc.) and 2.4 (revised better admin, better image handling) releases. He also announced some new things coming out and also talked one of the Devs into releasing a plugin he had created (for the WordCamp.org site) to handle payment through PayPal. He then wrapped up and we broke while they set up for the next presentation.

The last presentation was also one of the more interesting. That may be hard to believe after the State of the Word, but as irreverent it was at times, it was also pretty interesting. The Developer Duke-Out was also the time for Matt to ask a few questions (including some often asked questions) and also allow the audience to ask all the developers questions. The questions went from silly like “what’s your favorite beer,” to interesting like what plugins did you like, or what would you code on, if it wasn’t WordPress.

But the end of the day I was slammed, after a long commute home I crashed and took Monday off from blogging to recoup. I had gone through posts and added slideshow that had been posted, and I gathered together links like Charles Stricklins wrapup post about Day 2, and Donncha’s Two Posts (Saturday & Sunday). I will still post a couple more times as the videos of the presentations are posted and I get the last of the SlideShows (Matt Cutts for example had to run his by legal). I’ll end this post with a Clip from KRON 4 News about WordCamp that Matt pointed out.

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Here is also all the Flickr Images of WordCamp 2007. I couldn’t get them to do a SlideShow of all of them, so here are the ones I took.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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