I’m just back from two information packed days at WordCamp Chicago. After a conference, I try to find time to write down my takeaways. Generally my intention is to act upon the takeaways in a timely fashion. That does not always happen. So, writing this post serves two purposes for me: sharing the ideas and information with you and putting all the links in a place I can quickly find them later.
5 Things I liked/learned at WordCamp Chicago
1. KickPress – I kicked the conference off by attending Beyond the Theme – WordPress as an API presented by David Tufts. Later this summer, David is going to be releasing the KickPress plugin back to the WordPress communicate as a free open source tool that turns WordPress into an API-based content management system. This will greatly simplify getting your content to mobile applications you build for the Android and iPhone platforms.
2. Nginx – The techie in me couldn’t resist attending TJ Stein’s Developing Fast & Scalable Servers for WordPress session. I run my sites on self-hosted Virtual Private Servers and up until now have always used the Apache web server. After TJ’s presentation, I’ll be setting up a test server to see if I can get Nginx running in my environment. TJ shared this quote during his presentation that sold me on giving it a try.
“Apache is like Microsoft Word. It does 50,000 things pretty well. The problem is you only use it to do like 5 of those things. Nginx does those 5 things 5 to 50 times better and faster than Apache.”
3. Online is beginning to mirror humanity – During Mary DuQuaine’s WordPress and the Digital Ecosystem presentation, she discussed how Google+ Circles are getting very close to how we as humans organize our lives. There’s very little in our offline existence that we share with everyone we know. Yet online tools like Twitter only allow us to broadcast to the entire population. It was a presentation that got me thinking abut broadcasting less and focusing on targets groups more.
4. Hide date and time of posts that aren’t perishable. After our She Said, He Said session, I was approached by an audience member with a potential solution to an SEO problem I’m having. I struggle with the “Double your htc EVO battery life” series of posts falling in and out of Google SEO favor. It seems I need to find a way to hide the published time and date on those posts. Otherwise, I’ll continue to lose Google juice over time as the search algorithms look at those posts as “news” and thus somewhat time sensitive. I’ll be researching that.
5. Search for ‘search’ on Google – When you get done laughing at what the number one result is, consider taking a look at the awesome support page Google provides for webmasters. Nicole Yeary shared both these gems and more during her WordPress as Your Social Media/SEO Hub presentation. That’s the link to her presentation and it contains several action items you can dig into today! During her session, Shelby shared the following tweet that became a Twitter Top Tweet. Pretty cool for both you ladies.
If you attended WordCamp Chicago and feel I missed something, please use the comments to point us all in the right direction.
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