WordPress

The WordCamp experience comes to Milwaukee

by JimRaffel on April 27, 2012

Image of MKE BrewingIf you are in any way connected to the digital scene, there is probably no better way to spend $20 than buying a WordCamp Milwaukee ticket. That $20 will get you two full days of learning and sharing WordPress-related knowledge. You’ll get that and a pretty cool after party Shelby and I are planning.

It’s a community experience

In January of 2011 while attending my first WordCamp out in Phoenix, I experienced firsthand the friendly sharing attitude of the WordPress/WordCamp community. Everyone came to learn; even those there to share their knowledge presenting or helping out at the knowledge bar. Since then I have attended three more WordCamps (Chicago, Detroit and back to Phoenix) so Milwaukee will make my fifth camp and it’s going to be the most special as it’s in my hometown.

Lots of different topics and reasons to come

There will be three tracks at WordCamp Milwaukee: user, developer and an unconference. The list of speakers is coming together as well and it’s an impressive one (present company excluded). The point is this conference is for everyone from the writer with little technical knowledge all the way to developers working on the next version of the WordPress core.

I’ve met journalists, developers and social media gurus at WordCamps. It’s a place where all the disciplines of the digital landscape come together to freely and openly share knowledge with one another.

And you can get a shirt!

If you sign up by May 1, you will be guaranteed to get a shirt that fits. If you’re local, there is really no reason to delay and if you’re not local, don’t worry. I hear we are working on some good hotel deals for you guys too.

I’m hoping to see lots of my WordCamp friends from Chicago and Detroit as the drive is not too bad for you guys. Oh and here’s a little teaser: The picture with this post was taken inside the Milwaukee Brewing Company, where our after party will be held Saturday night (June 2). That’s right. In Milwaukee, a town made famous by beer, our after party is being held in a brewery. It’s also a brewery that happens to be walking distance from the event venue.

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WordCamp Phoenix 2012 Takeaways

by JimRaffel on February 27, 2012

image of wordcamp phoenixI spent this past Saturday at WordCamp Phoenix 2012 and, as it has become my custom, I’m sharing my takeaways from the event with you today.

The unexpected and intangible

Networking: I’ve been to enough conferences that I know this, but I always seem to forget that one of the biggest values of taking the time and spending the money to attend face-to-face events is connecting with folks. I got to meet some of the folks from our managed WordPress hosting company ZippyKid and reconnect with folks I’ve met at previous WordCamps. I’m a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t make any new friends. I’m not really sure why that was, but I plan to make sure it doesn’t happen at future events I attend.

Rockstar Bar: While at the event, Shelby and I discovered a problem with our SheHe Media site that we could not seem to solve on our own. After lunch, we spent about 30 minutes with three different WordPress rock stars at the Rockstar Bar. With their help, we confirmed it was a result of the configuration of our server side caching for the site. It wasn’t something we could fix ourselves, but at least I knew what to put in the ticket so that my friends at ZippyKid could help us resolve the issue. Once again, the power of the WordPress community proved itself to me. The community is a bunch of great folks all trying to help each other be successful.

The sessions

Next generation web: Technologies to take your UIX to the next level: I started the day with this session presented by Jake Goldman and I’m sure glad I did. Early on in the presentation, he asked the audience if we thought the combination of HTML5 and CSS3 could eventually reduce the need for dedicated apps. My gut has been telling me “yes” for a awhile now, but in about 45 minutes Goldman provided compelling evidence that HTML5 and CSS3 hold great promise. I’d suggest taking a peek at his slides. If you are in a rush, just jump to slides 43 and 46. The links provided on those two slides are compelling proof of the promise HTML5 and CSS3 hold for the next generation web in the coming years.

BuddyPress & Multisite: This session was presented by John Hawkins, a true WordPress Ninja. Over at SheHe Media, we’ve been giving some thought to an easy way to administer the multiple sites for which our little media company is responsible. Hawkins’ fun and lively presentation convinced both Shelby and me that a move to WordPress Multisite makes a great deal of sense if you are administering and developing on multiple sites. I’d love to make the move yesterday, but because it’s not a trivial decision, we’ll spend some time developing a migration plan. This will involve more investigation and working with our hosting company, but Hawkins did a great job explaining what we need to consider.

Journalism: I went into this session with a great deal of skepticism. After all, Shelby and I have argued this topic many times on the SheHe Media blog and during our weekly #shehechat over on Twitter. I was pleasantly surprised that Ryan Imel took a different approach. He recognized that a blog is simply a delivery mechanism for writing and focused on the tools (plugins) that can make your your writing process a smoother one. Like Shelby and me, he believes that if your blog is more than a one-person effort, you need additional tools to support the editorial process.

E-Commerce What to Know: I rounded out the day with Aaron D. Campbell’s presentation about using your WordPress site as an e-commerce platform. Campbell has shared all his slides here, which I found to be informative even to a guy like me who’s been doing e-commerce with WordPress for several years. He rounded up four of the more popular shopping cart options and also stressed the importance of taking PCI compliance seriously. There are plenty of useful links in the post so if you are considering e-commerce for your WordPress site. I’d suggest taking a look.

It’s all about the community

Each time I attend a WordCamp, I am blown away by how much time members of the community spend helping each other out for free. If you have even one WordPress site, I’d recommend finding a WordCamp near you and spending a Saturday engaged with the community.

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Over the last couple weeks, I’ve spent time rearranging this site without going through the pain of a complete redesign. The nice thing about WordPress is, depending upon the theme you utilize, much of the site layout can be changed by moving widgets around. The following are some of the changes I made and the [...]

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WordPress Enhancement Cyber Monday Picks

November 28, 2011
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This is post 674 since I started blogging in July of 2005. For all of those 674 posts, I’ve depended on the WordPress platform to power JimRaffel.com. I’ve watched WordPress grow into the feature-rich, community-supported, open source solution it is today. As great as WordPress is, if you’re goal is to run your blog as [...]

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WordCamp Detroit Takeaways

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I find it useful to turn notes from attending conferences into a blog post of takeaways. This is not meant to be a roundup of the entire two-day conference. It’s just those things that caught my interest and that I plan to follow up on in the next week or so. I’ve tried to provide [...]

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WordCamp Love

November 7, 2011

WordPress is more than a blogging platform. It’s a worldwide community of folks brought together by a common love of the blogging/content management system that has changed the way about 15 percent of us build a presence on the internet. One of the ways the community comes together face-to-face is at WordCamp conferences. What’s it [...]

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WordPress and MAMP

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Following are the slides from my presentation last night at the Milwaukee WordPress Meetup. Without the context of my talk and the question and answer session that followed, they lack context but nonetheless here they are. The goal of the presentation is being able to do WordPress development on your standalone machine without an internet [...]

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5 WordCamp Chicago Session Takeaways

August 1, 2011
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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 [...]

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