WordCamp SF 2008

I headed up to WordCamp 2008 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco with Dr. Mike (twitter) on Saturday 16th August. See Dr. Mike’s personal site for his own summary of the weekend.

We caught a flight very early in the morning, and a cab from the airport right to the conference.

There were two main rooms, one upstairs for the User track, one downstairs for the Developer track. Dr. Mike spent the day networking and in the upstairs room, while I split my time about 2/3 in the User track, the rest in the Developer track.

It was well worth the $20 for registration, the flight, and the hotel.. plus the schwag, coffee, and free poop colored WordPress shirt! Probably the only criticism I have during the event is that I was very underwhelmed by the food. I know it was only $20, but I’d rather have had a Subway sandwich.

The after party free bar was very much appreciated though!

I scanned in the conference schedule here, just for posterity sake.

What follows are some notes I wrote down during the talks I was able to attend during the conference..

WordPress In Education

Alan Levine (twitter) gave a talk entitled “The Future of Education and WP”.

Some examples of educational blogs
Here are his slides and his post on his talk, and his experiences at WordCamp.

SEO mistakes bloggers make
Stephen Spencer (sites: personal, business) gave a great talk on giving your site a serious SEO makeover. He’s a big advocate of this SEO title tag plugin. Also discussed using the WP-Sticky plugin.

Other great links..
- His presentation slides.
- Great SEO article.
- Ebook on power searching with Google
- SEO Best Practices & Worst Practices Checklist
- SEO Planning Worksheet
I thoroughly enjoyed his talk and I intend to do some detailed study of his slides.
Even faster websites
Steve Souders (author of High Performance Websites) gave a detailed talk on optimizing website load times. He’s got a great web metrics tool called “Cuzillion” available here.

It was VERY comprehensive but admit it’s not a topic I’ve had to think about much.

His talk slides are available here.
Secure coding with WordPress
Mark Jaquith gave this great talk on security and programming best practices for WordPress. I’m planning on doing a bunch of blog customization so I found this very useful.

His talk slides are available here.

His post on the weekend.
WordPress and microformats
Tantek Celik (twitter) gave a talk title “WordPress and Microformats: Past, Present, Future”. I really enjoyed this talk as it opened my eyes to a number of cool features supported by WordPress that I’m not using, and it made me more aware of the topic of Microformats and their pervasiveness on the web.

Some random scribblings form the talk..
- Try integrating the hcard (wikipedia) format to download contact info
- The Operator plugin for Firefox
- WordPress and microformats
- Search for wordpress plugins that support microformats
- http://buddypress.org/!
- http://microformats.org/!
- DiSo!
His talk slides are available here.
Quercus — PHP in Java
Emil Ong gave this talk. I got into the talk late so I struggled a bit to get it. Looked interesting though and I need to review his slides and read into it some more.

Here’s his post on the weekend.
Nginx for fun and profit
Chris Lea gave this talk on using Nginx as your main webserver instead of the usual Apache (sorry windows folks, this is a *nix biased blog ). Advantages are it’s simplicity and raw throughput power. If I remember correctly, it just serves up html pages, and delegates to an external php interpreter when required. I think he quoted an order of magnitude improvement over apache for basic tasks. Lots of very interesting points, definitely something to look into but not for the faint of heart as the doc compared to Apache is minimal - but apparently it doesn’t need all that doc anyways!

Misc notes..
No slides available at this point.
WordPress APIs, iPhone and beyond!
Joseph Scott gave this talk.

Some notes..
- AtomPub (WordPress support, Windows Livewriter, MarsEdit)
- Open source iPhone app
- xmlrpc client http://ditchnet.org/xmlrpc
Slides available here.
The State of the Word
Matt (WordPress creator) gave a good talk covering lots of stuff. I was so busy listening I didn’t get time to write down much!

Some notes..
- Included slide on many DoD branches now using Wordpress
- Top plugins include cforms, wp-polls, WP automatic upgrade, wp-cache, WordPress stats, nextgen-gallery, google-sitemap, akismet.
- Budypress
- Something called Hubpress
His blog post on the WordCamp event.
WordPress Consulting - getting paid for your WP skills
Toni Schneider gave a good talk on making some $$ from your WordPress coding skills.

Tips to get started include..
- Put up your own site, make it look professional.
- Be clear about the services you provide.
- Avoid tire kickers, they’ll suck your time.
- Think geographically, the US accounts for 40% of possible work, with the UK, Germany, Canada, etc. 5-10% in total.
- Sign up on the wp-pro mailing list. Consultants have reported this list can generate several projects per month.
- Perform work for referrals, “designed by” credit link, etc.
- Provide free themes and plugins.
Other notes..
- A good list of consultants: http://automattic.com/services/wordpress-consultants/
- Required coding skills include converting old sites, creating themes, programming, tweaking themes, plugins, howto upgrade/host, etc., custom themes, major areas: theme design, implementation, plugin development, others: security audits, training, SEO
- Projects/budgets typically range from $200 to $100k
- http://www.visudo.com/
- http://cnpstudio.com/
- http://allthingsd.com/
Hi slides from the talk available here.
Color Theory and the Making of Monotone
Noel Jackson gave this design focused talk. I made it part way through so missed a lot of context.. must review his talk slides to get up to speed.