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First Day at #WCIRL

So, day one of WordCamp Ireland draws to a close, there is a dinner tonight but the talks and sessions are over for the day.

I briefly helped John Handelaar during his talk on WordPress MU, but my main talk was on WP Super Cache. Thank you Hanni, Jane and Sheri for recording the talk. Hopefully it’ll be available online next week. In the meantime here’s the OpenOffice slides of my talk.

I must extend a big thank you to Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan for organising a great day and to the sponsors who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the dinner tonight, and the rest of the conference tomorrow.

Update! I’ve added a few photos from Day 2. I was shattered tired though as I was up until 1.30am chatting with Donnacha!

Update 2! Sabrina has written a thoughtful post about WordCamp Ireland. I for one had a great time there and so did everyone I spoke to. I totally agree with her about child minding facilities. My son Adam had a whale of a time, and is still talking about it. (and for an almost three year old, that’s a very good sign!)

Continue reading “First Day at #WCIRL”

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Gravatar enabled WordCamp Badges

Andy has the very exciting news that Gravatar icons will be printed on attendee’s WordCamp San Francisco badges this year!

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On supporting websites, Gravatars have become a de-facto identity for comment threads and discussions so to carry through the identity to the conference floor is just a logical conclusion.

There is one caveat. Gravatars can now be up to 512×512 pixels. The bigger they are, the better they’ll print. If your Gravatar is a measly 32×32 pixels it’s going to look like a dirty smudge next to the shiny badges of the big boys. Andy has created a handy form for checking if your image is the right size. If not, please upload a new Gravatar before August 14th!

I won’t be at WordCamp this year but after seeing the line up of speakers I’m looking forward to seeing the blog coverage afterwards.

PS. Andy has a new post showing how to create those badges with the help of a PDF library.

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Dvorak vs Malik at WordCamp on video

John Pozadzides has released the first video from WordCamp and it’s sure to be one that will interest many. John C Dvorak debates with Om Malik on the subject of Blogging vs Journalism. It’s hosted on blip.tv and John has uploaded a high quality version there.

I won’t embed it here, go look at John’s post for the video! Thanks John for doing such a great job!

We spent a good portion of today at SFMOMA, where they have a really interesting photography exhibit, and some of the modern art on the first floor really caught my eye, especially the self portrait of Andy Warhol and the image containing the pencils across the room from it. Blew my mind they did.
Later we went for dinner but in between we relaxed in a local park. Here’s a photo Alex took of me and Matt. Alex has a neat little RF transmitter and receiver for his camera and flash. He lay the flash on the bench next to him while he shot this photo. Good fill flash and it’s not in-your-face like an onboard flash would be. I have to get my hands on an RF transmitter to go with my 580EX!

While on the subject, this is Automattic. There are quite a few of us now, and as you can see, we’re really getting into the formal “must wear a suit to work” dress code.

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Sunday Morning Wordcamping

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Barry spoke at length about High Performance WordPress this morning, and Matt came on stage to introduce and summarise the main features of the new Hyperdb. If you missed it you’re definitely going to want to watch the video when it comes out. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that Barry was out last night telling me, “ah you’ll have one more before you go..” 🙂
Great talk guys!

Barry’s talk is already online. That was fast!

Rashmi Sinha, Iterative Design in Agile Environments

Rashmi Sinha’s talk on “Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems” is fascinating. I agree with her observation that the Internet really isn’t democratic. Whoever is popular will get ever more popular, in general. There are exceptions of course but the well established bloggers like Robert Scoble are hard to dislodge from their pedestals.

Dave Winer at Wordcamp

Dave Winer talking at Wordcamp.

John Pozadzides, Wordcamp Cameraman

John Pozadzides is the guy with the camera on the balcony at Wordcamp. He’s going to post videos of the event online and is looking for suggestions about where that should be. I’ll suggest blip.tv, as it’s served me well in the past!

Liz Danzico, Usability Analysis of WP

Liz presented research into the backend that will eventually make it into WordPress 2.4

Finally, Charles Stricklin has a great write up on the second day including the reminder that I sort-of promised to release that Paypal Instant Payment Notification code ..

There are literally hundreds of images from WordCamp on Flickr. Scott has posted a few too, and made them available under a CC license and here are a few photos taken by Alex who is just as mad about photography as I am!

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Really finally this time. I had my photo taken and then they made a cartoon out of it. Thanks! 🙂

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Saturday morning at WordCamp 2007

WordCamp at Swedish American Hall

WordCamp 2007 has just started and I’m there! Photos and posts are already appearing online and probably the best way to track them is by subscribing to the follow page’s feeds:

I’m posting photos to my WordCamp 2007 Flickr set. It’s growing slowly but surely and from my vantage point on the balcony I have a good view of the proceedings!

Lorelle at WordCamp

Half way through the day and I must say I’m enjoying Lorelle’s talk the most. (Edit – here’s a great write-up on her talk). I’m not very interested in podcasting but Dan Kuykendall’s talk on the subject might make me install his podpress plugin just to see what it’s all about.

Om and John Dvorak’s talk made me feel sick. I can’t imagine that most of the audience have problems with moderating too many comments. I know I’m overjoyed when anyone comments! And that comment about using the default WordPress theme made me angry. It’s not only new users to WordPress who use it but at least one established and respected blogger uses it and it hasn’t hurt how his writing is perceived. I felt a huge gap between what they were talking about and what I think about. Anyone else feel the same way? (eh Lorelle?)

self help for cats

The Blog Monetization talk is just finishing up but I went downstairs for a walk about and took a quick look at the stickers and card table. This card from Self Help for Cats is definitely the best card down there. Go visit them for feline help!

While on the subject of making money, here’s Jeremy’s tips for making money online:

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New! Add your photos to the WordCamp Flickr group! Tag them with “wordcamp” and “wordcamp2007” too!

OMG! Robert doesn’t know who Lorelle is! Shocker!

Matt & Matt

The Matt Cutts talk is great, I’ll post snapshots of his slides later! Biggest tip I’ve learned so far? Use dashes or underscores to separate out the words in categories or tags. Don’t join words. Update – text link ads are a definite no-no. Sites will be penalized.

Funny cartoons of Wordcamp 2007 participants and visitors: bodyabcs.com! Oh yes, hey hot stuff!

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Post WordCamp, Post SF, Post Haste

Last week I went to San Francisco to meet up with the rest of Automattic and attend WordCamp 2006. There's plenty of coverage of WordCamp so I'm sure you're not interested in me telling you how great it was, who said what, what sucked, etc, etc!

What I would like to say is my heartfelt thanks to Matt and Toni and those who control the purse strings in Automattic who made last week possible. Podz, Andy and I stayed in a fabulous house where everyone gathered to work and brainstorm new features, work methods, discuss our strengths and weaknesses and work super-fast on finally getting the Upgrades feature of WordPress.com out.

What are the guys in Automattic like? They're smart, they're enthusiastic, they're really driven by blogging and making things better. They live and breath blogs and tech but they really do worry about how a beginner views WordPress. They're also fun and great to be with and I look forward to the next Automattic get-together!

Much to my delight everyone I met was nice. In the cut-throat world of business it's not often that can be said. It's such a simple thing, that word, "nice". How often can you describe your work colleagues and business people in general that way? I hope that things remain competitive and fast moving but that people don't lose their humanity over the all-mighty Dollar.

I hope Matt doesn't eat all that brisket, I know it tastes like heaven but I think it may be off by now!

Oh yeah, a final thank you to you all for being so patient when I would say, "hang on, I just saw something" and go shoot a lamp post or a doorway, or some other street furniture or a silly yellow "computer guided" tourist car. I have 5GB of Jpeg files to look through! 🙂

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WordCamp Pictures and Words

WordCamp went really well yesterday. I’m a little hungover today so I’ll point you in the direction of others who blogged the event:

Later – I uploaded my images to Zooomr and created a smart set there. That was a nice experience, the uploader is slightly better than a regular HTTP upload and the smart set feature is like virtual folders in Thunderbird. If they had upload by email I’d be there every day!