Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging)
- WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice 😉
- Almost everyone I met was with some company, start-ups to large to individual consultants, people just creating themes, and were making a living selling services based on WordPress.
- Search Engine Optimization- I do buy the importance of making sure your stuff is well found, but the obsession with tweaking the game for the sole purpose of more rank is… well not my bowl of biscuits. If it your thing, check out Stephen O’Grady’s preso
- If you have a site based on LOLCATS, you have lots of good images for slides — see Ben Huh’s preso on Virality. He is one shrewd and funny guy and thinks I look like my icon. All of the I Can Has Cheezburger fleet is run on hosted WordPress (and he says, “we are simple only like 3 plugins!”. The complex submission process for GraphJam is one person in Vietnam processing the incoming submissions and emailing back to the main team. That’s one flat world.
- Microformats are quietly at work w/o us knowing it. Tantek Celik opened my awareness to hCard and a FireFox Addon that makes it simple to extract contact data from a web page (e.g. a google map search) and one click add that to your address book.
- Microformat stuff for WordPress http://microformats.org/wiki/hAvatar
- Concept of”syndicated” profiles is interesting. If site B uses flickr to authenticate me to create and account, it can auto populate my profile from flickr, it not only does that, but should I change my profile in flickr, such changes are propagated to Site B.
- Tantek also showed some prototype of profile sydnication tools — see DiSo http://code.google.com/p/diso/
- Cool tools from Lorelle
- Google Reader preview (greasemonkey)
- Absolute Comments plugin is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first.
- Greasemonkey Script: Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress greatly condenses view of Akimet to make it easier to comb through the crap
- Woopro website tracking
- State of the Word (Matt) – more than 2.6 million self hosted (wordpress.org) blogs + 3.8 miliion on WordPress.com. Coming soon- interface improvements, in-place updates (one click built in). Who has the most active plugins (max was 70+ for someone in the back). There is someone out there who has 1200 wordpress plugins installed, more than 500 active
- WordPress has a “turbo” link in top right of Admin dashboard that downloads via GoogleGears bits of the site to make it run more quickly http://tinyurl.com/464lkb
- BuddyPress looks compelling – social networking plug and play built on WordPress. “”BuddyPress will transform a vanilla install of WordPressMU into a social networking platform” See presentation from WordCamp
- “Crazyhorse” user study of experimental WP interface “with lasers” tracking user eye movement is a great approach! WordPress 3.0.. with lasers! (I made that up)
- Its fun to have a WP Rapper around http://www.theseorapper.com/
- Kathy Sierra is an amazing presenter, very passionate about users “kicking ass” “getting above the suck threshold”, etc. Wish she would blog again.
FWIW, Kathy Sierra is tweeting @kathysierra
Thanks for that Google Reader extension. Very helpful!
Really? People are a making a living selling WordPress related services? I wonder how many people that is. That would be interesting information for students.
Thanks @pumkin-she and I are mutual followers 😉 But the richness of her blog posts, the graphics, are what I miss. Maybe I am getting nostalgic for PT (Pre Twitter) days when people composed ideas.
@Dean- “Making a living” might be open to interpretation. Maybe its a corner of what used to be doing web design means using WP to put business sites online.
Yes, totally agree on her tweets vs. blog postings…I cut/pasted part of her twitter stream into a txt file the other day to consolidate some of her thoughts that were strung out over multiple tweets…:-)
It’s wonderful to relive WordCamp. Thanks for the great summary. You pointed out some things I missed!
And I agree with you about Kathy. She is so wonderful, and while she continues to participate within the blogosphere and social online world through other means, I can’t help but feel that the trolls won when she stopped blogging. I adore her, and wish her greatness in all she does, but still, so many of us miss her. That is why it was wonderful to see her in person.