WordCamp Victoria 2012 has been announced for January 14, 2012. As a WordPress developer, I’ve attended my fair share of WordCamps, from San Francisco to the Fraser Valley, and organized WordCamp Whistler as well as WordCamp Vancouver. It’s always a pleasure to attend the event organized in our province’s capital as well. Last year I presented “WordPress Plugins to Make Your Blogging Life Easier” showcasing several basic plugins and how you can select the right one for your needs.

I have been asked to be a keynote speaker for WordCamp Victoria 2012 and have prepared the following outline for my talk:

Time Management with WordPress
One of the questions I get asked most often is “when will I find time to blog”. While most of my tips can be applied to almost any platform, there are specific features of WordPress that can save you a lot of publishing time. From the WordPress mobile application (for iPhone), to pairing WordPress with plugins and social media management tools, I’ll discuss ways that you can optimize your blogging time as well as your time spent offline.

Other topics on the schedule so far include multi-site installation, multimedia plugins, social comments, Drupal to WordPress, and more.

Tickets are currently on sale for $22.40 for a full day of WordPress-related talks. It’s a great way to learn more about the platform and network with the online community on Vancouver Island.

WordPress.com powers over 50 million blogs and in total, the WordPress platform powers 22% of all new websites created. This open source content management system is used by your favourite international new outlet to your favourite knitting blog. Miss604.com has been proudly powered by WordPress since 2006 and my company, sixty4media, has been building custom WordPress sites since 2008.

It’s Open Source Week in Vancouver which means a series of events, conferences, and activities celebrating Open Source technologies are taking place around town.

Open Source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in. The non-profit Open Source corporation maintains standards for the good of the community (developers, software users, corporations and governments).

What this means to me is that platforms such as WordPress, that power millions of blogs and website worldwide, are constantly being developed and improved thanks to the contributions of the Open Source community.

As someone who owns a website development firm that specializes in WordPress development, celebrating and promoting its Open Source roots is key. I have done so through attending and speaking at WordCamps (conferences for WordPress users), liveblogging events (on Miss604.com), offering tutorials, promoting WordPress through blog posts and social networks, and organizing WordCamp Whistler (2009) and WordCamp Vancouver (2010).

As a part of Vancouver Open Source Week, there will be a WordCamp:Developers conference on Thursday May 5th, however this is just one of the many events.

The others include a Joomla Mixer Meetup Tuesday May 3rd, Drupal Mixer Wednesday May 4th, Linus User Group Meeting Thursday May 5th, Show & Tell: Storytelling for a Web Made World hosted by The Museum of Vancouver Friday, May 6th, and an HTML Meetup Friday, May 6th.

The week’s biggest event will be Make Web Not War (MWNW), a Canadian conference for designers and developers that has made its way to Vancouver for the first time. It will have a full day of sessions followed by an evening party, the details of which will be announced shortly.

All of the week’s events will offer networking opportunities and the chance to connect with the web community that drives Vancouver’s growing on and offline reputation for excellence in technology. Follow @WebNotWar on Twitter for updates throughout the week.

This past weekend John and I took the ferry over to Victoria to participate in WordCamp Victoria. I was slated to speak as a part of a blogger panel with Lorraine Murphy and Mike Vardy, as well as give a talk about securing WordPress (for beginners, just the basics). While no voice-over commentary is included, you can view my slides here:

During my session there was a question from Twitter about plugins and that since they are third party applications, they should not be trusted.

My response was that you can’t fear all plugins, but you can look out for the most effective and least damaging. Look for the version number and the date it was last edited. If a plugin was submitted yesterday and has no feedback, it may not be the best idea to install it. You want trusted plugins that have been updated, reviewed, and that work with your version of WordPress. Also, always install plugins from the WordPress directory and not third party websites.

As you can see form Lloyd’s response (he works with Automattic), plugins added to the official directory are vetted for malicious code. I would also add that the community is pretty good at policing plugins as well. If something’s not working, you’ll hear about it in the feedback, comments, and probably even on Twitter.

Should you have any questions about the basics of securing WordPress, please feel free to drop a note in the comments.

Finally, having organized WordCamp Whistler and WordCamp Vancouver before, we can appreciate all of the time and effort organizers put into these events and I must say, WordCamp Victoria was pretty stellar. Over 175 people showed up to participate, present, ask questions, and have stimulating discussions in the coffee room. Lunch was provided and Twitter was abuzz with backchannel chatter. Kudos to Paul Holmes and his team on another successful event.

I just finished up giving my session on Building an Intranet with WordPress at WordCamp Fraser Valley this morning. This session reflected mostly on a personal project that I’ve worked on at my radio day job. In the true spirit of giving back to the WordPress community, I showcased the project as well as the story and planning that went into it.

As promised, here are the slides from my session on SlideShare.

Here is a break down of the plugins I mentioned in this session. The conversion of Keynote to PowerPoint to SlideShare didn’t take so well, so here’s a list of those plugins with links to find out more about them.

• Ad-minister
• AddQuicktag
• Add Local Avatar
• cforms
• Easy Flash Embed
• FancyBox Gallery
• FAQ-Tastic
• Flv Player
• Pods CMS
• Simply Show IDs
• WassUp
• WordPress Database Backup
• wp-forecast
• WP-RSSImport
• WP-UserOnline
• WPaudio

If you having any questions about the material I’ve presented, please leave a comment on this post.

Cross-posted by Rebecca from Miss604.com

WordCamp Fraser Valley returns for its 3rd year of talks and workshops in Surrey on November 20th, 2010. WordPress is the top blogging platform in the world however it is also used to power millions of websites that you visit each and every day. Its endless theme and plugin capabilities make it one of the reasons why I have been building a business around the platform since 2008.

My company develops WordPress websites, specializing in social media newsrooms that tie blog and multimedia functions into a much more robust website platform. Along with Brave New Code, we hosted WordCamp Vancouver this year and received a fantastic response. I’m hoping that those interested in WordPress, from design and code to using it as a writing tool, will check out WordCamp Fraser Valley this weekend as well.

Speakers include my husband (and business partner) John Bollwitt who is an engineer at CHUM Radio Vancouver. He’ll be talking about how companies can built intranet sites using WordPress to keep their teams informed and in the loop. John has been using WordPress since 2005 and got me hooked on the platform in 2006.

He’ll be joined on the roster by Tris Hussey (author of Using WordPress), Dave Zille, Lynn Robson, and Kulpreet Singh. Raul Pacheco, Danny Bradbury, and Leah Cross will also address how to write and publish your various forms of content using WordPress.

Tickets are still available for $45 so if you’ve ever been curious about WordPress as a user, writer, or developer, these sessions and networking opportunities can’t be beat.

This week a colleague passed along this beautiful video of Vancouver, developed in partnership with the Vancouver Film School. The goal of this campaign is to highlight how the city has been the hub for many technological advances, start-ups, and innovative entrepreneurs over the years.

“The goal is to put our city on the map as the technology hub that we actually have been for quite some time, by drawing together stories of products and technologies people know about and that have daily impact in a visually compelling way,” said Ian Bell of AppSocial.

Some social media companies featured in the video include Flickr and the HootSuite Twitter client.

If not for the welcoming and nurturing local tech community in which we immersed ourselves back in 2006, we would have not been able to grow our business the way we have. The success stories in this video are inspirational and a great reminder that business in Vancouver is looking toward the future, while building upon the past.

When John and I started up our company there were several resources and tools that helped us through the entire process. One of those resources was Small Business BC online and in Waterfront Station. We got forms, advice, and flipped through micro-fiche listings of business names before we settled on sixty4media.

Next month Small Business BC is hosting the Successful You Business Awards and we’ve been invited to check it out.

The event will announce the winners of the Successful You Awards and provide a unique opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs and the media to network with over 350 local business professionals and successful small businesses. Keynote speakers, Larry Finnson and Chris Emery, founders of Clodhoppers Candy, will share their success story of making Grandma’s candy recipe into a recognizable worldwide brand. [Small Business BC]

Where Birks Flagship Store, 698 Hastings Street
When Thursday June 10th from 5:00pm – 8:00pm

If you’re a small business and aren’t familiar with the services offered by Small Business BC I highly recommend checking them out or at least coming by the event. Tickets for the awards event are currently on sale starting at $36 (early bird) and $60 (then $70 at the door).

We’re at WordCamp Victoria 2010 today. Rebecca just wrapped with the blogging panel during the lunch break with Raul and Lorraine, so we’re taking a break to get caught up on some food, post some photos, and catch some of the chatter over various WordPress related topics.

There are a lot of great topics being discussed here. Lloyd Budd gave us some great insight on what’s to come from WordPress 3.0, even giving a slight plug to WordCamp Vancouver that we are helping put together with our friends from BraveNewCode, John Biehler, and Kulpreet Sing on June 12th.

If you are interested in WordPress and want to find a way to learn more about it, WordCamps are a great resource to do this. I know I always walk away from these events with something new that usually ends up in a project somewhere down the road.

You can see more of my photos from today on my Flickr set, and there is also a yyjWordCamp Flickr Group to check out as well.

Cross-posted from Miss604.com

To many people, Facebook is the internet. It’s open in a browser throughout the day, it could be their home screen, and on average users are connected to 130 “friends” at a time [Facebook: Stats]. However, even with close to 400 million users (11 million in Canada alone) Facebook isn’t on everyone’s friend’s list.

Recent changes from everything to layout, policies, and terms of use have some people wanting to quit the platform. This has prompted the creation of “Quit Facebook Day” which will be coming up May 31, 2010.

For a bit of background as to why the extraordinarily popular site is seemingly losing momentum, here’s a brief history of Facebook: Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-posted from Miss604.com

Twitter was experiencing the effects of a bug this weekend that exploited the following/follower method (as this post on Mashable explains). This morning, as an after effect of this bug, all users have noticed their following and follower numbers have dropped right down to zero. This means the little corner store down the block has the same follower count as Ashton Kutcher or CNN at the moment.

I’m certain Twitter is working to rectify the problem and it’s not something permanent as timelines are still filling with updates. However, things like this always seem to cause panic, mass hysteria, and the inevitable shouting at inanimate objects such as a computer screen or iPhone. To alleviate some stress in the future, here are a few ways you can back up your Twitter account.

Backupify
John Biehler clued me into the Backupify service a few months ago and it can be used to archive and back up your accounts from Twitter to Flickr, Delicious, Google Docs, WordPress, Blogger, and Facebook. The very basic service is free (although they do have premium options) so there’s sanity to gain from simply singing up.

Backup My Tweets
The Backup My Tweets service will back up your Tweets since they have a limited shelf-life on Twitter.com. It doesn’t back up your followers as Backupify does, but it will provide you some peace of mind. There is a program you can download for your PC that will backup your friends however I have not tried this so I cannot guarantee its security.

The best thing anyone can do right now is wait this out. Do not go on a mass re-following spree as I can only imagine this would muck up any backups or restoration process they might have Twitter has posted an update saying they have suspended following until this is resolved. Stay tuned to Mashable.com or @Mashable for updates since they have been crowned the most influential account on Twitter (well, at least up until this morning).

Update All is right with the world. From the official Twitter account: “Follow bug discovered, remedied. Read our status blog for details. http://bit.ly/dhQ3fF“.