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.

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.

WordCamp is returning to Vancouver in the summer of 2010, welcoming WordPress developers, enthusiasts and bloggers once the Olympics have moved out.

We have a great group of people signed on to organize so far who all want to see this event become a smashing success.

It’s still very much in the planning phases so please follow @WordCampYVR for updates from Duane Storey (BraveNewCode), John (sixty4media), or myself. The website will be up at WordCampVancouver.com and it’s already listed on the official WordCamp directory.

Related: See John Biehler’s post about WordCamp Vancouver 2010 as well.

On August 22nd we’ll be participating in the second WordCamp Fraser Valley. The day will be laid out in tracks for beginners, intermediate users, developers, and a track just for Twitter use with WordPress.

This will also be our third WordCamp this year, having organized WordCamp Whistler, and attended WordCamp in San Francisco. My specific talk will be about how WordPress can be used for much more than blogging.

I’ll be giving examples of websites powered by WordPress where a blog is not the main feature and sharing some tips on how to achieve this use of the platform. It is in the “beginner” track so it will be far more educational than code-heavy. My hope is to spread the word that WordPress is powerful and easy to use but not just for blogging although that’s how my experience began.

WordCamp Fraser Valley is 9:00am – 5:00pm August 22nd at the SFU campus in Surrey at Central City. Easy to get to by SkyTrain and transit, with plenty of parking as well. Each track is $25 or you can get a ticket to all tracks for $75 by registering online.

Fisheye shot of WordCampSF Welcome (Photo by John Biehler)

We’re spending today at WordCampSF 2009. We hope to learn and share a lot of knowledge about all things WordPress, and you can following along Rebecca’s blog post that she is updating throughout the day.

If you’re here, stop us and say hello!

In just a few short hours we’ll be heading down to San Francisco along with our friend Duane Storey to attend this year’s WordCamp conference. The event takes place Saturday and the lineup includes everyone from Chris Pirillo and Cali Lewis to Matt Cutts and WordPress’ founder, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic.

John and I have been asked to do a shift at the Genius Bar so if you’re there bright and early, you can ask me all your WordPress questions from 9:15am until 10:00am. We’ll be blogging while we’re down there and hopefully making some connections, meeting new people, and brushing up on our WordPress skills so that we can deliver the absolute best sites and tools for our clients.

This past weekend sixty4media co-hosted WordCamp Whistler alongside Brave New Code. We had originally planned for 50 people and we ended up getting over 100 attendees joining us for the weekend for a day of talks about WordPress and online publishing.

Keynote Lorrelle Van Fossen (aka Lorelle on WordPress)
Dave Olson (Topic, Are you Worthy?)
John Biehler (Topic, How To Sex Up Your Blog With Photos And Video)
Dale Mugford (Topic, WordPress On The Go)
Andy Peatling (Topic, BuddyPress)
Quentin Mulhurt (Topic, WordPress and Search Engine Optimization)
Morten Rand-Hendriksen (Topic, Using WordPress In Alternate Configurations)
Tris Hussey (Topic, Using WordPress as a Generic Content Management system (CMS))

We were very please with the location and the accommodations, while the attendance, input, insights, and presentations exceeded expectations. We definitely look forward to doing this again next year.

You can read the live notes on the WordCamp Whistler website that John setup and I also have a few day blogs up on Miss604.com.

After several successful WordCamps in Vancouver, Kulpreet got the wheels in motion for the next event, coming this winter. Last night on Twitter something magical also happened – the idea of having the event in Whistler was hatched and so planning for WordCamp Whistler is now underway.

Read Duane’s blog post for a preview, view the Facebook event, and feel free to sign up on the wiki. More details to come in over the next little while. sixty4media will once again be involved as an organizer as well as presenting.

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powering millions of blogs worldwide.

During this year’s BarCampVancouver on Granville Island we had a sidetrack that featured WordCamp as well as PhotoCamp in the afternoon. In case you missed it, I have a small recap up on my site and here are some of the featured talks:

Andy Peatling – BuddyPress
Keith Murray – WordPress for Newbies
Brad – WordPress as a CMS
Tris – SEO tips
Lloyd Budd from Automattic – The Business of WordPress
Greg from Donat – sni.ps
John Biehler – FAlbum plugin

John also shared his top 3 most-recommended WordPress plugins, which include FeedEntryHeader, WordTwit, and Quicktag Manager.

So far I’ve had a great time at all of Vancouver’s WordCamps and we’re looking forward to the next.

There have been a few WordCamps in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley over the last year but none have compared to the scale and grandeur of San Francisco’s master gathering of WordPress enthusiasts. Duane from Brave New Code attended this year and is bringing back all sorts of ideas for the city’s next WordCamp, which sixty4media will be co-organizing with him at BarCamp Vancouver.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees are encouraged to give a demo, a session, a presentation, or help with one. All attendees are expected to be participants. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.

Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see at WordCamp during BarCamp feel free to drop us a comment. We’re hoping to incorporate some elements from San Francisco as well as bringing in experts to share their thoughts and knowledge on all fronts. This will be a learning session for rookies and veterans, all celebrating our favourite blogging platform.

Apologies for not promoting this event sooner, but WordCamp Fraser Valley is going on right now. In fact, Raul is up in the front of the room and giving his presentation on switching to WordPress from Blogger, so we are in full swing out here in Langley.

Rebecca is doing her best to live blog most of today’s event, so head over there to get more information.

It’s worth noting these types of events for being great places to meet other WordPress users. There is also a wealth of ideas that we find by attending gatherings like this. Whether it’s finding your voice as a blogger or discovering new tools to make your postings better, finding events like these are worth your time when it comes to wanting to find out more by what you can do with your blog.

Update: There was a question raised during Rebecca’s presentation that prompted me to make a quick blog post on my personal blog about “Designing drop down menus with CSS on WordPress“. This is something that we did for one of our clients, No Boundaries.org. If you are curious about this topic, please check out my post there.