Wordcamp 2006

Have I ever mentioned that I love being surrounded by other geeks? I am at WordCamp in San Francisco now. It is a one day conference about WordPress, and so far, I am having lots of fun.

I am sitting in the back with a bunch of other folks who felt the need to plug in to a power strip. It is comforting to have so many power strips about, and I am kind of amused at the amount of people who brought their own. Talk about good planning! I was happy that I even remembered to bring my power brick.

We are having a musical interlude now by Eric Haller. He is singing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ and playing guitar. It is very nice : )

There are lots of people here. Way more than there were at 9am. The first session was all about widgets and was very interesting. I haven’t tried wordpress widgets yet, but they look pretty fun! Matt M is going to give the ‘State of the Word’ now.

Matt is a really good speaker. I like how he speaks to everyone in the room and has such a concern about making wordpress easy for everyone to use, especially new bloggers and non-technical people.

People in the audience are making suggestions about how to make wp easier to use, for example adding images, changing themes, making it very easy and intuitive to perform common tasks.

Yobie Benjamin and Pat McCarthy are talking about monetizing your blog now. Sometimes I think about doing that either to this site or making other sites on specific subjects using targeted advertising. I gotta make money somehow!

I just noticed that the guy who is speaking now looks just like my brother, Bri. I find that a lot of people look like him. I took a picture with my phone, but I think I’m too far away for a good shot.

Now Mark Jaquith is speaking about using wordpress as a CMS. I do that a lot, so I am pretty excited about this one.

Not much new info about the CMS stuff, but still interesting to hear about. It was especially interesting to see the example sites and how far they diverge from the standard wordpress look and feel.

Now I am in room 2 where Donncha O Caoimh is leading a Q&A about wordpress mu (multi-user). I am most interested in this because I would like to set up something for Aspieland where users can easily set up their own blogs free and easy.

The windows are open and it is very hard to hear what is going on. No mic in this room : ( It’s not so bad when the traffic dies down.

At the Apple store now. I just HAD to come here, since I was in the big city and all. I left wordcamp a little early because my attention span ran out. It would have been nice to see the plugin showcase, but maybe someone will blog about it. Soon I will hop on BART and head home. There’s a party with free beer giong on at Pier 38 tonight which is pretty tempting, but taking BART home after that doesn’t sound so good. Okay, off to BART now. I will wait until I get home to post this. Gotta check for typos and all. I am writing this in Yojimbo so it will be on my big mac when I get home. Gotta love that!

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