Fade to Play

Last Wednesday I attended WordCamp Vancouver as a media sponsor. It was hosted by Tazzu . It was the first time that WordCamp has been held in Vancouver and there were a fun and energetic group of us at the Network Hub, a shared space for startups.

For a good summary of the night, please see the live blogging by Miss 604.

Please see my photos from the night on Flickr.

The Network Hub mission is to become a catalyst for early stage companies to graduate into venture capital ready companies. Start-ups and entrepreneurs can capitalize on the experience, skills and networks that The Network Hub to provide to streamline development and accelerate commercialization of idea

from wordpress.org

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

The first presenter of the night was Jeff Kee, the owner/director of Synchronous Design and Marketing.

According to their website:

Our mission is to help you achieve your marketing goals by providing you with great design and effective communication material.

Jeff Kee’s presentation was entitled “WordPress for total website development” and he discussed how he was able to design their website entirely using WordPress. He shared the benefits of using plugins with WordPress and demoed some examples.

Jeff Kee of Synchronous Design and Marketing

Next up was Monica Hamburg who spoke about Blogging & Social Media. Her presentation addressed how her experience as a writer influences her blogging and ability to evangelise about social media.

Monica Hamburg

Next up was Rebecca Bollwitt aka Miss 604. She discussed and demoed how to add plugins to your WordPress blog (e.g. the Flickr Photo Album).

Rebecca Bollwitt of miss604.com

Duane Storey spoke next entitled “WordPress and mobile blogging” and talked specifically about BraveNewCode and the release of the WPTouch iPhone theme earlier in the week which I had blogged about.

Duane Storey

Then we had a break to stretch and grab donuts. Some of us used the opportunity to take pictures of Interweb celebs.

With Lisa Bettany

Rebecca Bollwitt and Lisa Bettany

After the break Kulpreet Singh gave a presentation entitled “Using WordPress to create a custom library, catalog, or other mashup-type site”. He talked about how WordPress is a Content Management System and demoed a plugin called Enzymes. According to their blog:

Enzymes is a WordPress Plugin for retrieving properties and custom fields of posts, pages, and authors, right into the visual editor of posts and pages, and everywhere else.

Kulpreet Singh

Bruce Byfield spoke about how he came to enjoy blogging “The Joys of Amateur Blogging”. It was a fun presentation and let to a number of questions from the audience (e.g. How often should one blog?).

Bruce Byfield

The presentation portion of the night ended with John Chow of John Chow dot com whose presentation was entitled “How to make money using a WordPress Blog”. He makes alot of money from his blog ($30 000 each month) and he shared some advice such as how he uses OIOpublisher. He even showed us some copycats of his blog by other people (e.g. John Cow dot com).

John Chow

With the presentations over we headed to Flux for drinks and conversation. Thanks to Automattic for covering the first round.

Duane Storey eating

Post-WordCamp conversation

I enjoyed learning about WordPress from the different people that night who were providing smart and interesting perspectives on why they like to use WordPress and what they get out of it. Like Duane Storey commented, I also enjoy being part of the Open Source community — these are good times we are living in.

Relevance: WordPress rocks — play with it, learn about it, and then share your knowledge with others through twitter, your blog, word of mouth.