WordCamp Fraser Valley 2008
What is WordCamp and why would I want to go? That was one of the questions I have been recently asked when people found out I was going to WordCamp Fraser Valley. WordCamp is a conference or small information session about various aspects of the WordPress blogging platform. Presenters of various topics talk for small segments about areas of interest to help share knowledge of this favourite Open Source blogging environment. As for myself and why I attended this most recent WordCamp session was to see and meet the people who I follow either via their blog or through the micro-blogging system Twitter.
The Fraser Valley edition of WordCamp was held at the Cascades Casino in Langley, British Columbia. Normally it would have taken me roughly 20 minutes to arrive but since the Albion Ferry had a 3 to 4 sailing wait from Maple Ridge I opted to drive through Mission and Abbotsford instead, which took me roughly an hours’ worth of driving whereas the ferry would have been at least an 15 minutes longer than that.
To summarize WordCamp Fraser Valley there was a total of 4 speakers or presenters that evening who did an exceptional job at talking about their topic.
Raul aka Hummingbird604 talked about how it was easy converting oneself from the Blogger platform into the WordPress platform and why you should do it.
Next up was Gary of Bluefur (one of the evening’s sponsors and primary collaborator of the WordCamp Fraser Valley) who had to almost improvise his presentation last minute due to a cancellation. He talked about why businesses should have a blog and how it can increase your business’s online traffic. Granted not all businesses would need a blog, but he gave some valid points as to why a business would and could benefit from having one on their website.
Following Gary’s well thought-out presentation was the intermission where they encouraged the attendees to network amongst themselves. I’m not a big social networker and can be a bit shy when surrounded by people I don’t know. Get to know me and you might not get me to shut up!
Kulpreet Singh took the floor after the intermission and talked about how to secure your WordPress blog and why you should do it. I found some valid points behind his presentation. You should really change items like the default database name, the default database prefix, default administrative login username prior to installing WordPress. You can change these items after your install which isn’t entirely too difficult but it is a lot easier do it before hand.
Rebecca Bollwitt aka Miss604 (and also Miss778) had her presentation next, in fact you can read her Live-Blogging too. She talked about how you could customize your WordPress blog into using customized sidebar pages based on the parent page you were viewing. The application of creating such a customization is pretty straight-forward and she did a wonderful job explaining how to go about creating the customized sidebar pages and hooking them to various parent pages. Unfortunately the crowd seemed a bit new to WordPress and or blogging in general but it was informational nonetheless. She did a wonderful job answer questions even if the questions being asked towards her were not of her topic. Why would you ask about Javascript drop-down menus when her topic was about creating customized sidebars?
Following Rebecca’s presentation was the Evil John Chow. Now if you do not know who John Chow is you probably are not really into the Blogging World but he pretty much makes a large amount of money telling people how to make money online. His income from his blog for the month of June was $40,000! Anyway before I get too far into that topic, his WordCamp topic was on Evil ways to bring traffic to your blog and how to get them to keep coming back. There were a few points that made sense, a few points that were very evil but we all signed a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so I cannot discuss them here. The two WordPress plugins he recommends as a necessity to driving traffic to your blog are the All-in-One SEO Pack and the Google Sitemap Generator. Reminds me I need to install the Google Sitemap Generator on my site here as it seems to update the sitemap xml document on the fly after every post, which is a really good thing in the eyes of Google and other search engines!
So the attendance of this WordCamp was quite large and the venue was definitely better than the last one (or so I was told). This particular WordCamp was primarily created and discussed on the fly via Twitter and for an attendance like last night it turned out to be really well put together. I would like to thank Gary of BlueFur for setting this up along with the other bloggers out there. It was a pleasure in meeting as many of you as I did and who knows, perhaps I’ll show up at the next Blogging event.
Good stuff. Wish I’d been able to go. It would have been interesting to hear about some of John’s tactics.
Great to meet you last night (in person, finally!) Tyler! And great write up!
@Rod Yea you should of found babysitters for the twins, would of driven you out since it was somewhat closer.
@Raul yes it was great to meet you finally too. Your Flickr photos of the event were great too!
Thanks for giving insights into what John talked about, he said nothing on his blog..
The wife was not feeling too well, so while we were there we didn’t get to socialize much. Wish I’d had the opportunity to say hi, as you’re one of the few non-presenters in the room that I recognized. Hopefully we’ll run into each other at another event.
Hey Gregg sorry to hear the wife wasn’t feeling too well. I guess I should of been a bit more proactive in social networking that night! But yes next time let’s say hi!