So I’m back in Atlanta after spending 3 days in Frisco, TX last weekend. I’m still trying to soak in all the information I learned from WordCamp Dallas so this is going to be a long article!
Lots of things happen so I probably lefted out a lot of info and forgot to mention a few people. If I did, and you remember me, send me a comment! Thanks!

To summarize things up, I had a blast meeting so many people, getting a few business leads, learning a few new features in WordPress 2.5 I didn’t know existed, where it’s headed and just getting to know some
passionate people who all have one thing in common: we love using WordPress.

First of all, I need to thank my awesome sister, Maria Dunbar for making this trip possible. She hooked me up with a plane ticket to Dallas (even though had to fly to New Jersey first!) and got me a sweet discount at the Sheraton hotel which was about 10mins away from the venue. Talk about a hookup.

I’d also like to thank Ronald and Jeffro for picking me up at the airport on Friday and for being my ride going places. Without them, this trip wouldn’t have been all that great.

About Frisco:

Frisco City Hall. This is where WordCamp took place

Frisco is a new city in Texas and the population seems to be rising quickly because of all the land out there. How about, Frisco’s city is so awesome that they let us (WordCamp) use their City Hall to host the event! Free Wi-Fi was sprinkled all over the venue and power strips were of plenty. The building looked amazing from the inside out. Around Frisco, you’ll probably notice a lot of land and construction going on. Heck, the Sheraton I stayed in just opened up in March! Everything’s brand new and the locals are very out going and friendly. I could very well imagine coming back to this town and seeing it filled with possibly every popular store on the planet. Yes, that’s right. It’s that big. No silly, not really, but seriously, they have a great selection of stores down there and it’s probably going to double by the end of this year.

Jeff Chandler (Jeffro2pt0) and Ronald:

I arrived in Dallas at about 7:30-ish on Friday. Waiting at the airport were two people I’ve never seen before… Jeffro and Ronald. I meet both of them on Jeffro’s WordPress weekly podcast. I seen a picture of Ronald from his blog so I had an idea who to look for. As for Jeffro, I had no idea how he looked so I relied on this mental picture I had of him which ended up looking nothing like how he really looks!

Jeffro and I throwing up WordPress Gang Signs!

It kind of felt like we knew each other after talking for hours (and hours) on the WordPress weekly after show. There was no need for introductions, we just said “Hi! Hey! What sup!?” and headed out of there and raced to my hotel. I checked in, dropped my stuff off, and jogged back to the car.

We were late to the Dave & Busters meetup that all the attendees and speakers were invited to. When we got there, we were greeted by the WordCamp staff and they gave us our badges. They offer us drinks and showed us where we could get some free food! I wasn’t too hungry after eating lunch with my sister in Jersey but Jeff and Ronald were starving. There were about 30 maybe 40 something WordCamp people there and everyone was doing their networking, getting to know one another.

I remember talking to Cory Miller from iThemes, Nathan Rice, Alex Frison and Lorelle VanFossen, Liz Strauss and Charles Stricklin.

I had an interesting conversation with Alex. I could tell by his accent that he was German (I was right too), yet another thing we had in common (I speak fluent German). We probably talked ongoing for about 30mins straight. WordPress was mentioned a couple of times, but we mainly talked about our experiences in Europe. After the conversation we stayed in contact and he made me want to book a flight to Seville, Spain next year (which I will) after telling me how much fun he had over there.

I think I remember watching a video of Lorelle at last years WordCamp and after meeting her Friday night, I could tell why people call her the WordPress Queen. She gave me with this big super bear hug and greeted me to WordCamp. While we were talking, Liz Strauss and Nathan joined in on the conversation. We all talked about the next big thing on the net. Lorelle didn’t find my answer too satisfying but I kind of have an idea of what to expect for Web 3.0

Me and Mark Jaquith. This guy is super tall, I tried to tippy toe!

For some odd reason Jeff and Ronald didn’t want to eat the free food there so we joined Charles Stricklin, Aaron Brazell, and Mark Jaquith to eat at this restaurant called Bennigans. Mark Ghosh from Weblogtoolscollection joined in later on too. Conversations were all over the place I can’t remember any specifics. Even though I don’t remember what I ordered (I think chicken tenders), it is a great place to eat none of the less. By the end of the night, I got Charles to say my last name correctly. I would have never thought a day would come when someone pronounced my first name correctly and butcher my last name. Seriously, how do you get Duncan out of Dunbar??? Haha

Saturday – First day of WordCamp

The next day started out pretty early. Ronald, Jeff and I wanted to get some breakfast before WordCamp so we drove to IHop and I ate some French toast! Randomly, out of nowhere Ronald whipped out this awesome Nikon DSRL camera. So I took a couple of shots with it trying to see if it was something I was looking for. Immediately I fell in love so I was camera man for the day.

We arrived at the venue on time thanks to Ronald’s super driving skills. Oh he knows what I’m talking about. I started snapping a couple pictures of the venue. It was a pretty tall interesting shape/structure type building. I didn’t know this was Frisco’s City Hall until later on.

Lorelle and I holding up my WordCamp Tee

Anyway, we picked up some swag and saw Lorelle setting up her table for her Blogging Tips Book. I hesitated wanting to buy a copy so I can get it signed but I already bought one when she first started the preorders. After snapping some more pictures, meeting some more people, seen some more people from Friday, we took our seats and waited for WordCamp to get started.

WordCamp Starts

First up was Matt Mullenweg stating that WordPress 2.5 was going to be released in 5minutes along with the WordPress.org redesign which looks a whole lot better. Sidenote: I saw Ronald write up a quick three liner blog post spilling the news on Weblogtoolscollection.com which got digged to the front page. That was a first seeing an article rise to the front page. Geeky I know, whatever (I’m NOT a geek!).

Next up was John Pozadzides from One Man’s Blog. He talked about 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. John brought up the fact that people shouldn’t beg for donations and the way he said it makes me disagree with on that matter. He made it seem like bloggers devote an entire page in an attempt to collect people’s donations for whatever reasons. I typically come across blogs where the developer might have a donation button in a new theme/plugin release following a quick byline asking you to donate. That’s it. Nothing overkill or exaggerated, just (approx.) two sentences asking to contribute. But besides that, I do agree with him about begging making you look small.

Woopra – For you stats tracking fanatics

After that presentation, John demoed probably one of the best stats tracking app ever. One of its killer features are being able to chat with your blog’s visitors-so intuitive. After receiving a free beta invite I quickly added the small JavaScript code on my blog and tested it out. Sure enough I didn’t have as many visitors as he did so I had to ask Ronald to load up my site so we can chat. Worked flawlessly. Ronald, however found Woopra’s first limitation-it doesn’t work on leopard. There’s something about Java1.6 not being able to run on leopard for some reason. The app is written in Java so until that’s fixed, leopard users are lefted out of the fun.

Liz and Lorelle’s Presentation

Liz Strauss talked about Building Influence and Interaction with Blogging. Her presentation really got down to the core of blogging. Focusing on the fundamental things and treating your visitors right. Liz brings a lot of knowledge and experience to table with over 16,000+ 60,317 comments on her blog. Who has that?

Lorelle ended WordCamp on Saturday with her extensive WordPress Power Tips. She mentioned a plugin created by Coffe2code called Customizable Post Listings that I plan on adding to my blog soon. I jotted down tons of Firefox plugins Lorelle mentioned to help speed up the writing articles process as well as a few WordPress suggestions bloggers should consider.

After WordCamp

After WordCamp, Alex, Jeff, Ronald and I left to cool down and chill at a local Frisco bar. Others either went to the same spot or the Irish pub that we hung out at later on that night. I meet another WordPresser there, Chris Jean. He’s a plugin developer if I remember correctly. Besides being into WordPress, I found out that he’s a gamer too so we talked a lot about too (I wish he was a console gamer though!). Anyways, lots of random topics were being discussed, I really can’t recalled most of them to tell you the truth!

Alex and I at the Frisco Bar.

Sunday – Second day of WordCamp

Like Saturday, I had to wake up very early. I’m a night owl so there’s no chance I was getting use to this schedule. Time was limited since someone woke up late, so we ditched IHop in favor of Corner Bakery Cafe for breakfast. Again, Ronald and I ordered French toast but this time, they looked totally different-still good though. We ate quick and headed back to WordCamp.

First up was a live recording of WordPress Podcast. On the mic were Mark Ghosh, Jonathan Bailey, Mark Jaquith, Charles Stricklin and eventually, Matt Mullenweg.

Next up was Aaron Brazell talking about his notable series, WordPress FAQs. He recorded it live via ustream and did some QAs to finish things off. Aaron covered a lot of ground talking a little about Categories and Tags, GPL licensing, WordPress Hooks, Premium Themes and some SEO tips. His slides are up if your interested in that kind of thing.

After lunch, I attended The Business of Blogging panel with Liz Strauss, Aaron Brazell, Mark Ghosh, Matt and John Pozadzides. The panel members educated John and the audience about all the benefits of having a blog no matter how big or small your business is. In todays society, it’s all about transparency so if your company isn’t being transparent enough, you could be losing a lot of business right now.

Finally, WordCamp ended with Jacob Santos teaching developers how to contribute to WordPress via building test cases. I asked a few questions being a noob in open source development how theme authors and plugin developers can contribute to WordPress via the trac. He pointed me to an article he wrote a while back, How to Patch the WordPress Core which cleared that up. I really enjoyed Jacob’s presentation, while informative, it was very hilarious.

In an effort to thank Frisco for letting us host the event in their City Hall, everyone signed this large WordCamp T-shirt with their names and a link to their blogs or their email addresses. Not sure if that was practical decision but it’ll all work out. After I helped out John folding up some tables in the lunch area, I came back to meet up with Ronald and Jeff ready to head out to the pub.

Can you find my name?

Jeffro wasn’t feeling too good so we dropped him off at the hotel and stop by Best Buy to pick up an SD card reader for Ronald’s Nikon. Ronald and I then meet up with Alex at the Irish pub along with Mark, Aaron, Charles, and a few others. Charles Aaron Brazell brought up an interesting question regarding creating an event around content so we had a little brainstorming session.

Ronald and I later decided to hang out over at Alex’s place since he was closer to the airport. We had to leave early in the morning so avoiding early bird traffic was great. Everything after this point I don’t remember exactly or choose not too! We had a great time that night and I don’t regret anything! All I know is that Alex woke us up just in time for our flight at 8am, the rest is history.

Me, John and Matt

Overall, WordCamp Dallas 08 was a great success. I got everything out of it, plus more! Where ever the next big event takes place, I’ll be sure to attend.