Ptah Dunbar

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.

After coming back from FOWA a few weeks ago I didn’t think anything was going on till FOWD in April which I really want to attend.

I heard about WordCamp a while ago which is basically a conference for people using WordPress. I thought it was a small event for the locals to gather up and network (kind of like Barcamp in a sense). But to my surprise, WordCamps are big events held each year at different places attracting a lot of out of towners. Big D is where it’s at for 08 and lots of cool people seem to be going including the man himself, Matt Mullenweg.

WordCamp Dallas is going to be a two day event held on Saturday and Sunday March 29^th - 30^th lasting from 9:30am till 4pm. The first day will be geared more towards bloggers while the second day will focus more on the developers.

I’m looking forward to hearing where Matt plans on taking WordPress 2.5. The new release seems to be paving a road for something bigger in the works. So getting his insight into where WordPress is headed should be great to plan things out for my projects. I’ll probably ask him just a few more questions in that regard if they aren’t addressed during his presentation.

Finding different ways to contribute to WordPress including helping out with the trac is something I’m very interested in learning how to do. I’d like to contribute specifically to tickets related to themes and widgets since I’m all over that area.

While the topics and speakers are great and all, the main reason why I’m really going is to introduce myself to the WordPress community since I’m fairly new to the scene. I recently just became friends with Jeffr0 after listening to his podcast talking about WordPress. He’s going to be there along with Ronald who was also taking part during the podcast.

Through that podcast during the after show (which tend to go on for hours!), I got a chance to chat with Jacob Santos about GPL licenses and theming. He’s going to be a speaker at WordCamp giving a presentation on Testing with WordPress on Sunday which should be interesting.

Nathan Rice is also going to be there too. He’s a big contributor to WordPress as a theme author and contributing writer at blog herald and more. I haven’t conversed with him too much but I plan get to know him in Dallas. There are probably a lot more talented people attending WordCamp that I don’t know of so I’m going to try and introduce myself to as many people as possible. It’s great to get a chance to meet the people behind the blogs and the creator behind this entire platform we all evangelize so much on.

Dates are still a little shaky, but I’m leaving Atlanta, Friday morning and return back either late Sunday or early Monday just in time to get back to the day job. As with FOWA, I plan on writing up a little thing or two of my experiences going down there. It’s going to be awesome!

So I’m back from Miami, my little 3 day vacation and it was a blast!

FOWA

I was totally pumped for FOWA on feb 29th I couldn’t even sleep that night. I was up early and arrived at the venue around 7:15am-the conference didn’t start till 9. One of the main reason why I wanted to go to FOWA was to get a chance to talk with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress about a few things regarding the platform and his opinion on premium themes. But I was also interested in hearing about the future of APIs, Launch a Web App in 40 minutes, and Building the real time web.

About twenty minutes later after my arrival, I meet up with Mike Castilla from WPCandy and his friend Alain Fontaine for the first time. I meet Mike on twitter after helping him squash this nasty IE bug for one of his projects. We talked about a lot of our projects we were working on and decided to stick together since we wanted to meet the same people.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt suggested that we look all hard with our hands crossed etc. lol (photo by WPCandy)

After Matt Mullenweg gave his presentation on “The Architecture of Wordpress,” we got a chance to catch him during the AM break we had and talked well over 20 minutes. We talk about a lot of things like his opinion on premium (Paid) themes, whats going on with the whole WordPress Marketplace idea he talked about and a lot of other things going on with WordPress in general. Like others have mentioned, he’s an awesome guy, very humble and very into the community he created. (sidenote: I was going to talk about what he said in detail but that ended up being an article in itself so I’ll post that in the next article going live this weekend. I’ll be giving an update about my news theme too)

David Bracetty “the shirt guy”

(photo by WPCandy)

During the lunch break, Mike spotted out David Bracetty, who managed to get sponsors to pay for his ticket to FOWA in exchange for a spot on his shirt. I remember reading about him on bittbox and was interested in how he was able to pull off a stunt like that. So we wanted to congratulate him for being able to make it here. We ask him all sorts of questions like how he thought about the whole idea and where he was able to get the shirt printed (he got it from zazzle). After he explained how he did it, it didn’t take us long to ponder about ways we could do something similar to attend FOWD in April, but we’re still debating on that!

Elliot Jay Stocks

(photo by WPCandy)

Elliot Jay Stocks was super hard to catch. He was busy walking around filming short video snippets of people talking about their experience at FOWA. He was also helping out a lot with the event, making sure everything went smoothly. We didn’t want to bother him during his errands back n forth so we waiting until the last break when he didn’t seem too busy and we got a chance to speak with him.

We had a great conversation with Elliot talking about the whole inspiration or lack of creativity controversy and web designers just outright ripping off others since he’s been a victim of that plenty of times. Actually, Alain was the guy who informed Elliot about this designer who ripped off Elliot’s work a few times in the past so it was nice for Elliot to get to thank him in person. Elliot mentioned that he was going to be working with Adii on a premium WordPress theme in the upcoming months, which Adii previously mentioned in a power point slide. Elliot also mentioned to us a little of what he was going to talk about during his presentation at FOWD in London. I can’t wait to hear it in its entirety it sounded like something very innovative for future of web design.

Elliot handed us his moo card and we ended the conversation by him filming me saying a little about who I am and my experiences at FOWA so far which was totally unexpected. I said my part stuttering on a few occasions.

Gary Vaynerchuk

(photo by hyku)
The first time I’ve seen Gary was during the Launch a Web App in 40 minutes panel discussion. I didn’t who he was but he when he had something to say, he said it with a lot of energy and confidence which had everyone in the audience laughing. I was surprised that he was giving a presentation later on; I still didn’t know who he was or what exactly he does. When his turn came up to talk about How to Grow a Community in the Future, a lot of people started leaving as if FOWA was already over and it was time to go. I was confused but stood there to see what was going on. I guess he wasn’t too popular in the Web App community? I didn’t know but it seemed insulting that they would do that.

Anyway, he gave his speech and it was truely inspiring. Gary talked a lot about having passion and dedication for your brand or the product you’re selling. He covers how he does personal branding which is something I’ve been thinking about in the past. He really provided a lot of practical information the companies in the audience could use to build up their company or personal brand and build up a cult like community that’ll follow them throughout their ventures (think Steve Jobs). By the end of his speech, I already followed him on twitter and checked out wine library TV on my iPhone (videos didn’t show up though) to see what it was all about.

Blaine Cook

(photo by William Couch)
The FOWA conference ended with everyone heading off to the after party at the Nikki Beach in South Beach. Blaine Cook was still in the lounge, talking with a few guys so I thought maybe I could ask him a question or two about a few things that was bothering me regarding the future of Rails.

During his presentation, Blaine talked about why Twitter was having the problems they were having with Ruby on Rails and later said that if he had to start from scratch building Twitter again, he’d still go with Ruby on Rails simply because he loved Ruby.

I read a lot of controversy about ruby on rails being a ghetto, and not being able to scale. Other things like Ruby on Rails will never be like PHP since it can’t run on shared hosting environments thus not being able to adapt to main stream users. So I ask Blaine to elaborate more on why he’d still use Ruby on Rails again over something like Django or even PHP.

I specifically wanted to know if Ruby on Rails was a framework beginners (like myself) should still invest their time in learning, despite these current issues. It was great to be able to talk to someone who’s been through a lot of tough times with Rails and getting his opinion on that matter. I’m glad to get those issues cleared up since I already started investing my time into learning ruby and rails and I didn’t want to continue learning a dying framework.

Overall the weekend was great. I got a chance to meet and network with a lot of great people doing big things at FOWA; I got a chance to get all my questions answered by industry leaders (something I couldn’t do via an email or IM); I got a chance to spend some time with my family and visit a lot of places in Miami that were almost faded away in memory; three things I wouldn’t never got to fulfill if I didn’t come down here. The trip was well worth it. I can’t wait for FOWD and get a chance to visit London again.

UPDATE: I’m officially going to FOWA in Miami, FL on Feb, 28th!

After reading a very informative post over at adii’s blog about 13 Web 2.0 Conference Events You Shouldn’t Miss, I was really inspired to go to several of them.

Future of Web Apps - 28 February to 1 March 2008

FOWA located in Miami, Florida is only a month and 6 days away. With speakers like Matt Mullenweg from WordPress and Biz Stone from Twitter, the entire speaker line up seems very diverse and interesting, but the true gold seems to be at the FOWA workshops.

If I were to attend, I’d definitely choose Making Money From Your App in the a.m., and Self-Replicating Awesomeness: Unmarketing your Web App to finish the day off. Plus, everyone who attends the workshops receives a courtesy Survival Kit DVD full of code and resources used that day! Sounds great! The fact that I’ve never attended any major web conference before, meeting like-minded people, and most likely networking, blows my mind! However, looking at the numbers for attending the FOWA conference and workshop would ring me up approx. $700! That doesn’t make any sense!

I could, however just take advantage of the student price which is $50 and to attend just the conference. There’s also a Barcamp meetup the same day the workshop takes place so that looks like an attractive alternative.

Future of Web Design - London - 17 to 18 April 2008

At first, I wasn’t really interested in going to FOWD since I’m not primary a designer. But taking a look at last year’s presentations and speaker line up really changed my perspective on that.

Ryan Singer from 37 Signals did a great presentation on web application usability, most notably was point #8 about errors, hilarious! It was very practical, to the point, and entertaining all at the same time. Not a whole lot of people can pull that off. Being a Web Design Conference, I guess at first, I just thought it was solely base on Photoshop, and Graphic Design, but I was completely wrong.

This year at FOWD, were looking at about 12 speakers! These guys & gals have either spoken at other popular events, or they have an amazing company that’s doing big things right now in the industry. A few speakers I’m looking forward to are Patrick McNeil from Design Meltdown, Andy Budd from Clearleft, John Hicks from Hickdesign, and Daniel Burka from Pownce. Can’t wait to hear what they have to say about their topics.

Watching my first Layer Tennis battle against Veerle and Cindy Li, I’d suspect battle of the sexes to be interesting.

What are your plans? Do you plan on attending FOWA, FOWD, or both!?