Hearing all the discussion about the San Francisco WordCamp in 2007 got me pandering to attend one and soak up as much knowledge about blogging. Little did I know that Charles Stricklin of The WordPress Podcast and blog would be attending the same San Francisco WordCamp 2007 and would work towards bringing one these BarCamp style events to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
Before I knew that such an exciting event would be coming to Dallas I continued my work with Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell of Geekbrief.tv, helping them in various forms of work each week as they produced their 4 episodes a week Gadget video podcast. Which included duties such as the regular updating of their show archive page on their WordPress run website. That was really my first real interaction with the open source blogging and CMS tool. I had signed up for a free WordPress.com account before but I never really got into it shifting the cause to a lack of the ability to really personalize and control the commercialized free version of the blog engine. In the summer of 2007 I finally registered for a domain and hosting through Dreamhost.com which has the great feature of a one click install of WordPress through their website. A feature that makes getting started with WordPress a breeze. Since then I have played around with various plug-ins and learned basic concepts of getting around in WordPress.
Back to Dallas WordCamp 2008, a new chapter has opened up do to my involvement in the first annual Dallas WordCamp. I talked, listened, and Twittered all of the two days. Two people I seemed to chat with the most jfritsche(blog) and daysies(blog) had already met online before WordCamp but took this opportunity to meet each other in person and happily welcomed others to their conversation. It was a great event overall and I can not wait till next year a big thanks go out to everybody who put effort into the event. Also we cannot forget the excellent speakers with topics like plagiarism, Creative Commons, tags, and SEO techniques there was alot to soak in luckily it was recorded to video and I was told would be released as soon as possible watch for an update on my Twitter. Lets look at the numbers from the weekend to see what you can see now instead of later…
- 1 Great Location Frisco City Hall
- 1 Great Panel on the Business of Blogging
- 1 Live recording of The WordPress Podcast
- 1 beta invite to Woopra
- 2 WordCamp Dallas 2008 T-Shirts
- 2 Excellent Lunches
- 3 Diverse Operating Systems represented Win, OS X, Ubuntu
- 3 Working WiFi Hotspsots just for WordCamp**
- 3 Live streams of the event (Technosailor on Ustream, Mashable Live on Ustream, Cali Lewis on qik.com)
- 10 Informative Speakers
- 16 new Twitter Friends
- 45 Ways to PowerUp your Blog by John Pozadzides
- 146 Word Camp Dallas pictures on Flickr
- 170 registered attendees
- # of Lorelle VanFossen WordPress Power Tips heard (Lost Count)
- Numerous Power strips provided by the City of Frisco
photo credit:Daysies
i really like your list at the bottom of your post. i had to laugh at “Numerous power strips provided by the City of Frisco.”
WordCamp was a blast! i can’t wait until next year! maybe we can have smaller ones throughout the year, just get-togethers or meet-ups.
What a great recap, William! It was a really wonderful weekend and I’m glad I got to share it with you guys.
I’m so happy for you and proud of you for making connections at WordCamp! You’re gonna be a rock star!
Excellent article, William! And what a great run-down at the bottom of your post! It was a pleasure to meet you, Kathleen, and Jessica @ WordCamp, and I look forward to next year!
Thanks for coming to my blog this was one of my better articles so far because of and WordCamp Dallas. Whats funny is they did not teach me how to get inspired to write a post but showed me further into the workings of WordPress and how the blog interacts with people on the internet that has taken me farther than anything else with this blog so far, so thanks for coming. I am so excited to bring new life to this space on the internet and to welcome you to it.
Lost count! Geesh, getting WordPressers to count past 7 is horrible.
What fun we had, didn’t we? Wish we could do it all over again, or at least more often. Thanks for all your support and being a great sport!