Speaker Slides, Notes, and Flotsam

I hope you’ve had a chance to recover from WordCamp Portland (in a good way)!

We’ve asked our speakers to let us know if they have notes, links, slides, or other resources that accompany their talks. Here’s what they’ve shared:

  • The Art and Science of Premium – Shane Pearlman: Slides
  • Blogging as a Platform – Kiersi Burkhart: Handout / Slides
  • Don’t Put That In Functions.php! (Or, How to Write A Basic Plugin) – Kailey Lampert: Slides
  • How to Blog Every Day – Laura Kimball: Slides / Resources
  • How to Build a Professional WordPress Business – Grant Landram: Slides / Photos
  • How to use WP-Cron – Ben Lobaugh: Slides / Code / Tutorial
  • Questions You’re too Embarrassed to Ask – Eric Mann: Slides
  • Why We Click Publish: Advocating for User-Centricity through Interaction Design – Taylor Dewey: Slides

WordCamp Eve

Hey, we hope you enjoyed your attendee email today with lots of pro tips for enjoying WordCamp Portland tomorrow. Here are a few things we missed:

I-5 N is CLOSED: According to ODOT, Interstate 5 northbound is closed between the Marquam and Fremont bridges from 11 p.m. Friday, Aug. 17 to 5 a.m. Monday, Aug. 20.

**Avoid using I-5 north and U.S. 26 (Sunset Highway) east near the Vista Ridge Tunnel or expect long delays.**

Wow, it’s hot: Don’t be too scared to come to WordCamp! There is, as it turns out, AC in the building, but since the building dates back to 1928, it’s not the best climate control in the city. That being said, two of the tracks will be held in basement rooms and the other room has a super-high ceiling. So: dress cool but comfy and don’t forget to hydrate.

Can I still buy a ticket?: We’ll be selling walk-in tickets at the door for $25, credit card or check. 🙂

I’ve got the power: It would be best to power up all your devices and machinery tonight! There are outlets available, but not at every table.

We can’t wait to see you tomorrow morning! Oh, and don’t forget to read Aaron’s awesome poem.

10up + WordPress + Portland = Awesome

At 10up, meaningful community engagement is part of our DNA… and so is Portland. Just last year, 10up sponsored four WordCamps, and team 10up employees have spoken at over a dozen WordCamps around the country, from Seattle, to San Diego, to Miami, to New York.

10up is a premium, distributed agency, that serves customers ranging from small businesses to international publishing giants like TechCrunch, to cable networks like NBC Universal Sports. We have full time, salaried employees around the country, having found amazing talent in places like Boston, the New York City metro area, Washington DC, Sacramento California, Miami Florida, and Birmingham Alabama. But the closest thing we have to a home – our center of gravity – is Portland, Oregon.

Three of our fourteen talented team members – Zack, Taylor, and Jeremy – are proud to call Portland home. And if you call Portland home, you’ve probably seen them around; they’re active members of Portland’s WordPress meet up, and have spoken at local events like WebVisions. Somehow, between helping clients like Trulia and 9to5 Mac, they even found time to help organize some of this weekend’s events!

Two of our Portland contingent will be speaking this weekend. Zack and Taylor both kick off the morning with talks that demonstrate just how diverse our team’s skill set is. While Zack examines best – and worst! – practices for WordPress development, Taylor offers an in depth look at user-centric interaction design.

Of course, we get tired of hearing ourselves speak – we want to hear from you. Whether you’re an organization looking for a first class web experience, an eager developer looking for an amazing career opportunity, or just have an inspiring story to tell about WordPress, we want you to track down us down in our 10up t-shirts. In addition to our Portland contingent of three, Jake – 10up’s President – will also be roaming the floor. We’re always seeking new and exciting opportunities, and always recruiting.

Happy camping!

Jake Goldman

One more thing…

So…about that “To be announced” portion of the schedule. Ready for something cool? 🙂

Matt Mullenweg is coming to WordCamp!

On Saturday, right after lunch, we’ll have a 1-hour Town Hall Q&A with Matt. Come with questions, come to listen, come to have a great time.

For those fresh to WordPress, Matt is the co-founding developer of WordPress and the founder of Automattic, purveyors of fine web goods like WordPress.com.

Earlier this month he gave the State of the Word at WordCamp San Francisco. He talks there about how far WordPress has come and where it is going in the next year. Whether you are new to WordPress or a seasoned veteran you’ll enjoy that talk. You may even think of a couple of questions to ask him on Saturday.

We still have some tickets left for Saturday so grab one while you can! The $20 ticket gets you a full day of WordCamp awesomeness, a BBQ lunch, coffee, Whiffies, beer, and a WordCamp pint glass. It also gets you to the Dev Day on Sunday if you want to hack with other local WordPress developers. Yes, all that for $20! Register today.

See you on Saturday!

ZippyKid Makes WordCamp Portland Delicious

You know that feeling when you’ve got all your pals with you, and you know they totally have your back? That’s how it feels to organize WordCamp Portland with sponsors like ZippyKid. Do you like barbecue more than pasteboard sandwiches? Then stop by ZippyKid’s table at the event and thank them for us (but use a napkin first).

ZippyKid was founded by Vid Luther in May of 2010 in southern, sunny San Antonio, Texas. While having an abundance of management experience in website hosting, Vid started seeing the complication and frustration that customers of all sizes were facing with their hosting company and he knew there had to be a better solution, a better way to treat customers.“I was tired of the way hosting companies were treating small business owners… started ZippyKid, where I could dictate the quality of service and offering.”

ZippyKid offers reliable, secure and cost effective web hosting solutions that keep your website up and running. Their standard features include CDN, malware scanning, firewall protection, SSL, daily backups, and more.

Meet Three More Speakers: Zack, Laura, and Robert

Let’s meet our remaining three prescheduled speakers.

Zack Tollman

Zack TollmanWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
Since joining 10up last September, WordPress and I are going steady. As a Senior Web Engineer with 10up LLC, my day job involves building everything from basic blog sites to complex WordPress implementations to mentoring developers. If that is not enough, I am usually spending time in evening and weekends working on plugins, core contributions, or writing about WordPress.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
I am a big fan of Scribu’s Posts2Posts plugin. As the name implies, the plugin gives developers the ability to easily relate one post to another post or posts. Post relationships is an extremely powerful concept that makes structuring data in custom WordPress implementation more flexible. This is a feature that is lacking in WordPress and Posts2Posts excellent fills this void.

Beyond the technical offerings of Posts2Posts, I think it is “neat” because it is a user contributed plugin (albeit from a highly involved Core Contributor) that adds a capability that WordPress does not have. It is a fundamentally important feature that can be provided via non-Core code because WordPress is open source. I only hope that some day this code, or code that serves a similar function, is someday integrated into WordPress Core.

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
Absolutely! One of the more recent mistakes I made was while developing a plugin that automatically Tweets posts in a specified category to specified Twitter account, I imported the Theme Unit test data and it attempted to Tweet every post to my test Twitter account. I set the Tweet to be published when a post is published, forgetting that when posts are imported, the “publish_post” hook is executed. Fortunately for me, I had set up a test account on Twitter for this work and the damage was minimal. This experience reminded me that it is SO important to be aware of the context in which hooks are executed. Hooks can sometimes run at times that you do not expect. As such, it is important to test for context in a hook’s callback function. Additionally, when using an unfamiliar hook, it is important to carefully examine how and when the hook is executed in WordPress Core in order to mitigate collateral damage from an errant function execution.

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
Community. Community. Community. WordCamps are all about being and engaging with the community. I find inspiration, motivation and friendship from every WordCamp that I attend. I have no doubt that WC PDX 2012 will deliver in that regard.

I am also looking forward to getting a killer pint glass 😉

Laura Kimball

Laura KimballWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
We have a casual, open relationship even though WordPress and my blog, lamiki.com, have been going steady for the past two and a half years.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
I’m a huge fan of WordPress.com Site Stats from Jetpack. As a blogger, how people find my site and what they’re looking at is super important to me. And the best part is I can access that information without leaving the dashboard of my site.

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
Once I gave in to WordPress’ request to update my site and it took the entire site down. I have no idea what I did, which was probably the problem, and the worst part was it was on a night that I was posting a new blog and a lot of people were looking. Luckily my husband knew more than I did and was able to fix whatever I did without too much damage.

I love all of the plug-ins and how you can customize WordPress. But when it comes to things like updating the database, I now lean on some friends who have more WordPress-tech-chops than I do.

Also don’t do any major changes to your site if you are doing something major like blogging every day for a month straight or launching a campaign.

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
I’m looking forward to meeting the Portland-area WordCampers and listening to the other presentations. Not to mention the beer. J

Robert Rowley

Robert RowleyWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
“It’s complicated” would be what I’d put up on my Facebook wall. I focus on helping educate the WordPress community on security matters, while my work has me supporting and helping secure tens of thousands of installs it is the WP community that I enjoy interacting with the most.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
On a site, there are far too many to really have a favorite. However with technology, the recently released wp-cli tool makes me very happy.

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
Yes, oh my yes. Never forget about or ignore your site(s)! You know why 🙂

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
I only hope to have a good time with some good people, if I can help one more person secure their site then that would be superb.

Speakers Taylor, Eric, and Justin Answer Some Questions

Continuing our get-to-know-the-speakers-a-bit series (previous incarnations are found here and here), today we hear from Taylor Dewey, Eric Mann, and Justin Sainton:

Taylor Dewey

Taylor DeweyWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
It’s pretty chill. We’re profesional colleagues and even though we work together 40 hours a week, we’ll still get together on the weekends and talk shop over a good microbrew.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
I think that the community working on core does some of the coolest things with WordPress. While that seems like I side-stepped the question, the power of custom post types, the proliferation of featured images (along with other optional theme functions), and the mockups in trac for the upcoming media editor are what make it possible to keep doing neat things in WordPress.

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
When I started making websites, I made them by myself, in a bubble. Only recently have I started getting frequent code and design review from my colleagues. The difference this makes is astounding. I’ve learned a ton and my code and design has dramatically improved.

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
Aside from making sure my first WordCamp presentation goes well, I convinced my sister — a profesional journalist — to attend, so I’m excited to see her there. One of WordPress’ strengths is its community; I’m proud to be introducing someone to it.

Eric Mann

Eric MannWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
I use WordPress for my own websites and develop projects for various clients in both the private and public sector. Since I don’t develop with PHP for a living, writing code (plugins and patches) for WordPress helps me keep my skills fresh and makes me a better developer with multiple languages.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
I’ve seen so much amazing work it’s really hard to settle on just one. But I’ve seen amazing, interactive single-page websites built on WordPress that don’t require any code knowledge to maintain. Building a stellar site and allowing the end users to just write rather than hack PHP/HTML is fantastic!

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
Once upon a time, I was really concerned with proactively dealing with bugs for my users. To try to gather statistics, I built a small XML-RPC system into each of my plugins and had them phone home back to my server. This let me gather accurate statistics on plugin versions, WordPress versions, PHP versions, etc. It also let my plugins contact me immediately when something broke so I could fix it and email the site owner once things were back up. On the one hand, it was an awesome diagnostic tool for me. On the other hand, it was a huge security hole in all of my systems … and it was eventually exploited by someone who happened to browse my source.

I’ve long since ripped out all of the code, but I learned a huge lesson about data privacy, data security, and user trust in the process.

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
Networking. I used to come to WordCamps looking for incredible new code and great new ideas, but I’ve realized those things come out all through the year – not just at WordCamp. While I’m sure there will be a lot of groundbreaking work presented (or just going on during the dev/hack day), I’m coming more to meet the people doing the work and to make new friends.

Justin Sainton

Justin SaintonWhat’s your current relationship with WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS for clients since early in 2007. Ever since then, I’ve pretty much only worked with WordPress – there’s nothing else I’ve encountered quite like it. I made my first core contribution in the 3.3 cycle and I’ve been hooked ever since. The relationship could and should be aptly described as an impassioned love affair.

What’s the neatest thing you’ve seen done with WordPress?
Lots of interesting stuff out there these days! I always see something creative coming from Brad Williams and their crew, whether it is iPhone apps or Facebook apps or Zombies built with WordPress – GameFroot from Dan Milward and the Instinct guys down in New Zealand is off the charts. And I think the Group Deals plugin we put together is pretty spiffy. Also incredibly impressed with Scott Taylor’s work at eMusic. Not to mention some of the VIP work from the guys at 10up. Just so, so much out there that is super neat.

Have you ever made a WordPress mistake that we could all learn from?
Probably on a daily basis 😉 I think I share in most developer’s angst when I look at code I’ve written that is even as recent as 6-12 months old. Very early on (Probably 2007 or 2008) – I’d build themes for clients by simply replacing the contents of the themes/default folder. Don’t do that. Bad idea. I won’t beat the child theming/upgrade path horse. But seriously, don’t do that. Also, use esc_url_raw() when using URIs with the WP HTTP API. Lots of mistakes, I’ll send an alphabetical list.

What are *you* hoping to get from WordCamp Portland 2012?
Honestly? I just want to see what my local scene is like. I’ve spoken at nine or ten WordCamps, all around the world, in the past couple years – but this is my first time in Portland. And I live an hour away. That’s totally unacceptable. Best I can tell from Twitter, we have probably the best local WordPress scene in the entire world (fighting words!), so I’m really, really stoked to get to meet some of the other brilliant people from my own backyard.