Charles E. Frees-Melvin's WebHome

After twelve and a half long hours on a bus I have arrived in Montreal for WordCamp Montreal. This is my 5th WordCamp which I will do a post about sometime later.

I took a walk earlier today and walked through the historic McGill University campus. One sweet sign that the orientation for the new students coming to university this year will have a better orientation than the three I’ve go to is the size of the beer tent. There must have been thousands of bottles of Boreale Beer and lots of kegs too. Anyone who has been to Montreal knows that is good beer.

I have been trying to post a lot more lately. But one thing that greatly concerns me us the lack of good comments lately.

Practically everything on this site is open to commenting even the photos and the albums. What’s better is that if you see someone in a photo that you recognize you can even tag them, and they get a custom album automatically about them.

I’m working on integrating twitter feeds at the moment with these custom albums. Also I have run into a big hiccup with a problem in WordPress 3 that breaks the paging of an album. It is almost as if they did something that taxonomy pages only work for a post type rather than an attachment.

I have also decided that I will be going to WordCamp Montreal again this year. I was thinking that I could show off how I was able to pull of my photo album in an advanced theming tutorial.

That is one thing that I found dry about technical lectures at past WordCamps where they show off code but not put it together, to demonstrate something new. I think I would call it “Media and your Theme… Where can you take it!”

Last night I got to meet some really cool people at the first Saint John Tweetup. This hat to be one of the most geekiest event I have been to in the Saint John area. Well as a qualifier the IT Works 2003 was more geeky than last night but last night was pretty cool. Everyone that showed up to the even seemed to have an iPhone with the exception of 2 with iPod Touches.

I had a really good meal too and 2 amazing Hoegaardens. The meal consisted of a cheeseburger like no other and the famous kettle chips. The Saint John Ale House is definitely one of my favourite venues. In addition, everybody left with a door prize. My door prize was a Tri-Star Mercedes-Benz wine glass set donated by Tim Clark (@e55fan).

Thanks to everyone else for being there too: @SaintJohnShawn @chris_london @madelejm @MarkPridham @e55fan @koisspots @GrantTotten @shawnrouse @typeter and the must follow @horsetrough.

Tris Hussy Presentation

The first session I am attending is Jodie Gastel talking about installing WordPress. She is cheating a little bit using cPanel Fantastico. Which is good for beginners, although the regular way is not too much harder.

Next I went to see Jeff Richards presentation on widgets. It was very interesting to see the basics of widgets and how they can be used to link people’s sites together. It somehow left off many of the cool and fun stuff that widgets can be used for.

Tris Hussey’s presentation on extra tools for WordPress users was absolutely amazing. I haven’t had a chance yet to download all these tools yet but I sure plan on trying them.

The last presentation I attended was Jeff Richards about widgets. He has posted his presentation on his personal blog at Widgets:Making Your Site Great and Letting Others Help. It was very informative on how widget can be used to enhance a site or a marketing tool for others to put a link back to your site.

The best part of this WordCamp was the discussions in the breakout room about everything from Copyright, Creative Commons, WordPress MU, legal issues with hosting internationally, and many other topics.

In addition the after party at The Office Lounge was very enlightening on every topic imaginable from a Victoria point of view.

At long last I have finally arrived in Victoria. Five hours on a plane is really long much longer that I had really imagined. During the longest lag of the journey I got to see “My Sister’s Keeper” for the first time. I found it to be really an enjoyable movie, in the respect that you did not know who to feel sad for. Then it throws a huge twist that make the plot even more intriguing.

Upon first impression of Victoria is that it has an appearance of a fairy tile that has come to life especially now that its the holidays and the lights of colour in and on everything.

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