Charles E. Frees-Melvin

My personal spot on the web.

WordPress

Posts about WordPress and WordCamps I have attended.

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.

As most of you my readers are aware I am a huge WordPress enthusiast. I also like to write about local Saint John affairs too. While I would like to promote a site that is local and very interesting. It is http://www.barbbarbbarb.com. I came across this website as a suggested person to follow. (@barbbarbbarb)

This site is focused around fashion and is very well written. To tie it back to WordPress this site is running on an older version of WordPress 2.8.3 and is using a modified version of Kuuler I theme made by stratus, a well-known WordPress developer.

Give the site a good read I’m sure you will enjoy it. Also, next weekend is WordCamp Montreal 2010. It is going to be a blast.

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!”

I started writing thing on December 29th but researching the links has taken some time, in fact much longer than I thought to find all the links. I have defiantly accomplished a lot this year, looking back this has been the best year in a while. Of the things that stand out as my holy crap moment of the year was standing at the window in the Vancouver airport with the setting sun breaking a bit through the clouds. That was the moment it rang true to me that mountains were more than just really big hills.

One of the biggest events that kicked off the year was the 2009 Atlantic Major Midget Regionals at the LBR. This one event not only was my first time writing for sports, I also learned what makes up a shot on goal in a hockey game was. In addition, actually pulling off the live feed was amazing. That and meeting Don Mabee for the first time.

The next moment of this year, happened when I attended to Faces of Fusion dinner in May. That is where I ran into Ian Finley from East Coast Connected. It was from that meeting that I ran into him again on my annual birthday trip to Toronto, that I learned about the monthly East Coast Army nights at Gracie’s.

During that trip I had the privilege of attending my very first WordCamp in Toronto. It was amazing to see all the interest of all the web community in a town so driven by media. It was there that I met some very interesting people who I hope to never forget such as Jeremy Clarke, Brendan Sera-Shriar, Accordion Guy, Alexa Clark, Erin Blaskie and George O’Neill. But even better from there it lead me on the path to attending WordCamp Montreal where it was there in that little town (humour people!) of Montreal. The place was amazing when during the very early dawn morning that I got to walk through the Montreal Jazz festival that made me realize I was so wrong about Montreal and its many misconceptions. Then meeting folks like Kim Valee, Matt Mullenweg, Jane Wells, Eva Blue and many others.

And then there was Victoria, where at WordCamp Victoria I ran into many more amazing people. I kind of really like BC, despite only seeing it for 2 days. Perhaps I can find a way to go back sometime this or next year.

Tris Hussy Presentation

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.