Taking advantage of free inflight wifi provided by gogo (for smartphones only) posting using the WordPress 2.9 mobile app.

Flew down to San Jose and rode with my parents (who flew into San Francisco) to San Luis Obispo for my Aunt’s wedding. I was the official photographer for the ceremony. Weather cleared up nicely for the big day, and didn’t get too hot. Sunday the next day was really nice and quite warm. I got to bury some cousins in the sand, but sadly didn’t get a chance to try surfing.

Sunday night we headed to the bay area and did the touristy stuff on Monday. Went and visited the Full House house in San Francisco, My old college roommate who works at google gave me and my dad an abridged tour of his workplace, small software company, you may have heard of, went shopping at the Apple Company store at 1 infinite loop, and drove by Steve Jobs’s old house in Los Altos. Then it was back to the San Jose airport, and here I am, blogging at 30,000 feet (not sure how high we actually are, just a guess).

Also, as has been in the news this week, the 4J district and Unions are fighting over whether to add back furlough days as work days, which due to budget shortfalls, would mean they would have to lay off over 100 workers (mix of classified and certified). They of course let the newest hires go first, so we’ll see if this lasts past December 17.

• Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells of Automattic
• Scott Porad from the icancheezburger network
• Tyler Sticka, designer at Waggener Edstrom
• Will Norris, one of the core developers of Shibboleth and author of the OpenID plugin for WordPress
• viper007bond, one of the most prolific WordPress plugin developers
• Aaron Hockley, founder of the Portland WordPress Users Group
• Justin Kistner, senior manager of social media at WebTrends (and designer of some of the sites I currently manage)
• Rick Turoczy, from Silicon Florist, a blog about web startups in the Portland area
• and countless others

These folks and others, along with awesome food from Whiffies Pies, Windmer Beer, Zupans, Resers, Coconut Bliss ice cream, Cup Cake Jones— and the awesome folks at WebTrends for providing the venue for the event— made for an AMAZING WordCamp.

Also a big thanks to my buddy Tristan for letting me crash at his apartment Saturday night and helping me find my way around town. Tristan’s former roommate from Eugene, Aaron was also there. They both live and do freelance web development in Portland, so it was also a great networking opportunity for them.

This is a fairly long post, so continue after the break if you will

The first presentation Saturday was Jason Grigsby about speeding up WordPress, and a few browser plugins (Firebug, YSlow, and Google Page Speed) as well as server-side solutions: SQL Monitor and WP Super Cache. General tweaks for speed whether on WordPress or not include going though Yahoo’s 14 Performance Rules, and if you have lots of small graphics on your site, use spriteme.com to turn graphics into sprites *and* tweak your CSS accordingly to utilize such sprites.

Speed Up WordPress Wordcamp Pdx 2009

Next up was a Web Analytics talk by Lorelle, probably the worst presenter at the event. Her entire MO was selling her book and promoting a new web analytics tool she’s involved with, Woopra. I did sign up for a beta account, but the beta is closed or soon closing, and is going to be a pay-for service, so I’m not going to link it.

I will rant a bit though…

Maybe the ad industry has jaded me, I’ve become extremely resistant to people/companies trying to sell me their own products. I don’t want to hear a sales pitch from someone who stands to profit from my business. Most of the time, when I sign up for new services or get new products, it’s because of a first-hand recommendation from a personal friend, or I’ll do all the research myself, weigh the options and still go over the findings until a choice becomes obvious. Personally I think I’ll stick with Google Analytics.

Next was Tyler Sticka’s AMAZING presentation on using WordPress to develop your own portfolios, using ~3 snippets of PHP code. This really turned some heads, and got a lot of attention from the #wcpdx Twitter stream. I’m not sure I could do the presentation justice, so here is his sideshow (hoping web streaming from the event will be up soon)

WordPress-Powered Portfolios

Then John Hawkins demonstrated creating a plugin to fetch author graphic and information from gravitar.com. He so kindly provided lots of documentation for his presentation on How to Write a WordPress Plugin on his site. Sometime after this, there was a breakout discussion on Advanced Plugin Development. Notes to take from this:

• Avoid custom tables
• Output buffers are bad, but Matt Mullenweg loves them
• Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation
• IRC Channels: #wordpress-dev or #wordpress on freenode
• WPHackers mailing list, WP mailing lists may need some restructuring

Very infotaining speech by Scott Porad of the Cheezburger network explaining the “Lazy, Messy & Backwards” mindset behind their business model. Found out they have about 47 blogs of mainly funny pictures, 10,000 images are submitted daily, and roughly 200 make it on to the sites. Every image uploaded is backed-up/archived in 4 places immediately, and moderated by real people.

Lazy, Messy, Backwards – Scott Porad

The conference ended with a panel of experts on an SEO SMACKDOWN. The debate was “Good Content” vs “Findability.” The consensus here seemed to be overwhelmingly that content is more important than SEO. But my take on the issue is to excercise “best practice” as far as SEO first, then forget about it so you can focus on content.

Other Plugins of Note:

• More-Fields
• Multi-Level Navigaion
• Flexi-Pages
• WP-DB-Backup
• Socializer
• All-in-one SEO Pack

Random Links:

• Starkers (a really barebones theme, use as a starting point for development)
• Web Worker Daily
• There, I fixed it!
• Picture is Unrelated

That’s what Toni asked me about 2hrs ago. Followed by:

Me: getting my calendars set up to sync through google
Toni: sounds exciting there
Me: you have no idea
Toni: lol
Toni: you are an odd one

Anyways this is fairly brilliant. Google Calendar is the brains of the operation, where the data is stored and whatnot. Sure I exported most of my calendars straight from iCal, but then I set up the calendars to utilize Google Calendar’s new calDAV service (Google’s instructions). So now I can edit events on my iMac at home, the iMac at work, even on my iPod Touch, and it’ll sync up to the gCloud, and back down to my computers/iPod, and essentially be the same everywhere.

Caveat here is regarding the iPod Touch. I only see the “live” calendars when using Google’s mobile interface, the Apple Calendar interface needs to get plugged in at home to sync. Same with posting, it if i post to Apple Calendar, nothing goes live until I plug & sync at home. And obviously Google Calendar needs to be within earshot of wi-fi access.

This is all acceptable though, wi-fi seems ubiquitous enough for when I’m hopping between computers, and when I’m not (say, when I visit the family cabin in Minnesota), the iPod Touch will be the only device I have for keeping schedules, so it’ll “just work”.

The one thing I don’t understand, is why do each of my Google Calendars need seperate CalDAV accounts in iCal? This is makes it a pain the ass to set up, but after the fact is mainly cosmetic (see image above, and click to enlarge).

Hmm.. ramblomatic blogger? I’m going to bed.

I said: “Most of mine are on strips of light sensitive celluloid… er.. film, which I have to develop myself, so I don’t have anything to look at yet.”

Mike replied: “You might try some Preparation “C” on those sensitive celluloids. Just apply liberally to your F Stop and wait a few hours.”

Here’s my 2nd roll of film. A little misleading, I’ve been using 2 cameras, and I started this roll first, but it was the last (of 4 so far) to get finished, developed and scanned. Same deal as before, side image to view the rest of the album, or squares to see the individual images.

That’s right, they’ve finally made the icon grid adjustable. In relation to 10.4 “Tiger,” the widest spread looks to be about 10% wider, and is finely adjustable to what I would consider too close. I appreciate being given the choice.

To set this option, click on the Desktop, and under the View menu, select “Show View Options”.

Finally was able to login to the Up-To-Date order tracking system tonight. And to my horror, this is what I saw:

Anyways, I won’t hold my breath. I know I have a license for the software, so I should be able to acquire a copy from work by the weekend. Thanks Apple for not using product activation.

A bit of backstory: I’m part of the Up-to-date program because I picked up a “new” previous generation 24″ iMac at the beginning of the month. The thing is freaking huge, biggest screen in our apartment.

If you use an online bookmark service or social bookmarking site, tell me what you think.

Also, I picked up a Magic Bullet blender yesterday. So far we’ve made fresh homemade guacamole, arctic chocolate milk shakes, omelettes, and chicken quesadillas. In addition to the recipe book that came with it, I downloaded about a dozen other recipes online last night. It doesn’t live up to the infomercial, but it is a cool gadget!

edit: Add hummos and mac & cheese to the list today.

I’m the new webmaster for the UO School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC).
w00tage!

Rant: So the Sony PSP plays little discs called Universal Media Discs. What the hell is universal about it? SRSLY. Hey Sony, universal means it should work across a multitude of platforms across brands and such.

Hand candy at it’s finest.