• 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

• competed in a city league ski racing league, and our team won the whole season
• had the worst Christmas ever #christmasfail08
• been [positively] excited about a presidential inauguration
• played a UO officially sanctioned flip cup tournament with the club sports olympics, and we WON
• broke a slalom ski
• went from 5 down to 2 e-mail accounts, and one of those may be going a way soon
• met a girl, her name is Angela, many of you have even met her by now
• graduated from college!!!!!!!!!
• successfully survived a road trip with Angela through 9 states
  • Yellowstone, Ren Faire, Badlands, Wall Drug, SLC, etc…
• partaken in a few dancing lessons (ssssh! don’t tell anyone!)
• somehow convinced Angela to buy a Mac
• dealt with 2 flat tires in 2 different states I don’t live in, and neither one on my personal vehicle
• turned 27
• competed in 9 waterski tournaments in 6 different states, and waterskied in a 7th state
  • including Collegiate National All-Stars for slalom+trick, and AWSA Western Regionals for 3-event (and qualified for but didn’t go to AWSA Nationals)!
• upgraded my wordpress blog, twice, without posting anything
• volunteered with a church group on a construction project
• bought a Playstation 2 from a thrift store for $12.50 and repaired it myself
• sold my old DSLR and bought a spiffy new one, and taken thousands of photos with it
• attended a number of concerts
• given up on my football team, due to some unFavreable circumstances
• finally started getting my online portfolio and résumé up-to-date

…and some other stuff too, I assure you. But now that you’re updated on my life, maybe now I can get this site fully back on track again?

Mainly writing this post to see how they integrate with other blog postings.

EDIT (8/2/08): So that didn’t last long. I was tweeting way more than I ever blogged, and a page full of tweets just doesn’t look that good. So I’ve dis-integrated the tweets from the blog, for now you’ll see ~5 at a time in my sidebar.

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.

Long story short, they asked me at 11:30pm last night to come in for an interview today at 10:30am. I also know they’ve been looking through my website, so I won’t say anything more.

*fingers crossed*

1. What do you think of me, iTunes?
2. Will I have a happy life?
3. What do my friends really think of me?
4. Do people secretly lust after me?
5. What does [insert significant other] think of me?
6. How can I make myself happy?
7. What should I do with my life?
8. Why must life be so full of pain?
9. How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?
10. Will I ever have children?
11. Will I die happy?
12. Can you give me some good advice?
13. Do you know where your children are?
14. What do you think happiness is?

I ran this twice (once from my library, and once from my smart playlist I always listen to), and posted the answers in the comments section. My iTunes is psychotic and scares me.

Yesterday I could barely hold onto the rope. But the good news (sorta) is I now get a week off from waterskiing, and I can let my hands heal a bit. Also I have the opportunity to get a considerably newer ski for quite a reasonable price. There is a question I have yet to ask the owner of it though before I write a check for it.

Besides waterskiing, I’ve been trying to teach myself some guitar riffs and chords the past few days. I just need to keep on messing with it. I’ve picked up almost one riff a day, and been working on all of them to get the timing better and sounding cleaner.

It’s weird to find out people actually read this site. I often (ok maybe not so often), rant about things, or talk about things that happen in my life, but it feels kinda funny to find out who reads the site, especially the blog.

In other unrelated news (I guess I’m going for the the post most unrelated to itself today), I’ve listed my laptop for sale, and have had 2 people interested so far, but only one has made a somewhat serious offer (quite below my asking price). If I don’t get an offer of something reasonably close to what I’m asking, I may just keep it at least for the summer.

All that and my summer vacation/trip starts soon. Will be very nice to see everyone again! Well, that’s it for now.