WordCamp Nashville 2012

WordCamp Nashville 2013 » Go

It’s been almost two weeks since WordCamp and the dust of catching up is finally starting to settle. A huge thanks goes out to all of you attendees that came out! Check out some of the resources below that we’ve accumulated from the community. Photos, Reviews & Slides!

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WordCamp Nashville Reviews

• WordCamp Nashville 2012 by WPCandy
• WordCamp Nashville by Michael Toppa
• WordCamp Nashville by Daryl L. Houston

Available Slideshows

Thanks goes out to WPCandy for accumulating the list below! We’ve all been catching up these last weeks, but I think the dust is starting to clear.

• Kenneth White: Categories, Tags, and Custom Post Types! Oh my!
• Mitch Canter: The Blank Screen: Overcoming Your Fear of ‘Pressing From Scratch
• Joel R. Norris: A Beginner’s WordPress Bootcamp
• Ryan Green: Child Theme Frameworks Through the Lens of User Experience
• Rick Sanders and Tara M. Aaron: Copyright and Other Legal Basics for Bloggers (and Developers, too)
• Andrew Nacin and Samuel Wood: Otto and Nacin Show
• Brad McCarty: Making the Leap: From Hobbyist to Professional
• Michael Toppa: Dependency Injection for WordPress Plugin Development (and his post)
• John Housholder: The future of WordPress in Nashville
• Anna Belle Leiserson: Search Engine Optimize Your Site in Three Easy Steps
• Russell Fair: LESS, JS & WP (and demo theme on Github)
• Anna Belle Leiserson: Search Engine Optimize Your Site in Three Easy Steps

Worknik is way, way more than an online dictionary.

It started as the web’s first word navigation system. The site grew into a community of bloggers and word-lovers. Now, while keeping its consumer audience, Wordnik is expanding to meet growing interest from content publishers and businesses that want to add value to their content and engage more closely with their users.

Wordniks can share their favorite words and make lists of top words in categories. Community members can “like” words as their favorite, creating a social network of word lovers and word users. The site shows definitions from multiple sources, giving users different takes on a word’s meaning.

“Word of the Day” is a popular feature, and today’s word (April 19, 2012) is “crapulence.” It may not be what you think. Still, this is a fine word, though it does not apply to Worknik, our other sponsors, WordCamp Nashville 2012, our speakers, attendees and volunteers,  or WordPress. At all.

Crapulence is a noun defined this way by Wikitionary: “Intemperance; debauchery; excessive indulgence.” Century Dictionary and Cylcopedia says this: “Drunkenness; a surfeit, or the sickness following drunkenness.”

“The word ‘crapulence’ attests to the 1650s, and comes from the Latin ‘crapula,’ excessive drinking,” Wordnik says. “The word also has a modern sense of the state of being crappy or inferior.”

Wordnik has a developer community, too.

It has used its site to brand its API framework and has a host of apps for mobile devices and desktops. “The Week in Words” for The Wall Street Journal and similar features in other prominent publications, in print and online, are Wordnik-powered.

Take a survey to sign up for some beta features as they’re released. As of April 19, Wordnik described itself as “billions of words, 984,433,066 example sentences, 6,898,870 unique words, 232,414 comments, 179,268 tags, 121,454 pronunciations, 79,170 favorites and 1,044,091 words in 33,387 lists created by 84,667 Wordniks.”

Our word of the day is “awesome.”

WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company that goes beyond slammin’ website hosting.

It helps customers large and small wade through the thousands of themes and plugins out there. WP Engine hosting comes with a one-click backup and restore option — at no extra charge. The company also installs WordPress security updates proactively.

The WP Engine team serves at least 125 million requests daily, each one carefully and continuously tuned for speed, scalability, and security. The company is beloved by hundreds of customers from huge, popular sites down to bloggers and small company home pages that care about their SEO ranking and their users’ experience. Customers rave about WP Engine’s tech support, where only WordPress experts answer questions.

Using suggestions from site owners, WP Engine expanded its account features to include a staging area that allows deployment of new pages and themes or site changes without crash worries.

The company also has a high-profile roster of investors that includes Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, and Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. WP Engine is based in Austin, Texas, the same state where WordPress itself was born.

And we grateful the WP Engine team is stopping in Nashville, even virtually.

Mike Toppa of WebDevStudios, a website development company specializing in WordPress and related open source platforms, talked clean code at WordCamp Philly in 2011. He’s joining us Saturday in Nashville to talk about dependency injection for object-oriented programming on the developer/advanced track.

This is a powerful and flexible concept. Here’s an analog-world analogy: Would you buy a lamp that required you to solder it directly to the electrical wiring in your wall? Of course not. That would be dangerous, and would make it hard to switch to a new lamp in the future.

You want a lamp you can simply plug in, and easily replace with another lamp (or some other electrical device) when your needs change. This is a good way to look at the object-oriented programming technique called dependency injection. When programmers first learn object oriented programming, they typically “hardwire” the dependencies between objects, making their code inflexible and hard to adapt to changing needs.

In this talk, Mike will introduce dependency injection concepts, and use real code examples to explain how to create “pluggable” object relationships in the WordPress environment, so your code can be easily reused and adapted to emerging needs.

Don’t miss it!

WebDevStudios
Company bio
Twitter: @mtoppa
http://www.toppa.com

WordCamp Nashville is excited to announce several new developments to make your day at WordCamp just a little bit more enjoyable.

1.  There will be free muffins from Foxy Baking Co. for the first 150 people who show up to go with free coffee from Ugly Mugs.  Combined with the stylish WordCamp Nashville t-shirts as part of your swag bag, 9am and the speaker tracks has never felt so good!

2.  Lunch coupons!  WordCamp is going to be helping you with your lunch by providing $5 coupons to one of the participating restaurants.  More details to follow. (Rumor mill: one will be BBQ).

3.  After Party:  With free beer from Yazoo courtesy of MetaCake and lots of time to socialize, your day can’t get much better!

Take a look at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center website. It is clean, easy to navigate and delivers important information to those who need it without fuss. It also rocks on Search Engine Optimization.

Anna Belle Leiserson, VICC’s web coordinator, will share her strategies at WordCamp Nashville. “Giving your site good Google juice is not rocket science,” she says. “What it takes is TLC.”

Her talk will include SEO fundamentals, what to look for in a WordPress theme and how to leverage WordPress plug-ins. She presents frequently within the Vanderbilt web design and web development communities on SEO, analytics and content management systems.

The Vandy-Ingram website features easily accessible (and understandable) videos, information on clinical trials and updates on cancer research. We aren’t the only ones who noticed: A study in the January 2012 Journal of Healthcare Management named the site one of the top 10 hospital websites in the country.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro used a webcrawler that scored 636 websites on four criteria: accessibility (ease of use for people with low computers skills), content (freshness, quality and amount), marketing (how it fares in searches), and technology (download speed, site structure, code quality).

We’re fans of all that stuff, too.

The Next Web is an international technology blog with 5 million unique visitors each month and 10 million monthly page views. Brad McCarty, the blog’s managing editor and a professional blogger, lives right here in Middle Tennessee and he’s a WordCamp Nashville speaker.

His presentation, “Making the Leap: From Hobbyist to Professional,” targets WordPress newcomers as well as content creators and publishers. He’ll share strategies for bloggers to kick it up to the next level that include workflow, search engine utilization and content sharing networks. Approaching larger publications for guest posting and finding potential revenue sources round out Brad’s presentation.

Brad has a serious online presence. In various profiles, he describes himself a fan of cool startups, music and really good advertising. In his own words: “I love finding new startups and beating up huge speaker cabinets.”

He is a true, professional blogger. He writes for The Next Web – Monday he posted twice – guest blogs and fills his personal blog with great stuff. He recently moved his personal blog from wordpress.com to svbtle.com, which describes itself “as an experiment that brings some of the best things from newspapers and magazines to a network of independent bloggers.”

We aren’t surprised that Brad is involved in something that considers itself an experiment. “Just one of those guys” is the tagline on his personal blog. Check out Brad’s work here:

• The Next Web – International tech news site (built on WordPress)
• Brad’s TNW pages and posts
• Personal site
• Twitter: @BradMcCarty

WordCamp Nashville 2012 is lucky to get him, even though he doesn’t have to drive far. He moderated a panel on WordPress at SXSW 2012, spoke at TechStars Boulder Super Conference 2012 and presented at Barcamp Nashville 2011.

And yes, The Next Web is built on WordPress. It is a highly custom installation, and TNW crew has published a few of its plugins to the WP repository.

The “Nacin and Otto” show is a big score for WordCamp Nashville. These two are WordPress legends and we are thrilled they want to visit Music City. Some background:

Samuel Wood AKA “Otto”
Otto is a core WordPress contributor and developer from Memphis, TN. He is a “Tech Ninja” at Audrey Capital, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s investment company (http://audrey.co). He also is a moderator of the WordPress.org forums.

His sites and profiles:

• His WordPress site
• Otto’s Personal site
• Bio from personal site
• His WordPress profile and list of plugins/activity
• Twitter @Otto42

Andrew Nacin
Andrew Nacin is a core WordPress contributor and developer from Washington D.C. He is also a “Tech Ninja” at Audrey Capital. Not the shy type, Andrew has become a sort of legend and meme in the WordPress community, inspiring (or runs…not sure) the twitter accounts @NacinBot & @BlameNacin (WordPress inside jokes)

His sites and profiles:

• WordPress.org profile
• Personal site
• Bio from personal site
• Twitter @Nacin

But that’s not all!

Our very own Brad McCarty, who lives in Spring Hill, TN, is another presenter. He’s a professional blogger and the managing editor of TheNextWeb, one of the World’s largest technology blogs (based in the Netherlands).

His sites and profiles:

• The Next Web– International tech news site (built on WordPress)
• Brad’s page and posts
• Personal site (WordPress blog)
• Bio from personal site
• Twitter @BradMcCarty

If these guys aren’t enough to grab your attention, here’s another incentive: We must order Friday, April 6, and the ticket form allows size selection for this signature shirt.

If you stall, you may wind up with an awesome t-shirt that doesn’t fit.