Fresh! Scott Berkun How WordPress.com is Made

Scott Berkun How WordPress.com is Made

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Straight from WordCamp Seattle, Scott Berkun on how WordPress.com is made. You can read more on the WordPress.com News blog. (Listen carefully for metrics Scott mentions that you may never have thought about that are available as a result of your using WordPress.com.)

To be fair, Raanan Bar Cohen mentioned how Automattic handles internal communication when he spoke at WordCamp Israel in 2008, when WordPress.com had a mere 4.7 million users. Today, WordPress.com is closing in on 20 million users.

(If the above embed link is not working, you can watch Scott’s presentation on WordPress.tv)

Better shared!

Good Morning From WordCamp Jerusalem (Almost)

After an early morning ride with Lisa and two other fellow WordCamp attendees followed by an extra strong cup of coffee, WordCamp Jerusalem is underway. Miriam Schwab thanked the people arriving from Tel Aviv for their extra efforts in making their way to the conference (we were on the road at 07:15, before I normally even wake up).

And at that point yesterday, the WiFi at the Jerusalem College of Technology, a religious school, filtered access to WordPress.com, as well as to other sites apparently. As several people pointed out this was rather ironic given the driving idea behind WordPress. Fortunately, twitter continued to work and, besides the inevitable moaners and wailers, the twitter stream for #wcjeru was very active.

Overall my experience at WordCamp this year was on a completely different level from earlier WordCamps I attended and serious kudos to WordCamp Jerusalem for not only bringing in gifted and professional local WordPress developers/designers but also for tapping into the web design community as well. The most interesting session I attended during the day was “UX Cookbook: Creating Delicious WordPress Sites” where Barak Danin of UXI.org.il talked about how users experience your site and how you want them to experience your site. I came away with a lot of insights and more importantly, lots of questions that I will now try to answer.

Networking was an important and, thankfully, built-in part of the WordCamp Jerusalem program. There’s no question that when so many people who regularly see one another at conferences of this sort get together there will be networking involved. Having time to talk, swap information and brainstorm ideas with other WordPress enthusiasts acts as an incubator for further collaborations. One idea I chatted over the lunchtime break with Yoav Farhi was the possibility of a local WordPress.com meetup. Stay tuned! (And for those of you looking for the “How to go from zero to hero” learning site for WordPress.com that Matt mentioned, it’s there in my sidebar under Blogging Gurus.)

Needless-to-say, the Town Hall meeting at the end of the day  with Matt Mullenweg was the highlight of the day for me and many people. Matt talked about the development of WordPress, complimented the local community for being so active, was asked questions about WordPress usability and the future of WordPress and also said he liked the beaches in Tel Aviv.

So, Matt, here’s a small souvenir to take home from a beach a bit south of Tel Aviv, a lively reminder of why the beaches here are just so darn hot.  (Back to the version posted originally, which appears to have been replaced officially due to concerns about the music first used, an ABBA/dance mix.)

Again, kudos to Miriam Schwab and her team (and, of course, the sponsors) for putting together an event that set the standard for future WordCamps in Israel.

More event posts you might enjoy:

• Gil Reich does Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Video of the Q&A session with Matt (via @ Felix Wasserstein-w/blog post in Hebrew)
• Photos by Elad (where the back of my head got lots of exposure. )
• Photos by Lisa (a different Lisa than the one mentioned above.)
• Photos by Reuven
• Photos by Eyal Sela
• Photos by WCJerusalem
• Israeli Security Hates the iPad (oops)
• Photos by Matt
• Behind the Scenes of WordCamp Jerusalem
• וורדפרס: מגרסת מילים
• חוויות ורשמים מוורדקמפ 2010
• WordCamp Jerusalem 5/9/2010 (in Hebrew)
• (If you know of any more, please add them in the comments.)

Did I Say I Was Excited for WordCamp?

Hannit powering up!

The final schedule and list of speakers is up on the WordCamp Jerusalem site and it looks like we’ll be having a last-minute, surprise guest speaker, too. (Or at least it was a surprise to me since I haven’t visited the WCJ site in a few days.)

Like previous years, there’s a waiting list of other WordPress enthusiasts hoping to attend. So if your plans have changed and you won’t be able to, please change your RSVP on the Meetup site so that someone else can.

Looking forward to seeing everyone on Sunday! Make sure to bring along an extension outlet with multiple sockets! WiFi we may have, but without any juice – bupkes.

WordCamp Jerusalem

After a nearly two-year hiatus, WordCamp returns to Israel. Color me excited! Earlier WordCamps IL were in 2007 and 2008 and you can click on those links to read about my previous experiences.

Raanan Bar Cohen-2008

Illuminea (the only Israeli company listed in Automattic‘s “CodePoet“) is organizing #wordcampjeru this year and as they pointed out, setting up and running a WordCamp is more work than they first expected. Regardless, the announcement  came less than a month before camp date and things have been moving along at quite a brisk pace. With less than two weeks to go, there are already over 200 people who have RSVP’ed their attendance, planned speakers from abroad include Automattic’s Barry Abrahamson and Raanan Bar-Cohen, local speakers include Yoav Farhi, one of two local Happiness Engineers (the other being Ran Yaniv Hartstein, the person responsible for WordPress_HE), Hannit Cohen, Jonathan Klinger, Ma’ayan Alexander, who are familiar names from previous WordCamps IL and quite a few names new to me.

Did I say I was excited?

Like most WordCamps, the self-hosted Org version takes center stage and while the event is open to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org users, the last two WordCamps have made me feel like we’re the poor relation. I’m not sure why that should be given that the number of blogs on WordPress.com now being mentioned is 15 million (click on that photo of Raanan to see where we were in 2008). Granted that we don’t have the sheer number of options available to us that Org users do, especially on the developer end of things (all that is done for us), but there are a lot of tricks up the Com sleeve that many users don’t know about and those that do aren’t sure how to use (like Jabber, Twitter API, webhooks, and other esoterica).

But, I’m still excited.

The three tracks offered this year are: Beginning Developers, Advanced Developers and Publishers. I think you can guess which track I’ll be in. So here’s what I’ll be learning this year, according to the WordCamp Jerusalem website (and, of course, subject to change):

Tools and techniques for building accessible websites

In this lecture we will learn techniques for developing more accessible websites according to WCAG 2.0, the guidelines for creating accessible online content. We will get to know tools that help you learn the rules for accessibility and to uphold them – as part of the design and development process.An accessible website improves user experience and can help increase traffic. When a site is more accessible, a wider range of people can use its content. In some cases, an accessible site will be more useful for users without disabilities.Lecturer: Eyal Sela. Track: Publishers. Language: Hebrew

UX Cookbook: Creating Delicious WordPress Sites

You’re using WordPress for your site. You’ve got a great theme, and an excellent programmer. But what do you ask that programmer to do? How do you create a WordPress site that people want to read and will be able to find what they’re looking for? Who are these people anyways? In this lecture Barak will explain how to plan a successful site by looking through the eyes of the user. He will show some examples using WordPress, and give you practical tools that you can use when planning your own site.
Lecturer: Barak Danin. Track: Publishers. Language: Hebrew

Panel: How are you using WP to revolutionize your industry? Non-profit, Politics, and Education

This panel will look at how WordPress is used in each of their industries in unique ways to achieve their non-profit, political and educational goals.
Panelists: Ma’ayan Alexander, Nir Hirshman, Sharon Greenberg. Track: Publishers. Language: Hebrew

Optimizing WordPress to be your social media & SEO hub

WordPress is a social platform. In terms of SEO, most WP themes are pretty optimized out of the box. However, there’s more you can do to take your WordPress site to the next level. This lecture will show you plugins and simple hacks that you can use to help your site reach its full social media and SEO potential.
Lecturer: Miriam Schwab. Track: Publishers. Language: English

GPL and how it affects WordPress theme and plugin development

Since GPL began to evolve, there have been many debates (and Jonathan has had the pleasure of taking part in at least one of them) about the virtues of free software. However, the recent events and announcements about WordPress and GPL show that the basic freedoms of the GPL are not what the Free Software Movement has in mind when they interpret the license, and sometimes their interpretation may harm the community rather than help it.
Lecturer: Jonathan Klinger. Track: Publishers. Language: English

Panel: Do we still need blogs in the age of facebook?

The elephant in the room: with most of the world on facebook, and twitter growing like crazy, do we still really need blogs and websites? Aren’t blogs so 2009? Or do we still need our own place on the web? This panel will discuss current internet trends and how they see them as affecting the future.
Panelists: To be announced. Track: Closing Session. Language: To be announced.

…

Quite an ambitious outing! I don’t know how much will be applicable to the various sites I host on WordPress.com, but I can’t think of a better way to spend the day than to be with people that eat, sleep and breath WordPress.

If you’re another WordPress.com enthusiast attending WordCamp Jerusalem and would like to meet and discuss our favorite blogging platform, leave a note in the comments (publicly visible) or use the contact form on my *About page (private message). Look for the gray, spiky-haired woman, but I’ll be coming without my kite.

WordPress Logo Fun

So, here’s my entry for the Logo Fun, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License .  Thanks for looking. //Update 20091024: oh well, my entry didn’t make the cut, but I had fun working on it and the finalists were quite creative. You can go vote for them on the voting page.

Hmmm, just after 02:30; think it might be wiser to stay out of the forums and head for some sleep? I agree!