Wordcamp Boulder 2010 - Morning
Wordcamp Boulder 2010
Wordcamp Boulder is set, naturally enough, in Boulder, which is a fantastic place to have a conference where the locations are spread out like this. Walking from room to room allows you to enjoy Boulder's laid back atmosphere and the eclectic stores spread around the Pearl Street Mall and the Boulder Theater. It's just a bit of a shame that two of the three locations that Wordcamp is using are overcrowded and standing room only! (Well, a shame for my back, at least!)
Signup was quick and easy, and although the badge they hand out is simple cardboard that you write your name on, they've cleverly printed it so that inside the fold is the schedule – also cleverly printed upside down, so it's easy to read when you're wearing it. The Boulder Theater is a lovely building, and I wish I had more excuses to go there.
The initial session there is titled “Creating a Blog Community,” and it features Dave Taylor, Doyle Albee, Aimee Giese and Holly Hamann discussing blog communities – which mostly seemed to focus on how to deal with comments, that being the main way that people participate in blog communites, it seems. They went over deleting abusive/spam comments, modifying comments, and the legal problems that come up when you have a moderation policy. They suggested having a set of terms for use, and including a link/mention of it in the comment form.
Next off, interested in consutling, I went to Atlas Purveyors for the “WordPress Consulting Discussion”, which was lead by Joe Corr and Nick Gernert. Atlas Purveyors is a nice coffee shop, but I'm afraid they're a little overcrowded – we had people standing along the walls and suspect we crowded out their usual business. There was a lot of general consulting discussion going on – I wouldn't say any of it was really outside the scope of any consultant – dealing with customers, getting better customers, and the tools to use to run your business were all brought up, with the general crowd being encouraged both to ask and answer questions.
My last session before lunch gave me another reason to visit the third location for the camp – the TechStars offices, which I'd been in once before. I'd seen some warning tweets that it was crowded, and boy, was it. “WordPress Development” may have had a hundred people crammed into that room, and I shudder to think what the fire department would have had to say about how we were crammed in there. That said, Alex King and Shawn Parker did a good job of going over how to create a simple widget that would display a given twitter feed in the side column of your blog, going into how to subclass the wp_widget class, getting admin data – the twitter name to fetch, displaying an rss feed, and how to sanitize what you're displaying for the user. They didn't go into caching, but that was mostly because there had already been a caching session for Wordpess earlier in the day.
With that done, I've headed off for lunch. As part of the conference, they're giving out $10 gift cards to use somewhere in Boulder, and I'm taking advantage of it to enjoy the fantastic sushi lunch at Japango, which I've missed since I stopped working here in Boulder.
