If you are heading up to WordCamp Whistler 2009 or just want to help get the word out about the event, slap some badges on your site to spread the word.
There’s about four to choose from, so pick one and tell the world about WordCamp Whistler, especially if you’re going!
After much plotting, planning, wishing, hoping, and a few meetings, WordCamp Whistler 2009 is a full go for January 24, and registration is open for attending as well as speaker submissions.
If you have ever wanted to find out more about how to use WordPress, the mechanics that drives it, and how other people are using it, then this is a great opportunity to find out more.
With the venue booked, keynote secured, website and social media streams in place, we’re ready to officially announce WordCamp Whistler 2009.
This site is your official source for WCWhistler information. Check out the speaker page, add your own submission to become a speaker, find out more about sponsorship, and check back for blog updates. You can also follow the action with the RSS feed or by adding @WCWhistler on Twitter.
The official conference tag (for Flickr photos or blog posts) is wordcampwhistler09.
Browse the site, get all the info you need, ask some questions, and register through Eventbrite. There is a fee for this conference but since we’ll be in a world-class location with top notch speakers, we think it’s worth it (and we’ll even through in some lovely swag as well).
My snowboard boots are already by the door – right next to my laptop. I hope to see everyone there for this amazing weekend of WordPress geekery, networking, and good times. [wordcampwhistler]
Duane, Rebecca, and I have really tried hard to get this idea off the ground, and there is still much left to do before the date comes. Keep tabs on the WCWhistler website and subscribe to the RSS feed for all the latest news.
Delicious recently did an overhaul of their site design about three weeks ago, and many folks have already weighed in on what they thought about it.
For me, I have to use something for a while before I really give my full sense of how a redesign like this actually affects my work flow because I use their service so much.
For me, it’s way too hard for me to grasp the concept of writing it as “Delicious”. For so long, it’s been “Del.icio.us.com”, and I think that’s a large, geeky reason that I liked the site. In this redesign, they also did a rebranding and dropped the extra dots. It’s a small thing, and I’m getting over it. I always loved the clever use of the .us domain.
Otherwise, I love the new Delicious. The redesign has long been needed, and it finally matches up with how much I like the service.
For me, I read a variety of RSS feeds. Using Google Reader and Firefox, I can use their browser plugin to quickly bookmark items to either share with others or come back to later. This method might not work for everyone, but it works very well for me. Bouncing between computers at home or work, I can tag something that I find interesting.
Mostly it’s the design that has taken a little time to get used to before I could really decide what I thought. Visually, it works better than it previously did. Sure, it looks prettier, but you can make anything look good and not have function. Delicious seemed to step up to this notion of the K.I.S.S. principle that I’m a big fan of.
If you would like to see the things I tag, feel free to check out my Delicious page.
As we head into the late stages of summer and fall is still a little ways under the horizon, that only means one thing. BarCampVancouver 2008!
Planning is still going on, but one thing has been set for this unconference. September 27th is date for this year’s BarCampVancouver, and I’m sure the events, gatherings, and other mischief will extend from that.
BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.
All attendees are encouraged to give a demo, a session, a presentation, or help with one. All attendees are expected to be participants. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.
Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present.
Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join. [barcampvancouver]
I had to miss last year’s BarCamp due to my hectic day job at the time, but things are slightly different now so I should be able to attend without too much concern. I have even thrown my hat into the ring in terms of helping organize the event, so it’ll be a lot of fun seeing how this comes together behind the scenes.
Another thing I will say about BarCampVancouver is that the one I attended in 2006 was one of the best things I have probably ever done. I met so many people that have become great friends, and there were a lot of things that I learned as well.
In fact, when I think back to it, it’s amazing to see where the “Techcouver” community was then and where it is now. One might say that it’s changed quite a bit, but it’s an amazing community nonetheless. Of course, the technology has made some leaps as well, but that goes without saying.
So, mark the date! September 27th is the day for BarCampVancouver!
I designed a WordPress site for my friend Andy at No Boundaries.org some months ago, and the final version that we settled on really pushed my personal boundaries of knowledge in terms of PHP and CSS to get some of the things to work that he was wishing for. Never wanting to let a good friend down, I got something to work that came up tonight at WordCamp Fraser Valley.
I’m not sure what the original question was, but my design for No Boundaries had custom drop down menus added to the header so that Andy could easily add and remove pages from where ever he was in the world and have them show up in those menus.
And to be honest, I can’t really tell you how I got it all to work because it was that long ago. However, Stu Nicholls made a great blog post about how to do this with simple CSS. I used this post to hack together my concept for Andy’s site, and the final design turned out to be what he wanted.
Now doing a quick Google search to find this resource again, I came across this WordPress plugin, WordPress CSS Drop-down Menu, that could do this for you without getting into all the code. I have no experience using it, but the author makes reference to the same blog post that I just did, so it might be worth checking out first before you get into the code.
You could say that this style of WordCamp is a bit out of the ordinary. In fact, I’m not sure that many WordCamps are held in casinos, but this event is pretty nice in the fact that there is an amazing space out here for gatherings, meetups, and conventions like this.
WordCamp Fraser Valley is a growing push to move web related camps like this out of the downtown core and into the mysterious world away from the ocean waters. Wifi, reasonable sources of power, plenty of water, a huge room, podium, PA system, projector, and a screen. What more could you really need for a WordCamp?
Well, it might be better if something like this was a bit longer, but an all day event at a location like this might be tough. If you head down the escalators, you might be enticed by the various ways to gamble your money away, so you’re probably better off sticking to your laptop like myself and get some content out while checking out your RSS feeds.
The list of presenters tonight are a good group of folks. Raul kicked off this WordCamp with a session on switching from Blogger to WordPress, and it was a great way to introduce newbies with a way of letting go of your worries and do more with blogging in general. Even if you don’t have a blog or are just beginning with your blog, these concepts are worth considering.
Gary from BlurFur, the folks who have headed up this event, made a last minute presentation on business blogging after another speaker was unable to attend. A topic that is largely ignored, and often not even thought about, businesses should be doing more blogging. Period. If you want a way to reach your customers directly, then this is it. Promote your product, talk about your industry, or publish your your press releases on your blog, there are many avenues you can take when it comes to adding a blog to your business.
More topics are being presented tonight, so I will let Rebecca’s live blog speak more to what’s going on, not to mention that she is also one of the presenters tonight. She will be speaking about adding custom sidebars to your posts and pages, something we are big fans of doing. Kulpreet is currently speaking about security to WordPress, and John Chow will bring his evil, money making ways with blogging to the room.
I have to say that I am really impressed with tonight’s turnout. It’s always great to see people from various aspects of blogging. And yes, there are people that don’t even have a blog and are here to find out more. If that’s someone like yourself, then check out a WordCamp sometime. The WordPress community not only does geek stuff and talk about code, but we also like to share the things we know.
There is a good chance that RSS subscribers just got blasted with a back log of posts, so please don’t think that I made about ten posts in a single day. I did some rearranging a couple of months ago when I re-themed my site, restructured my WordPress install, and upgraded to the latest and greatest version of 2.5.
I neglected to make adjustments to FeedBurner, and that has been fixed. Let that be a mental note to the rest of you with similar setups. If you make significant, back end changes to your WordPress site, don’t forget to double check you RSS feed if you are using a third party site like FeedBurner.
Rebecca recently made a post about using the AddQuickTags plugin for WordPress to display captions on photos in her blog posts, I would elaborate on the CSS styling it takes to get this. The WordPress plugin makes this easier, but I thought it would be useful to share how you can do this with some simple CSS, especially if you don’t have WordPress at your disposal.
First, how do you get this…
to work?
To start with, you need your image and then link it to its origin or creator to attribute credit to. This is just good practice and makes the original author happy. We’ll have to peak at some quick HTML to get a sense of what’s going on here because we don’t like using visual editors. Code might be tough to work with for some, but it’s second nature to us.
<a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>
Your HTML might look different, but the premise should be the same. It’s a linked image, but how do you get the “Photo by:” tag underneath the image? Let’s start by adding some code to your CSS.
.captioncentered {
display: block;
text-align: center; /*centers text & image*/
margin: 10px auto; /*centers the whole div*/
padding-bottom: 1px; /*this depends of your design*/
font-size: 0.85em;
color: #ccc;
}
This will make like somewhat simple for you in the long run because this will set the design of your blog to work for all posts you use this styling for. So now what do you do with it?
You just setup a “class” to use in the “div” tag. It works like this.
<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a></div>
That centers the image, so now you need to add a little more HTML to this in order to get the credit where it deserves to be. This just requires some text and then linking the words you want linked. However, this extra text must be inside the div tags in order for this to work!
<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>
<br />Photo by: <a href="http://website.com" />author</a> on PhotoSharingSite.com</div>
Once you have this, you are able to to display an image, such as a photo from Flickr, with proper attribution. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do, not to mention a legal way to not get yourself into trouble with the original author for taking their content.
The next thing you can do is edit your CSS to make some adjustment to the look of your text or perhaps the background. It really comes down to what you want to do. There might be a better way to do this, but this is how we get this function to work.
It’s harsh to mention this now, but Drupal Camp Vancouver is this weekend. If you haven’t signed up to attend, then you’re out of luck. It’s been sold out for the last few weeks, but that does ensure that this gathering and sharing of knowledge all related to good things Drupal should be a good one.
I am fortunate enough to be able to attend as well as helping out with the behind the scenes of getting things lined up with some of the sponsors for the event. Working with DaveO, we were able to make sure that they and we were all good to go for a spectacular weekend of talking Drupal.
Unfortunately, my day job prevents me from making Friday’s events until late afternoon, but I’ll be getting into what I can on Saturday. I’m not sure what my coverage of the event will be like this weekend, but be sure to check in on Rebecca to get some insight to the action from her recap from here and there.
In an effort to at least post something in about a week, I thought I would make a quick mention of some initial thoughts I had when I downloaded Firefox 3 beta 3. Now to get that in normal people speak, that would be version 3.0 of Firefox, but it’s still in the beta phase of development, meaning that it’s not ready for official, widespread release and/or use. The second 3 means that it’s third in a series of release candidates for the big day when Firefox 3 is finally here.
You still with me?
The first thing I noticed, on my Powerbook G4 with a 1GHz processor circa 2003, is the speed that this browser works. It’s fast. The current release of Firefox, 2.0.0.12, is rough on my laptop. I can only achieve half the speed of the latest beta by plugging in a hard wire connection, and that only makes me even more sad to the reality that this beautiful laptop is ending its life cycle, but that’s a whole other story.
Rebecca has been using it a bit more than I after I told her about how well it operated, but it starts and stops with the speed. There are some minor bugs that still need to be worked out. There are key commands for WordPress that don’t work in the beta release, but that’s less important than the numerous plugins that I rely on daily which need to be updated and ported into this new version. That will come in time, but certainly makes me hesitate to make the upgrade before I get all my tools lined up and readily available.
Phillip sent me a Twitter the other night when I mentioned this, asking if he should download it. I would say that it wouldn’t hurt if you are a multi-browser user. Firefox is my main workhorse, but I also bounce in and out of Safari and Camino. I expect to do the same with this beta release as well, so if you think you are along those lines, then go for it. Otherwise, hold off. This beta release (beta being the very important word here) isn’t quite ready for the big time.
