WordCamp Atlanta 2010

I spent the past day and a half down­town at the inau­gural Word­Camp Atlanta, which turned out to be one of the best technical/​professional con­fer­ences I’ve ever attended. Usu­ally I find that there is at least one time slot, and usu­ally sev­eral, where there is no pre­sen­ta­tion in which I am inter­ested. Not so this time — there was at least one inter­est­ing talk in every ses­sion; because of the short­ened sched­ule there were even con­flicts and at least one can­celed pre­sen­ta­tion that I’d wanted to attend.

Lucky for me and every­one else, all the pre­sen­ters are shar­ing their pre­sen­ta­tion slides at Slideshare (hash­tag #wcatl). All the pre­sen­ta­tions were also taped and streamed, and are being made avail­able online for later view­ing, hur­ray! Plus some peo­ple took notes and have posted them online, as I will be doing for the ses­sions I attended over the next few days.

So what did I choose to do while there? On Fri­day night I:

• Lis­tened to Ale­jan­dro Leal and Thomas Wheat­ley of Cre­ative Loaf­ing talk about the jour­nal­ists’ (read: users’) per­spec­tive of using Word­Press. The techno­geeks in the audi­ence weren’t too appre­cia­tive but I think it was a good per­spec­tive to hear.
• Became evan­ge­lized in the ways of SEO by Topher Kohan of CNN — thirty min­utes that made the $35 reg­is­tra­tion fee seem like a bargain.
• Heard from Chaz Pariz­man about how Scripps Net­work uses Word­Press to cover their “quick and dirty” “need a web­site THIS MINUTE” needs.

Sat­ur­day I spent my time with:

• Jane Wells of Automat­tic as she shared what we have to look for­ward to from Word­Press dur­ing 2010 in her keynote address.
• Ryan Imel, who fin­ished the job of con­vinc­ing me that parent/​child themes are a GOOD thing.
• Chris Scott, who told us all how we are cod­ing things wrong and how to do it The Word­Press Way (or rather the cor­rect way regard­less of platform).
• Scott Kings­ley Clark, who failed to absolutely con­vince me that the Pods plu­gin is the answer to my CMS issues, though he did piqué my inter­est enough that I will inves­ti­gate further.
• Wade Kwon and audi­ence, who all wanted to break those bar­ri­ers to blog­ging and brain­stormed some good solutions.
• Dave Cous­tan and his sug­ges­tions on strate­gies for cre­at­ing qual­ity con­tent and not los­ing out to the “con­tent farms.”
• and finally Mark Jaquith’s clos­ing Q&A ses­sion, straight from the mouth of a WP lead developer.

The live Twit­ter stream (hash­tag #wcatl) moved at warp speed, it seemed, and it was hard to catch all the infor­ma­tion on it. Atten­dees posted a lot of good links there, and I tried to “favorite” all the good ones so I could find them later.

I feel like my poor brain is in infor­ma­tion over­load, so I just may process some of that in my next few posts here. I also have some new ideas and tasks in my head to han­dle in the next few days/​weeks — a GOOD out­come!

The only down­side for me was per­sonal. It is always hard for me to just walk up to unknown peo­ple and start chat­ting thanks to my lit­tle psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der com­bi­na­tion which makes me with­draw into myself in crowds, and it was cer­tainly true here. It seemed like peo­ple already knew each other to a large extent (how?? I don’t know.) and that made it dou­bly intim­i­dat­ing. How­ever, that’s an incen­tive to try to con­nect with the local Word­Press com­mu­nity before next year. If I already know peo­ple, it’s man­age­able. It’s only when I’m sur­rounded by strangers that I freeze.