E Barney's List: Conferences 2010

The official site for the WordCamp Chicago event, includes the program lists and profiles for the speakers.

A quick list of links to the slides and twitter accounts of the presenters

Kyle Jones has been working with library students locally at Dominican University and hosts a blog covering educational technology at http://thecorkboard.org/ and has a twitter account (@thecorkboard)

This presentation talked about the benefits of using Wordpress and  Buddypress rather than a traditional Learning Management System and pointed to specific examples, plugin additions he's used, and new features they're hoping to add through Google's Summer of Code (GSOC) working on a new version called "scholarpress" to include educational features like schedules, assignments, and bibliographies

Jane Wells (@janeforshort on twitter) is one of the Wordpress development team and did a live demonstration of the new Custom Menus feature of Wordpress 3.0 at Wordcamp Chicago 2010. There was no recording of her session that I know of, but this blog post covers many of the features she described.

While the menu feature is built in for Wordpress.com users (and she mentions themes that support it on Wordpres.com), people self-hosting blogs from software found on Wordpress.org may find it more difficult (at the moment) to find themes that support this feature. Some of the themes she mentions in this post require payment for self-hosted blogs.

Jeremy Harrington (@jharr on twitter) talked about testing your blog thoroughly with your users in mind, getting feedback whenever possible and working with the software instead of trying to force it to do things it isn't designed to do.

His checklists at the end of this slide set are very helpful - there isn't a transcript available below, so you'd need to view them here or copy them out manually.

Scott Robbin (@srobbin on twitter) covered specific tools and techniques that can help speed up how quickly a Wordpress site loads.

His 3 basic concepts are:
1 - make fewer file requests
2 - download files concurrently
3 - far-future cache expiration

He offers tips on very specific tools to help measure and improve these areas, from YSlow to spriteme.org to PHPminify on google code

Daisy Olsen (@wpmama on twitter) gave a step-by-step presentation on the coding needed to add support for the new custom menu option to older themes.

The slides don't include the audio for her instructions, so it may be more useful to browse some of my other bookmarks on adding custom menus:
http://www.diigo.com/user/ebarney/"custom+menu"

John James Jacoby (@JohnJamesJacoby on twitter) is one of the buddypress developers who spoke at Wordcamp Chicago 2010. He didn't use slides, but he did highlight the buddypress site, including this showcase site that gives examples of creative ways different places have used Buddypress already.

He also talked about some features people have seen on other social networks that they'd like to start implementing through Buddypress - some may be added to budddypress code in the future, but many are being developed separately through additional plugins, which can be found under the "Extend" tab.

Andrea Rennick (@andrea_r on twitter) has been one of the primary people providing training and support for Wordpress Multi User (MU) through her site http://wpmututorials.com/

Since Wordpress MU is being integrated into Wordpress 3.0 as Wordpress Multi Site (MS), she explains the basics of enabling that feature and then goes into detail on setting up multiple websites with different urls to run from the same MultiSite installation.

I'm not sure how applicable her instructions are if you're using anything other than the standard LAMP server setup. We use a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, PHP) setup here, for instance, and some of her instructions may not apply correctly.

Shannon Steffen (@SKSDesigns on twitter) offers professional SEO (search engine optimization) consultation services, but went over some of the basics in this presentation at Wordcamp Chicago 2010.

She talked about what to focus on, what doesn't matter (either because search engines aren't paying attention anymore or because it's a waste of effort). She also explained how layout and urls can affect your search ranking and how to follow best practices so you don't get blocked by search engines.

Chris Ross (@carinallc on twitter) explained how he started working as a Wordpress developer, what tools he uses, and what he's found to be the best pratices - personal and social.

Chris Jean (@chrisjean on twitter) gave a lot of pratical advice for securing your backup process to be sure you could get your site running again quickly if anything bad happened.

He explained why the standard backup tools probably aren't enough and also covered a number of plugins (both free and $) that can help cover everything you need to backup and automate the process so you don't forget to get a backup when you need it.

Jason David Pelker (@jpelker on twitter) talked about his frustrations as a developer with using different themes in wordpress and ways he thought the process could be much improved.

Much of his talk was intended to go towards people developing or customizing themes, but his specific suggestions would be helpful even for less technical people who may be trying to decide between themes and not sure what to look for on the back end: modularization, naming conventions, repetition, and exportable options. Exportable options or good documentation would be the most important for less technical wordpress users.

Ron Rennick (@wpmuguru on twitter) is one of the original developers with WPMU, but in this presentation he concentrated on explaining the history of wordpress and how buddypress themes fit into the file structure for wordpress. 

Jake Goldman (@jakemgold on twitter) explained how to customize the back end of Wordpress to make it easier for different types of users to manage a Wordpress site.\n\nHe talked about changing the dashboard screen, adding more information to the help screens, and redefining different types of users to have access to different options. \n\nThis blog post includes both his slides and a downloadable file that includes some of the changes he demonstrated in the talk.

The conference website - find links to all of the session information here

They go through all of the details of their fairly professional person-based video setup. They were less focused on the content than the process, which was more complicated than some of the approaches we've considered (voiceover with screen capture or slideshow of still images, stop motion, etc.)

Showed how to create your own touch digital signage using flat screen tvs, touch-button software and RSS feeds built into a website, and Opera Kiosk mode. Also included a "find directions" js demo using svg maps.

An informal discussion of different ebook experiments currently taking place at several schools, included a demo of the entourage edge digital reader and a discussion of using Westlaw casebooks in the ebook format

This is the digital reader that was demonstrated at one ebook session at CALI - it's a two-screen reader that includes eink and a touch screen.