Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011

Saturday’s sessions are ending with a little flash and a bang in the form of lightning rounds: short, 10-minute sessions designed to teach and inspire you. Here’s a little about our lovely lightning round sessions:

Blogging in the First Year by Kathy Baldock

How do you go from no online presence to blogging within a week of WordCamp? I will talk briefly about: choosing a theme, setting up the categories, adding images and video,categories, tagging, linking and pushing the blog out through other online media and sites. I will share what I wish I had known day one to help get more traffic early on and what the experience of blogging has personally done for Canyonwalker Connections. This I do know, the process has changed my life radically

7 Steps to SEO Heaven by Jonathan Denwood

He’ll talk about 7 practical steps you can take to improve your WordPress site’s SEO, covering topics like keyword research, link bait and source order. The talk is aimed at bloggers and WordPress site owners and doesn’t
assume any particular technical knowledge.

Writing Blog Posts by Michelle Montoya

In this lightning session, learn tips for writing effective blog posts. From brainstorming ideas to editing final drafts, you will learn how to write posts quickly and easily.

The Zen of WordPress by Colin Loretz

We live in a world of infinite complexities but sometimes some of the best solutions are often the simplest. Zen of WordPress will explore how you can use simple solutions to keep your website lean, efficient and secure.

Dre is cool and everyone knows it. He’s the founder of CubicTwo and Sucuri and has a love for security. In his presentation “End-User Security,” Dre will be walking through you through some basic things that can keep your WordPress site secure:

Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet?

WordPress End User Security by Dre Armeda will cover basic information security principles to consider before you start a WordPress driven site, and a run at the top 10 WordPress security tips.

Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

More than anyone else I know, Andrew Nacin lives and breathes WordPress. He’s been a WordPress core contributor for the past few years and is addicted to reading the WordPress core mailing lists and WordPress trac.

As a core developer and committer, Nacin knows all the ins and outs of how WordPress is made. In his session “How WordPress(.org) is made,” Nacin will be educating us on how WordPress core decisions are made and give a primer on how you can give back to WordPress.

The students at the UNR Reynolds School of Journalism have learned the power of self-publishing with WordPress as part of their curriculum. Geoff Roseborough, Jay Brissenden, and Derek Jordan are current and former staff members of UNR’s Insight Magazine, a completely student-run publication whose website is run on WordPress.

In “Running a Publication on WordPress,” Geoff, Jay, and Derek will give us tips on what it takes to run a publication using WordPress. They’ll highlight publication practices, recommended plugins, and go over what WordPress can offer over other platforms like CollegePublisher.

Keith Casey says he likes to break stuff, but only because it helps him understand good code vs. bad code all the better. Keith is a PHP dev (aka chief Stuff Breaker) for Blue Parabola. In his spare time, he is the Project Lead for web2project, works to build and support the Austin PHP and Flash communities, and blogs regularly on technology and random geekery at http://CaseySoftware.com/blog and http://phparch.com/

In his presentation “Integrating with WordPress”, Keith will be teaching us how to get our WordPress websites to play nice with other APIs and web apps:

As more and more companies dive into WordPress for their public sites, we end up with yet another application to track. Even worse, our users have yet another username and password to remember. It’s annoying at best and frustrating at worst.

Coming from the PHP world, we know how to build application, scale them to incredible heights, and generally get them to play nice, so what if we could get the systems to interact and share credentials and functionality instead? Even without Single Sign On or embedding WordPress into our applications, there are lots of things we can do to make our users’ lives easier. This session will be a walk through of integrating one application with WordPress’ authentication and API.

Have you seen the new style update for the upcoming WordPress 3.2 release? If you haven’t, here’s a little preview. Most of the code behind the update can be attributed to Daryl Koopersmith, a JavaScript, CSS, and front-end development core contributor for WordPress core. You might remember Koop from his work during the Google Summer of Code on the Elastic Theme Editor.

At this year’s WordCamp, Daryl will be giving us a primer on the Basics and Best Practices for using JavaScript in WordPress:

Many WordPress developers are skilled in the art of PHP, but freeze when confronted with a screen full of JavaScript. I’d like to change that.

I’ll discuss JavaScript’s numerous differences from PHP, how to use JavaScript in WordPress, and a handful of best practices. Are you using jQuery’s ‘ready’ event properly? Why does JavaScript’s ‘this’ keyword cause so much grief? What the heck is prototypal inheritance? I’ll answer each of these questions (and more) through simple examples.

As developers, it’s important to understand the tools we use. Learn to write better JavaScript.

John Hawkins (aka VegasGeek) is a self-described WordCamp groupie. He’s been skipping across the country to speak and attend WordCamps because they’re just so fun and awesome. When he’s not at WordCamps (and sometimes when he is), John runs 9seeds, a Las Vegas-based WordPress development company.

At this year’s Reno-Tahoe WordCamp, John will be doing an introduction to creating child themes with StudioPress’ Genesis Framework with “From Start to Awesome in Under an Hour: An Intro to StudioPress Child Themes”:

Since being introduced to child-themes in WordPress, I’ve taken a serious liking to the Genesis theme framework by StudioPress.com. The more I use it, the more I realize how powerful it is. But, with great power comes (I will not say “great responsibility”) a greater learning curve.

In my presentation I’m going to give you a brief walk-through of how a Genesis child-theme works and an introduction to some of the powerful functionality you can use to take your site from start to awesome in under an hour.

We’ll be covering the following topics:
– The Theme Options screen
– Widgets
– Genesis Simple Hooks plugin
– Genesis Simple Sidebar plugin
– WordPress custom menus

If we run out of time to cover a topic you are interested in, I’ll be available in the Genius Bar during the afternoon, or just track me down during the day.