Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011

Luke Pilon has been living and working in the WordPress community as a software architect, entrepreneur, WordPress San Diego Meetup organizer and managing partner of Mobiah for years.  He’s been to WordCamps around the country and, through WordPress, has discovered that a successful business can be built with community support.

In his talk, “WordPress Network Effects: How The WP Community Changes Your Destiny,” Luke will familiarize you with the basics of the WordPress community and teach you how businesses can use and give back to WordPress:

The WordPress community is booming and you are unsure about how to make the most of it all. Use this session to understand how network effects are changing the landscape of the WordPress community in 2011 and how every new user is helping you be a winner. Know how the community can play a deciding role in the success of your business. Understand how the success of everyone else depends on you.

This 101-201 level presentation will get WordCamp attendees up to speed on the current architecture of the community, orientation on how Automattic and other major players contribute, and categories/lists of resources to help them find their way. We’ll cover WordPress.com, WordPress.org and everything that comes tumbling after. Finally, we’ll cover clear instructions on how we as individual members pay it forward and contribute back to the community.

Ed Adkins is cool.  He organizes beer crawls, does improv, reads comics, and uses WordPress (the coolest). Ed’s been working with WordPress clients for the last 6 years. Inevitably, he’s come across some common obstacles for WordPress users.

In his presentation “WordPress Black Holes,” he’ll identify the biggest obstacles for beginner users and how to overcome them:

When you first get your hands on WordPress, the possibilities seem endless: the allure of Open Source freedom, the versatility, the FIVE MINUTE INSTALL! But then, you start running into the black holes. Things no one warned you about. Things that suck you in and waste a day of your life. Things like .htaccess.

The first year of WordPress presents a bell curve that’s not too much to handle, but why take a year when you can become aware of most of those black holes in a little under an hour? Learn how to deal with them, how to avoid some of them, and where to get help in the future so that you can dig yourself out.

Mitcho is one of the smartest people I know. He’s done a lot for the WordPress and open source community, including writing YARPP, one of WordPress’ most popular plugins, and contributing to Mozilla Lab’s Ubiquity. Mitcho is currently busy being a PhD student in linguistics at MIT and organizing this year’s WordCamp Boston.

In his presentation “What’s Your Site’s Content Life Cycle?”, Mitcho will be showing us how important our content is and how we can best showcase and handle our content with smart design and management decisions:

Modern WordPress has grown far beyond its humble blogging roots, with so many of us using WordPress as a CMS.

In this talk I’d like to focus on what I believe is an important (but often overlooked) consideration when rolling out WordPress as a CMS: what is your “content life cycle”? That is, what are the content or entities which must be managed? Who will contribute them, edit them, manage them… and how, and when? I’ll present different technical and design decisions that can be made depending on the particular content life cycle of the project, drawing on my experience various custom WordPress-based sites and applications at MIT.

We’ll also touch on how WordPress features like custom post types and taxonomies can make it easy to build out a custom WordPress-based solution.

We all know that usability is key. If people can’t use your site, they won’t – plain and simple. But how do you test? What do you test? Who do you test?

Larry Dailey knows the answers. As a professor and chair of media technology at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism he’s been teaching local UNR students those answers and more since 2005.

He teaches courses in innovation and usability testing and in designing and building serious games. He holds a master’s in photography and spent three years producing multimedia for one of the web’s top news sites – MSNBC Interactive.

His session – “Usability Testing: From A to B” – will lay out the tools to test your site’s usability and how to make effective changes. He’ll also introduce some simple methods to run user testing sessions on your own.

P.S. – In case you’re wondering who I am. My name is Justin Broglio and I’m a rookie. I started using WordPress three years ago and I’ve self taught my way through a host of projects. By trade I’m a writer, but in today’s jungle it pays to multi-talented so I’m stoked to be helping out with this year’s Reno-Tahoe WordCamp. What’s more, in researching Professor Dailey I learned a heck of a lot about usability testing and I’m confident you’ll learn something too.

Another introduction to one of our wonderful speakers! If you don’t know who Mike Pomranz is, then you’re probably not getting enough laughs in your day. Mike is a blogger, comedian, musician, and beer lover from Brooklyn who has learned how to build audiences with comedy and writing. He is currently a senior blogger and researcher for Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 and has formerly blogged for Slashfood.com and the Cheezburger Network’s My Food Looks Funny.

In his session, “Whittling Your Tone: How to Engage an Audience with a Pointy Stick of You,” Mike will be taking his experience and teaching us all how to engage your audience and build a strong following online:

Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog, but not everyone has an audience.  Culling a group of engaged readers is what separates a successful site from just another empty lot of Internet real estate.

But where do you start?  And how do you grow?  And why the hell would I want to waste my time pandering to these stupid commenters anyway!?

Whoa!  Slow down.  The web can be tough waters to navigate, but we’ll look at how to define and refine the tone of your blog and your writing in a way that will engage an audience without undermining everything you’ve ever held dear.

We’ll also discuss how to listen to and work with your readers, understanding how they can hold the key to helping you achieve your goals.

And we’ll try to do it all with an eye towards not taking ourselves too seriously.  AND SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!

Yes, SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!!!!!!

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing everyone to our wonderful lineup of speakers. First up: Sterling Hamilton, Senior Web Developer for Dealertrend, Inc.

Hailing from Las Vegas but now a Reno resident, Sterling’s been developing websites and web applications for the last 15 years. While at Dealertrend, Sterling has worked on a rapid development WordPress theme framework and a few WordPress plugins. He likes to skydive and contribute to Open Source projects in his spare time, but presumably not at the same time.

At this year’s WordCamp, Sterling will be teaching us about the power and benefits of using version control systems like GIT and Subversion to track your WordPress code and why version control may just save your life:

So there you are, writing the next great thing in your favorite coffee shop and you might be by yourself, or maybe you and a couple of developers have decided to team up.

Why should you have to bother with things like version control? These days, isn’t it simple enough to just make the changes to your source code carefully and if you have to talk to another developer, just yell across the room. It’s not that complicated right?

This session will attempt to convince you that there are many important, life saving and jaw droppingly awesome reasons why you should be using version control. Whether you’re a lone developer, a small team, or an enterprise company.

We’ll be going over the basics of version control and how you can start new projects with it, and how you can get your existing projects using it. We’ll be covering Subversion and GIT. Subversion is what WordPress is built upon, and GIT is what I believe is the future.

Sterling’s session “WordPress Development: Tracking your code with Version Control” will be at 11:30am on the Design & Development track.