Jennerosity

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Last Saturday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the second annual WordCamp Fraser Valley (wcfv) event! The day was full of meeting new people and learning a lot from the great lineup of presenters that they had speaking at the event. In fact, by the end of it, I think I was one of just many people whose brains were running over with ideas and things to try. Here is a brief overview of what hasn’t fallen out of my head (yet) and how I plan on applying it to my own blog.

The first speaker was Raul Pacheco, blogger at Hummingbird604.  It was a great way for me to start since I just love the natural energy and enthusiasm that he exudes!  His session focussed on how to maximize reader experience.  He highlighted some of his favourite plugins which I will be gradually checking out and adding to the blog as time passes.  I’m already using one comment plugin (though not the particular one that he recommended) and will definitely be checking out the flickr and twitter plugins that he mentioned along with a few others.  Already added to the site is a comment form so that people who want to get in touch with me can do so easily.

Next up was Glenda Hyatt, the left thumb blogger.  After I read a bit about her on the wcfv site, I was really looking forward to her presentation about blogging and accessibility.  I think this isssue is so important that I’ve put all the tasks that her presentation generated to the very top of my to-do list right along with blog security.  A few of the things involve getting into the code of my blog to tweak the theme a bit, so I’m not quite ready to go live with all of the changes, but I’m trying to remember to do better linking and include good alt text for my images.  She had A LOT of great tips that were very well presented.  If you’ve got a blog, you should go and check out her e-book, “How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog Accessibility”.  The advice she gives for increasing accessibility will make you a better blogger overall.

When we got in to the intermediate speaking track, Dave Zille gave a very good presentation about using the custom fields feature that comes with WordPress.  I have to admit, until I read the topic of his presentation, I had never even noticed them sitting at the bottom of the post screen in the dashboard.  And during the talk, I didn’t really see how this could be applicable to my blog since the examples he gave weren’t really relevant to my blogging style.  That was, until I remembered that National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is fast approaching and it might be fun way to blog and add in things like my word count or general sanity level (if I can manage to stay sane enough to put a few blog posts up throughout the month).  Dave’s presentation slides and a video demo can be found on his blog too.

One of my favourite speakers at last year’s wcfv event was Kulpreet Singh.  Last year, Kulpreet talked about blog security (which maybe I didn’t listen to as closely as I thought I did).  This year, Kulpreet presented on mastering and tweaking the dashboard of the WordPress.org interface.  Thanks to one little plug-in (Admin Drop Down menu by Ozh) I find the dashboard to be about 10 times better than it was before.  That alone was worth it!  But I’ve got another list of plugins to customize and tweak things as well.

Most of the Development track was way above my geek level and made me feel as though my brain was melting.  With one notable acception.  It involved the presentation by John Biehler (whose blog you can find here) and the acronyms WAMP, MAMP, and LAMP.  Don’t understand what those mean?  Neither did I before Saturday.  And the short-version explanation is that it lets you install WordPress.org on your local machine.  Which means I can play with it and try new things and break it over and over again BEFORE I do any of that online.  I was so excited about this possibility that I downloaded the little program on my laptop while I was listening to the presentation.  I’ve already got it set up and that is where I’m testing all the other goodies that got added to my to-do list from wcfv.

Like I said up top, these were just the things that DIDN’T fall out of my head.  There were also presentations by Rebecca Bolwitt, who is best known for her blog Miss604; Lorraine Murphy, also known as Raincoaster on her blog and elsewhere; Jeff Kee was there from Sonika Studios Inc.; and George Plumley from SeeHowTwo.com.  Plus, there was a twitter track at the end of the day.  But, that’s for a whole other post.

My blog’s to-do list has quadrupled in size from this one day of presentations.  So readers, where do you go to get new ideas and things to try on your blog?  Got any other great blogging tips for me?  How long is your blog’s to-do list?  Let me hear about it in the comments!

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