Meeting Matt at WordCamp 2008

06 Sep 2008

6 Sep, 2008 events

Just got home from WordCamp Philippines 2008, held at the College of St. Benilde earlier today. This whole day event was so much fun! Aside from that, it’s sort of a little historical too, being the very first WordCamp in South East Asia. For those not familliar with it, WordCamps are basically venues where WordPress users and developers hailing from a somewhat relatively small geographical region (say a country like the Philippines) can gather and talk about this outstanding piece of software.

The Event

Besides being fun, the whole thing was a really great learning experience. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress platform was there for a short talk about the state of WordPress and some Q&A towards the end. He had a really really light character and seemed to be a very approachable guy. I really should go to more of these kinds of gatherings. It’s definitely a great way of enriching and cultivating my inner geek. Ooops, maybe I should edit that out, because I don’t think I have an “inner” geek. I’m probably geek inside-out. Haha. So much to learn today and I’m really glad that Wilson told me to register for WordCamp in the first place. Funny thing though, Wil doesn’t even have his own blog (yet).

Stuff I Learned

It won’t be like me at all if I didn’t take the opportunity to share with you folks some of the things I learned (and as I said, there’s a lot). There so much stuff that I can’t even figure out how to put it all in this post. So, to save up on time, I’ll just pile them up in a bulleted list:

Indonesians Rock - apparently, the second most used language in WordPress, after English, is Indonesian. Cool.
WordPress is so much more - I already knew that, but seeing companies using WordPress for corporate sites is simply amazing. You can’t even tell that some of the websites are made with wordpress. Like this one.
Tons of SEO plugins - a really hot topic in today’s WordCamp was Search Engine Optimization. Just do a google search on WordPress Plugins for SEO to streamline your blog for search engines.
WordPress is actually very profitable - a lot of people think that there’s no money in Open Source. I guess this just proves how wrong they are. Just the licensing of Akismet alone is already a lot of money.
Some folks really take blogging seriously - I wasn’t really familiar with the concept of Pro-Blogging, but it seems, some folks earn decent (or maybe indecent) amounts of money off of their blogs. Wow. I’d be satisfied if I could just earn enough to pay for my webhost and domain.
Custom Fields for CMS - using WordPress to manage web content becomes really easy by using custom fields in your post. You could attach additional content to a post such as a logo, an audio file, an excerpt to sort of customize the way each post will be presented. This is especially useful if you want to use WordPress to build a website other than a blog.
A whole lot more - which I’ll just share when I get to apply them.

Photos

Here are some pics from the event:

Matt, Wilson and Me

Matt, Wilson and Me Again

My Sister with Free Chowking Food

Freebies Galore

For absolutely 0 pesos, I got the folloing:

A cool mug from NuffNang.com
A small cloth bag with the WordCamp Philippines Logo
Chowking Lunch
Two wordpress stickers (round and square) which I now proudly sport on my laptop
Free blog advertising (care of wilson)

For a little bit more, I got:

A really really cool shirt which I showed in this post. According to Matt, it’s one of the best designs he has seen so far from any WordCamp.

I can’t wait for the next one!

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32 Responses

drew
Sunday, September 7, 2008

Hey, nice to hear you had a great time at Wordcamp! Thanks for coming!

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