Orange County WordCamp » Brandon

Austin Passy

Brandon — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:57:12 +0000

Austin Passy is a freelance web designer and WordPress developer. Austin built a WP centric site “WPCult” and sold it this year, he’s also been known to build a few plugins. He was the Organizer of SoCal’s first WordCamp: WordCampLA 2009, and is getting ready to start planning for 2010.

Let’s Share the Love

Brandon — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:45:57 +0000

The countdown begins. We’re less than a week away from Orange County WordCamp and we’re stoked about all the stuff we have for you.

But, we want to go bigger.

A lot of you are coming to Orange County WordCamp, but there are people all across the world who can’t make it to the conference due to the sheer distance they’d have to travel to get here. We have no doubt that WordPress fans around the world would also benefit from the presentations you’re going to experience first hand this weekend. So, we got to thinking…why should we limit our audience to those who can make it in person? Why shouldn’t we try to spread the WordPress love all around the world?

We started talking to Joe Christensen of Blaze Streaming Media. They’ve streamed other WordCamps live in the past, so they know what to expect. The other benefit of having them in Orange County is that they’ll be able to archive our presentations on WordPress.tv so that you can go back and use these presentations as a reference.

There’s only one problem…and it’s a big one.

It’s a bit out of our budget to bring these guys to the event. We haven’t gotten as great a response to our call for sponsors as we’d hoped and we’re already over budget. If you have it in your wallet, or you work for a company that does, please help us bring Joe and his crew to OC WordCamp. Any amount of donation you can make will help to make this happen.

Unconference/Ignite Sessions

Brandon — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:57:09 +0000

@Mac_Boy mentioned a sort of niche topic in a comment on the CMS talk teaser post. It got me thinking…Is anyone interested in giving some short informal talks during lunchtime? We have the rooms all day, so we might as well use them. The topics can be anything you’re comfortable presenting on (hopefully WordPress/blogging/Internet related) and that you think people would be interested in.

Leave a comment on this post if you’d like to hear a presentation on a specific topic, or if you have a topic you’d like to present on and we can get a list going.

Lucy Beer

Brandon — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:25:55 +0000

Lucy Beer of Web Training Wheels is an online marketing professional of 8+ years. She has a background in constructing and executing online marketing campaigns for small business, entertainment and art clients.

These days she loves to teach small businesses and entrepreneurs how to develop their online marketing strategies. She has been using WordPress since around 2004 and has never looked back In addition to marketing consulting she provides WordPress training through one-on-one or small group sessions to help businesses build a solid online foundation for their marketing.

5 Lucky Attendees

Brandon — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 04:26:09 +0000

Thanks to Wiley (@WileyTech), publisher of all kinds of awesome WordPress books, five lucky attendees will be walking away from Orange County WordCamp with one of the fine titles shown below.

Last Call For Tshirts

Brandon — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:16:30 +0000

Ladies and gents, we’re getting ready to put in our order for the t-shirts that you get with your ticket. I’m sure there are some of you who are waiting for the last minute to buy tickets, but if you do that, you might be left with a shirt that doesn’t fit you (or one that doesn’t fit you). This Friday, April 16th, at 12pm Pacific time we’re placing our order. If you buy tickets after that, you may not get a t-shirt in your size. We’re going to do our best to buy extra shirts in all sizes, but if you buy your tickets after this Friday, it will be first come, first served. If we run out of t-shirts in your size, you’ll be out of luck. My suggestion is, don’t wait. Go buy your tickets now!

OC WordCamp Badge Widget

Brandon — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:30:43 +0000

We know there are a lot of you already coming, but we’ve still got room for more. To help get the word out, we’ve built a little WordPress widget that you can install on your blog to help promote the Orange County WordCamp event. You can download it at the link below.

Click Here To Download

To install this on your blog, follow these simple steps:

Unzip the files and upload the entire oc-wordcamp-badge folder to the plugins directory of your WordPress powered site.
Go the the plugins panel in the admin and activate the plugin.
Add the widget to your sidebar in the widgets panel in the admin.
That’s it!

Oops! Did I Scare You?

Brandon — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:56:39 +0000

You may have noticed a little grey box that says “Woopra” at the bottom right hand side of your browser when you visit this site and may not have thought anything of it. It’s a simple thing to overlook, but I can assure you that it’s something you should be paying a lot of attention to. Let me explain why.

At Pixel Jar, we use Woopra to track stats for nearly every site we own/manage these days. We used to use Google analytics, but we were frustrated by the delay in actionable information. So much of the web happens in real-time these days, why shouldn’t our ability to act on it be real-time as well. Woopra allows us to do just that. If you’re browsing this site and can’t find what you’re looking for, take a look at that little grey box. If it says “Chat with us”, you can click it and immediately put directly in contact with me, the guy with the answers. How sweet is that?

Now, here’s the part that might freak you out. I say that, because I think I’ve scared some of you off. Sorry about that. We can see what pages you’re browsing…in real time. When you click any link, we know it immediately. Now, we’re not stalking you, but having this information at hand helps us to better deliver the kind of content you’re looking for. If I happen to be looking at the stats app and notice that someone is spending a lot of time on the site, has a history of coming to the site, they bounce around from page-to-page, that tells me that they might be looking for something that just isn’t there or is hard to find. This can also be the sign of a frustrated user.

I’ve tried to reach out to a few of you to see if I could answer any of your questions, but I think I scared you.

If you see a chat notification, don’t freak out. We’re still trying to figure out how best to harness it’s awesomeness. If you’re browsing around this site and get stuck and one of us is online, feel free to reach out and say hello. I bet we have the answer you’re looking for.

Woopra has some strong ties to the WordPress community through John P. (One Man’s Blog), Lorelle VanFossen (Lorelle On WordPress) and early adopter/promoter Cali Lewis (GeekBrief.tv). It was unveiled at WordCamp Dallas in 2008 and immediately went in to closed beta. Keep your eye on this technology folks, it’s just going to continue to get better.

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Checking in With UC Irvine

Brandon — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:39:54 +0000

Here’s a little back story on why we chose UCI as our venue.

First off, UCI wasn’t our first choice. As a graduate from Chapman University in Orange, I thought it would have been be a perfect venue for OC WordCamp. It’s small, central to Orange County and has a good community. Unfortunately, they don’t use WordPress at all internally and therefore didn’t have any sort of motivation to help us out. My wife is a UC Irvine graduate and suggested we look there.

Guess what?

It turns out that UCI is using WordPress MU to facilitate Blogs @ UCI, a blogging service for UCI faculty, staff and graduate students. I spoke with the manager of the UCI blogs, Sylvia Bass, who works in the OIT department about sponsoring the event, but due to reductions in university budgets they aren’t able to help us out. However, we were able to secure two rooms on campus that have the technology that we’d need to put on a successful event.

Today I went down to campus to drop off our deposit. OC WordCamp is right around the corner and I’m super pumped.

Much WordPress love goes out to all of the people who have already registered. There’s still tickets left, but the price is going to go up pretty soon. Don’t wait to get your tickets…and why not donate a few bucks to the cause while you’re there.

The End of An Era

Brandon — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:41:16 +0000

My WordPress branded pen just ran out of ink. I got this pen at my very first WordCamp, WordCamp San Francisco 2009. It lasted me only a year, but with that pen, I’ve proudly planned and executed many WordPress projects. Lucky for me (and for you), Orange County WordCamp is right around the corner and Automattic has kindly donated a bunch of the very same pens, stickers and other awesome shwag. Make sure you pick up one of these trusty pens on April 24th. It’s not only a writing utensil, but a symbol of your connection with a great community.

If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, head over to the ticketing page and snatch them up before the early bird discount is gone. See you all on April 24th.