Orange County WordCamp

Steve Zehngut

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:49:45 +0000

Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995. Despite dozens of dot–com hey–day offers to “partner up” for mountains of stock options, he remains the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach–based company. With a degree in cinema and a background in graphic design, Steve has been a multimedia developer for more than fifteen years. Under his direction, Zeek Interactive has grown from an apartment bedroom to one of Southern California’s leading development and consulting shops.

Steve is recognized as a leading Web and Flash programmer. He has been a frequent panelist and speaker at industry trade shows, including the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the Macromedia International User Conference. He was also a former Macromedia Advisory Board Member, a member of Producer’s Guild and he sits on the Advisory Board at the Art Institute. In addition, Steve has participated as a mentor in the American Film Institute eTV Workshop.

Steve has taught interactive development courses at University of California Irvine, University of Southern California, American Film Institute, and California State University Long Beach.

Scott Elkin

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:49:06 +0000

Scott Elkin is a self-employed web developer creating websites for over 10 years. Being a Microsoft Certified programmer, the only world he ever knew was Microsoft. When he discovered Wordpress, he switched to developing almost all client sites using that platform, integrating with everything from membership sites, forums, shopping carts, split-testing and CRM’s.

Pete Mall

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:48:44 +0000

Pete is a self-described WordPress ninja and has been contributing to WordPress since 2005. He provides WordPress consulting services through Joint Forces Technology Solutions (jointforcestech.com). Pete has worked with multiple Fortune 100 brands, as well as smaller companies. He is known for turning around troubled development projects and improving the productivity and dependability of the team. You can follow his rumblings on his personal blog at developersmind.com or catch him on Twitter @petemall.

John Hawkins

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:47:07 +0000

John has been working in the web development field for more than a decade. He started his first blog back in 2003, moved to WordPress a short time later and hasn’t looked back. John has been active in all aspects of the WordPress Universe. He’s customized themes, released plugins to the WordPress repository, hosted WordCamp: Las Vegas, and presented at WordCamp events all over the United States. John currently creates custom WordPress solutions for his clients at 9seeds.com

Colin Loretz

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:46:26 +0000

Colin is a developer, designer, entrepreneur and community builder. He develops custom solutions for Salesforce.com, Wordpress and the iPhone platforms as the Chief Architect of Lively Labs. A supporter of tech culture, Colin also heads up Ignite Reno, organizes Reno-Tahoe WordCamp, and co-founded the Reno Collective coworking space for fellow entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Blair Williams

Brandon — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:38:22 +0000

Blair Williams has been working as a Software Engineer, Internet Marketer and New Media Consultant for over a decade. He specializes in leveraging and writing Software to automate Internet Marketing to drive explosive growth and sales in Businesses of all sizes. He’s an expert in WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing, Website Strategy and New Media.

Blair is the author of the Pretty Link plugin for WordPress. Pretty Link has been downloaded over 100,000 times and is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress. Blair has also released the Pretty Link Pro plugin for WordPress — providing a ton of useful features and premium support on top of Pretty Link.

Brainstorming Session

Brandon — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:52:06 +0000

I heard through the grape vine last week that a local group was considering organizing a WordCamp for Orange County. Imagine my surprise! I got in contact with William, one of the organizers, and we’ve been talking about how to work together to put on a successful event. The OCPHP group is having a meetup next week, and they’re going to have a planning session to discuss ideas for OC WordCamp. For all of you who want to pitch in some ideas, or just meet other like-minded people, I encourage you to show up and say hi. The brainstorming session will start at 6PM on Jan. 27. You can get more info and RSVP at the OCPHP Meetup page. I hope to see you all there, and look forward to hearing some exciting ideas.

Blair Williams Love Fest Heads to Orange County

Brandon — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:43:02 +0000

I met Blair through John P. at WordCamp Las Vegas. Upon my return home, I bought and installed the pro version of Blair’s plugin, Pretty Link to check it out. I was totally impressed with the functionality that his plugin brought to the table and began looking through his code. Let me tell you, it is a meticulously organized and succinctly written bit of code. Blair not only writes code, but effectively markets a pro version of his plugin.

As if he wasn’t busy enough, over the last few months, Blair has been busy writing another plugin, Mingle. Mingle is a simple way to turn your WordPress blog into a social network without the overhead of WordPress MU and BuddyPress. He launched a companion site to showcase the plugin’s abilities when he released the plugin and the site has become nothing less than what I would consider to be a Blair Love Fest. The feedback he’s gotten on the plugin has been overwhelmingly positive.

I think we can all learn a lot from Blair’s breadth of knowledge.

It is my great pleasure to announce that we have confirmed that Blair will be presenting in Orange County. If you’ve ever wondered how to build and market a WordPress plugin, come check him out.

You can find Blair at the following places:

Put In Your 2¢

Brandon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:52:34 +0000

We have a good idea what we want to see at Orange County WordCamp, but we won’t be the only ones in attendance. We want this event to be as meaningful for everyone as possible. Fill out the poll below and let us know what you want to experience at Orange County WordCamp 2010.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Big Time Support From John Hawkins

Brandon — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:16:20 +0000

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of attending Blogworld Expo as well as WordCamp Las Vegas. While Blogworld was fairly large, WordCamp Las Vegas was a more intimate and exclusive sub-conference I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with some really great WordPress users and developers, including long time WordCamp Las Vegas organizer, John Hawkins of John Hawkins Unrated. John gave us the low down on how an event like this should really shape up. Needless to say, his insight was very valuable for us since it’s our first time planning an event like this. John really believes in what we’re trying to do, so he accepted our request to have him present and also decided to sponsor the event through his new venture 9seeds. We couldn’t be happier to have John on board, and I hope you feel the same.