Well, after braving the sub-freezing temps (kind of a big deal down here in the south) and navigating the icy streets of west Georgia and Atlanta, we made it to WordCamp Atlanta last night… and we weren’t even late! Ok, well… we would have been late if they’d started on time, but…

Several good sessions tonight including my fav, a block from Topher Kohan on Optimizing your WordPress install for SEO purposes.

And on Saturday…
… I woke up sick. Throbbing head cold and all that goes along with it. The decision between WordCamp and the Doc-in-a-box was touch and go there for a few minutes. But I hung in there and made it in this morning. It didn’t hurt my feelings at all that they pushed everything back an hour to make it easier to get to SCAD in spite of the remaining ice on the roads. Read the rest of this entry

With WordCamp Atlanta less than a week away, I thought it would be a good time to throw out a few thoughts on how you can make the most of your investment. There’s also a post in the archives about Making the Most from a BarCamp that has lots of good information. Check it out as well. So strap up and lets dive it!

Construct Your Schedule
The schedule for WordCamp Atlanta is up so take a little time before you head out to put together the timeline of sessions you want to attend. This can be kind of tricky, especially if your fairly new to blogging or this is the first WordCamp you’ve attended. Use the speaker profiles and Read the rest of this entry

The first of sevaral? Yeah, I came away with so many topics and things to cover that I just don’t think it would be fair to try to cover them all in a single post… so I’ll do several. Several because I haven’t decided exactly how many yet, I guess we’ll see how that goes together.

Probably the single greatest benefit from WordCamp Birmingham ’09, or any camp style meeting for that matter, was the opportunity to talk about ideas. The power of the groupthink is undeniable. You can see it in the faces of people as they hear little tidbits that fit perfectly into that missing space in their puzzle. Or even better, opens a door of thought for them they hadn’t even considered before. The cumulative increase in knowledge is just something you’ll never be able to reach by yourself… at least it would be very very hard.

For me, one of the many awesome aspects of attending WordCamp Birmingham was the opportunity to hear, meet, and talk about ideas with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. And Matt did a lot more that just come by, speak, and hit the door. He sat in on and participated in several of the sessions… especially on Sunday. Listening to the challenges and solutions the WordPress community is experiencing, suggestion solutions, and taking back ideas to incorporate into the product.

I had the opportunity to talk with Matt one-on-one for a few minutes and wow, was it great. One of the near and (not so) dear topics for me was Akismet, especially my recent success in escaping Akismet hell. As it turns out, the guy who is normally responsible for answering emails about this topic has taken some time off in the past week or two as he and his wife have just had a baby. Matt shared that he had answered many of those emails while the regular guy was out so, as it turns out, it was probably Matt himself that help me with my escape! Cool.

BTW, The whole time I’ve been using it, I’ve pronounced it like ASCII-met. I said it that way talking to Matt and he pointed out the the correct pronunciation should be a-KIZ-met. So I went back and looked at the word… wow, I wasn’t even close.

And there were lots of other great folks I got to meet there. Many I’d “talked” with on-line but never met face-to-face, many I was meeting for the first time. Thanks to all of you for your input and contribution to my present and future success! Please, let me know if I can ever help you in any way!

@jtrigsby