WordCamp Chicago 2010 Followup

Posted on Jun 9th, 2010 in General, Wordpress | 1 comment

This past weekend I spent my time at WordCamp Chicago. It was an amazing weekend nonetheless and here’s a quick followup from my weekend. First, if you’re not familiar with WordCamps and are a user of WordPress, I highly suggest you go. Its a weekend full of WordPress users, developers, writers, and everything in between. These events reiterate how awesome the WordPress community really is!

Read more and find a WordCamp near you: http://central.wordcamp.org/

The night before, I attended a WordPress Chicago meetup and got the chance to meet a lot of great WordPress users and developers of the community. If you’re in Chicago make sure to check out the meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/mywplife/

(Happen to crash a ritzy lil party at Millennium Park with some new friends afterwords)

As for the conference itself, the quality of the content and the presenters was definitely worthwhile. I was very impressed with the amount of great content I was able to take away. There was two tracks, a developers and a users track, in which I found myself bouncing back and forth too.

There was a lot learned, so thank you to all of the presenters. If you’d like to see the topics shared, check out the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/event/wordcamp-chicago-2010/slideshows

In short here’s a few bullet points from the weekend:

WordPress 3.0 to be released June 14th
New affiliate plugin for the WP-ECommerce plugin
New event ticket plugin for same WP-ECommerce plugin
SpriteMe.org – Great service to help sprite images on your site for performance
The WordPress community is extremely friendly and simply awesome
Widget Logic – Plugin to determine which widgets show on which pages
Custom Post Types in WP 3.0 is my favorite new feature, WordPress is heading into the CMS direction, finally!
Update Notifier – Plugin to notify you when plugins and themes need to be updated
GoDaddy has WordPress designed hosting packages

Ultimately, though, these events are about connecting with people who are just as passionate about what you do. This is my strong reason for going. Think of them as events with speaker breaks. And the after parties are where it’s at. If you go to one of these events DO NOT MISS THE AFTER PARTY! WordCamp Chicago had their after party at the Bull&Bear. Again, the night was great, such a stellar group of individuals.

After chatting with a few new friends, we got on this sharing book spree, that it inspired me to put together a little internet book club. Its invitation only, but feel free to email me for an invite code. For now check out the great books we’re sharing here: http://www.pixelminute.com

Lastly, WordCamp Chicago couldn’t have ended any cooler. I watched a very inspiring presentation of Cory Miller (at iThemes) and we all teamed up, raining GoDaddy stress balls on him. I recorded a video of it with my phone but Qik is being stupid with me. Luckily Mike Torbert was able to catch a shot of the mayhem:

UPDATE: My video of the Cory Miller ball rain finally uploaded, fast forward to about 3:55.

If you’re looking for something to do this fall, I’m helping with the organization of WordCamp Detroit this October. Register now at: http://www.wordcampdetroit.com

WordPress fans unite.

Thanks to everyone in Chicago for making it an amazing experience, see you next year!

2010: Products and Services I can’t live without

Posted on Apr 19th, 2010 in General | 2 comments

I saw a recent blog post by Kevin Rose, which he had gotten the idea from Michael Arrington on listing your products/services for the year you can’t live without. I plan on doing this once a year to see what is just a fad and what stays for the long haul. So here is my quick list:

My products/services of 2010

Motorola Droid
- This device is a huge epicenter to a lot of my interactions and productivity everyday. From using Google Maps to find alternate routes skipping traffic to using it as my main connection to all of my social interactions, it’s surprising how valuable this device has become. I’m absolutely in love with the Android platform.
Gmail
- For the past 7 years I’ve been strictly using GMail. Not just Gmail, but also Google’s Apps which allows me to use the Gmail software with all of my other domain emails. Organizing content heavily by labels and filters, this tool is amazing.
WordPress
- WordPress has quickly become a core to many of my web development projects. With community and the ever growing library of plugins has made this open source platform stand out well beyond the rest. Tell me it can’t be done with WordPress and I’ll show you it can.
Last.fm
- Without audioscrobbling, the service that works hand in hand with last.fm, I don’t know what better music recommendation engine there could be out there. When I want to know about music, this is always one of the first sites I visit.
Digg
- Can content consumption get much better? With social popularity of news articles and its aggregation of news from all over the internet, its my main site for news and updates.
Evernote
- A suggested tool after following the works of Tim Feriss, this quickly become my way of tracking notes. With the use of the Firefox plugin and the Android app, my notes are easily saved and synced from anywhere.
Foursquare
- I think this is such an amazing thing. Now that more and more of my friends are joining Foursquare, its great being able to see if they’re in town or at the same bar I’m at. Also with the new focus for small businesses to encourage customers to become the mayor, I see a bright future for this tool.
Amazon Prime
- I typically go to border book shopping, but I buy nothing. instead I use the Amazon Android app to take pictures of the covers of the books I want, and them to my wishlist. Then in future time, I order the books I’m most interested in buying. With Amazon Prime I’ll quickly have them within 2 days and save a butt load of money by using Amazon.
Netflix
- This has become the primary method of me watching movies, beyond the theatre. With instant streaming to my Nintendo Wii and Bluray player, they just don’t make it much easier do they?
Google Docs
- This collection of tools wouldn’t be as impactful without its online collaboration and sharing. When working with groups on projects, I always find myself using Google Docs.
Picasa
- I’ve not stored over 10,000 or so photos with Picasa. This is so great when I want to show someone pictures of that past I can quickly login to Picasa where ever I am and enjoy.
Jing
- I find myself sharing and helping other a lot. Or sometimes I need a quick screen capture. This tool makes it quick and easy to do a screen capture and crop only what you want. Even mark it up or circle/highlight things quickly. Best of all, its free.
Firebug
- As a web developer I don’t know how I did development without it! Its amazing how much more efficient my development has come with this Firefox extension.
Google Voice
- Two levels this tool is amazing. First I never had to delete a voicemail and it’s even transcribed for searching (yet the transcription kinda sucks…for now). Having these voicemails saved with Google I can listen to them without my phone on my computer. So great when I’m getting back into work and I need to replay a message. Second, international phone calls. I couldn’t even tell you how much money this has probably saved me allowing me to make phone calls to Canada at no additional charge. Thank you!!
Facebook
- We all know what Facebook is by now, hence the reason why I love it. Being able to stay connected at the level Facebook provides has become part of all of our lifestyles. That’s truly epic.
Mint
- Sometimes I really hate logging into my mint account because I’m reminded of spending that I totally forgot. But in the reality, that’s what this tool is for. It really is a great way to manage your money.
Delicious
- Having the Delicious extension in Firefox just makes it that much easier to save, share, and categorize my bookmarks.
Bose QC 15s
- Music will never be the same without these headphones. I listen to my podcasts and music tracks on these all day long while I work and its freaking awesome!
Tweetdeck
- When I’m tweeting or trying to play catchup on Twitter, this tool couldn’t make it any easier. Especially when at events and following a Twitter hash, this is great!
LastPass
- Password management is a huge issue as many of us know by now. Using LastPass and its many browser extensions, I’ve quickly found a way to manage so many passwords by now. Add a Ubikey for an additional layer of security and you have yourself one secure password management suite.

So there you have it a quick list of my favorites of 2010. What are your products and services you can’t live without?

A Quick Introduction

Posted on Oct 27th, 2009 in General | 0 comments

There’s something beautiful in code, how the beauty isn’t necessarily in the visual code itself, but what it represents. This blog is dedicated to my passion for coding and sharing my code snippets that I write or recommend along the way.

I’ve written a lot of the years and this is me giving a little something back. You can learn more about me here or see some of my open source code projects here.

As for now, I hope I can share with you a few things…