Category Archives: Events

Conferences, meetups, talks, and gatherings.

WordCamp Update

Events, WordCamp

So 1 day after the announcement, 104 people have signed up that they're coming to WordCamp and 58 have joined the mailing list. Wow! Thank you, as this has been a huge help in determining what sort of resources we're going to need to pull this thing off. Now the big challenge is finding a venue appropiate for the event, feel free to ping me if you have any ideas.

WordCamp – WordPress Conference

Events, Press, WordCamp, WordPress

The idea for an event for WordPress users has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, as there is a really interesting group of people around WP but we don't do nearly as many face-to-face interactions as some similar projects. A set of circumstances are coming together at the beginning of August, and I think we're going to give it a go.

August 5th, 2006 is the date, here in the lovely town of San Francisco, California. The idea is a one day BarCamp-style free conference with a party that night. There will be free BBQ for lunch, WordPress t-shirts, and a full day of both user and developer discussion. ("BarCamp-style" is a code phrase for "last minute.")

There are still a few things to figure out, such as a venue, schedule, and other little things like that. (By the way, if you can help with any of these or have event experience, please drop me a note.) But mostly I wanted to get the date out there so people could start planning for it, buy tickets if they're travelling, and let us know if there are any huge conflicts that day. (Like a national holiday or something.)

In the meantime, I've put up a quick site where you can leave your email to signup for more information or let us know you're coming. If you think you can make it, please say so as soon as possible so we can prepare for the right number of people. If you'd like to help in any way, drop me a note via email or in the comments.

Don't know if this will work or not, but it should be fun regardless. Podz is coming in all the way from England, and Donncha from Ireland. 🙂

At Webvisions in Portland

Books, Events, Scaling

About a month from now I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” The talk will be part tech, part social. It’s a very reasonably priced conference with a lot of great speakers, I think they’re going to sell out soon so if you’re interested in going book soon. It’ll also be my first time in Portland, so I’m looking forward to exploring the area a bit and meeting WP users.

Banned from Google

Events, Google, Humor

Something really weird happened when I had the password problem last week — I completely disappeared from Google. It’s not just the search for Matt, but almost every page on my site has disappeared even for super-obvious searches. This happened within a day of the guy getting into my blog account. I have two theories, one is that when all my links started pointing to blogspot (he changed my siteurl) that triggered some sort of anti-spam flag, and my second theory is that [H]e turned on the new Blog Privacy feature in WP that adds noindex,nofollow to the header of your page, and Google was crawling me that very instant and removed my site. BTW, as an update to the previous entry, I have since found out that I did not have a super-obvious password, but rather he found it embedded in the source code in the SVN repository of a new project I’m working on that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve axed the repo, but at least now I don’t feel so bad about having an awful password on my blog. Regardless, the event was a good excuse to review my password strategy and make sure everything was fairly locked down. Update: I’m certain it was the noindex thing, which looks like it was on for about a week. Let’s see how long it takes to bring everything back and if I rank the same. Update 2: Everything is back to normal. 🙂

Beeping

Events, Personal, Press

About five minutes ago, the beeping stopped.

I was in Texas last week for BBQ, clouds, and a wedding. At some point when I was gone, something in my house started beeping. When I arrived home there was a high-pitched chirp about every 45 seconds to a minute, coming from somewhere in the house. Generally when things beep annoyingly it’s one of the UPSes which like to complain loudly after a power outage. The one at my desk and at the closet both had a weird light on back saying “Building Wiring Failure.” (Probably because I removed the ground plug to plug them into a two-socket extension cord.)

I tweaked the UPSes for a good hour or two trying to get them to stop beeping, I pressed the buttons, reset the circuit, unplugged them, left them off, I even flipped my master breaker. (Which reset all of the thermostats to 62, a chilling fact I realized the next day.)

Eventually, I realized the beeping wasn’t coming from a UPS at all, but rather from the smoke detector in my office. I stood on a wheeled chair and sure enough there was a 9-volt battery in there that looked pretty dead, yet it was still wired into the wall in a way I couldn’t disconnect easily. Now that the problem was identified, I just had to find a 9-volt battery (I didn’t have any) and everything would be okay.

That was three days ago. Since then, I came to live with the beep. I found that if I closed the office door and my bedroom door I couldn’t really hear it while sleeping, any more than a cricket chirping. I took calls in my living room instead of my office. Even sitting at my desk, not 5 feet from the smoke detector, I was able to get productive work done with the beeping like a minutely metronome that was hardly noticable. For days.

Engineers do this all the time. We ignore the high-pitched beeping 5 feet away from us that would drive any normal person insane because whatever gene that gives you the programming knack also makes it disturbingly easy to focus and ignore things we’re familiar with.

This is why releases are so important, they force you to clean up your house like you’re having company coming over.

Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner. Let the nagging details of what you do grind like nails on blackboard and amaze you that you have ignored for months or years something so familiar yet so annoying. Obsess about it until you can’t do anything else except fix it, and take the 10 minutes to walk to the store and get a 9-volt battery.

Back to Toronto

Events, Travel

After just enough time to do my laundry and eat some BBQ, I’m heading back out to Toronto. My passport is packed! This time it’s for Canada’s Web 2.0 Mesh Conference, which looks to be pretty interesting (despite the Web 2.0 moniker). The folks I met last time were so great, I’ve really been looking forward to this trip. Update: An airline problem has me stranded in Philidelphia for the night, I’ll be arriving at the conference late tomorrow afternoon.

In Toronto

Events, Press, Travel, WordPress

I’m getting ready to hop the redeye to the lovely city of Toronto for the iSummit conference where I’ll be speaking about social media (whatever that is). Thursday night there’ll be a GTA blogger meetup which sounds like it’ll be a blast — I had no idea there were so many bloggers and WordPress users in Toronto. If you’ll be in Toronto any time before Saturday please drop me an email or try to come to the meetup Thursday night, I’d love to meet more folks out there.

Commercial Akismet

Akismet, Events, Spam, ,

Blog Herald asks about WP plugging a commercial project, namely Akismet. One of the lessons I learned from Ping-O-Matic is that web services like this can grow far beyond what you anticipated, need a lot of attention, and can be expensive to maintain. (Akismet has to be really fast otherwise it bugs people and delays commenting.) You also have a social contract with all of your users to continue to provide a service they’ve all come to rely on. When Akismet first got started, I wasn’t at all worried about the technology — I was using it myself and it worked great. I spent most of my brain cycles planning out how the service could be economically independent and self-sustaining in the future, so it could thrive and provide a great service to the public without relying on charity. I had to balance this with my desire to just give everything away (as I usually do).

I’m happy with where it eventually ended up. The Pro-Blogger limit was set very high and the vast majority (over 99.9%) of people use Akismet at no cost whatsoever. I’m able to justify devoting my time to the service while still putting bread on the table and the larger blogger community can stop dealing with disgusting spam on their blogs. The technology has scaled incredibly well and even before the Yahoo deal Akismet had a bright future. Also the API and the plugin itself is completely open so people could clone the API or modify the plugin if they wanted. The service just hit its first major milestone, has been embraced by the development community, and I’m confident now that it will continue as a public service. I think it’s also providing something pretty valuable, as evidenced by the people who have been buying Pro-blogger licenses just to support it, not because they fall under the commercial terms.