Last Saturday, October 4th, was the long-awaited DFW WordCamp #wcdfw. Long-awaited because the last one was in 2009. WordCamps are a gathering of folks interested/obsessed with WordPress. It’s a 1 to 3 day event that focuses on the sharing of information related to all things WordPress. Most WordCamps have tracks that hopefully have appeal to anyone attending. Here are common tracks at a WordCamp:
- Beginner
- Business-focused
- Blogging/content creation
- Developer
Even if people are pretty well-versed on how to use WordPress for their needs, they still enjoy attending because it’s a great place to meet and network with this great community. I was fortunate to be able to hang out with the iThemes team – just about everyone was there who is U.S. based, so we all got to spend time together outside the office and we had some great conversations and fun times.
This was a 1-day camp – they had some great topics – below is the morning schedule. I attended sessions mainly in the Track 1 area. The speakers were knowledgeable and well-prepared and there were volunteers in each room to introduce the speaker and keep them on target to have Q&A at the end and then to dismiss on time. There were a few technical glitches and a few of the rooms wouldn’t hold all the attendees, but it’s difficult to correctly anticipate attendance for a given session.
The keynote was given by Cory Miller @CoryMiller303. I always look forward to hearing him – he’s the Founder and CEO of iThemes. This one was titled, ‘The Click Publish Moment – Releasing Your Content Into the World’. Cory is passionate about entrepreneurship. He excels at developing, mentoring and nurturing his team and his talks motivate and inspire me (and others), to be bold and courageous. He urges us to use our ‘Time, Talent and Treasure’, to make the world better. Here’s one thing he said that I tweeted out (as did several others), that is important. His point was to click publish – get your content out there and then improve on it.
I’ve read a lot about getting things published that are perhaps not quite perfect (this doesn’t apply to client work!). My personal story is about my website. I had been planning for years to redo my website, but I would never even start because it wasn’t fully planned down to the last paragraph. I was always thinking about what cool sliders, widgets and plugins I could have, what my background would be, what the colors would be. Then I finally realized that it just needed to be done, even if it started out simple, then I could revise and improve it later. Once I got over the perfection impediment, then I could actually start and finish the site. It’s not everything I want it to be, but it’s out there, it looks good and it’s better than it was!
Here are a few photos I took during a few of the sessions. I’ll caption them!
Attending WordCamps means you’ll come home with some cool swag. I was especially impressed with the t-shirt – love the feel, color and design. Thanks again to the organizers and volunteers who worked many hours to bring us WordCamp DFW!
