I’ve been home a few hours after WordCamp 2008. It was a wonderful time of listening to other bloggers speak about their experiences and share tips with the rest of us. They spoke on almost everything from building an audience to search optimization.
To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what to expect before going. I have really never been to a conference like this and was a little scared to be honest. Mainly because I wasn’t sure what would be expected of me. Had I been given the choice to do this weekend all over again, I would have definitely still gone.
I learned a few very important things that I think apply to all aspects of business that I am interested in:
- Network Network Network!
- Nothing bad comes from just stepping out and trying.
The conference was an excellent chance for me to really step out of my comfort zone and meet a lot of new people. The people I talked with were all over the board as far as experience goes. Some people were newer to blogging than me, while others were making a full time job off of blogging. Among those people was Matt Mullenweg whom I didn’t really know what to say to, but I made sure to say hi, shake his hand, and thank him for coming out for the conference.
Overall, I was very inspired and definitely hoping they have the conference next year.
I am also posting a few photos I took at the conference to use the new gallery feature. I’m not sure what it will do to with the current theme I have, but here goes:
It was a fairly exciting day for me. I went to my very first conference which was quite a new experience.
I had the chance to listen to Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress, as he announced the release of the new version of the platform. He talked about some of the new features as well as plans for the future.
Of course Matt wasn’t the only one speaking. I also heard some great tips from John Pozadzides, Jonathan Bailey, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, Liz Strauss, and Lorelle VanFossen.
I’ll be out tomorrow at the conference as well. I am really looking forward to it. I took a few photos with my phone and will hopefully get some new ones tomorrow. Sounds like a great excuse to try the new gallery feature in 2.5! 
Blogging hasn’t been a real priority for me in the past. It is only recently that I’ve tried to keep up with my own as well as do my share of contributing / reading other blogs.
Just a few hours ago, I found out about WordCamp Dallas. I live so close, it seems like a great opportunity to pick up several tips from the best, so my wife and I have registered (registration was only $20) and we will be attending this weekend.
I’m looking forward to learning a lot and meeting new people!
It may be a little too late in the game now that everyone is sick of Facebook apps but I’ve been wanting to build one for quite some time. Many of the applications on Facebook are pure crap. They’re a sorry excuse for serving ads and collecting marketing information and it’s unfortunate for people like me who want to put out something with a little more quality. Thankfully Facebook seems to have heard the cries from users and is really cracking down on privacy and how many invitations applications can send.
There is another problem I must overcome though: Needing the answers to all of the unknowns. Needing all my questions answered before I start. The funny thing is, that everything I’m not sure about at this time is something that won’t even be an issue until later on. I can’t plan for every situation that will come up. I can’t make an app and have it run perfectly the first time. I’m going to make mistakes. There, I said it.
That is probably my biggest fear. It’s the huge factor in deciding whether I finish a project, or if it gets added to my never-ending list of ideas that I’ve had and dropped. So today I’m making a decision to just start. No more reading countless tutorials and blogs to make sure I am doing things the best way possible; I can always refactor later. No more buying every book I can find on a topic so that I can know every possible angle on the subject. While these things are fairly healthy to an extent, they’ve always given me enough time to talk myself out of a project.
Hopefully this more agile approach will at least get me to the point of being able to know if something will work or not. We’ll see.
