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Posts tagged wordpress
Podcast Series: Exploring Commercial WordPress Models
May 28th
Throughout the month of April, I had the pleasure of co-hosting the WordPress Weekly podcast with regular host Jeff Chandler. The April episodes comprised a mini-series focused on commercial WordPress business models, not including consulting. Our primary goal was to provide insight and wisdom to those considering a commercial software or SaaS model built on an open source project (WordPress, specifically) from those who had been there and done that.
The origin of the series actually dated back to January’s WordCamp Boston, where Jeff moderated a panel I organized called “Monetization in a Free World”, intended to help the audience understand the commercial WordPress themes, plug-ins, and SaaS businesses. Jeff ended up being in an impossible position, with 40 minutes to cover all 3 models and incorporate Automattic’s perspective, visa vi Jane Wells. Jeff and I decided it was worth doing justice to the idea; and so the April series of podcast episodes came to life.
WordPress Providence Meetup Kicks Off
May 1st
Inspired by a few WordCamps that built themselves up from local WordPress meet ups, I finally got a few locals together at the beginning of April (Ken DeBlois of Brown and Suzanne McDonald, a freelance writer) to help organize a Providence Meetup. A couple of planning meetings, a new website, a Twitter account, and some local marketing later, we had our first meet up on April 26th.
I’ll be blogging over at the WordPress Providence website, so I won’t say too much about it in this forum, but the headline is that I was thrilled by the turn out and energy at our first event. We had about 30 attendees, a lot of buzz during the hour of networking, a nice and short presentation by DandyID (a local firm with a popular plug-in), and a great after-presentation brainstorming / discussion session.
The feedback has been positive, and we organizers are jazzed to keep the momentum going. On top of our base from the first meet up, I know at least a handful of people who wanted to come but had conflicts, and we already have a couple of RSVPs for our next meet up who were not at at our inaugural event.
In addition to the official website I scraped together, be sure to check out my guest post on RI Nexus, and some photographs of our first meet up over on Flickr. And if you’re in the Rhode Island area, come to our next meet up on May 25th!
WordCamp Miami, The Great CMS Debate
Feb 15th
I will be talking WordPress at two upcoming events, on opposite ends of the U.S. east coast this month.
WordCamp Miami. Never a big fan of winter, I’m definitely looking forward to a breather in sunny Miami, Florida. I’m flying down the evening before (this Friday, the 19th) and returning the following Tuesday. It’s actually more economic to stay a couple of extra days at the hotel as compared with taking a Sunday flight back. In any case, I’ll be speaking at Miami’s WordCamp, which takes place on Saturday the 20th at the University of Miami. I’ll be presenting a revised version of Themes 101, which “premiered” at WordCamp Boston. It will incorporate new information on the upcoming “default” theme, along with some feedback from Boston. If you’re in the area and interested in meeting up on Sunday or Monday, send me a note.
Boston North Shore Web Geeks’ “Great CMS Debate”. I’ll be representing WordPress on a panel debating the merits of a few popular web content management systems (CMS). Other panelists include Boston Web Studio’s Marc Amos (Expression Engine), Jay Batson (co-founder of Acquia, a widely known Drupal consultancy), and Fidelity’s Tom Herer (representing Kentico). My friend, founder of WordCamp Boston, and strategy guru at Optaros, John Eckman, moderates. It takes place on February 25th, at 7 ,pm in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
WordPress.tv Cameo: Intranets
Jan 10th
Back in November, I had the pleasure of attending WordCamp New York City. I spent about 10 minutes presenting my Google Reader plug-in, had a kick off WordCamp Boston planning meeting, had the pleasure of meeting inspiring folks like Raffi Mudge, and even had a great conversation in the hallway with Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Chandler (me in the middle with the shoulder bag, Matt sitting to my left, Jeff to my right – photo courtesy John Eckman) for about 40 minutes.
One of the sessions I attended was Ramil Teodosio’s WordPress Powered-Intranets. I’ve done a few Intranet implementations of my own and Ramil’s seminar was a bit more focused on SharePoint-like substitution than I expected. My own experience gave me an opportunity to pipe up a couple of times to offer suggestions and, among other things, plug my free Restricted Site Access plug-in, which was born out of an Intranet project, and I thought might be of interest to the audience. Judging by the post-presentation follow-up with a handful of attendees, at least a few found my comments useful.
That session has been posted on WordPress.tv. While I don’t have that much that’s interesting to say (and audio is iffy), you can see my chime in at about the 24:30 and 30:00 marks.
Speaking of Restricted Site Access, I need to get around to incorporating the fork / changes added by Eric Buth who contacted me recently. It’s always great to see others build on your own open-source projects!
Interviewed on Episode 81 of WordPress Weekly
Dec 16th
Last night I recorded the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler of WordPress Tavern. We chatted for about 90 minutes, and then want on to chat more during an after show chat that continued for over an hour. The podcast was published today, you can listen to it or get instructions for downloading it here. Here’s the iTunes link.
Topics included:
- General WordPress consulting services
- WordPress value perception as compared to other major CMS platforms
- Exciting developer features coming in WordPress 2.9 (RC1 out today!)
- What the near future holds for WordPress, with the MU merge and growth of BuddyPress, bbPress, et al
- My latest Smashing Magazine article
- WordCamp Boston (which I’m helping organize)
I really enjoyed participating in the podcast, and hope to participate again in the near future.