Working the T Shirt Table at WordCamp SF 2009

I think it is certainly appropriate that I write a blog post documenting my time working the t-shirt table at WordCamp SF 2009, considering that my blog is on WordPress, so is The General History Project and The Bead Store SF.  Yes I’m a big fan!  And, I don’t think I need to extol all the great features, you can find that by doing some easy searching.

I’m meeting a lot of cool people – bloggers, theme designers, and the rest.  The Mission Bay Conference Center also has a gym, so I have a lot of people stopping by to ask me what WordCamp is about.  It seems a lot of people know about WordPress!  And others want to know about me and what I can do to help them with their website, which is also very cool.

Some of the highlights of my morning include:

• Meeting the LaidOffCamp guy, Chris Hutchins. He let me talk my headoff about Turkey and traveling through the Middle East. I told him about Matador Travel, which is an awesome online travel community.  The people there helped me plan my trips to Costa Rica, Greece, Turkey and Israel.  I’m hoping he’ll contact me so I can put him in touch with Laura Lee; she’s a great resource for traveling in Africa.
• Hearing one woman say, as I gave her the American Apparel shirt – “It’s probably some cheap shirt made in China”.  It’s nice to see that some people don’t pay attention to what seems obviously a pop-culture-brand success.  American Apparel’s whole pitch is that they’re the largest clothing manufacturer in the USA.
• Meeting Om Malik and asking him if he ever filled that position posted on 37signals.  Sounds like he did! Congrats!
• Having a run in with the guys from MediaTemple.  They’re a sponsor for WordCamp, and came to the table with a little sway and swagger.  I asked them if they were competitors for GoDaddy, and then if they could help me secure a domain name in less than 5 minutes by phone the way I did for tacocrawl.com last Saturday night.  Their response? “What kind of phone do you use?  Blackberry? It looks a whole lot cooler on the iPhone!”  Me? “Looks like those bloody mary’s this morning were a good idea”.  Bad idea for two reasons.  First, I’m the type of GoDaddy customer they want to acquire.  I buy domain names like other girls go clothes shopping online.  Second, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone, these guys and my friends that were with me last week, that securing a domain name by phone is a good feature.
• Seeing how truly humble Scott Beale is from Laughing Squid.  I follow him on twitter, and have been reading his blog since I moved out here in fall 2005.  When he came to the tshirt table, and I saw his name tag, I said something to the likes of “hey you’re that guy”.  He seemed surprised that I would recognize him, which really impressed me since he has 40K followers on twitter and a significant fan base.

If any of you are reading this, come say hi!

Akismet WordPress Plugin is Amazing!

So I wrote about it once or twice before, but WordPress spam is horrible.  Before I added Akismet, I had over 2500 spam comments.  I was deleting batches, maybe 20 at a time.  It was tedious.  With some help from my buddy Ivan, I got my WordPress API key and installed Akismet.  The plugin adds a button to your comments’ options called “Check for Spam”

Once I selected “Check for Spam” all 2000+ comments were absolutely gone!  I felt like a huge load had been lifted off my shoulders.

Note:  Also in this post, I’m testing RealMac Software’s LittleSnapper (its hosting the screenshot) and Twitme (my twitter should update with a link to this blog).

It’s a Busy Morning when You’re Tummy Hurts

I’ve been in bed now for about 5 hours.  I read 20 pages of my book, wrote a blog posting, upgraded word press, installed google analytics on my blog, and now I’m changing the theme.  I’m trying an out-of-the-box theme for this month before I go and write my own CSS.  I think I should focus on my dev sandbox and portfolio for the month of January.

Installing WordPress on Go Daddy

I finally took the first step towards developing my own blog by installing WordPress on my site. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, and yesterday I took the plunge. I ran into some problems because I didn’t have the host named correctly in my config file. Ultimately, it was this tutorial that helped me figure this all out.

In retrospect, the process of installing wordpress was not that difficult, but it was something I had never done before. Recognizing small accomplishments can be important : )