WordCamp Mid-Atlantic
15 - 16 May 2009
at Baltimore, MD
Talk comments
The presentation seemed to be about "Here's something I wish existed, so help me dev. community." But then he said it's available soon, once a system comes out of beta. So I was lost on the purpose. Good idea though.
I suppose I expected a more wide-ranging discussion of the notion of extending the blog, not just of one necessary but tightly-focused API system.
Also, the speaker needs to s l o w i t d o w n a bit. He finished 15 mins. early and there were few questions.
On the whole, I was most impressed by this session, perhaps because of the sweeping nature of it and how many times I had to scribble down the name of a plugin I'd never heard of before (On that note, though, I wish Mark had either stopped to resay the name of a few, or had posted the names on the screen).
Brandon did a great job of showing exactly how much each caching option would improve performance.
This was a "WordCamp" for all things WordPress. Not a Social Media camp. I guess Anil is why Matt Mullenweg changed his plans - who can blame him? Nothing against Anil, but who cares? It's wordpress!
Other thoughts:
This is the most expensive wordcamp I've attended. The other (cheaper) camps provided lunch, which allowed attendees to network. Not to mention a wordpress t-shirt.
Having ignite in between sessions made no sense at all - it had nothing to do with wordpress (and in most cases, blogging). It was confusing and circus-like.
Other than that, great job. Hope you are buying drinks at the after party with the money you saved on lunch! ;)
Brandon did a nice job of laying out different methods of implementing caching. He touched on a purely server-config option (APC) and then got into the WordPress-specific options to a reasonable depth for the session.
This is probably a 5 thumbs up but it's "Information overload." I could not keep up with the volume and speed of content.
This session was info dense but really, really good. I would have gone to a session twice as long from these two guys - I have a lot to learn about SEO.
Fantastic tips and hints to help the newbie and intermediate blogger.
I loved this talk - a lot - but I can see how some will complain that it wasn't WP-centric enough. Let them kvetch, this was good.