Thank you to our Heart and Sparrow Sponsors

WordCamp Portland would not exist without all the wonderful sponsors that believe in supporting the Portland WordPress community! Thank you to the following sponsors:

We <3 our Heart sponsors!

ivycat_logo_transparent_186x92IvyCat is small, agile team of WordPress developers and server geeks based in lovely Gig Harbor, Washington. They’ve been a consistent sponsor of WordCamp Portland for many years – so awesome! They’ve also contributed seven plugins to the wordpress.org repo.

 

X-Team-Two-Colour---Vertical-HIRESFormed in 2006, X-Team is a team of digital pioneers capable of bringing imaginations to life, whose mission is to create awesome experiences by embracing extraordinary challenges. They don’t just create websites, mobile apps and games — they strive to maintain a culture based on trust, generosity and high-fives. This is their first year sponsoring WordCamp Portland. Welcome!

SmileLogo-whitebg-webSmile makes productivity software for OS X and iOS devices. They’re in their 10th year of great products and fast, friendly customer support, and this is their first year sponsoring WordCamp Portland. Welcome!

 

Our Sparrow sponsors give us wings!

Gravitate is a digital marketing and design company located in beautiful Vancouver, Washington. They’re another wonderful first-time WCPDX sponsor, yay!

Sticker Giant has provided WCPDX with amazing stickers for many years, now, and has always treated us well. Thanks for festooning our gear for another year!

WordCamp Portland Afterparty: Momo’s

After we wrap up WordCamp Portland, we invite attendees to walk or take the streetcar a few blocks over to Momo’s (725 SW 10th Ave) for an informal afterparty starting around 5:30pm. Join fellow WordCamp attendees to socialize, network, relax, and wind down from a great day of WordPressing.

Given the current weather forecast, we should be able to take advantage of Momo’s nice patio area behind the bar (as well as some inside seating).

A drink ticket will be provided to WordCamp attendees. A big thanks to our sponsors for their support of WordCamp Portland! Of course you’re welcome to purchase food and/or additional drinks on your own.

Contributor Day

WordCamp PDX would not be complete without a Contributor Day. That’s right, on Sunday, August 11th, from 10 AM – 4 PM, we will hold a Contributor Day to close out WCPDX. The Contributor Day is open to anyone wanting to work on any aspect of the WordPress open source project. Codex, Make handbooks, core tickets, plugins, themes etc. are all ways to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem and are all things that you can work on during Contributor Day.

The event will take place at the Lincoln Building in downtown Portland (421 SW Oak Street UPDATE: 208 SW 5th Ave; same building, different entrance). Digital Trends, one of our wonderful sponsors, is providing the space. The rooms have plenty of space and allow for groups of individuals to break out and work on specific projects. The building is easily accessible via public transportation and there are a few parking garages in the area.

While there is no set schedule for the Contributor Day, we are expecting a number of leaders of different parts of WordPress to assist with contributing in a number of different ways. We will provide lunch to help fuel all of the awesome work!

We look forward to seeing you at Contributor Day!

A bit of unconference fun

In years past we’ve experimented with a lot of different ways of building unconference sessions in to WordCamp Portland. 2011 even saw Portland tackle an entirely unconference conference. 🙂

This year we have a block mid-morning for unconference sessions. All 3 rooms will be available and we’ll get an unconference board going in the morning to post the schedule from.

Wondering what an unconference is? Aaron’s post from 2011 is a good primer. You can also find a list of the sessions that took place that year to get a feel for what works well.

So if there’s an idea you’ve been kicking around in your mind that you’d love to present or a discussion you’d like to lead come August 10th with those ideas. If you haven’t signed up yet you can also still grab a ticket to this year’s event.

Meet Maria Erb

Maria Erb works as an Instructional Designer with the University of Portland. She joins us at WordCamp Portland to speak about how WordPress can save higher education. We got a chance to ask her a few questions about the talk.

How is the internet changing the landscape of higher education?
The Web first impacted the face of higher education about 15 years ago when LMS (Learning Management System) systems became widely adopted and suddenly something like “online learning” was possible rather than “distance education.” Even though the potential for something new and exciting was there, most people just didn’t know how to use the new medium so things stayed at a “meh” level for a long time. What is really kicking higher education in the face is MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) because now there is a way to network web savvy learners from around the world and turn them loose on engaging content and creative assignments. It’s like learning on steroids. It’s not a replacement for an intimate conservatory-like experience, but maybe not everyone wants/needs/or will pay for a conservatory-like experience. And not all MOOCs are designed well either. It will be very unfortunate if the whole thing shakes out along class lines with only a small portion able to afford friend to friend learning and everyone else relegated to MOOCland whether or not the MOOCs are good and whether or not they’re a good fit for your learning style.

What’s one e-learning problem you wish there was a WordPress plugin for?
Interface design. Collaboration. I’d like to see 3 or 4 different themes (based on the 3 or 4 stellar MOOC platforms I’ve seen) and then I’d like to see a BuddyPress-like plugin (much leaner) that lets students work on teams together and interact with each other. I’d like to see a good page layout plugin too. And everything super mobile friendly. Mobile design for learning is an area where even the major players are lagging.

Why should the WordPress community focus their attention on higher education?
The issue with LMS systems has always been poor interface design. While administrators focus on back end integration and security issues, faculty are usually stuck with clunky tools that make it difficult to engage students. The problem that MIT, Harvard, and Stanford just solved for nearly $100 million is one of interface design i.e. they came up with really nice interfaces that draw you in right away and make you want to engage with the content. Add the social components that weren’t a part of early LMS design, and now you’ve got a great experience all around. But anyone who cares about open education (and open software) wants to see the DIY culture prevail, or at least allow colleges/universities a choice in how they develop online courses. Right now, we can continue to limp along with Moodle which does some nice things but falls short of making it easy to create a dynamic interface or we can hope the WP community will put some muscle into e-learning plugins and themes.

Meet Mika Epstein

IpstenuMika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. She works at DreamHost where she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day.

We caught up with Mika to ask her a few questions about her lightning talk at WordCamp Portland.

How’d you get into contributing to the WordPress.org support forums?
Would you believe I had a question? I was having massive issues with Mod Security (I often call it my arch nemesis – I love it, but man I hate it sometimes) and while I was looking for an answer, I ran into someone’s .htaccess question. I had just faced that myself, so I answered. Then I saw all these questions people had and realized I knew some answers, so I kept answering while code was compiling at work. One thing lead to another, and I told my boss I was volunteering in order to beef up my skills at handling weird requests. Which worked out really well for me!

What’s the most memorable interaction you’ve had with someone in the support forums?
The worst one was the guy who threatened to sic 4chan on me for deleting his posts (which I actually didn’t do). I never laughed so hard.

The best one, though I saved it here:

*Forthcoming caps do indicate yelling.
I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS PLUGIN MY WHOLE LIFE. WHERE THE EFF HAS IT BEEN?! I’VE GOOGLED THE JUNK OUT OF THIS MOTHER.
Thank you for improving my quality of life. I hope that you will fall off a cliff, only to be snatched out of the air at the last second by a friendly dragon-thing (like in Avatar), and carried off to a magical land where you can connect your tail with a tentacle tree and commune telepathically with nature, because then you will feel like I do right now.

How can you beat that!?

For those building plugins and themes, what commonly-missed advice can you offer?
Remember to set up email alerts or RSS alerts for your plugin/theme! You can find that at:

http://profiles.wordpress.org/YOURID/profile/notifications/

You can get email alerts! They rock.

For someone looking for an answer to a problem, how can I increase my likelihood of getting help?
Use a short, descriptive, title, like “When I activate Rickroll, all my videos change to ‘Evolution of Dance’ instead!”

And in the content of the post, be descriptive and list anything you’ve already done. Nothing’s harder to debug than someone saying “It broke!” Remember we can’t see your screen, so saying “My screen is blank white!” is super helpful to us. Saying ‘I tried everything!’ also is less effective than you’d think. What you did was try everything you could think of. I can think of other things you may not have. That’s why you’re asking, right?

Finally, be ready to try things out. You’re now a partner in the debugging process, so you’ll have to get your hands a little dirty. I know Ms. Frizzle would be proud.

Meet Matthew Eppelsheimer

Matthew EppelsheimerMatthew co-founded Rocket Lift, a WordPress development company based here in Portland. His interests span art and beauty, local food, journalism, and the open source cultural revolution. He’s speaking this year about checklists. They’ve tamed complexity in many industries and they can help your web work, too.

We caught up with Matt to ask a few questions about checklists. Read on for his epic answers!

How’d you get interested in checklists (a pretty specific topic)?
I happened to catch an interview on the radio with Atul Gawande, the author of “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”, where he was recounting stories about hospitals bringing rates of infection in some surgical procedures from 10% and higher down to nearly zero, simply by utilizing checklists in surgery. These highly educated doctors and nurses had been trained in all the steps necessary to prevent infection, and yet checklists helped them in dramatic, statistically significant ways. It almost made me angry to learn that deaths and complications from surgery were so easily addressed, by simply enforcing procedure.

But I was also frustrated with our inability at Rocket Lift to stop launching “finished” sites without discovering errors in the weeks that followed, and some of our clients were angry with us too. It was like you could bet good money that we would get something wrong. I was aware of this, and we were looking for issues before launch, but they still crept in. So, I picked up The Checklist Manifesto because I hoped there might be some lessons for us. Maybe our bugs were similar in some way to infections introduced in surgery, and checklists could help us, too.

I really got interested when, just a few pages into the book, Gawande described exactly the conditions of extreme complexity that we work with every day. It turns out that the same issues that give rise to problems in medicine also exist in web development — just as they do in many other fields, like in air travel and in building construction. When every project is different, with more factors and changing conditions than you can count, and you have a bunch of people with different skill sets all working together, then unforeseeable problems will arise, someone might make a bad assumptions, and the team will likely miss a small detail that turns out to be important. That describes “complexity”, and it applies to web design just as well as it applies to surgery. Of course what we do is hard!

Checklists have become the fundamental building block of how Rocket Lift works. I never would have guessed it, but they not only help us to avoid errors, they also help us to apply our learning at a faster pace. We’ve been measuring errors and have seen them drop to near zero, but what’s most interesting is that we don’t repeat mistakes now. Period. When we introduce a problem into a live website, we identify what to do to avoid it in the future, and incorporate the lesson into our checklists. We’re able to focus now on doing even better work, instead of trying and failing to avoid screw ups.

So, checklists excite me because of their amazing superpower to tame the complexity of our work, with dramatic, measurable results. They’ve enabled us to pursue excellence instead of merely avoiding failure (in vain). It’s almost poetic for something so simple to make so many complex problems manageable.

Can you detail the history of checklists a bit? How are they used in other industries?
The idea of a pre-flight checklist has made it into our popular lexicon, but they didn’t always exist. Pilots invented the pre-flight checklist in the 1940s when flying became complicated enough that highly trained expert pilots were dying in accidents. Often this was due to operator error because they neglected something routine.

It’s interesting to me how much this took ego out of the picture. Imagine having tens of thousands of hours of flight time, and all of that training, yet still methodically reviewing simple steps with your co-pilot before take-off. Has the flight plan been filed? Is the trim set? Are the flaps unlocked? Are the oil gauges in the green? … it’s humbling. And yet this is what keeps air travel safer than driving your car. Pilots had the sense to accept that they needed memory aids to get the mundane things right and keep the plane in the air.

Professionals in other industries, like building construction, litigation, investment, and project management have adapted checklists to their needs. One notable idea from the construction industry is including checklist steps to make sure the qualified experts are in communication when they need to be. This is important. Sometimes, we need checklists to remind us of the many little details. Other times, when complex situations arise that a checklist couldn’t have planned for, improvisation is called for. In those cases it’s often important that solutions be vetted by the whole team. For example, if a structural engineer makes a change to a skyscraper during construction to account for something unforeseen, they may need to check in with inspectors, other engineers, and project managers to make sure the solution doesn’t cause additional issues.

The medical field has adopted checklists in a phenomenal way just in the last decade, and thousands — if not millions — of lives have already been saved as a result. No doubt Gawande’s book, published in 2010, has a lot of people thinking more directly about how important checklists can be, and the art of using them to augment a team’s effectiveness.

Applications of checklists in software certainly aren’t new. Software engineers and project managers have been using them for decades to standardize code and prevent errors. In the web design and development world this is becoming more relevant as web programming becomes more sophisticated, and we develop professional specializations around publishing with content strategy and editorial content management.

What’s the composition of a good checklist?
Checklists should have two primary roles: First, to make sure the important steps in procedures are followed. Second, to make sure the knowledgeable brains on the team are in communication. I’ll go into more depth on the checklists Rocket Lift uses in my talk, but here’s one example.

Our checklists for deploying website updates begin with “Talk through steps on this checklist”. This ensures that our standard list has been properly adapted to whatever specific steps we’re taking that day, and to give all team members an opportunity to contribute their perspectives on any risks and how to mitigate them. I’m always amazed at what comes up on the fly in those discussions. We’ve brought together a smart and capable team that already knows what needs to be done. The checklist is mostly concerned with facilitating the team’s communication.

What are your favorite checklist tools?
We use Asana for project management, and it is essentially a glorified list maker, so it lends itself well to making custom checklists.

We like our checklists to be tightly integrated into the work we’re doing, to minimize friction by presenting information exactly when and where we need it. There aren’t any good tools I’m aware of for adding checklists within the WordPress admin itself — yet. I think there’s room for an editorial workflow checklist plugin that might interrupt publishing a post with a checklist and a “confirm publish” button. The checklist could have custom items depending on your needs, items like “add SEO meta tags”, “consider whether your tone is angry and needs revision”, “categorize and tag appropriately”, “preview post”, “customize post slug”, and so on.

And, whenever possible we like to automate steps out of the checklists — for example, using provisioning and build script tools, unit test suites, and WP-CLI… basically, we look for software tools that automatically run through checklists steps for us, and throw up flags if anything needs attention.

What are some ways you’ve adopted checklists at Rocket Lift?
We have one master checklist for starting new projects, which we use for new client intake and setup. It doubles as a project wrap up checklist. We also have a checklist for bringing new team members on board. We have weekly administration checklists and a team meeting agenda — a kind of checklist — that help the company run smoothly.

Then we have more situation-specific technical checklists, like browsers to test against and deployment procedures, which we adapt for specific projects and situations.

We continue to add and update checklists as we grow, to standardize our processes and incorporate our lessons learned. I’m looking forward to giving more examples in the talk, and also having an interactive discussion of the ways audience members can adapt checklists for situations we haven’t thought of yet.

Meet Andy Hayes

92d21a572172b3ff5eae8a3cf37b4a79Andy Hayes is a creative web producer based right here in sunny Portland, Oregon. While his background is in IT, he’s owned a hospitality company, published two books, and has bought & sold a variety of travel and tourism websites. He joins us this year to talk through some website critiques, what works, and what doesn’t.

What’s the best way for me to come prepared for the session?
I can’t critique everyone’s website in this session, so regardless, I encourage you to come to this session knowing two things: what parts of your site you think are the best, or most popular, and what parts of your site you think could be better. You’ll find this useful info as we go through the critiques.

If I wanted to hire someone to make a website for me, what should I look for? How do I judge someone to see if they’ll produce what I want?
Web design involves a lot of personal preferences – it’s like interior design, if you don’t like pink, it’s not because pink is bad or wrong, you just don’t like it. So while it’s important to look at a web designer’s portfolio and ask for relevant examples & testimonials, the most important thing to look for in a web designer is communication skills. You want someone that understands your comfort level with technology and is able to communicate with you in a style that works for you – some of us are phone people; some of us are email people. Maybe you like using drawings and pictures, or maybe you only work via smoke signal. If you have a designer that you can communicate with effectively, all things can be conquered.

What work managing my website should I take on myself, and what should I hire out for?
For tasks and activities core to the business and change regularly – for example, updating your restaurant menu or posting a weekly sales special – I think business owners should be empowered to be able to make these changes; whether you choose to do them or choose to outsource them is a business decision, but you need to be able to get by if your contractor goes out of business. For bigger projects and technical work, if you aren’t a web designer, you shouldn’t be doing that work – bring in help to do the heavy lifting.

How should I consider my business’ web presence when running the business is a full-time job in itself?
In today’s marketplace, this question is like asking “how should I consider managing my voicemail and phone calls when running the business is a full-time job.” It’s non-negotiable – if you want to be competitive and relevant, you need a website. Having said that, you need to get clarity on what’s important for your customers, provide that, and everything else is a bonus. The magic is finding out that sweet spot, which is different for every business. For example, you have a restaurant? You need hours and location, reservations info, and specials/menus. That’s what potential and current customers expect. However, a motivational speaker will be more focused on videos of his/her previous work, testimonials, and pricing guidelines. The customers have totally different expectations. What are your customers’ expectations?

Meet Bob Dunn

Bob DunnBob Dunn is a WordPress coach and trainer who’s spoken at everything from BlogWorld and New Media Expo in New York to various WordCamps. He’s coming to WordCamp Portland this year to talk about how to make your WordPress knowledge stick. Whether you are learning WordPress yourself or teaching others, Bob will have something that will help you.

We chatted with Bob about his talk, blogging workflow, and more.

As someone who wants to learn how to use WordPress, how can I come best prepared to maximize what I learn from your talk?
Of course you should bring your laptop, iPad, or even a pen and paper to jot down a few notes. But more than that, be ready to focus on the content and give some thought to how it applies to you. The best preparation is to come with an open mind and a degree of flexibility. We each have our own unique way of learning and the takeaways will be different for each person. If you stay open to new ideas, you may discover additional ways of learning WordPress that you have never considered before.

What’s typically the hardest topic for a new WordPress user to pick up?
There are quite a few, depending on at what point you drop into WordPress. One of the most confusing to someone starting to explore WordPress is understanding the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Most of us in the community use that terminology, but it might make more sense to say WordPress.com vs. A Self-Hosted WordPress site and go from there. I cannot tell you how many people have asked me where they can start their blog on WordPress.org, or even tell me that someone is setting up their new site on WordPress.org.

What does your blogging workflow look like these days?
A bit neurotic, at least in some people’s minds. Some bloggers use an editorial calendar to plan and schedule their content. Since I try to post 4-5 times a week, often I spend part of my Sunday writing them all. But I tend to get distracted by shiny objects and new WordPress stuff, so often I readjust what I’m publishing to fit into a last-minute post. I do all my posts by directly typing them into the editor window. Also, if I am doing videos, I need to work those in as well. Often, depending on my time, a post with screenshots will win out over a video, as the video takes longer to produce, edit and get ready for the public. I think every blogger has to find what works best for them.

What’s your favorite tool to archive all of your knowledge, and how do you use it?
One word. Evernote. There are so many reasons this works for me. It makes organizing all the resources I find and my own thoughts easy, which saves me a ton of time I used to spend bookmarking pages in my browser. Make sure to come to my session to learn exactly how I use it.

Meet Christina Elmore

Christina got into the nuts and bolts of ebook production in 2010 and has enjoyed watching the ecosystem mature. She’s speaking this year about how to most effectively make a book from a blog. We covered a few questions about her talk, ebooks, and more.

Who can make their own ebook? (Not to be confused with the question of who should make their own ebook.)
Just about anyone can get basic text content into an ebook format. The process isn’t quite as simple (and definitely not as delightful) as making a WordPress site, but it’s moving in that direction. Create a Word document with clean, consistent formatting (but no images or tables, folks), upload the file, fill out some form fields and you’ve got an ebook for sale on Amazon.

Just like websites, it gets more complicated when you want to tweak formatting, include images, display information in a table, or customize a table of contents. And you’ve got to figure out formats: will the EPUB file work on a Kindle and my mom’s iPad? (Answer: no. But you can use yet another tool to convert EPUB to a Kindle-ready format.)

If you want to publish an ebook that goes beyond the basics, you need some additional skills and a good tolerance for trial and error. Experience with HTML and CSS will help, and you can use Adobe InDesign to layout a print book and export to the EPUB format. There are also author-services companies that offer ebook production, as well as many other publishing services like editing, cover design, printing, and marketing. Finally, there’s a book publishing platform called Pressbooks that’s built on WordPress—it’s an especially good choice for writing teams with multiple contributors and editors.

Your tools of choice should depend on your range of skills. And that’s part of what stalls people who are trying to get started: which tools do I really need and when is it worth paying an expert? The bottom line is that it’s doable for an amateur to produce a high quality ebook without web or book publishing experience.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in publishing ebooks?
Let me count the ways. . . My biggest single mistake was to expect a degree of standardization that isn’t there. It was (still is, but less so) chaotic: a messy environment in which the publishing powers were enforcing a lowest common denominator. And most of the e-publishing tools looked like they escaped from a Gateway PC running Windows 98. I wasted a lot of time looking for an existing tool, model, or guideline that I could trust. (For most web developers, a state of evolving standards is the norm, but it was foreign to me.) I certainly couldn’t look to the traditional publishing houses for best practices. I’ve come to take delight in the shifting landscape of ebook production, but it was a challenge at first.

What’s the coolest WordPress-powered author website you’ve come across, and why?
Hugh Howey is worth checking out. His site is built on WordPress, he’s a self-published author who’s had great success, and he uses his site to engage readers. Howey works on multiple pieces at once, and he keeps readers clued in to his progress with a simple bit of code that calculates words written against each story’s total expected word count. It displays as progress bars on the left side of every page. (The tool originated with National Novel Writing Month, and I think there’s a petition out there to have George R. R. Martin start using it.) Howey also promotes fan fiction and fan art on his site and sells DRM-free and signed copies.