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WordCamp Boston 2012 Review

Serendipity

This year's WordCamp Boston went off with an interesting start. I got there about half an hour early, grabbed a coffee sat down at one of the tables in the keynote area. After chatting with the only other person at the table for a bit, something sounded strangely familiar. When I mentioned I lived in the South End, she figured it out. We sat almost at the exact same spot, during breakfast, and chatted at last year's WordCamp. What are the chances?

Introvert

The opening keynote speaker was non other than Diane Darling the famous FFI and author of The Networking Survival Guide, and "how to work a room". She gave her usual funny and insightful talk about how Introverts can still network effectively.

Stylesheet Preprocessors

First session I attended is "How we can have nice things" by K Adam White. My main take away was the benefits of using a stylesheet preprocessor, like SASS or LESS. I know of LESS from the bootstrap CSS framework but have yet to try it. Now there is a reason to try it. One thing that I wish LESS support is the @extend feature, which would allow clean rule inheritance in the CSS.

To make any of these work, one should get node.js working on your desktop environment so that you can run javascript at command line.

Wordpress Optimization

A talk on Wordpress Optimization by Ben Metcalfe, co founder of WP Engine, which also which gave out the coolest t-shirts at this unconference. He gave a useful set of recommendations:

A funny fact is that he listed a list of plug-ins to avoid -- things like broken link checkers. Later on, in another session on SEO, another speaker recommend using the same plug-in. Ben is right of course, broken link checking should be done outside of WordPress.

Wordpress as an Application Framework

This talk was not what I expected. The presenter created a piece of code to allow PHP code to access a global (singleton) object, which is useful for adding more functionality to Wordpress. But that is far from being an application framework. Is is more in the line of -- if you want to stick with wordpress and knows PHP, this is one approach for writing more custom PHP code.

Content and more Content

After lunch I switched track and attended the sessions on content and SEO. Jeff Cutler gave an entertaining talk about the process of creating content.

  • addictomatic, a search aggregation site (like duckduckgo) is a site that I didn't know about, and
  • the importance of an editorial calendar -- I know I should use one, but now I am convinced.
  • YouTube, storify and instagram seems now to be "valid" channels to consider when cross posting content

SEO

No wordpress conference would be complete if I did not attend a session on SEO. I sat in on a session by Casie Gillette . She recommended a few tools that I did not know about:

  • Screaming Frog's SEO Spider
  • sharing plug-ins: sharebar and sharaholic
  • Google authorship markup is all the rage apparently, it is a way to have Google recognize your blog posts with you as the author, showing your picture alongside search results. The authorsure plug-in is one way to handle it.
  • related posts link using YARPP

Podcasting

The last session that I attended is Guerilla Podcasting by Lanna Lee Maheux. She makes a good case of using a podcast specific hosting service for the podcast because they will charge by size vs bandwidth. If you have a successful podcast you will be paying bandwidth costs if you host the files at a normal hosting company. Libsyn, buzzsprout and blubrry are the three sites that she mentioned.

Final Thoughts

Due to scheduling conflict I had to leave wordcamp early. There were other sessions that I wanted to attend. All the sessions were tapped and should be available online. Overall I like this year's program better. I still think there are one SEO session too many. I wish they have more case studies instead.

Family living, South End vs Lexington

Now that we moved, I have started blogging at the Lexington Patch. This article talks about my initial observation about what has changed from living in the South End to living in Lexington. One additional point about our move -- our new place is very close to Lexington Center. So everything is within walking distance, exactly like the South End. While we miss the Chinese supermarkets and Peters Park, we still get the benefits of having everything else very close by. If we have to get into a car to drive 5 minutes to get to anything, we may feel a little differently.

 

Flower thief caught

I planted some nice petunias along our driveway in the new house. One day later all the flowers were gone or broken off. Neighborhood kids? I don't think so. Today I caught the thief red handed. Not only he munched away most of the flowers, he is sunning himself two feet away. He did not even move when I got this close to take the picture.

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How to Adjust IKEA SAVERN Shower Curtain Rod

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I do not buy spring loaded shower curtain rod too often so I often forget how to install and adjust one. After the move I bought a IKEA Savern show curtain rod and for a few minutes cannot figure out how to adjust the length. Then it came back to me. You just PULL. There is a lot of built in resistance inside the rods to keep them attached. You just have to pull really hard to extend the rod until it is just a little longer than what you need. Another tip: If you ended up pulling the two rods apart, make sure you insert the smaller rod back into the larger rod spring side last. The spring at the end of the smaller rod is supplying the tensions.

Nice Folks, Mean Folks Part Two

In my previous post, I described the nice things that happened this morning. This post tells you about the not so nice people I encountered today. Remember my "dumber than a dumbbell" post last year? I thought that is behind me but I thought wrong. My Tai Chi student has signed up for some program at the Boston Sports Club that gives her a lot of coupons for "free friends visit". So she has been using them on and off to get me into the club to do the Tai Chi class. Since she has been away for almost two months we actually have not been going for awhile. Today, only our second time since the beginning of Summer, a BCS staff stopped us at the entrance.

"You can't use that coupon, it is for new visitors only", she waved that in front of my friends face. My friend explained that she was told that she could. In fact, the only reason she signed up for the special program is to get those coupons to use for the Tai Chi classes. "No you cannot, see what it says here" the lady pointed at this little postage stamp sized coupon again.

The conversation went downhill from there. I explain to the lady that I am truly puzzled why she explicitly go out of her way to annoy my friend and myself. I told her the additional irony -- I just received a flying from (a different location up the street) BCS offering corporate membership at my office. And her attitude turns me off Boston Sports Club completely.

I really try to understand this lady's mental process (or the lack of). What does she think she is doing? Is she profiting from this or being hurt by this. Today we paid the extra $15 guest fee. So Town Sports made $15. Hurrah! But would we ever go back again? Highly unlikely. So there is no future $15. My friend currently has a family membership. She is so annoyed that she wants to quit now. So that are more hundred of dollars of annual due lost. Why?

You think the lost of one membership is not a big deal. But this is a tight neighborhood. This is my second blog posts that I am writing on this topic. Will this in anyway be positive PR for Boston Sports Club? Or negative?

I quickly checked their yelp listing here. Here are some juicy excerpts:

  • "Staff, including the General Mgr. in particular, often looks like they would rather be anywhere else.  Can't say I blame them, but it's called "acting", I do it at my job all the time."
  • "The hairdryer holders in the women's locker rooms are all broken so the hairdryers just lay on the shelves leaving no room for toiletries etc. Towels are thin with wear. The staff, both front desk and trainers, are indifferent. Asking a question generates attitude - especially the trainers."
  • "The 1-star is for the woman who handles the memberships at this location. Every time I talk to her, she gives me incorrect information. She seems so vibrant, confident and well-versed that you want to believe her - sadly it's a facade."
  • "The staff always says "Have a good workout" even though they clearly don't mean it and don't care."

Enough said.

Nice Folks, Mean Folks

Two things happened today within 10 minutes of each other. Once involved a Boston Police officer. One involve a neighborhood health club manager. If you guessed the nice folk is the Boston Police officer, you are correct. I parked my car on the street early in the morning today right next to my loft and my office. I did not see a poorly taped sign that says temporary no parking. (I still cannot read it). Late morning I got a phone call from an unknown number. This is what happened:

The police officer, instead of towing my car away because turned out that they are doing construction around my parking spot, looked up the registration. He then walked around the block to my building. Fortunately he miss read the loft unit number and knocked on my old neighbors door. They answered the door and rightfully was surprised that a police is at the door. The nice police officer explained that, instead of towing my car, he just want the owner to move it. Once my neighbor realized what is going on, he called me on the phone. I ran downstairs, moved the car and waved a quick thank you to the officer standing next to the construction site.

There is a bit of luck involved here, with the police officer knocked on the wrong door, and that my neighbor was home. But clearly he could have just towed my car. Instead, he and my neighbor saved me a lot of brief and money.

The mean folks tale is here in a different blog post.