Follow-up: Wordcamp Romania (Codecs, 2009.09.16-17)

On September 16th and 17th I took part to Wordcamp Romania. Here are my thoughts on this. What did I learn at the conference? Note: WP = WordPress; CMS = content management system; Most of the links lead to Romanian pages, sorry about that;

Day 1 (see the pictures I made for day 1)

[alpine-phototile-for-picasa-and-google-plus src="user_album" uid="105739282412330811858" ualb="5384884852829540129" imgl="fancybox" style="wall" row="4" size="640" num="100" highlight="1" align="center" max="100"] Videos for day 1: Nikolay BACHIYSKI: News about WP (video I made) (see his presentation online) - words to describe WP: power, freedom, confusion, income, ladies, gentlemen; - WP is more of a cultural thing, rather than a software thing; - WP project started due to sharing; - WP has a GPL (General Public License); - sharing has become an integral part of WP community; - there was a community pressure on WP; - everyone can make a piece of software, but it is the sharing of contributors that gives WP power; - Wordcamps are an excellent method of sharing knowledge; - through sharing, even if you give some of your time away, you will learn more things; you may even give yourself a bigger gift than to others; On WP MU: - MU = Multi User; - for blog hosting - totally open source; BuddyPress - a social network in a box; bbPress - forums in WP style; Backpress - management of software projects (web based); P2 - when you write something on the blog, it appears in real time (instant blogging); WP 2.9: - will allow moving to trash (instead of instant and permanent deleting); - in the future: a. better documentation (hand books); b. photo albums; c. will try to be a good framework for more development of features; Lorand MINYO: Hosting for blogs (video I made) (and another video) (see his presentation online) - Orădeanul (the blogger from Oradea) should have held this presentation; - Webfactor hosts a lot of blogs, even some from Top 10 ZeList; - WP is of great help to hosting providers; - Cabral shared his user and password in public; - a lot of people hacked his blog; - WP is scalable; - are there problems with updating WP? Solution: the hosting provider should do the update; - for very popular bloggers there are problems on things such as: hacking, flooding (database interrogations); - one year ago, less than 1% of web sites used WP as a CMS, now it's about 40%; most surprisingly - this applies not only to individuals, but to companies (using WP as a CMS); - what do bloggers want: uptime, performance, scalability, low costs; yes, all four in the same time would be great; - you shouldn't use poor plugins; - you should update WP CMS as soon as possible; - avoid using WP hacks; - types of hosting: a. shared hosting; b. VPS; c. dedicated hosting; - caching data? Perfect solution; Alexandru NEGREA: How to choose a WP theme? (video I made) (see his presentation online) (see the author's thoughts on the event) - there are a few types of themes: a. Free themes; b. Paid themes, but with author rights (links in footer, for example); c. Paid themes, made exclusively for one blog (no links in footer) - not recommended if you don't blog professionally; - for the free themes: a. there is not a readme.txt (how do I change a picture in the theme?); b. free themes? Not recommended by Alexandru NEGREA; c. You usually can't find a perfect theme; - today's free themes are not really that good (design, programming, support); - premium themes with author rights (links in footer) are an excellent option for users; - recommended web site: ElegantThemes.com; - any blogger should have a PayPal account; - TemplateMonster.com has great options for buying themes: unique themes (expensive) and generic themes (much cheaper); - the classical WP theme has no appeal; - do you have a niche blog? You need a clear visual identity; - own a personal blog? Your blog needs personality / identity; - a paid theme has a better structure of information; - green and orange, used for communication purposes, are very effective colors; (they suggest a call-to-action) - SmashingMagazine.com - great place to look for themes; - on a side note, don't search on Google, it tends to provide results which lack value added; Solution? Search on Twitter; - Alex BUGA sold his blog theme to a museum; the best WP theme in Romania? - it's perfectly fine to start designing a theme from the default theme; - there is a WP plugin that makes a WP theme look great on mobile phones, also; Andrei ROŞCA: Team blogging (video I made) (see his presentation online) (his own blog post on the presentation) - you should take community very seriously; - team blogs and niche blogs may be more valuable than a personal weblog; - this is a great world (nice blogs and Web 2.0 are based on this) - but all these require a community: a. open society; b. unrestricted access to knowledge; c. unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance; - in order to make money from blogging, you have to have good quality publishing; - it will be very hard to make money from a blog if you're alone; - there is a book exchange initiated by BookBlog in a lot of counties; - from many perspectives, an online business is similar to an offline one; - what would the value of BookBlog be? A blog with a similar content, with no team, with no board, could cost from 80,000 EUR; - the price for a paid book review on BookBlog is 80 RON (this is the amount authors receive); - types of incomes for BookBlog: a. advertorials; b. RSS advertising; c. banners; d. paid book reviews; - (gotta love this) efficiency means doing things with a good result (good performance), while efficacy means doing the right things; - you shouldn't tell your team about money; it's all about goals, and values, and dreams and future; - it's great to have offline meetings for online teams; you can't force people to be friends, you can only provide a context; Cristina ANDREI: SEO vs. Copywriting (see her presentation online) - normally, you shouldn't have to pick between SEO or copywriting, they should coexist; - copywriting is a persuasive text (used not only for banners and ads) that should convince readers to read the text (i.) and forward it (ii.); - in the Romanian blogosphere there are some misconceptions: a. Keyword stuffing (in titles, meta description, h1, ALT, link title) is fine; b. Link exchange; c. SPAM comments; - you should comment on blogs with relevant ideas, rather than spamming with comments; - how to promote a blog post? Twitter, ProBlogger, FTW; - recommended plugin: All in One SEO pack; Costin COCIOABĂ: Niche blogs (video I made) (see his presentation online) (thoughts on this) - journalists, TV stars, singers, even responsibility actions - they are the ones with the most traffic on ZeList; - magazine styles WP themes - make a blog similar to a big publisher; - a niche blog can attract the right audience; - when you have a blog, you're actually a publisher; - in Romania there are not good niche blogs: auto, finance, etc.; - tips on making money out of a blog: RSS advertising and affiliate marketing; - if you want to become a successful publisher, you have to be informed; - niche blogging require permanent testing; - there was no plan behind refresh.ro; - main communication theme for refersh.ro - objective communication; - you should use tags on your blog - mostly for people and actions; - motivations based on money are not that important;

Day 2 (see the pictures I made for day 2)

[alpine-phototile-for-picasa-and-google-plus src="user_album" uid="105739282412330811858" ualb="5384886263371692913" imgl="fancybox" style="wall" row="4" size="640" num="100" highlight="1" align="center" max="100"] Videos for day 2: WP Themes Pavel CIORICI (video I made) (see his presentation online) - I can't work 10 hours a day for a theme, so in two weeks time I can do a WP theme for scratch; - there is an open forum with help for themes; We answer 2-3 times per day to the topics; - the reason our themes are bought is mostly customer support, but also the unique design (the theme won't be common on other web sites) and functionality; - IE (Internet Explorer) 6 has some rendering problems with themes; - we offer 25% commission to our affiliates; there are 300+ other blogs that mention our new themes; the affiliate system is very good for us; Alexandru NEGREA (video I made) (see the author's thoughts on the event) - it's a great thing to be able to live out of selling themes; - freelancing may be a good method of doing things; Răzvan TÎRBOACĂ (video I made) (author thoughts) - Strategic web site needed a CMS; - we tested Drupal, Joomla! and WP as CMS; WP was best; - the main requirement was ease of use to non-technical users; this should also be the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of WP in front of other CMS; - clients need specific solutions from WP, and this is the thing you should sell; - WP is free and it's not fair to ask for money for it; Instead, custom services are great; - you should sell WP as a CMS, rather than as a blog; - case studies are great solution when selling something; - you should use tags a lot; - web site architecture should be incorporated into design, rather than programming; - a web 2.0 approach - using tools from other providers; - rather than selling WP installing (done easily), you should sell custom themes and programming; - put some emphasis on hosting and security; - when asked for supplemental security, you should require an extra payment and provide hosting with firewall, for example; - on a side note, it may be fine to start a company in Cyprus, due to fiscal laws in that state; WP Development & Plugins Cristi BURCĂ (video I made) (see his presentation online) (thoughts) - taxonomy is a way of classifying things (both blog posts and blog pages); it refers to making some compartments for easy finding of information later on; - in WP there are two types of predefined taxonomies: categories and tags; - in WP you can have multiple set of tags; - for advanced use of WP as CMS you can use advanced taxonomies; there are plugins dedicated to that; - the permalinks look great on taxonomies; - taxonomies are nicely stored in WP database; Dan ŞTEFANCU (video I made) (idea 1 , idea 2) - custom fields are not that complicated; - custom fields are neither tags nor categories; - instead they are additional fields used for adding extra information; - for a real estate web site, you can add custom fields with information about each property; - you can adapt the WP dashboard to use your very own custom fields; - custom fields are easy to use, a lot of them can be added to any post, they are store in a personalized way, they can be shown everywhere (even in feeds); Alex MIHĂILEANU (video I made) (see his presentation online) (his own message on the blog) - you should give your themes an easy design and coding; - coding things in a good manner right from the start means less work later on; - less plugins? Great! Lesser server load; - Piticu has a slow server due to a widget in the sidebar; - you can edit the plugins to get only the code you need it; - WP is so easy, anyone could learn how to use it; Ciprian TURCU (video I made) (see his presentation online) (blog message) - WP recently hit 50 million downloads recently; - WP is an extraordinary environment for designing web sites; - if you have knowledge with PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, you will have an easy life with WP; - when designing plugins, there are ways to call already written functions (hooks) for a lot of things; - there are a lot of plugins only compatible with early versions of WP - this is a problem, but also an opportunity (you can do an updated version of an old plugin); - when working at a plugin, you should take into account name functions - giving original names for functions (FTest48Original3name), rather than generic ones (FunctionName) would help prevent compatibility problems; - there might be version problems with other plugins or with WP; - a lot of plugins might encounter problems with design - there are differences in the CSS of the blogs, sidebar width, things of this sort; - there is little feed-back to plugins - why someone uses a plugin? It's not that easy to register at WP, creating an account, posting a question; you can't post anonymous comments and feed-back; Călin DON: WP MU (video I made) (see his presentation online) (see more about Călin DON) (see a blog post on this) - initial server configuration (1+ year old) held 10 active blogs: 196 MB RAM, Apache server, PHP Fast CGI configured; - current configuration includes 1.2 GB of RAM, nginx, PHP FPM; - the current configuration requires few RAM (8 MB of RAM can process 1.000 queries); - some requests can be processed via a caching system; - you can send files in accelerated method (they are sent automated by the web server); - PHP FPM (PHP's Fascia) works as an application server (you can separate the web server from WP); it allows running process with different rights (per blog for instance); - we try to fully use the system resources of the server; - recommended plugin: WP Super Cache; you can run up to 30 times more requests from the server; - we also use APC; - we started the blogging platform as one made for our friends; when the user count become too large, we installed WP MU; - our current version, we have a svn-core (for WP installation), svn-plugins (WP plugins), svn-mu-plugins (plugins specific for WP MU), svn-themes (the themes users can pick); Managers blogs Mircea SCĂRLĂTESCU (video I made) (see his presentation online) (thoughts 1 & thoughts 2) - in 2006 I started reading some blogs I liked; I liked Zoso's blog; I had only a few posts; - in 2007 I started writing more for the business area; - June 1^st 2007 gives the first link from Orlando NICOARA; - on August 1^st 2007 I got on a first fight with Zoso; - today I have a big influence, and not that great traffic; - I earned no money from blogging; - personal branding might be a very good reason to start a blog; it's one good reason to start a blog; - most of the money in blogging will come from the networking starting from the blogging; - it's very cheap to get press coverage via a blog that has a good readership; - you can easily be taken into account by important players in the online world; - blogs can make relations between humans more personal; - competition will also take a look on your blog; Bogdan Theodor OLTEANU (video I made) (see his presentation online) (blog post) - why blog? a. experimenting social media b. know online people; c. learn communication techniques; d. an extend pool for recruiting; - in PR (Public Relations) it is important to have a good team; - choosing WP as a blogging platform was the decision of an IT person; - via social media you can transmit information about the company team, team culture and managing style; - thousand of potential employees have social media accounts; you can see a person's behavior online; - in five years time, PR might move online; - there is no such thing as total sincerity, neither online nor offline; - if you are realist, you realize there are masks that people wear; - especially multinational companies use social media, mostly due to an overall direction given by mother companies; Radu GEORGESCU (video I made) - Adriana IORDAN said that there are things to be said on a blog; they belong neither in a personal blog, nor in a company blog; - in Romania it would be useful to have a community of IP (Intellectual Property); - IP is a business with exponential growth, compared to the invested resources; - in software development, internet dot com portals, social media - after an initial investment, it is very easy to grow; - in Romania there are three examples of successful companies which are frequently provided: BitDefender, Softpedia, GeCad; but the list is much longer; - online advertising in Romania? It had a premature death, perhaps it even didn't start; - ideally, you should find another way of monetizing the blog, rather than by advertising; - blog to read: Marriott on the Move - Bill Marriott's Blog; Company blogs Silviu TOMA (video I made) - you can't really tell what would be people's reaction prior to launching a blog; - a good approach to negative comments would be solving the presented issues; - it would be useful for a whole team to be present on a company blog; - campaign - "Write something so that you will receive a book"; main idea - promote Nemira's values; the campaign helped raising awareness of the blog; in 3 months a community of both commentators and bloggers was created; - prior to starting a blog, you should create a good atmosphere in the company regarding blogging itself; Daniela DUMITRICĂ - Paralela 45 worked hard for a new blog; Adriana IORDAN (video I made) - how can you attract with your marketing campaigns the trust of some companies? Tricky question; Another one: how can you promote the implementation of an IT solution in a company? - Avangate offers software vendors an eCommerce platform; - GECAD ePayment is an online payment solution; - on the international market there was a lot of competition; - how to promote a business solution? Become an expert in your niche; the expertise of someone can be easily spotted; - we did some SEO for keywords; - our focus was content marketing; - we identified online communities that could help promoting our business; - after a good online presence, we found good ideas about some blog articles to create; - cool blog: MyAdobe; Also Balsamiq Blog;

About the event itself - feed-back to the organizers

What I liked about the event? Wordcamp Romania had good speakers, nice room for the event, plenty of participants. What would I do better next year? Longer days, better presentation systems. Who were the top speakers? 1. I liked a lot Adriana IORDAN's speech; Imagine hearing a person talking on SEO (search engine optimization) using white hat techniques, natural growth, all that on a large company; With results, a good case study, funny speech; About this speech - content (of the speech) was king; 2. I also like Costin COCIOABĂ's speech; Funny, straight to the point, with key facts and real life examples; Very entertaining, he went for some raise of hands; About this speech - a lot of courage; 3. 3^rd place is shared equally by Radu GEORGESCU, with good good and valuable information, and Andrei ROŞCA, with a very pleasant to see speech and in the same time good content. Would I recommend you to participate next year? Yes, Wordcamp Romania was a very nice event overall.

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