WordCamps are conferences that focus on everything WordPress. They’re informal, community-organised events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas and get to know each other.

The Gold Coast WordCamp consisted of two tracks. A high Tech Track and a Low Tech Track. This meant that there was something for everyone, no matter what your WordPress experience.

I’ll briefly go through the sessions that I attended but if you’re interested in reviewing the full schedule for the weekend, you can find it on the WordCamp Gold Coast website.

Saturday November 5

Kate Swaffer — Using WordPress to capture memories
The day started off with a moving talk by Kate Swaffer. Kate was diagnosed with a rare younger onset dementia when she was 49. She spoke and presented a video about her life, living with dementia and how she uses WordPress as a personal journal. As it’s getting harder and harder for her to recall past events, blogging helps her to remember her life.

There are over 1500 cases of dementia diagnosed each week and as yet, there is still no cure.

Kate’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/using-wordpress-to-capture-memories-by-kate-swaffer

Dan Milward — How to facilitate and Build an open Source Community
Dan is the man behind the wildly popular WP e-Commerce plugin, which at last count, has over 1.7 million downloads. He spoke about what you can do to create a successful open source community. Key points included finding a niche market and how important it is to be innovative rather than simply copying where others have been.

John Ford — How Automattic works across 20 countries with 95 employees
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet and numerous other popular tools . It’s founder, Matt Mullenweg, is the man behind WordPress.

John gave us a really interesting talk on what it’s like to work for Automattic and their culture. He also spoke about how they manage to operate with staff residing all around the world and some of the tools he uses in his day to day activities. John currently heads up the VaultPress team.

Some of the tools used by John and his team include:

• Jabber – used for chat/forum notifications
• Skype – used for voice chats
• Kickoff – collaboration tool for small groups
• Optimizely – A/B testing
• Kissmetrics – Web analytics
• P2 WordPress theme – used for blogging

Stew Heckenberg — Freelance FTW (Strategies for Success, Pitfalls to avoid)
Stew lead off his talk with a great quote from his father. “The world runs on 98% bullshit and 2% brains”. Using this “philosophy”, Stew outlined some simple steps to take to accomplish your goal of working from home (or wherever you like), while still keeping hours that suit your lifestyle.

Dee Teal — Getting to Grips with Genesis (A WordPress Framework)
Starting the afternoon sessions off was Dee with a really interesting discussion on the Genesis WordPress Framework. The Genesis Framework is one of the more popular WordPress frameworks that are around. Dee discussed the benefits of using a framework like Genesis and also briefly outlined its use of Hooks, Actions & Filters.

Dee’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/word-camp-twp4by3

Japh Thomson — Code quality standards and best practices
Japh gave a fantastic talk on the importance of coding standards and the use of best practices. Not only is this going to help yourself, but in the long run, it’ll also help your users, clients, the community in general and potential employers. Japh provided some great links that are a “must read” if you plan on developing any WordPress themes, plugins or getting involved with core updates.

• WordPress Coding Standards
• CSS Coding Standards
• Site Design and Layout
• Theme Review
• WordPress API’s
• Creating Tables with Plugins

Japh’s presentation can be found at http://japh.com.au/wcgc2011/

Anthony Cole — WordPress Plugin Development 101
Anthony shared his extensive knowledge in developing WordPress plugins. It was a great presentation if you’ve not yet begun to develop plugins. As part of his presentation, he briefly discussed WordPress Actions & Filters along with the various API’s that are available for use within WordPress.

John O’Nolan —
Designing Emotion – Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience
The first day ended with one of, if not THE highlight of the weekend, listening to John’s session on Designing Emotion. John is an extremely talented user interface and user experience designer out of the UK. Lucky for us, Australia is the first leg of his newly embarked world travels. He’s packed his bags and is travelling around the world for an indefinite period, working, blogging & taking photos. You can follow his adventures on his website.

John has worked with the likes of Virgin, Microsoft & Google and is also a WordPress Core UI group contributor. His talk centered around how design evokes an emotional response. It makes users feel an emotion and great design creates an awesome experience.

John’s presentation can be found at
http://speakerdeck.com/u/johnonolan/p/designing-emotion-1

Sunday November 6

Troy Dean – Running a Small Business as a WordPress Developer
Sunday started off a little later than the previous day. The first talk I attended was a really interesting one on running a small business as a WordPress Developer. Troy had some fantastic tips on running your business efficiently and I think they apply to any small business, not just WordPress developers specifically. Some of the points he specifically mentioned were:

• Use templates for proposals. No need to re-write everything, everytime
• Follow up proposals with a phone call, 5 days later
• Payment terms – 40% Deposit, 30% Design pmt (after completed design), 30% Final pmt (prior to “go live”)
• Limit your number of design revisions to two
• Feature creep – Quote only after payment has been made for website
• Follow up client 1 month after release/training. Use this opportunity to ask if there’s anything else they require, such as email marketing or a social media strategy. You can also ask for a testimonial.

Some of the useful sites that Troy mentioned were:

• Andy Clarke’s Contract killer
• Wireframe Sketcher
• Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me.

Troy’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/word-camp-gold-coast-notes

Dion Hulse, John O’Nolan, John Ford & Dan Milward — Live Panel
Originally this was just going to be a session with Dion on What I’ve Learnt From Working In Open-Source but it was then decided, since there were so many talented people from other countries who had come over, why not take advantage of it. It was turned into a live panel discussion on not only the Open-Source environment of WordPress but on all sorts of other topics, offered up from audience questions. It was awesome to hear the thoughts of these guys who are so involved with WordPress one way or another.

One of the points that really stood out and agreed upon among all the panel, was the benefit in getting more involved in the WordPress community, whether that’s through core commits, UI design, testing beta releases or even just helping people on the WordPress forums. If you’re interested in following along with development updates, check out the official blog for the core development team.

Stephen Cronin — WordPress and Government – The Australian Perspective
Stephen gave a really interesting perspective on what it’s like to work in an Australian Government environment and how and where they’re using WordPress. He spoke about some of the challenges of working in such an environment, such as their prolific use of IE6 (Eeek!). He also touched on some of the other government sites in other countries that are using WordPress, including:

• alpha.gov.uk blog – An experimental prototype (an ‘alpha’) of a new, single website for UK Government
• The Official site for the British Prime Minister’s Office
• Library of Congress blog

Stephen’s presentation (minus the images) can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/sjcronin99/stephen-cronin-wordpress-and-government

Bronson Quick — Supercharging WordPress with BuddyPress!
The last session for the weekend was from Bronson on implementing BuddyPress. BuddyPress can turn your site into a complete social network. It comes with activity streams, forums, mentions (ala Twitter), friending and private messaging. This was a live demo of setting up a BuddyPress site and so was a great insight into just how easy it is to get the default site working. Bronson also mentioned some of the great plugins that are available for increasing user engagement and just generally improving your site:

• BuddyPress Default Data plugin – Populate your site with a bunch of test users, friends, messages, etc.
• Achievements plugin – Adds awards/badges onto Buddypress
• BuddyPress Likes plugin – Gives users the ability to ‘like’ content across your site
• Welcome Pack – Automatically send friend/group invites and a welcome message to new users
• BuddyPress Activity Plus – Gives your social network all the features and ease of Facebook when it comes to uploading and sharing media
• BP Labs – Among other things, provides autosuggest for usernames

Bronson’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/supercharging-wordpress-with-buddypress

Presentations for the other speakers not listed, can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/presentations

Conclusion…

WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 was Awesome!! This was the very first WordCamp that I’ve been to and I had a fantastic time. As well as getting the chance to hear some extremely talented people discussing various topics, it was a great opportunity to network and meet folks who I’ve only ever “talked to” online, as well as meet lots of new friends. I know it definitely wont be my last WordCamp!

Did you manage to make it up to this one or have you been to other WordCamps? Leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to hear

Just over two years ago now I wrote a post giving 13 Reasons Why Vista Is Crap. In it I mentioned that I couldn’t wait for Windows 7 to be officially released later that year, and at the time, I couldn’t! Vista really is the biggest piece of shit out there! Well, after running Windows 7 for almost 2 years, I’m ready to kick this OS to the curb as well. It’s definitely nowhere near as bad as Vista, but it’s still crap.

So what wrong with Windows 7?

Well, for starters, it’s memory management sucks ass. I’m talkin’ serious suckage! I got so sick of applications constantly displaying “Not Responding” whenever you had more than one app open! God forbid you have multiple apps running in a multitasking Operating System!

Both Vista and Windows 7 run SuperFetch technology. It basically fills up your RAM with what it thinks you’ll need. This is why, if you look in Task Manager on the Performance tab, you’ll see your Free memory usually sitting around the low teens or single digits. Personally, I don’t think it does a very good job of working out what I want running. In previous OS’s such as XP, it simply loaded the application into memory when requested and dumped it when finished. WinXP would occasionally freeze for a second or two but nowhere near as often as Vista or Windows 7.

Other things on my long list of annoyances are…

Icons in the System Tray constantly disappear, even when they’re set to “Display all the time”. This is really frustrating when you have an application running and the only way to bring it into view is by clicking on the System Tracy icon!

Device drivers constantly reinstall. I would plug my iPhone into the same cable, which in turn is plugged into the same USB port, everyday. I can’t tell you how many times Windows would popup a message saying “Installing device driver”. Aaargh! FFS! It’s the same fkn device I had plugged in yesterday! And, if you dared change the device to use another USB port, well… you’d definitely get the “Installing device driver” message then!

Network drives would constantly disappear. Up until recently I was running a Windows Server on a standalone PC as a development web server. It was never turned off and sits on the same subnet on my network yet somehow Windows 7 would just occasionally forget about it and I couldn’t access my development files.

Devices plugged into USB Hubs would frequently not work after booting up. At least a couple times a week I would have to unplug my Wacom tablet and plug it back in just so Windows would see it after booting up in the morning. I even had a batch file in my Startup Folder that would Stop and Restart the Tablet drivers as suggested by Microsoft Australia.

Windows would constantly lock files and folders even when they’re not being used. I’ve lost count how many times Windows told me that I can’t delete a folder because it says it’s “in use”, even when there are no files open in any application. So many times I would have to close down Windows Explorer and then reopen it before it would let me delete a folder.

And do I even need to mention how slow it is to boot up!? Yeah, the desktop and icons display within a couple of minutes, but big woop! The hard drive is still beating itself to death and you can’t start any applications because the system is still loading all it’s files and drivers.

Are Mac’s really that good?

As much as some of the Apple Fanboys will tell you otherwise, Mac’s aren’t perfect. I ordered my new iMac online and after having it for only 3 days, it got sent back as it was having problems. It wouldn’t wake from sleep. The only way to power it up was to physically unplug the power cord, wait a few seconds and then plug it back in and turn it on. After making an appointment at my local Apple Genius Bar, they recommended that I return it for a refund and then order a new one from them. Several weeks later, here I am am with my brand new iMac. One of the truly great things about Apple products though is their support. It really is second to none!

Technically, my PC was quite powerful. It was running an Intel Quad Core i7 @ 2.6Ghz. My new iMac is also running an Intel Quad Core i7. It’s obviously a newer generation chip and it’s also running slightly faster @ 3.4Ghz. The speed difference between the two is amazing though. No longer am I sitting, waiting for an application to start loading. I’ll click on an app and a couple of seconds later it’s up & running. I really do feel a lot more productive as I’m not waiting for the OS all the time, like I was in Windows.

I’ve found with the majority of the Mac applications I’ve run that they never seem to have as many options or preferences as Window applications. This has it’s pros and cons. Too many options can make applications confusing but too few, obviously means sometimes there’s “features” or settings that can’t be changed or are missing.

Apple hardware tends to be a bit pickier when it comes to accessories. On a PC you can plug pretty much any device in and it’ll work. Not so on a Mac. I’ve got a USB hub and an external drive, both of with worked fine on my PC but have problems on the Mac.

One of the things that I find really annoying is the Apple Finder application. It’s basically Apples equivalent to the Windows Explorer app. Within Windows Explorer, say you’re copying a series of folders and files from one location to another, if the destination location has folders or files that have the same name as the ones you’re copying it gives you the option to “Move & Replace” the files/folders in the destination location or “Don’t Move” the files/folders, leaving the original intact. You can also have it keep both versions, whereby it will rename the file(s) your copying by appending a number on the end (eg. mydoc (2).txt). If you’re moving a lot of files, you can apply your selection to “all files” in the case of multiple duplicates. Using the Apple finder application, when you’re copying files and it finds duplicates, the only options you’re given are to replace the duplicate files, keep both files (by renaming one) or stop, which cancels the copy. What’s worse is that if you are copying folders, then the “Replace” command will do just that. It won’t merge the files you’re copying with the target location, it will actually remove the target location and replace it with the folder you’re copying. What this means is that if there are files in the target location that are different from the ones you’re copying, they’ll actually get deleted since the whole folder is replaced! That’s ridiculous! I can see it being quite easy to lose files when you’re using the Finder app to move files and folders around.

It’s only since owning a Mac that I’ve found out that they don’t have anything like the System Registry on Windows machines. This is awesome news! The Registry is where Windows keeps all it’s application configuration settings and options. It’s also one of the main causes when applications stop working or don’t work properly. You’ll also find that a huge amount of applications never delete all their information when the application is uninstalled so you end up with all these “orphaned” settings for applications that no longer exist. To uninstall an application in Windows you have to run an application within the Windows Control Panel. When you choose an application to uninstall, this will then run that particular applications uninstaller. To uninstall on a Mac, you simply drag the application from the Applications folder to the Trash. So simple!! All Mac applications are bundled together in a special “package” unlike Windows apps that can put files in numerous locations and settings all throughout the System Registry.

There are obviously lots of other little differences between a PC and a Mac, which you’d expect, but most of it just comes down to getting used to how it works. The Home & End keys are a good example. Within Windows, pressing the Home key will place the cursor at the beginning of the current line and pressing End will put the cursor at the end of the line. On a Mac, pressing Home will place the cursor at the beginning of the application and End will place it at the end. So, if you’re writing up a document for example, pressing Home takes you to the beginning of the document and pressing End will take you to the end of the document. This I don’t think I could ever get used to and thankfully I found a cool little app called DoubleCommand that allows me to easily remap these two keys so they work the way I’m used to.

You’ll quite often hear Apple users boast they they don’t need to run anti-virus software like you do (or should) on a PC. This may be true but it’s not because Macs are immune to getting viruses or malware. What a lot of Apple folk don’t seem to realise is that the main reason that they don’t need anti-virus is because the majority of viruses are developed for Windows based PC’s. A-holes who write viruses aim to do as much harm to as many people as they can and since Window PC’s have the greater market share, this is who they target. If this market share ever starts to even out, I’m sure you’ll see viruses targeted for Macs.

So what’s the verdict?

Overall, I love my new iMac. It’s extremely fast and responsive and the new version of their Operating System, OSX Lion, has some really great features and, with all the touch gestures, really is a joy to use. The display is amazingly crisp and vibrant and being a 27″ iMac, is HUGE!

It will be interesting to compare  Microsofts implementation of gesture control when they officially release Windows 8. I doubt they’ve put as much time and effort into perfecting them as Apple have. I think Apple have successfully integrated their iOS gestures into a desktop Operating System. From all the videos I’ve watched regarding Windows 8, Microsoft seem to be more concerned with making their OS work on tablets and seem to be forgetting about all the people who’ll actually be using a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.

</end rant>

Have you switched from using a PC to using a Mac? Leave a comment and let me know, I’d love to hear how your experience was.

I ♥ WordPress! It’s a fantastic Open source blogging and content management system. There’s a great community of people behind the design & development of the WordPress system itself as well a huge number of designers & developers who share their knowledge through blog posts, tutorials and the creation of thousands of themes & plugins.

When I was first starting with WordPress though, I was disappointed that there was no user manual or simple guide to get me started. True, there are heaps of articles within the WordPress Codex that go into great detail about all sorts of topics and this is great if you want to get really involved in developing your own WordPress theme or creating plugins, but it can be a bit daunting for those users who just want a simple guide to using the Content Management side of WordPress. A quick look through the online documentation on the WordPress site can have you scratching your head within minutes as to what to read first.

When you create custom designed sites for your clients, it’s not always possible to physically go to a their location to provide them with hands-on training. So, rather than simply sending people a bunch of different links in the hope that they’d use them to learn WordPress themselves, I decided to write an easy to follow manual that I could provide them.

My aim for the Easy WP Guide was to write something that was easy to read and that covered the basics in regards to editing & updating your site content. You’ll find that some topics within the guide are only touched upon lightly. My intent wasn’t to cover setting up your WordPress site or editing theme files, there’s plenty of information on those topics within the WordPress Codex and on the web. I’ve created the site so that I can share my documentation with anyone who may be in the same situation. The documentation is available as a PDF and a Word document on the download page. Feel free to rebrand the Word doc and pass on to your clients if you find it useful. Alternatively, send them to the Easy WP Guide site where they can read the documentation online.

The site itself was designed and developed by yours truly. It was developed using HTML5 & CSS3 and of course, it also runs on the power of WordPress. Font replacement is courtesy of Font Squirrel, an awesome resource for 100% free for commercial use fonts. I’m using PT Sans for all the main site copy and menus and Journal for all the headings. I also made use of the awesome HTML5 Boilerplate.

HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass’s base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.

HTML5 Boilerplate gives you the best of the best practices: cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain Ajax and Flash. A starter apache .htaccess config file sets you up with caching rules and preps your site to serve HTML5 video, use @font-face and gzip. It’s cross-browser compatible, HTML5 ready, provides iOS, Android, Opera Mobile-adaptable markup and a CSS skeleton as well as .clearfix and .visuallyhidden classes to style things wisely and accessibly. If you’re thinking of getting into some HTML5 development, I suggest you do yourself a favour and check it out.

I hope that you find the Easy WP Guide useful, either for yourself or for passing onto your clients. If you feel that something is missing, incorrect or not covered adequately, drop me an email and I’ll look into it.

I’d love to hear if you think you’ll be able to get use out of it, so leave a comment below. Thanks.

The problem…

Recently though, I found out that within WordPress you can also leave comments on images as well as Posts. It came to my attention through a test blog that I have setup. I use this test site as a “staging server” when I’m making the final touches to a clients website, prior to cutting it across to their “live” domain. It allows me to show the client the finished product with all their content and allows them to check for any last minute revisions. Most of the time Comments are normally Disabled through the Dashboard Settings option (Settings > Discussion > Allow people to post comments on new articles) however recently I started receiving Spam Comments on images themselves. This was happening even though Comments were disabled. It seems that even if your WordPress blog is configured to not allow comments, depending on your theme, it may still be possible for someone to post comments via one of your images.

The solution…

To get around this, you will need to create an attachment.php file for your theme, if it doesn’t already have one. If one does exist, WordPress will use your attachment.php file when viewing a single attachment, such as an image. Since all themes are different, I’ll show you how to make the modifications to the standard Twenty Ten theme that comes bundled with WordPress.

At around Line 111 in the attachment.php file that is included in the Twenty Ten theme, you should see a line that calls the comments template. It will look like this…

<?php comments_template(); ?>

To avoid having comments posted on your images when you’ve disabled them, simply replace this line with the following…

<?php if (comments_open($post->post_parent)) {
   // Only show the Comments Form if the parent post has comments open
   comments_template();
} ?>

The If statement in the first line checks the Parent Post to see if comments are allowed and if so, will then call the comments template. If comments aren’t allowed, the comments form wont be displayed. The second line is simply a std PHP code comment and can be removed if you’d prefer. Personally though, I like to keep my code well documented.

Of course, if you’d rather not have comments posted on images (or any attachments), then you could also simply comment out or remove the call to the comments_template() function all together, from your attachment.php file.

If your theme doesn’t have an attachment.php file, you will need to create one. The simplest way to do this is to start by duplicating (& renaming) your single.php file and then adding in the extra functionality as per the attachment.php file included in the Twenty Ten theme.

I know that I’ll be including an attachment.php file in any themes that I create from now on. Leave a comment and let me know if this has helped you.

As I’ve been so often asked, she was the inspiration for my business name. Her full name being, Maddison Inyapen Starblaze. She came with me wherever I went and would even follow me around the house, from room to room. It just doesn’t feel the same without her. I miss her terribly

Looking back at photos of when she was younger, it’s hard to imagine her with a black face as she was quite grey during her later years. Still, she was as cute as ever though. Although she had a great life, she also endured some hard times, with numerous operations. Among these were 2 knee reconstructions (both back legs), eye surgery (to heal an ulcer) and removal of numerous lumps and bumps. With lots of love and attention, she was able to recover from all of these. She was also there for me, through all my hard times over the years. Whenever I did have to leave her at home, without fail she’d be sitting at the front window by the door, upon my return. Always there with a smile on her face and a wag in her tail.

As well as being a great companion, she also starred in numerous television commercials both Nationally and Internationally and also feature films. Some of her credits include Maxwell House coffee, Honda Odyssey and the Feature Film – Noise, which received rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival.

In memory of Maddie, I’ve put together a collection of photos of her at various stages throughout her life. I hope you get as much enjoyment looking at them as I do.

Rest in peace beautiful girl. You’ll be forever remembered. xx