Ryan Joy (atxryan)

Andy Skelton announced that Automattic is looking into opening an Austin WordPress Professional Office. The office would be open to designers and developers who earn their living primarily through WordPress.

If this sounds like something that might interest you, head on over to Andy’s blog and let ‘em know in the comments.

Highlights for this day include:

• Listening to Charles Strickland, Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday, Mark Jaquith, March Ghosh, and Matt Mullenweg joined together to live record the 39th episode of The WordPress Podcast.
• Aaron Brazell went over WordPress FAQs. Topics covered included the epic categories vs. tags, what is GPL (what is free, for that matter>), and the two different types of “hooks” (filters & actions) available to plugin and theme developers.
• Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, Matt Mullenweg, and Aaron Brazell covered business-blogging best practices in their panel The Business of Blogging
• Jacob Santos explained “unit testing” in his Testing with WordPress. Interested in learning how to patch the WordPRess Core?

That about wraps it up. I may end up coming back to these posts to add more information in the following days. All in all WordCamp Dallas 2008 has been great and, at only $20 registration, it’s been a steal too! Many thanks to all the folks who worked to put this event together.

Paul Menard, Jeff Bernier, Michelle Greer, and Jen Simmons and I made the trek last night to Frisco, Texas for WordCamp Dallas 2008.

Today was day one and it’s been very informative thus far. Highlights include:

• Matt Mullenweg announced the official release of WordPress 2.5 during his talk this morning! You can download it and it’s Dashboard/Admin goodness at http://wordpress.org.
• John Pozadzides listed 45 very good and thorough ways to power up your blog. Most of his points were targeted at bloggers who write for an audience, but I believe that many of his points can be applied to a smaller, personal site like mine as well.
• Jonathan Bailey covered Copyright, Creative Commons, content theft and the detection/prevention/obstruction thereof, and everything in between. I don’t consider many of the issues he discussed to be applicable to myself, but they are definitely important to my clients. Of course, if I’m ever hit with a DMCA notice then Bailey’s talk would be very beneficial indeed.
• Listening to Lorelle share her power blogging tips (and take WordPress to task for anything that bothered her in the least bit) was great. She’s a firecracker. :-)

Austin Wordpress users: Andy Skelton announced that the May GeekAustin Happy Hour would be co-hosted with Wordpress on Tuesday, May 20th. Like the previous two GeekAustin events, this one is to be held downtown at J. Blacks on W. Sixth.

I can attest that LinearB throws a great party, so come out and have a drink with us! And, I’ll remind you, that there is a local Wordpress Meetup Group.

I registered today to attend WordCamp Dallas to be held March 29th - 30th. It should be fun!

Thanks to Paul for alerting me to this mini-conference.

Today I’m testing out blogging from Textmate on my Mac. I’m not sure that I’ll ever blog from my text editor as my primary mode of publishing content to my website. For one thing, I didn’t see how to utilize tagging. But it does seem more natural to write, especially code, in an environment that I use every day.

I watched this screencast for a tutorial.

Update: Ok, I did a little test and found that Keywords ==> Tags in the blogging bundle.  That solves one issue, at least.

Paul Menard has taken it upon himself to start up Austin’s first Wordpress Meetup Group. If you use Wordpress as a blogging tool or are thinking about using it, then you should check out the Meetup.com and Google group. Same goes if you’re interested in using Wordpress as a CMS solution for client projects.

http://groups.google.com/group/wordpress-austin
http://wordpress.meetup.com/173/