Hackathon Projects Chosen

You all made it very difficult to only choose three organizations for our upcoming WordCamp Hackathon. In the next week we will be matching WordPress teams with organizations.

The WordCamp Committee has selected the following submissions for the Inaugural WordCamp Hackathon:

  1. Sky Garden Urban Farm Market
    Fresh local food store opening in downtown by October 1. Our storefront space a few steps from Central Ave., at 311 Gold St., will carry a rotating selection of New Mexico-grown produce, locally prepared lunches and dinners to go (expanding to include vegan and gluten free options), and a few staples to help to help meet the growing daily food needs of downtowners.
  2. Fairfield Farm & Market – A Farmer’s Cooperative
    Fairfield Farm & Market is a farmer cooperative that not only strives for land stewardship—such as helping revive the nostalgic King Orchard brand of apples—but equally believes in the stewardship of letting farmers be farmers. With multiple levels of agriculture services from seedling to sales, Fairfield Farm & Market works with producers through market or partnership packages to get their products to the local community. Fairfield Farm & Market is a woman-owned cooperative committed to producers and the customers they serve in providing the best quality products in a streamlined support and supply chain model. After all, we are farmers, too.
  3. Cathryn McGill Productions
    I am a local performing artist–I call myself a cultural griot.  A griot in the West African tradition is a musician, an orator and aunifier.  I believe that I am all of those things.  Since arriving in New Mexico in 1984, I have used not only to give people pleasure and entertainment, but also as a means for invoking civic dialogue around important social subjects.  While working at the Rape Crisis Center, I started an annual benefit called the SAVI Fair (loosely fashioned after the Lilith Fair) and organized and produced a fundraiser that used music, local talent and the stories of survivors of rape to raise money.  I worked for 10 years for the National Dance Institute as the “voice” of all of their end of year fundraising shows throughout the state.

We will be in touch with Hackathon participants in the coming week to coordinate the next steps in this process.

If you want to participate in the Hackathon, it’s not too late. Let us know by commenting below and we’ll add you to the list.

Hackathon takes place on Friday night at the Holiday Inn at 6 pm. More info here. [map]

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Meet and Greet Reception Friday, August 24, 6-9 pm

WordCamp Albuquerque is a few days away! Are you ready? We are. And we’re getting the party started with a, well, kind of a party!

Come on over to the Holiday Inn [map] on Friday night at 6 pm to meet the speakers and other WordCamp attendees. Grab a beer or glass of wine from the Sports Bar and watch (or participate in) the hackathon. It’s a great way to start your WordCamp weekend!

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Flying High: Making a Living Blogging about Model Airplanes

Guest Post by Albuquerque WordCamp Speaker Carlos Reyes

My web pages and videos are now getting about 40,000 views a month. I’m told that this number puts me out of the amateur blogger category and into the “major leagues”, whatever that means!

I started my website (www.RCadvisor.com) for a simple reason: I’m not getting any younger, and I had never held a job that I truly loved. I do now. Using WordPress and other open source tools, I run a web server that was 100% configured by me. In fact, the only part of my entire website that I did not do myself was my logo. I cannot draw, otherwise I would have done that myself, too (grin).

My web server can handle 200 web page hits a second and easily send out 10,000 emails in an hour. My incoming email handler lets maybe one spam email get through a week. In other words, this is a state of the art web server. Thanks to WordPress and the other software packages I used, I paid zero dollars in software licensing fees.

Intrigued? Come to my presentation at the Albuquerque WordCamp to learn more about how I did it and what lessons I learned along the way.

WordCamp Session» | Speaker Profile» | Speaker Website»

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Make Your WordPress Theme Your Very Own

Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Max Bloom

In this workshop, we’ll discuss what defines a WordPress theme and how you can redefine that theme to reflect your own style. We’ll start with the overview – what is a theme, what is CSS, and what are rules, elements, properties and values. (Hint: they’re the code that tells browsers what your website should look like). We’ll also go into ID’s and Classes and the basics of how to use them.

Once we know what CSS is and what it does, we’ll learn where to find it in your WordPress dashboard and on the server using your FTP client. We’ll learn how to edit the CSS file, and more importantly – before we do any editing – how to back up the CSS file. We’ll also learn about some useful tools (text editors, FTP clients, Firebug, color pickers) that will help us determine and execute the changes we want to make.

We’ll go into the standard WordPress Twenty Eleven theme and make changes to images, fonts and colors so that the original theme is unrecognizable (in a good way!). If we have time, we may introduce a very cool WordPress plugin that allows you to load your Facebook page into a sidebar or other area of your website.

A basic understanding of HTML will be helpful but not necessary to benefit from this workshop.

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The Benefits of WordPress-Specific Web Hosting

Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Jamii Corley

Choosing a web hosting provider can be tricky. Price is often a prime consideration, but certainly not the only one. Picking the right hosting provider depends a great deal on the characteristics of your website. How busy is it? How much of it is dynamic based on database queries? Are you about to become wildly popular? How much time do you want to spend tuning it for performance?

Often if you move from a web hosting company that deals with all kinds of websites to one that specializes in a particular web application, like WordPress, you’ll get an environment that just works better for your website.

This talk is about how a farm of web servers can be built to support a web application and make your website faster, more secure, and easier to maintain.

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High-Performance Front-End Development

Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Ben Byrne

You could be losing visitors in the blink of an eye.

Data from major Internet providers like Google, Amazon and Akamai has shown that how fast a website loads significantly affects user behavior. People may visit a website less often if it is slower than a competitor by as little as 250 milliseconds — less time than it takes to blink. A one-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%. To pile on, because users don’t like slow sites, Google even uses load time as a factor in computing PageRank results. In short: It pays to be fast.

There are a lot of factors that can affect your site’s performance, such as the configuration and specifications of the web server your site lives on, using a content delivery network (CDN), and how much data your site eats up. But there are plenty of factors beyond the sheer number of bits and server/internet speed that affect your page load time, such as HTTP connections, DNS lookups, and asset load sequencing.

If you’re a front-end developer and you’re serious about building websites that load as fast as possible, come to my session to learn about techniques you can use in your markup and themes — whether on WordPress or some other system — to help things load as quickly as possible. We’ll also cover tools you can use to assess whether your site is doing all it can to load quickly, such as Y!Slow.

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WordPress is Just the Beginning

Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Kimanzi Constable

I had been blogging for a little while on Blogger, talking about work  and how we spend our 40 hours a week. I took it a step further and decided to self-publish my first book, I knew I needed a better platform for my book and that’s what led me to WordPress.

I was so excited the day my WordPress site had 100 visitors, I thought I would sell one million copies of my ebook. The book came out and no one bought it, after two months I had sold 11 copies.

My website was only getting 20 visitors a day. I was missing something that would bring in the traffic to my website and give my ebook some exposure. I study a lot of figured out what I was missing and to date have over 10,000 visitors a month to my website and have now sold over 55,000 copies of my two ebooks.

My session at WordCamp Albuquerque will teach you how I finally brought people in, got them to come back and bring others with them. I will teach you the major change I made to sell so many ebooks I was offered several publishing contracts.

This session will help you take your WordPress site to the next level!

WordCamp Session» | Speaker Profile» | Speaker Website»

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Badge for Attendees

I know you’re excited you’re coming to WordCamp Albuquerque. How could you not be? It’s little more than a week away! Well, now you can tell the world about it. Here’s a badge that you can use on your website:

Additionally, you can use the hashtag #wcabq on Twitter while tweeting to your followers to join you at WordCamp!

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WordCamp Hackathon Coming Your Way

What’s a hackathon? A hackathon is a gathering of programmers, developers, designers, and in this case WordPress users and bloggers to collaboratively work on a project over a very short period of time that will benefit the community.

The WordPress community in Albuquerque is such a great group of individuals and businesses, we’re taking a few hours at WordCamp Albuquerque to give back to the community at large. We’ll be using our skills as designers, developers, writers, publishers and just regular old WordPress users to help an individual or business in need.

Hackathons have been held at many WordCamps worldwide, and since we didn’t have one last year, this year we’re going to take the idea and give it our own special Albuquerque flavor. With the invaluable help of ABQSprout and New Mexico Tech Council, we’re taking the opportunity to use the resources we have at our fingertips (that’s you) to create a website (or two or three) for a worthy startup or nonprofit organization. The New Mexico community is invited to submit their project for consideration.

Come join us and contribute your publisher, designer, developer skills to this event. You’ll be glad you did. Register for WordCamp here and express your interest in participating in the Hackathon during registration.

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Get Your Happiness on at the Happiness Bar

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, the definition of happiness is:

  • a state of well-being and contentment
  • a pleasurable or satisfying experience

So, what’s a Happiness Bar? This is what it looks like:

Photo courtesy of All Narfed Up

You’ve got WordPress problems? We’ve got WordPress answers. At a WordCamp Happiness Bar you can bring your issues to WordPress experts and get help.

  • Having trouble figuring out how to upload an image?
  • Developing a plugin and having a little trouble with some of the code?
  • Trying to figure out a tricky bit of CSS?

Don’t have any of these issues? Are you are WordPress guru? Come join us at the Happiness Bar. Volunteer your time to help the WordPress community in Albuquerque, you’ll be glad you did. 🙂

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