Author Archives: Andy McIlwain

About Andy McIlwain

Andy wrangles content at GoDaddy and co-organizes WordPress meetups & WordCamps in Toronto. Find him on Twitter and his personal site.

Sunday Schedule Now Available

The Sunday schedule for WordCamp Toronto 2013 is now available.

This is the most ambitious Sunday we’ve ever done, with a full day of workshops and panels plus a second day of catered lunch! There are four tracks:

1.) D.I.Y WordPress gets you working with WordPress at a novice development level. The goal here is to give you the skillset to customize your site.

2.) Making a Living with WordPress is for all of the freelancers, contractors, and agencies who work with WordPress on a day-to-day basis. This track talks less about the code and more about the business: handling clients, managing projects, providing training, and so on.

3.) WordPress Development is all tech. ‘Nuff said.

4.) Community Code kicks off with WordPress project demos from local shops before diving into a panel discussion and wrapping up with a hackathon tackling Trac.

With just a little over two weeks to go, now’s the time to register!

Note for panelists: We’ve rearranged some of the panel names and groupings, but content is the same. We’ll be contacting you shortly with updated details about the discussion panels. Thanks!

Featured Speaker: Mo Jangda

Mo Jangda wrangles code and VIPs at WordPress.com. He enjoys ice cream and other sugary things. Follow Mo on Twitter.

Presentation: Caching; for fun and profit

Simple caching patterns and ways to better handle caching at a code-level in your WordPress sites, themes, and plugins.

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Schedule Now Available

The tentative Saturday schedule for WordCamp Toronto 2013 is now available!

Key points:

  • Registration kicks off earlier this year at 8:00am.
  • Rather than gathering everyone in a common area for opening remarks, we have something special in mind for the welcome message at 8:45am. Details TBA!
  • Thanks to the earlier start, we’ve managed to fit in an additional hour of sessions.
  • The Sunday schedule is still being developed.
  • Sessions that are not linked in the schedule still need to be added to the site.
  • This is a tentative schedule. Session times and tracks may change.

A big thanks to co-organizers Ed and Terri Caissie for all their hard work in assembling the schedule this year. At a grand total of 28 sessions, it’s a whopping ten sessions bigger than what we did for Saturday in 2011 and 2012. (Woo!)

If you have any questions about the schedule, shoot us a message.

Sponsoring? Speaking? Volunteering? Attending? We’ve got web badges for ya!

Our last few WordCamps lacked web badges. 🙁

Thanks to Meetup group member and in-kind sponsor Patrice Atwell of Atwell Design, we’ve finally cleared that hurdle this year!

We’ve got a lovely batch of web badges for you to add to your WordPress website or blog.

Head on over to our new Web Badges page to take a look for yourself! You can also find your way to the page under Get Involved > Web Badges in our navigation menu.

wcto2013-attending-badge

Dreamhost Sponsor Spotlight

Sponsor Showcase: DreamHost

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute.

Please visit DreamHost.com for more information.

As a personal aside: I’ve been a happy DreamHost customer since April 2006. They’re my go-to provider for domain name registration, in part because of their free domain WHOIS privacy service.

A big thanks to DreamHost for their support of WordCamp Toronto 2013!

artifakt Communications

Sponsor Showcase: artifakt Communications

artifakt Communications is a digital strategy agency specializing in WordPress website and plugin development and consultation, online presence, and complete digital strategy solutions. They provide services in writing & editing, social media strategy, digital newsletters & flyers, and digital publishing.

Industries that artifakt has a particular focus on include:

  • Realtors and Real Estate Agents
  • Real Estate Marketing and Listing Sites
  • Hotels, Hospitality, and Tourism Operations
  • Food and Beverage Operations, including restaurants, bars, and nightclubs
  • Artists, musicians, and DJs

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WCTO2013 Tickets Now On Sale

Tickets Now On Sale

Registration is now open for WordCamp Toronto 2013!

It’s only $30 for the entire weekend. That’s two days. Four tracks. Sessions. Panels. Workshops. And did we mention great food? Yup, we do our best when it comes to catering, too!

If you applied to speak, you’ll be getting a notification from us in the next week or so. If you haven’t applied to speak and have something that you’re just dying to present, we’re still accepting applications until August 31st.

As announced yesterday, we’re also looking for wizards to work our Happiness Bar. (If you’re an awesome WordPress pro who wants to give back to the community, this is your chance!)

If you have any questions, shoot us a message. Thanks!

Photo Credit: John Martinez Pavliga on Flickr

WordCamp Wizard

Are You a WordPress Wizard?

We’re looking for WordPress experts — “Wizards”, as we’re calling them this year — to man the Happiness Bar at WordCamp Toronto 2013.

What’s the Happiness Bar?

  • The Happiness Bar is a space set aside for folks who need help with WordPress. It’s manned by volunteer WordPress experts (“wizards”). These experts help WordPress users troubleshoot problems on WordPress.com and self-hosted .org websites.

What’s the commitment?

  • A minimum of one hour. As with all other volunteers, if you volunteer for three hours or more your WordCamp ticket will be refunded. 🙂

What’s the benefit?

  • Give back to the WordPress community. So much of what makes WordPress successful comes from individuals contributing their time and knowledge for the greater good of the WordPress community. This is your chance to do the same.
  • It’s an excellent networking opportunity! Nothing shows off your skills as a WordPress pro like troubleshooting and fixing problems on the spot. Who knows – you might get get a gig out of it!
  • It’s fun & rewarding. Helping others tackle their WordPress problems is a great way to learn about different themes, plugins, and potential bugs that you may have never seen before.

How does one become a Wizard?

Camp Tech - Sponsor Spotlight

Sponsor Showcase: Camp Tech

There are tons of great tech tools out there for small businesses to take advantage of. Unfortunately, when you’re running your own business, it’s hard to pull yourself away long enough to do anything else! That’s where Camp Tech‘s courses come in. Founded by Toronto-based web designer Avery Swartz, Camp Tech offers introductory-level tech workshops in a casual environment.

Current classes include:

  • WordPress for beginners.
  • Search Engine Optimization.
  • Blogging for business.
  • Twitter for small business.
  • Facebook for small business.
  • Photoshop for small business.
  • Online Marketing & Productivity Tools for small business.

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Discussion Notes from WordCamp 2013 Planning Meetup

The Toronto WordPress meetup met on Saturday afternoon to discuss plans for WordCamp Toronto 2013. The turnout was great, and we got a lot of fantastic conversations going about what’ll be happening on October 5th & 6th at Humber College.

Thanks to B2B marketing agency Brainrider for providing the space for us on last-minute notice. It was greatly appreciated! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without their support.

Notes from the meetup are after the jump.

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