BlogOrlando3 - Morning Sessions

September 27, 2008

BlogOrlando is back and I am at it for the second year. It is the 3rd year for BlogOrlando. Crowds are big and the speaker list is really diverse. Hard choices this year. I am going to miss something good this time around.

Here are the notes and pics from the sessions I have been to so far:

Keynote

Jake McKee - http://www.communityguy.com

Community builds better business, communication with customer to lead the model/product. support what is already there, encourage the fan(atic).

Lego was closed wall institution that viewed all costumer conversation as unsolicited. Forced meetings through tenacity and support of immediate management. Show not tell. Get those that holdout to see what is going on. Got CEO to see massive displays of Lego builds that were attracting huge foot traffic. Also support communities that have grown organically, engage. Use those instead of squashing out that business or reinventing the wheel. Support with product, info or money, still cheaper than making your own.

Based on these new conversations products were retooled to give what not the gross quantity of customer wanted but what the most profitable customer wanted driving all sales up as it refocused the line to what made it good while adding a high end, high profit market that drilled in to the fanatic market that was giving the feedback. Win-Win for both

Big takeaway is that community (fans) can be harnessed to drive the model, tell you what is right/wrong, lead you to the customer base that is hidden but powerful and create organic loyalty

used to have 4hrs of unscheduled playtime - now 15 mins

Raising Digital Children

David Parmet - http://www.parmet.net/pr/

kids do:

3.5 hours of games
16.5 hours of tv
5.5 hours of online

- we are not in jobs that were in existence when we were in HS

- we are not educating for the jobs of tomorrow let alone today

critical thinking is the need, question is how is technology to be used?

Guidelines [from David]:

- turn off the damned tv

- leave the iPhone at home

- keep track of what you are doing

- give them freedom but don’t be afraid to keep an idea on what they are doing

- block the sites at the router/ envelope of passwords for emergency

http://delicious.com/dparment/homeschooling

WordPress Advanced

Mark Jaquith - http://markjaquith.com/

Scaling

WP Super Cache

WP can handle 10 request per second this handle (millions)

WP Cache

not as actively maintained

Subversion

FTP sucks to maintain new WP versions. Use it to pull down the new version directly to the server

http:svn.auttomatic.com/wordpress - add the commands to direct it - /branches/[version#]

search “svn redbean”

can move your user changed files into suberversion to keep a clean install WP in folder

has blame feature to tell who changed what line when

Advanced URL techniques

http://example.com[...]/postname

/feed [put this at end of url for creation of feed item for variable urls]

feed?paged=2

?cat=3,-4 [show only the chosen category, - excludes cat]

?s=foo [searchs for mention of "foo"]

Advanced Worpress Themes

Eric Marden http://www.Xentek.net/

http://www.getk2.com

K2 theme as base

easily build one from that as a base for client and make function fast

built in goodies: advance navigation, seo value built in, archives with tags, calendar etc

switchable stylesheets within admin, allows to maintain theme base and modify theme without changing the base code

header no uses the same upload structure as any othe uploaded file

drag and drop widget for sidebars manager for k2, same controls but easier to user, manage sidebars as per page [very cool]

uses cssedit [cool program for making css edits easy, can hilight selected section in page by selecting either the css style or the actual place on page]

** padding problem for odd colored spaces that are not selectable in cssedit**

firebug - the inspector will find the issue

hint - dont do a big clickable logo, not over fancy

- 3 browser test - good semantic code, validates in all

- date built into the body class = , can then use date based changes i.e header change

edit links at widgets take you to the sidebar manager

move sidebar to the bottom [clear: both, width: 100%]

rounded corners:

-moz-border-radius: 13px

-webkit-border-radius: 13px

use template files to mod design with out messing with the actual WP php call files

checkout sandbox