ifc portfolio

I attended the inau­gural WordCamp Boston this weekend. I wasn’t com­pletely sure what to expect with the event, but it ended up being very worth-​​while.

As you may or may not know, this site runs on WordPress. It’s the second site that I built around the plat­form, and it’s gen­er­ally my testing ground for ideas that I have. Before this iter­a­tion of the site, I had been hard-​​coding HTML pages. They were a drag to update, and — due to my extremely lim­ited ability to write code — their func­tion­ality was quite lim­ited. They we very basic, and not really a lot of fun to update.

When I dis­cov­ered WordPress, it took me a while to wrap my head around the con­cept of how the soft­ware func­tioned, and even longer to figure out how I could bend it to my will. I have found that despite its roots as a blog­ging plat­form, it is an excel­lent con­tent man­age­ment system. It is used for an extremely diverse variety of sites that have little or no rela­tion­ship to a blog. What I really love about it — above of its other attrib­utes — is that it democ­ra­tizes the web.

On wordpress.com (a hosted ser­vice, not to be con­fused with the .org domain) any­body can create a site. The plat­form there is much more blogger-​​centric, but the fact remains that any­body and every­body can have a voice there. In this envi­ron­ment, any­body can put their voice out there. Sure, it’s not easy to find an audi­ence, but nobody could say that they weren’t allowed to speak. That’s really why I got into learning how to create web pages, and it’s amazing to me now how easy it is.

With all that said, I’d like to high­light a few of the stand-​​outs from the weekend.

The Loop

After Mitcho’s talk about the Loop, I was left feeling that manip­u­lating the Loop was both easier and far more com­plex than I had imag­ined. I got some good ideas and tips from the talk, but he really oper­ates on a level that I’ll never able to attain.

jQuery

jQuery is one of the things that I want to learn more about. Jim broke down the basics, and answered some of the burning ques­tions that I had. His talk really inspired, and made you want to write (less) code. His site: jimdoran.net

After the Deadline

Raphael’s demo of After the Deadline was the only “wow” moment that I had during the con­fer­ence. I hadn’t really thought about spell checking and proof­reading in the past, yet installing the After the Deadline plug-​​in was the first thing I did after log­ging in today. It’s an amazing piece of soft­ware that helps you write better via con­tex­tual clues.

Parent/​Child themes

Parent/​child themes have seemed like an inter­esting con­cept to me, but it’s like learning a new piece of soft­ware. Especially since most of the theme frame­works out there aren’t that well doc­u­mented. Daisy from wpmama.com really helped to break it down. It makes a lot of sense, and I’m strongly con­sid­ering using a parent theme on my next site.

WP Security

Site secu­rity is some­thing that I know that I should spend more time on, but it’s just dif­fi­cult to focus on. Brad laid it out in a very clear way, with some con­crete advise and things to get me started.

In addi­tion to the tech­nical info, I met some inter­esting people and gen­er­ally had a good time. It’s some­thing that I’m looking for­ward to next year, and I sug­gest that any­body inter­ested should attend.