WordCamp San Francisco 2010 » Jane Wells

Registration is Closed

Jane Wells — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:02:45 +0000

Advanced registration is now closed. If you did not yet buy a ticket, you will be able to buy a ticket as a walk-in at the event for $60. There are a few people who were having trouble buying a ticket on the site who emailed us over the last couple of weeks. Those people will get an email from me letting them know they can buy a walk-in ticket at the advance rate since it wasn’t their fault they weren’t registered before the deadline.

Walk-in attendees can pay with cash or credit card (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express) when they arrive, and will receive a receipt by email, thanks to the nifty Square payments system we’ll be using (more on that later). Walk-ins will only get a shwag bag/t-shirt if we have extras, but in the event we run out we can mail a t-shirt to any walk-ins after the event.

Don’t forget: your name badge will have your gravatar printed on it. Go to the attendees page and find your name. If you have a gray “mystery man” icon next to your name, then you need to get a gravatar or add the email address you used to register for WordCamp to your existing Gravatar.com account. If you don’t have a gravatar, don’t worry, you can always draw a picture of yourself on your name badge after you get there tomorrow!

Hashtag!

Jane Wells — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:36:09 +0000

Hey kids. As you start chattering online about WordCamp SF, try to use the hashtag #wcsf. We’ve used #wordcamp in the past, but let’s face it, that takes up twice as much room in your tweets! So remember, follow us at @wordcampsf to keep up to date, and use hashtag #wcsf to contribute to the conversation. :)

Party Down with Media Temple!

Jane Wells — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:05:42 +0000

Media Temple has been a sponsor of WordCamp San Francisco before, but this year they chose to focus their sponsorship on the afterparty. Their generous platinum sponsorship will provide for the open bar and a dancetastic DJ, and I fully expect it to live up the parties they’ve sponsored at other industry events. Frankly, the afterparty alone is probably worth the cost of a WordCamp ticket (seriously, with drink prices in this town?). And it does look like there might be a couple of iPads getting raffled off, so keep your eyes and ears open for more information about that.

Media Temple is a solid hosting company that offers a one-click install for WordPress sites, as well as more advanced WordPress hosting options. They sponsored the newbie track at WordCamp NYC last year, and I’ve used them for hosting myself. I hear they’re branching out into the cloud hosting space, so check out their site for their range of WordPress hosting products. A handful of Media Temple folks will be attending WordCamp SF, so if you see one them, say hello, and be sure to thank them in advance for the party. Because let’s face it, after taking advantage of the open bar and riding the high of the social wave that will be in effect, you might forget later on in the night. :)

Note: the afterparty will require a name badge for entry.

Thank You, Layered Tech!

Jane Wells — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:51:11 +0000

Layered Tech, one of the companies that provides hosting for WordPress.com, signed on as a platinum sponsor to show their support for WordPress and the WordPress community. Located in Texas, the same state in which WordPress was born, Layered Tech helps thousands of businesses with hosted infrastructure in secure, top-tier data centers. The official spiel, since I’m not all that technical: “By providing high-quality technology, infrastructure and relentless support, Layered Tech enables its customers to reduce capital expenses, save on operating costs and focus on their core business issues. From advanced virtualization and cloud computing to managed dedicated servers, Layered Tech delivers superior hosting value so you can manage your success.”

Also? I think they’re going to raffle off an iPad at the afterparty. :)

Thanks, Adobe!

Jane Wells — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:09:57 +0000

We love free/open source software, but let’s face it, almost all of use some proprietary software. The designers behind WordPress, like many designers, frequently use Photoshop and Illustrator, so when Adobe stepped up to become a silver sponsor, we were pretty excited. Add to that the fact that the new Dreamweaver CS5 has WordPress support, and it’s a natural alliance. What do we mean by WordPress support in CS5? There’s a new code hinting feature that will suggest WordPress code/tags/hooks to save you the trouble of looking them up in the Codex, and it also uses proper syntax for custom PHP5 functions (especially handy for those plugin developers who are pushing the envelope and writing PHP5-only plugins). Granted, we’re not using Dreamweaver to write WordPress core code, but for new theme and plugin developers, it will provide a great tool to get started with WordPress development. So thanks, Adobe, for sponsoring WordCamp SF, and for supporting WordPress in CS5!

Thanks, Page.ly!

Jane Wells — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:20:19 +0000

The very first person who said he wanted to sponsor WordCamp SF this year was Josh Strebel of Page.ly. I met him at WordCamp Boston when we were on a panel together, and then met his wife and business partner Sally Strebel at South by Southwest, where she helped out at the WordPress BBQ event. Unlike our other hosting sponsors, Page.ly only hosts WordPress sites, and they have partnerships with a number of commercially supported themes and plugins to make it easy to have a fully customized site. Coming in as a silver sponsor, Page.ly has some groovy stickers that you’ll find in your shwag bag, and I would not be surprised if they wind up surreptitiously handing out some t-shirts to enthusiastic attendees. They even bought a couple of extra tickets to give away to their customers. That’s loyalty. Thanks, Page.ly!

Thanks, Mojofiti!

Jane Wells — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:08:12 +0000

I first heard about Mojofiti when they decided to sponsor WordCamp NYC in 2009. I hadn’t heard of their platform before (still beta at that point, I think?), focused on translation and running on BuddyPress, but I was definitely intrigued. In the 6 months since then, Mojofiti has grown and we’re very pleased they decided shortly after we announced the event to come on as a gold sponsor for WordCamp SF this year. We have attendees flying in from all over the world, and internationalization is a topic on many people’s minds in the WordPress community. From the description we posted on the Sponsors page:

Mojofiti is currently collaborating with open source developers, users, companies and hundreds of translators to develop real-time language-enabled solutions that can be used across multiple communication mediums. Mojofiti.com is an open source-based publishing and networking platform where people publish, share and interact with each other in their native local languages while reaching out to the world in 27 other languages through Google’s machine dictionaries. Mojofiti.com uses a combination of WordPress, BuddyPress and proprietary technologies augmented by Google machine translations to allow users to translate content from their WordPress blogs instantly for viewing in their visitors’ native languages.

Thank you, Mojofiti, for your generous sponsorship of WordCamp San Francisco 2010. We hope you have a great time on Saturday!

A Week Away!

Jane Wells — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:19:52 +0000

WordCamp San Francisco is only a week away, yay! Sorry the blog has been low on the posting frequency…we’ve been super busy working to make this the best WordCamp yet. This week will see a flurry of posts about our speakers, their sessions, our generous sponsors, the schedule, extracurricular events, and more, so bookmark us, add us to your Google Reader, grab the feed, whatever: just find a way to stay tuned, because there’s going to be a lot of information coming to this space this week, and you don’t want to miss it!

Thank You: InMotion Hosting

Jane Wells — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:53:50 +0000

When we first put out the call for WordCamp San Francisco sponsorship earlier this year, a lot of companies were interested, but the first one to show us the money was InMotion Hosting. InMotion sponsored WordCamps in Los Angeles and Huntsville (AL) in 2009, so they are no stranger to the WordPress community. As a Silver sponsor, InMotion Hosting is helping to cover the expenses of what promises to be the best WordCamp of the year. They’ll be sending representatives to the event, so if you see anyone from InMotion (you’ll see it on their name badge), be sure to say hello and thanks for their support. Without the support of companies like InMotion, your ticket prices would have been much higher. So why are they sponsoring us? Because they host WordPress sites, and want you to know how awesome they are, of course.

The official stuff:
InMotion Hosting has been offering business class web hosting services since 2001. From its inception, InMotion Hosting has focused on providing industry-leading technical support and quality of service. InMotion Hosting offers 24×7 U.S. based technical support, automated WordPress installation through Fantastico, a choice of datacenter locations and a 90-day money back guarantee. InMotion Hosting operates two office locations; Los Angeles, CA and Virginia Beach, VA.

So, thank you, InMotion Hosting, for stepping up early to sponsor WordCamp SF and be part of our community’s flagship WordCamp this May!

Are you interested in sponsoring WordCamp SF? It’s not too late; check out the details.

First Speakers Announced!

Jane Wells — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:08:03 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve published the new Speakers page, which lists the speakers who have been confirmed so far for WordCamp San Francisco 2010. We’re still working out the schedule and additional speakers, but the ones we have confirmed so far should be enough to get you excited. Richard Stallman, founder of GNU (also called the father of open source)! Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic! Karl Fogel, founding developer of Subversion! Me, founder of the bestest cookies and panda raccoon! Just kidding, I felt left out for not founding something big.

Seriously, though, the lineup is going to be stellar, so keep an eye on the Speakers page. You can also sign up for email updates to get the latest WordCamp SF news delivered straight to your inbox. And if you haven’t registered yet, get your ticket now!