Wow, what a weekend!
Saturday morning, I put the finishing touches on my custom LAMPPIX boot CD. My goal - Create a CD that I could boot to demonstrate the might and power of WordPress 1.6 (not yet released, still in alpha) to the Philly WordPress Meetup group. I dumped WordPress 1.5.1.3, 1.5.2, 1.6, and 1.6-Owen onto the ISO, burnt it, started it up once to see it boot, and fled for the city.
I started out way early, and had time to stop at the Apple store in King of Prussia before heading on into the city. I have to admit that the Apple store is pretty alluring. I left without buying anything, though. (More on that topic in a follow-up post.) Even with the stopover (and the $2.75/gal for gas!) I got to Fergie's way early, and they were locked up. I wandered around the block a bit and noticed that there are quite a few cool places nearby to Fergie's. You could make a really full day in the city and fit the meetup in the middle.
But enough about the wonderment of the city and the delicious jerked pork sandwich I had for lunch (Aw, yeah), and let's talk about the meetup.
Jim was the first guy to show up, and we talked while I ate lunch. He teaches some computer classes and dabbles in PHP, rewriting plugins to his needs. WordPress is his platform personal blogging, and as with most folks who I meet using WordPress, it's a hobby, not an obsession, like it seems to be for me.
After a while Scott showed up. Scott's a bit of a local celebrity, getting his name in the Philadelphia Inquirer for actually acquiring a job via his blog. You hear so much about folks losing their jobs because of their blogs, it's nice when the opposite can be said.
Andrea was next to arrive, my second "regular" member. Andrea attends more meetups than I knew existed, and if everything worked out, I think that she hit three on Saturday.
Kirk (there's no site in your Meetup profile, Kirk!) came in by bike and settled in before I gave my brief and impromptu demo of the new features of WordPress 1.6. Kirk was the only attendee at our meetup not already running WordPress, and so the demo was even better for him (I hope) since I had to run through an install from the LAMMPIX disk.
It took only a few moments to get rolling, since I did have to run a WordPress install. I could have written a script to do it from the CD, but I didn't want to mangle things so they didn't work at all. And even so, the only reason a WordPress install would take more than 30 seconds is if you have to talk about what you're doing.
I demoed the new post page, with the resizable WYSI editor and collapsable panels. Scott helped me out by manipulating the controls. This is actually something interesting with demos that I've noted in my professional career - get someone else to handle the controls if at all possible, especially if they've never used it before. It lends credence to how easy things are to use. Scott picked it up right away, and I was left fumbling in my description of how these amazing feats of web tech were accomplished. I think I answered everyone's questions well enough, though.
I also went through some of the user permission changes, which don't look like much in the interface, but are significant. I don't remember if I said anything about presentation at Fergie's, but I did talk about it later...
And that was about all the time we had. Usually our meetups are more social, but I feel a bit guilty for dragging people out for the afternoon, and not giving them something WordPress-ish for their time, so I brought the demo. I hope that everyone saw something that they wouldn't have seen if they didn't come.
Just as we were packing to head down the street to the Philadelphia Weblogger Meetup which was three blocks down the road, Maurice wandered in. Mo is our first regular WordPress meetup blogger, and I'm glad he showed up when he did, or he would have missed us.
Thankfully, we didn't encounter the rain that Mo's wet umbrella implied as we walked down to the Nodding Head for our next appointment.
It turns out that the Nodding Head (somewhere I'd never been) is a second-floor bar-slash-microbrewery. In other words, they've got their own beer. For the uninitiated - Do not order Budweiser at a microbrewery. I eventually had their oatmeal stoudt, which (not to turn this into a food review post) was "eh". I'm one of those guys that likes my stoudt to taste like stoudt. Enough said.
I figured that there would be more people at the general blogger meetup, but I was still surprised by the number of people that were there. There was Scott (he's the organizer) in the middle of the table surrounded by maybe 8 people, with smaller groups at outside tables. Now that I think about it, I've never been in the same room with so many bloggers and known that they were bloggers.
I didn't get to meet too many folks personally, since I was still catching up with the WordPress folks from our short meetup. We did quick introductions, which I'm sorry to say often go so quickly and so quietly in a bar setting that I lose them too easily.
Someone recognized that we had all wandered over from the WordPress group and asked what was new on that front, so I cranked up the notebook again. Boy, I feel all geeky suddenly. A couple of guys seemed interested in the overall features of WordPress.
One thing I found very interesting about the group is how many of them are hosting on shared freespace such as Blogspot. That's cool, but I now have a zealot-like need to convert them all to WordPress. Maybe next meetup.
I'm going to assume that I was talking to this Matt at one point, since he's the only Matt in the attendee list. He seemed interested in the demo I was putting on, checking out some of the new features.
I think I spoke just very briefly with Albert, also from Messy and Picky, another one of the few Philly bloggers to be using WordPress that wasn't at the WordPress meetup. As an amateur photographer, he's taken some nice photos at Live 8 in Philly.
I also conversed with Karl, founder of Philly Future. Philly Future runs on Civicspace, which is something I need to look into a little. It turns out that Karl is a Java guy from way back.
I wish that I had talked with a few of the other folks. There were so many people there. It seemed that there was a lot of social talk, just like our WordPress meetup, and yet some technical discussions, too.
One thing that I should bring up more generally, maybe at the meetup but definitely in a new post, is what it takes to make money form a personal blog. I was reporting the statistics for my site that make it possible to earn enough money to pay for it. I think I might have scared someone. I mean, if you're going to put Google ads on your site for the heck of it, then that's cool, but if you really want to make the ads work for you, you need to put a little work into it. The key is in how much you can do without going to the dark side - I need to congeal these thoughts and post again.
Ok, here comes the hard part... Finding the posts where everyone wrote about the meetup. You can get a complete list of the sites of the attendees of the Weblogger meetup at Philly Future. But here is where they actually talked about the meetup:
Did I miss anyone?
Well, it was an interesting and enjoyable afternoon. I learned another important lesson on Saturday. If I stay in Philly only until 5 and drive back during rush hour, it takes me until 7 to get back to West Chester for my standing weekly Saturday evening appointment with the guys. If I stay in Philly until 6:30, I get to drink an extra beer and still make it back to West Chester by 7:10 or so. So why do I try to leave early?
If you're looking for BBQ info, stay tuned. I'm going to make some calls/do some research and find out what it would take to reserve a spot in Valley Forge (if that's even possible) so that we can grill some meat in the outdoors for our next meetup. If you were waiting for a good excuse to come to our meetup (or to Philly!) September should be the month to do it.
