“What’s this?” you ask. “This meetup is a week early!”
That’s right! The dates have changed to avoid these blasted holidays. It seems like every week we have a meetup there is some holiday like Christmas or Memorial Day or something. So the monthly Philadelphia WordPress meetups are now the third Saturday of the month.
Meetup time is 2pm. Immediately following the WordPress meetup at 3pm (at least, last I looked) is the Philadelphia Weblogger Meetup. It’s mostly Blogspot users, but they’re a fun group of prolific Philly bloggers. It’s nice to see how the others live.
I want to see about moving the meetup to a cleaner venue. I like Fergie’s but it seems that some of the group isn’t down with the dark and smoky Irish bar scene. That’s fine, but I’ll need to find someplace new.
Jim suggested World Cafe Live, and I’m going to drop by over there after the meetup to check out their space. I wonder how much that’s going to cost me. Hmm.
In the future, assuming the group continues to show up, I would like to get some special guests. Maybe I could get them to Skype into the Meetup and answer some questions or tell us about what they’re working on. If you are interested in participating as a speaker, please let me know.
If that pans out, I would like to produce a monthly podcast from the meetup. It would be a summary of topics covered, and everyone could get some mic time, including the special guest. I’m not sure how the format would work, but I think this would be of interest not only for luring more folks into our own den of geekines, but also for getting more people involved worldwide.
Our group caters to a low-techie audience. I’ve answered a bunch of new user questions, and I’m happy to do it. Getting down with the people who actually use WordPress and make it popular gives me insight into how things can be made better for its audience. And sometimes I just like to help.
Many of our unscripted topics are of interest to computer users in general. We don’t talk about WordPress and blogs through the whole meetup. So don’t let that scare you away. If you’re thinking of coming down for a walkthrough of the software, that’s not what this is really about. We can tell you what we like about it, how we’ve accomplished things with it, what we use it for, and what we write about. We can show you some new things, talk about new features, and give you a glimpse at the future. But really, we just like to get together and hang out.
Please join us this weekend for our December meetup at 2pm. Meetups usually last for about 2 hours, sometimes longer. Fergie’s often has live Irish music at 4pm, which isn’t half bad. Come and enjoy!
