WordCamp Chicago 2009 And My New Blog

Well I have to say I had an unbelievable experience attending WordCamp Chicago this weekend. It not only provided me with valuable information on how to maximize the WordPress for both clients and personal projects, but also gave me the opportunity to meet a room full of smart, enthusiastic entrepreneurs and business owners. I even had the chance to speak personally with Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress open source platform.

With the help of all the inspiring presentations and meeting some great people, I was enticed to take my sad little personal site (basically a one page html website that I wrote in notepad a while back) and finally put up a blog.

To be honest I’ve had reservations for a while about having a personal blog because I know that I just don’t have the time to update with enough frequency for it to be worthwhile.

A funny thing happened though. The last year I’ve been using Twitter and in a way that slowly became my personal blog  (or “microblog” I suppose).

The thing that bothered me though, is that everything I was writing is hosted at twitter.com, so they in effect own the content. Furthermore all links on Twitter carry the “nofollow” attribute so whenever I link to content I like, I’m not able to pass on full link popularity and SEO value to the writers that deserve it. (Correction: the Twitter tools plugin currently “nofollows” links, looking for a fix for this)

The last day and session of Wordcamp I got to ask Matt Mullenweg about this dilemma and without hesitation he told me to check out Twitter Tools. That solved the exact problem I was having! That is the beautiful thing about WordPress is that because of the large community it has there’s almost always a solution to just about anything you want to achieve with your projects.

The Blog

I’ve built a number of sites over the years with WordPress,  so when I got back from the conference I broke out the famous 5 Minute WordPress Install documentation for a refresher, fired up a MySQL database and got the site up and customized with the plugins I needed pretty quickly. I used a great theme from Brian Gardner who is a phenomenal designer and coincidently one of the co-founders of WordCamp Chicago.  You can check out more of his themes at StudioPress.

It remains to be seen if a blog full of tweets really is providing that much value, but I think the definition of a blog is rapidly changing and I am excited about how WordPress will continue to evolve to meet this challenge.

Overall I highly value the opportunity I had to attend WordCamp and am happy to annouce my new blog at chrisking.info. Thanks again to all the organizers, speakers, and attendees!