This event is for anyone who blogs on WordPress, designs for WordPress, develops WordPress (or its plugins or themes), runs their business and website on WordPress, or loves it for any other reason. If you don’t know what WordPress is or haven’t used it yourself, come anyway and ask other people why they use it and what they think.

The event will take place the evening of Thursday, May 6. Venue details are still being finalized, but we wanted to give you advance notice so you can plan to come. We’re planning to provide food and drinks at the event, a short talk, WordPress site demos, and more importantly a chance for you to meet and mingle.

Hope to see you there! We’ll post on the blog and on Twitter more details as they come. Follow WordCamp Seattle on Twitter here.

The videos in order of appearance at WordCamp:

• Chris Pirillo: Community
• Jane Wells: WordPress Questions
• Aaron Hockley: After Launching a Couple Dozen Blogs
• Scott Porad: WordPress at the Cheezburger Factory
• Mark Jacquith: BuddyPress and the Future of WordPress Plugins
• Martin Buckley: Self-Hosting Multiple WordPress Blogs
• Eric Amundson: 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof your WordPress Site
• Chris Molitor: Finding the Perfect Theme for Your Business
• Donald DeSantis: Create Your Own WordPress Theme
• Mark McLaren: WordPress and the Social Web
• Liz Strauss: Context, Campaigns, and the U Community
• Josh Harrison: wp-config Tips & Tricks

WordCamp Seattle Speaker Mark McLaren

Editor’s Note: Mark McLaren (one of our speakers from WordCamp Seattle 2009) originally posted this to a local email list and gave us permission to republish it here.

I have noticed a number of list members using WordPress.com to host their business blog, and I thought I would offer a few suggestions.

You can continue to host your blog on WordPress.com but use an upgrade (about $10 a year) to map your own subdomain to the site. That way your blog URLs will start with http://blog.yourdomain.com/ rather than http://yourusername.wordpress.com/.

There are lots of reasons to do this, including improved search engine optimization, but the most significant is that if you ever decide to switch to a self-hosted blog, you will be able to change hosts without losing any URLs.

Details for subdomain mapping are here:
http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-subdomain/

In almost every case, I recommend using a self-hosted installation of WordPress right off the bat. Again, there are many reasons for doing so. One is that, at the very least, it will allow you to place an obvious link to your main website in the navigation of the blog.

Typically, when you host your blog on WordPress.com, there is no easy way to get to the main website from the blog, which is a significant usability and web marketing issue.

First of all, people will be going to the blog from the main site. You want them to be able to get back to the main site without having to think about how to do it.

Second, people will be landing on individual blog posts from many different sources: search engines, links pasted into email messages, other web pages, Twitter, etc. You want them to be able to get to your main website quickly and easily from any page they land on.

Even if your main site runs on .NET, it is still possible to use self-hosted WordPress. Here is an example I built for one of my customers: http://www.photosafaris.com/blog/

(Editor’s note: Thanks for the tips, Mark, and we’d love to hear feedback in the comments!)

DECEMBER 17, 2009 UPDATE:
There are more reasons to choose self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com.

You can’t install Google Analytics on WordPress.com. If you are going to go to the effort of maintaining a blog, you should track visitors. The analytics that are included in the WordPress.com Dashboard are inadequate.

There are thousands of outstanding plugins and custom themes for WordPress that you cannot use on WordPress.com. The range and depth of plugins and themes is hard to convey in a few sentences. Some plugin examples are the Disqus comments system (shown here on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog) and the Share This plugin. Installing these plugins takes only minutes and significantly increases your blog’s chances of success.

Below is the video of him speaking at WordCamp Seattle (found on WordPress.tv) and his slide deck (found on slideshare.net).

Download video | View video on WordPress.tv

Here is your chance!

The post-camp meetup is scheduled for The Ballroom in Fremont, which is just blocks from the Adobe building:

The Ballroom
456 N 36th St
Seattle, WA 98103-8631
(206) 634-2575

We have a reservation starting at 6pm, with no set ending time. Pizza will be provided and it there will be a no-host bar. Laura Fitton of 140.com will be there to answer your Twitter questions.

If you have questions about parking, please check our FAQ: http://www.wordcampseattle.com/faq/

Be sure to view the agenda if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, it’s been updated with the latest speaker information available.

Waitlist Update: We contacted a number of people on the wait list on Friday — if you have not yet heard from us, unfortunately we aren’t able to open any more seats. There may still be a few people who can’t make it to the event or who are looking to sell their tickets — please feel free to coordinate in the comments or on Twitter for anyone still looking to buy or sell a ticket. Due to time constraints we won’t be able to facilitate these transactions directly on late notice.

Thanks and I look forward to seeing you at the event!

Then brush up on your WordPress Trivia facts and get creative with your name tag because we will be giving away 5 tickets to WordCamp Seattle at the Pre-Camp Meetup.  Everyone is welcome at the Pre-Camp Meetup so invite all your friends that love WordPress as much as you do.

We’ll be getting starting at 7pm with six tables of free pool and a WordPress Trivia Challenge.  All evening long, meet our speakers and sponsors of WordCamp Seattle in an open forum while mingling with members of the WordPress community. And compete for cool prizes in our BYO-Name Tag competition.  Most creative name tag wins!

See you there!

Jillian’s Billiards – 731 Westlake Ave. North, Seattle, WA – We’ll be upstairs

Friday Sept 25th @ 7PM

If you have already purchased a ticket…
Please consider donating your ticket to somebody on the wait list. Please email us (contact form) to let us know and we’ll make sure somebody on the wait list gets in. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources necessary to refund tickets. I’m sure many people on the wait list would be willing to pay for a ticket and we can try to accommodate this, but payment will need to be handled between yourself and the other person.

If you do not have a ticket and are on the wait list…
If we have room for additional people due to ticket-holders not being able to attend the event, we will contact you by email this week to let you know.

Additional WordCamp Weekend activities
We will be having a pre-party at Jillian’s (Friday, 9/25, 7:00 PM) and an after-party following the event (Saturday, 9/26). The pre-party and after-party will be open to anyone!

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The following topics have been submitted:

1. Create Your Own WordPress Theme in Five Minutes – Donald DeSantis
   

   Learn to create a personalized theme for your WordPress blog. In an action packed five minutes, we’ll review the structure of a WordPress theme, export graphics from a Photoshop design, and assemble our blog with little to no coding. I’ll post all of the files used during the session on my website for your download and review. Creating your own WordPress theme isn’t hard. And as we’ll see, it doesn’t take long either.

2. Fixing WordPress Search for CMS Applications – Eric Amundson
   

   Quickly make WordPress search more robust and relevant using Relevanssi, a WP plugin, plus some easy code.

3. The Untimely Demise of the Webmaster, a Historical Journey, as Told by Stephen Colbert – Mark McLaren
   

   Told in the voice of Stephen Colbert. At one time, the mighty webmaster had complete control over his domain. Nothing could happen on a website without his (or her) consent. But WordPress has made much of what they used to do unnecessary. Told as a bitter lament, this story will show how WordPress has helped to “democratize” the Web by giving everyone the ability to do things only webmasters understood: like creating a static home page with what used to be “blogging” software, adding a custom header, editing posts and pages, inserting media, customizing a sidebar, adding even more features using plugins, and customizing the look and feel with themes.

4. Finding the perfect theme for you or your business – Chris Molitor
   

   With all the hundreds of thousands of Wordpress themes out there, how are you suppose to know which one you should use? Should you use a free theme? Should you buy one? What are the advantages or disadvantages to purchasing a theme? What are the advantages or disadvantages to using a free theme? I’ll help you answer all these questions and more, as well as give you some great resources for finding the perfect Wordpress theme for you or your business.

5. Self-hosting multiple WordPress blogs: my experience, tips and tricks – Evil ZEN Scientist
   

   I self host about a dozen WordPress blogs – for family, friends and my own ramblings. In this session I’ll cover some of my experience about keeping on top of the multiple layers of security, patching and change control – and some of my thoughts on how this can help others.

6. Keeping the Lawyers at Bay: How to Avoid Unwanted Attention to your Blog – John Grant
   

   Free advice on how to stay out of trouble as a blogger and dispel a lot of legal myths. Learn how to protect yourself, your work, and how to blow a whistle without a backfire.

7. 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site – Eric Amundson
   

   Using free and open source tools to quickly and easily test your site for usability and accessibility.

8. WordPress and the Social Web – Mark McLaren
   

   Technology like WordPress makes the social web possible. I will give a brief tour of the transformation that has taken place in online (and mobile) communication over the past 5-6 years. One of the best examples of this transformation is the move from the frozen-solid, wall-like brochure-ware website to the fluid, state-of-the-art WordPress site. Communication today takes place on many different platforms in real time. WordPress is keeping pace with all these changes. The social web is about listening and responding to your community, and that’s what WordPress does.

9. wp-config Tips and Tricks – Josh Harrison
   

   Just by adding some configuration settings, you can improve the functionality, performance, and security of your WordPress-powered site. The wp-config file is a simple file, but it provides users with a way to customize their WordPress installs. Using real-world use cases, you’ll see some useful tips and tricks that don’t take a lot of time to add. You’ll wish you would have known these long ago!

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