I attended the WordCamp in Zurich last Saturday.
It’s been a while since I attended a similar geek event and I enjoyed listening to others.
It was encouraging to hear about WordPress. I’ve used WordPress since September 2004. And it’s truly a great sign of continuity that WordPress is still here. Not only that, but there’s a thriving community and a company that want to keep it that way as well.
Secondly, it was encouraging to hear from other bloggers and web developers.
Here’s a quick run through my Twitter notes and faves (like a Storify summary of Tatort on Spiegel.de ;-)).
First talk I listened to was on trends in enterprise blogs. I found this talk useful for my day job.
Large, enterprise blogs have switched off commenting and are experimenting with new forms of integrating user interaction, e.g. by using annotations, or by asking specific questions, or moving comments entirely to Facebook.
Regarding content length, short texts and long analysis articles (aka Longreads) work best. It’s the mid-length texts between 500 and 800 words that are read least frequently.
And many of the enterprise sites use extensive email marketing to bring readers to their site.
The slides are here.
Next talk that inspired me was by Vitaly Friedman. He had a fun starting point by looking at typewriter art in the late 19th century, which led to ASCI art and teletext.
If the Internet hadn’t appeared, we would all be teletext designers and developers.
I think I’ll print this tweet on dead wood and post it on my office door:
Vitaly had some excellent UX examples. His message: details matter for usability.
Another very enjoyable talk was by Paolo on virtual offices and distributed teams. First thing to note it’s not only about tools. The tools should not be the first thing you try to solve when setting up a distributed team. Three common mistakes are
- Trying to mimic a local office setup
- Measuring work based on the wrong metrics
- Suffering instead of embracing change
Recruiting is a very important part of distributed teams. And because your team is in different places and different timezones, managers need to empower their team members. Managers must trust team members to perform and deliver their work packages in time, in high quality.
Next talk:
I liked Christian Leu’s humorous talk about how to become a successful blogger. His point was there are tonnes of articles on successful blogging. There’s no point in repeating this.
Many long-term bloggers have moved to Twitter and are blogging less. Main reason given by many is lack of time. As a result, @leumund presented 10 simple tips to find more time for blogging.
It’s important to stay true to yourself.
In summary, it was an enjoyable day.
Videos of the talks will be published WordPress.tv at some point.
Observation:
There were several talks on maintaining multilingual sites with WordPress. For me this is a sign, that WordPress is used increasingly in a Swiss business environment. Many Swiss websites (even for SMEs) need to display in German, French, Italian and English. My humble tip: Consider using Drupal instead of WordPress for multilingual sites. Maintaining multi-language sites is part of the Drupal core.
While listening to others present, I thought of two WordPress presentations which I could present to share some of my more recent learnings and experience:
- Idea no. 1: POSSE and IndieWeb plugins for WordPress – Using Webmention plugin, an URL shortener and Jetpack’s Publicize (see corresponding entry)
- Idea no.2: Security for non-techies – Make your WordPress site less vulnerable, even if you’re a non-developer; about WordPress resources, plugins, advice, where to get help
Further links:
Storify
Blogging in an imperfectly multilingual world
Live blogging notes by Evren Kiefer
On communication within a distributed team
The end of time
