WordCamp New York City 2009

Steve McNally

With TrueSlant.com, we set out to build a new newsroom.

Our team brings a mix of newspaper, magazine, television and book publishing to the table in addition to collective decades of online experience. A shared driver in building True/Slant is our wish to bring some of the best-practices learned working in those media to the immediacy and community of blogging.

The Editorial team recruits Contributors with a vision of the news – a Slant.  These credible and knowledgeable Contributors – hundreds of journalists, authors, professionals and academics with topic-specific expertise – blog under their own names, are working to build their own brands, and are trusted to make their own editorial decisions. Editors then curate the stream of stories coming through: slotting them in where they fit best, featuring the larger trends, and promoting stories across and outside of TrueSlant.com. Our Founder & CEO Lewis DVorkin calls this “Editing Talent” rather than Content.

Building on WordPress MU gave us simple, powerful tools for Contributors; extending MU helps us provide frictionless publishing and promotion across a network of quality content, helps community members find what’s relevant, helps our Contributors build audience, and helps our Editors create a lively site with minimal effort.

We’ll cover the enhancements and curation tools that help keep TrueSlant.com a vibrant, growing network with a limited editorial staff. We’ll discuss the thinking and technology behind the Content Management methodologies and tools in use.  We’ll walk through the ways Editors manage content flow to create the home page, Topics, and promotional opportunities throughout and the site.

Erin Blaskie

In a world where everything moves as quickly as it does, it’s no wonder that we (bloggers, entrepreneurs, geeks, etc.) are looking for ways to capture our online lives – our online presences – in a way that is coherent and succinct. We also live in a time when voyeurism (not that kind) is at an all-time high and being transparent, authentic and open is the way to build a business and solidify a tribe.

As we look at ways to create a moving, online picture of our lives online and also tie in the need for transparency and authenticity, it’s not surprising that we turn to social media, blogging and lifecasting. These mediums allow us to share ourselves with the world in a way that feels good (and is good for business).

If you Google me, Erin Blaskie, you’ll quickly realize that I live on the Internet.  Really, I do.  It’s a fun place to exist as it’s ever-changing, ever-evolving and there’s always someone online to chat to (even at 4:20am).  More than that, it’s becoming a way of life for many of us who run virtual businesses, have telecommuting positions or who are blogging on their off hours.  It brings us together and connects us as human beings.

In my presentation at WordCamp New York City, which I am super stoked to be giving, I’ll be covering the topic of, “Lifestreaming: The New Future of Blogging?” We’ll be exploring ways to bring in all of the different social media sites to one aggregated source, how to keep your lifestream up-to-date via the mobile lifestyle and whether too much transparency is a bad thing.

I’m curious to see what the general consensus of the crowd is on this question.  Do you think we’re moving into an era of total transparency via lifestreaming or do you think we’ll stick to the more traditional forms of black text on white screens?

Here is a sneak peek at the Lifestreaming Blog design map:

I invite you to share in the comments what you think about lifestreaming in general. Heard about it?  Want to know more?  What are the questions that you’d love me to address via my presentation about this subject?

I look forward to meeting you at WordCamp and you’ll know who I am… I’ll be the girl with the iPhone, laptop, Flip camera and “regular” camera which will be all but strapped to my head a la lifecasting style.  Please, stop me to say hi!

Raphael Mudge

You’re making the word processor obsolete. Thanks to you we’re composing email in our browsers, writing articles in software like WordPress, and building all kinds of sites that welcome user-generated content.

The web is not ready to replace the word processor yet. The word processor still has something that we don’t.

One of the great powers of the word processor is its magical ability to check my writing and tell me it’s OK. Before the web can replace the word processor this fire must be stolen from the proprietary word processor and brought into more systems.

Meet After the Deadline

After the Deadline is a magical proofreading technology created (not stolen) by rubbing dry sticks together for over a year. After the Deadline is an API that checks spelling, style, and grammar using artificial intelligence. The software is capable of amazing feats. Use it and you may believe Prometheus is chained to the side of a mountain reading and correcting your content for all eternity.

After the Deadline is a software service. Since it’s open source you’re not tied to any vendor and you have access to the code to run your own server.

Add Proofreading to Your Application

Using After the Deadline is seamless thanks to jQuery and TinyMCE plugins that communicate with the server software.  You add After the Deadline to an application by loading one of these plugins on your page and adding an After the Deadline button to check the part of the page containing the content.

As an example, here is a bare-minimum After the Deadline integration:

<html>
  <head>
    <!-- 1. load jQuery -->
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

    <!-- 2. load AtD/jQuery plugin -->
    <script src="scripts/jquery.atd.js"></script>

    <!-- 3. load a library to do cross-domain AJAX over CSS -->
    <script src="scripts/csshttprequest.js"></script>

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="css/atd.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="preview">heloo world</div>

    <p>
      <a href="javascript:AtD.checkCrossAJAX('preview');">Proofread!</a>
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

You can try this example on our server. This example loads the necessary resource files and creates a DIV with the ID preview. When the user clicks Spell Check! the AtD.checkCrossAJAX('preview') code is executed. This one function calls make all the magic happen.

This picture shows how it works:

All you need to add AtD to your application is jQuery, our jQuery plugin, and a CSS file to style the menus and errors.

This simple example could serve as the basis for an editorial review feature on a site. Imagine having a button where a site administrator could quickly check the content area for errors. I’m saving textareas and other form elements for the session. Speaking of which:

Come to the Session

Adding grammar, style, and spell checking to your system will be the focus of my Saturday session in the Advanced Development track titled: After the Deadline: an API to Check Spelling and Grammar. Come on by and let’s change the way people write together.

If you have any questions or points you’d like me to discuss, leave them in the comments or contact me rsmudge at gmail dot com.

Raphael is a code hacker and technology entrepreneur. He developed After the Deadline, the intelligent proofreading software used on WordPress.com and available as a free GPL plugin on WordPress.org. Raphael resides in Washington, D.C.

Casey Bisson

Most every university uses LDAP or some other authentication technology to reduce the number of systems that users have to maintain their passwords in. When Plymouth State University first deployed WordPress MU (when it was still in pre-release beta), we integrated with LDAP. Eventually we migrated to single sign-on via CAS (Central Authentication Service) and I took over maintenance of the wpCAS plugin.

Running WordPress as a client to other authentication systems is easy, but WordPress offers a number of user-facing features that get lost when doing that.

So when we went looking for ways to improve the security of our password assignment and reset process, we decided to make WordPress the center of the system. Using WordPress saved us the trouble of building our own and the many eyes of the WordPress development community help ensure the overall security of the system.

WordPress now powers the authentication, password recovery, and profile management for the university, replacing the authentication features of our commercial portal system. Now we’re taking advantage of WP’s plugin architecture to easily add new features (like sending password reset codes by SMS), but this approach also offers a neat way to sneak more social features into the tools our users depend on daily.

I’ll be discussing the evolution of WordPress authentication at Plymouth State, including the custom plugins and hacks we developed to make it work, in my session on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems at WordCamp New York.

The awesome speakers list wasn’t enough to convince you to attend WordCamp NYC? No problem: here’s the preliminary list of Saturday sessions, 59 of them and counting. There also are a handful still in the process of being determined, and these will be added to the list as soon as they are confirmed. Remember, with 8 tracks of content — Newbie, Blogger, CMS/App, Beginner Dev, Advanced Dev, BuddyPress/MU, Academic, Open Source Community — there’s something for everyone.

Right now the list is mostly just a list, but descriptions of each session will be added as the speakers write them.

We’ll create a place to discuss potential unconference sessions (to fill in the programming gaps) here on the site a little closer to the event.

What session are you most excited to see? Post in the comments!

*Yes, I know I shouldn’t have ended the title with a preposition, but that what I wanted to say.

We recently posted a survey asking potential WordCamp NYC attendees what kind of conference ours should be: what general tracks would be interesting, what specific topics would be awesome (or boring), and what the make-up of the audience would likely be. It’s open until August 31st, since we’ll start making official schedule announcements September 1st, but we’ve got about 130 responses so far, so I thought we’d share the results and what they mean for the WordCamp NYC program.

Audience Make-up
I’m glad to see ours will be a developer-heavy event, rather than what I think of as a “WordCamp Lite” (WC Lites are aimed solely at bloggers hoping to improve their search rankings so they can make more money from Google AdSense, not that there’s anything wrong with that.). The breakdown:

23% Consultant using WordPress for clients
21% Personal Blogger
11% Work for a Media Company using WordPress
10% Other (ad-hoc answers for this question were an even split among the existing categories)
8% Designer
5% Academic User (professor, student)
4% Theme Developer
4% Corporate Blogger
4% Plugin Developer
3% WordPress Core Developer
2% Photo/Video Blogger

Tracks
We proposed 7 potential tracks and asked which ones you would be interested in attending, as well as which one you would attend if you had to pick one. When forced to choose, the numbers look like this:

27% Developer
20% Use as a large-scale CMS
19% Business
18% Blogger
7% Newbies only
5% Academic use
5% Systems/security

These ratios mean we will plan a very developer-friendly program, and will try to get lots of demos around practical usage for bloggers, as opposed to the more generic “How to get more comments” type of talks that I see at so many conferences. Maybe small tracks with limited enrollment would be a good idea for newbies and other smaller constituencies.

Days
I love two-day WordCamps. I love them because you have more time to talk to people and get to know the local community face to face, you can participate in more sessions, and it’s not as tiring as attending one very long day that leaves you exhausted for the last couple of hours. That said, I’ve been to a number of 2-day WCs, and I’m always disappointed when I overhear people saying they aren’t coming to the second day because they just wanted to see Matt speak (btw: lame! engage your local community!), have laundry to do, or whatever. Why? Because in addition to missing half the experience, you’ve effectively denied it to someone else, as well. Many WordCamps sell out quickly, have long waitlists, and have to turn away hundreds of would-be attendees. Because of this, we asked if you would attend both days. The results:

50% Only if I was interested in speakers/topics on both days.
48% Of course! The more WordCamp, the better.
2% I would only attend one day.

I would hate to turn away as many people as I’m expecting we’ll have to, just to find out come Sunday that we could have let in another 50 people after all. So, we’re going to try to do some of the smaller tracks with single-day scheduling, so you’ll have the option of registering for one or both days.

Session Types
As Mark Jaquith pointed out recently, most WordCamps aren’t really unconferences, they’re planned conference programs that are just a little more casual than your standard fare. I personally enjoy the WordCamps that have some scheduled sessions *and* some unconference time built in for ad-hoc collaboration and discussion. We asked you what kind of sessions you would prefer. You said:

37% Small workshops
34% Visiting speakers from the broader WordPress universe
13% Short demos of plugins/themes/sites
6% Local NYC speakers giving presentations
5% Ad-hoc unconference sessions and discussions
5% Other

I’m not sure why there was so little interest in local speakers and unconference sessions… maybe you felt like you could get that at the local meetup? In any case, we will put together a proposed program that mixes a variety of programming types.

Session Content
There was a matrix-type question that asked you to rate potential topics based on your interest in them. The results of this type of question are kind of a pain to type out, so if you’re interested in the vote-by-vote details, check out this chart. If you just want a high-level recap, here are the three most popular topics, based on the percentage of respondents who said they’d wait in line to see sessions about them:

50.8% Theme creation/editing
47.7% Making money with WordPress
46.9% Site demos (how to make this using WordPress)

Of course, we’ll have sessions about all kinds of things.

So, that’s about it. The survey will remain open until August 31st (as previously announced) should you decide to weigh in. The next vote you see here will be for our event logo, which is coming up in a few days.

It’s time to start nailing down the schedule. As the venue has a large studio, a couple of smaller rooms, and a couple of even smaller rooms, we need to figure out how to divvy up the space and allot it to various presentations, workshops, discussions, etc. If you are planning on attending WordCamp NYC in November, please fill out this survey and let us know what topics most interest you. This will help us in confirming speakers and creating the tracks.

As a thank you, when we open registration in the fall, you’ll get an email giving you a heads up the week before we make a public announcement. Let’s face it, NYC is big, the venue only holds a few hundred people, and we will undoubtedly sell out within a week or two of opening registration. Filling in the program survey will give you an edge in terms of beating the registration crowd.

So go on and tell us what you most want to see/learn/do at WordCamp NYC!