WordCamp LA – Hanging With People Cooler Than Me

I had the privilege to attend WordCamp LA on Saturday. It’s a gathering of geeks who love WordPress. There were presentations all day long. I expected to enjoy being around other people with similar interests and hearing some great, hard core geeky WordPress developer stuff that I wouldn’t quite be able to keep up with. I expected to be bored for most of it.

It was nothing like that.

The first speaker was the one that I came for. Shayne Sanderson talked about using the WP-ecommerce plugin in WordPress MU, the multi user version. I never knew that would work and apparently it wouldn’t up until a couple weeks ago. Huge shout out to Shayne for the presentation and then letting me bug him afterwards. He was very gracious and helpful, even as I asked more and more questions. Huge help to me and I’m very grateful.

I plan on taking this technology and making it available to you. We’ll be working on a new site that will allow you, or anyone, the ability to create a new blog, pick a theme, and have an inventory system to load all of your products into, then sell them in a shopping cart. We plan to only charge a monthly fee and not a transaction fee like some people we know.

We’ll back all of that up with some training material to help you through the process of setting up your own business of selling your own products.

We’re aiming this at crafters, but it will work for anyone who needs an ecommerce site, a site that sells stuff and accepts payment.

Imagine being able to work in your own home. You can have your own web site to sell your products and make enough money to meet your goals.

It’s possible and it’s coming. Subscribe to our news letter to be the first to know when it’s available.

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Back on track. The next speaker was Ben Huh. He’s the CEO of the company that publishes I Can Has Cheezburger and the FAIL blog. Go ahead. Go read the sites. I know you want to, so I’ll wait here.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

You’re back? Cool. He’s a funny guy, as you might imagine and I didn’t expect much more than that, a good time. He proceeded to explain their business methodology. MPH stands for Mr. Potato Head. It means that if a part of your business falls off, it’s ugly, but nobody dies. It also means that if you add a part to your business, it’s ugly, but everybody lives. He said that they focus on exactly what they need to do to get the job done and no more. You need to let go of the ego, kill the sacred cows, and lose the attitude. Be lazy. Do what your users want and that’s it. They outsource everything they can.

The results of this apparent slacker attitude? 8.2 million page views a day. He wouldn’t talk about how money they make, but the company has 21 employees.

Micah Baldwin talked about Failure being job one. The difference between failure and losing. If you have a failure, it’s only an event along the path to success. If you lose, that’s the end. There is no more. He pointed out that America loves a failure who succeeds, but hate a loser. Don’t be a loser. Get back up and fail again.

Andrew Warner talked about how to put video on a web site. I figured that I knew everything about video. I own and use Final Cut pro. I’ve put together some nice stuff out there. Oh, wait. None of my stuff is on the web, not really. He showed some crazy easy ways to produce good stuff and put it on the web. There are tools that I wasn’t aware of. Now I am. Now I’m hot to do video. Training videos. Blog post videos. I’m gonna do it. Watch this space.

John Hawkins ended up by talking about how to develop a plug in for WordPress. I always wanted to get around to learning that someday, but I knew it would be hard and I would fail and I wouldn’t like it. He was the most technical speaker, but I kept up and he made it look easy. I’m encouraged. I can do this thing. Look for a plugin coming sometime soon too.

During all of this whole day, I was hanging out with my old friend, Doug Wade. We used to go to MacWorld together, back in the early days of the Internet. I have a lot of friends, but he’s one of the few who get this part of me. I really appreciate him. I didn’t realize how much I missed him until I saw him there. Check out his blog.