A journey lugging aspirations and experiences, tools and ideals.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 190 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
Whew. What an amazing weekend. Scranton PA held its first WordCamp this weekend. #wcscranton was well put together and featured some great sessions. How can you have anything but a successful event when you put Matt Mullenweg on the stage for a town hall style Q&A to close out day 1! Cool beans. It was my first opportunity to hear Matt speak live and I came away very inspired.
I met some great folks doing WordPress stuff just 2 hours north of me. As a solo-preneur trying to make a living with WordPress it is so important for me to build community at events like these. The WordCamp organizers at wcscranton offered ample opportunity for small groups and individuals to get together to share stories, exchange solutions and discuss challenges.
I was not able to stay over for the Contributor Day on Sunday so I headed home. One benefit of that was that I was able to log onto GenesisCamp – a 24 hour online WordCamp-style event focused entirely on the Genesis framework from StudioPress. Session after session of talks covering a broad range of topics. The cool thing about this was that I was present during the very early stages of the planning of this event. I had been invited to join the Genesis Slack channel which brought me to the loose group pulling together the first online genesis gathering. As I watched the Slack messages fly fast a furious over the next few hours I witnessed the event taking shape. A few dates were tossed about, someone secured the domain, SturdioPress was brought into the conversation and consulted about “giving its blessing” and the legal tie-ins, a logo was designed (how cool is that) and shown, hosted was secured for the site and that was just during the first few hours. This thing was becoming a reality.
Fast forward a few months and I am now benefitting from listening to some of the most creative, successful and influential people in the WordPress / Genesis community. And I could participate in all of this from the comfort of my den, with my late night snack first, my breakfast next , dinner, …. well you get the point.
I did miss a few live sessions mid day on Sunday to attend a minor league baseball game (home team won!). Here’s the icing on the cake. GenesisCamp, run as a series of Google Hangouts, was being recorded and each session was immediately available on YouTube. I could catch up on missed sessions right away. Great decision on the part of the organizers to use Hangouts on Air.
This week I’ll catch up on a few of the overnight sessions I missed. I learned so much this weekend. It was amazing. The opportunities available to me seemed to be making themselves known at every turn. I’m exhausted, but full of satisfaction in the path that I find myself on now. This is where I’m supposed to be at this moment.
Onward and upward….