Blaze New Media

Photo: Mostly Lisa

Thanks to the organizers and everyone who came out last night to Tazzu WordCamp Vancouver. The place was absolutely packed out and really shows that Vancouver is a hot bed for WordPress enthusiasts and blogging in general.

I had the chance to meet a whole bunch of people, sorry to those who I didn’t get a chance to speak with. I hope everyone at least got a WordPress sticker!

The next event will hopefully be held in a larger venue so we can get more people seated. I might even consider presenting something on BuddyPress.

Event wrap-ups from: Duane Storey, Hummingbird 604, Miss 604

Photos of the event are on Flickr tagged with ‘tazzuwordcamp‘.

Wordpress 2.5 was released today along with a completely new Wordpress.org site design.

If you haven’t seen or tried 2.5 yet, I really recommend upgrading. It contains a huge number of updates as well as an excellent administration area overhaul.

I’m particularly happy with the new visual editor that now leaves your HTML untouched. This is going to make using Wordpress as a CMS a whole lot better.

A lot of work has gone into this release, thank you to everyone who helped out, a fantastic job well done.

I haven’t publicized this at all as it is reasonably fresh. I’ve put together a one page site that syndicates all of my online content creation. I call it “Andy In Life“.

The site is a combination of RSS feed rendering and API utilization from all the major social sites and tools I use. I just felt like a lot of this content was getting lost, and it was nice to bring it all together in once place.

Also, Yahoo Pipes - very cool. I used YP to merge all of my RSS feeds together, manipulate them a little, and spit out what I call my “Mega Feed“. The feed contains everything I put on the web, including anything from this site, so grab that and you’ll be constantly bugged by my daily life.

Today is my first day working for Automattic! For the past several weeks I’ve been talking with Matt and Toni about the direction of BuddyPress and what I did last year with the ChickSpeak project. They have given me the opportunity to come on board and concentrate on the development of BuddyPress under the Automattic umbrella.

The talent they have on board at Automattic is incredible, some of the brightest minds in the game. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with everyone on a daily basis and soak up some of the tremendous knowledge available.

I’ve been all consumed in WordPress for the past two years now, I think almost every single site I’ve built since working as a freelancer has used WordPress in some way. To get the opportunity to concentrate fully on WordPress everyday, and also the chance to help mould WordPress in new ways is a fantastic one not to be missed.

Also, the buddypress.com domain is in the process of being moved, so further updates on the project will be available there once the move has been completed.