This Spring I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to go to Word Camp Victoria and both listen to a few of the presentations/workshops as well as lead one of the workshops about plugins for Wordpress.

I had the good fortune to sit in on a workshop with Tim Ayres as he gave the masses a little of his hard fought wisdom being a blogger/real estate agent in Sooke and looking for ways to be effective as a blogger for business. It was an interesting discussion, as he told basically how much time and effort he put into creating an interesting blog. It was a great reminder how you can build a name for yourself, a following and some online presence by simply putting your head down and writing. I'm not in a position reight now where daily blogging is possible but I can say that it is something I would like to work toward.

Next I sat in with Paul Holmes as he expounded on the world of blog aggregators, their strengths and weeknesses. He pointed out the BC bloggers network. That was a new one for me. Which reminded me that it would be fun to setup a planet for Victoria. I feel like Victoria wide would be local enough to keep the contents interesting. I do enjoy reading planet.debian.org would I enjoy reading a planet.victoria.org. Hard to say

Next was me! I talked about in plugins for Wordpress, it's a huge topic and in spite of the fact that I prepped a presentation, I pretty much abandoned it immediately in favor of simply taking questions and doing my best to put together some answers from the expertise in the crowd. That was my plan help everybody help one another. If you were expecting me to be the fountain on knowledge... well... you would have been disappointed. But I thought we did pretty well to address a few issues that people were having with forms, caching, signups, etc.

Finally, I sat in on Raul's talk about having a blog for personal/life and a second blog for professional purposes. This was great to hear his take on it. I've though about this tons. Especially with relationship to different topics. He did a good job of drawing things back to your goals for your audience and first defining those and then letting everything flow naturally from that starting point. Maintaining two blogs is obviously more work, but if you really are trying to reach separate audiences, it just makes sense.

That was it! It was a great afternoon at Wordcamp! I enjoyed having the chance to lead a workshop and hope that the folks in the workshop were able to learn a thing or two!