WordCamp Birmingham Wrap-Up, Part 1 of 2

The first Word­Camp in the South­east was a suc­cess. Andre Natta of Birmingham’s The Ter­mi­nal, as well as oth­ers whose names are escap­ing me at the moment, did a won­der­ful job of putting this uncon­fer­ence together.  I’ll recap some of the high­lights of Word­Camp B’ham.  In this post I’ll cover the meetup and day one of WordCamp.

Fri­day NIght — The Meetup

I arrived at the hotel (La Quinta in Home­wood) about 5:30 p.m.; the meetup was at 6:00.  So I imme­di­ately refreshed, got back in the truck, and drove to Jim ‘N Nicks in Five Points South for a night of ban­ter and bar­beque.  I didn’t know quite what to expect; this was actu­ally my first meetup/tweetup.  I met some nice folks and had some won­der­ful food!   I think there were nine who showed up in total.  Here’s a pic­ture of some of the crew:

Some of the WC B’ham Crew

We talked reli­gion, pol­i­tics, Twit­ter (of course), Word­Press, Birm­ing­ham cur­rent events, and I even think sports made it into the mix.  I think I sam­pled some of the best BBQ the city had to offer, also:  half rack of baby back ribs, mashed taters, and of course the sweet tea.  Dana Franks ordered some fab­u­lous nachos and I just had to get a picture:

Nachos ordered at Jim ‘N Nicks

Sat­ur­day — Word­Camp Day One

Day two started out with Dou­gal Camp­bell dis­cussing The Future (and his­tory) of Word­Press.  It was very infor­ma­tive, since most of the his­tory of Word­Press hap­pened before I became a fan and a user.  He touched on all the major revi­sions, going from 0.70 (the first release) to the cur­rent release of 2.6.2.  Ver­sion 2.5 was the big one (to me), since it totally changed the admin­is­tra­tion panel (back­end).  Ver­sion 2.7, due out in Novem­ber 2008, will again change the backend.

• Mitch Can­ter, Andre Natta, and Jeremy Flint (“Word­Press as a CMS”)
• Donna Fontenot (“SEO for WordPress”)
• David Griner (“Merg­ing Your Work and Blog Lives”)
• Dana Franks (“Main­stream Media Blog­ging with WordPress”)
• Whit­ney Sides (“Blog­ging for Health”)

Lunch was catered by Full Moon Bar­be­cue.  Once again, this was some of the best bar­be­cue I have ever eaten.  Here’s a snap­shot of the spread:

Full Moon BBQ Lunch

There was a lot to be learned in a very packed first day, and it was very enjoy­able.  David Griner injected some much-needed humor into his pre­sen­ta­tion (“Make sure your e-mail is colon-rupturing in its awe­some­ness.”) and Whit­ney tugged at some heart­strings with her can­cer sur­vivor story.  (She’s in remis­sion!  Out­stand­ing!)  I am very much look­ing for­ward to next year.  I believe the South­east showed the Word­Press world how to really throw an “unconference”!

Tomor­row will be the wrap-up of the First Annual Word­Camp Birmingham.

Related Posts:

• Word­Camp Week­end Starts Tonight!
• Gulf Coast Word­Press Meetup Com­ing to Mobile
• Word­Camp Birm­ing­ham 2008: I’m going!
• Back to the basics of blogging
• Word­Press vs. The­sis: It’s called steal­ing, Chris.