• Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells of Automattic
• Scott Porad from the icancheezburger network
• Tyler Sticka, designer at Waggener Edstrom
• Will Norris, one of the core developers of Shibboleth and author of the OpenID plugin for Wordpress
• viper007bond, one of the most prolific WordPress plugin developers
• Aaron Hockley, founder of the Portland WordPress Users Group
• Justin Kistner, senior manager of social media at WebTrends (and designer of some of the sites I currently manage)
• Rick Turoczy, from Silicon Florist, a blog about web startups in the Portland area
• and countless others

These folks and others, along with awesome food from Whiffies Pies, Windmer Beer, Zupans, Resers, Coconut Bliss ice cream, Cup Cake Jones— and the awesome folks at WebTrends for providing the venue for the event— made for an AMAZING WordCamp.

Also a big thanks to my buddy Tristan for letting me crash at his apartment Saturday night and helping me find my way around town. Tristan’s former roommate from Eugene, Aaron was also there. They both live and do freelance web development in Portland, so it was also a great networking opportunity for them.

This is a fairly long post, so continue after the break if you will

The first presentation Saturday was Jason Grigsby about speeding up WordPress, and a few browser plugins (Firebug, YSlow, and Google Page Speed) as well as server-side solutions: SQL Monitor and WP Super Cache. General tweaks for speed whether on Wordpress or not include going though Yahoo’s 14 Performance Rules, and if you have lots of small graphics on your site, use spriteme.com to turn graphics into sprites *and* tweak your CSS accordingly to utilize such sprites.

Speed Up Wordpress Wordcamp Pdx 2009

Next up was a Web Analytics talk by Lorelle, probably the worst presenter at the event. Her entire MO was selling her book and promoting a new web analytics tool she’s involved with, Woopra. I did sign up for a beta account, but the beta is closed or soon closing, and is going to be a pay-for service, so I’m not going to link it.

I will rant a bit though…

Maybe the ad industry has jaded me, I’ve become extremely resistant to people/companies trying to sell me their own products. I don’t want to hear a sales pitch from someone who stands to profit from my business. Most of the time, when I sign up for new services or get new products, it’s because of a first-hand recommendation from a personal friend, or I’ll do all the research myself, weigh the options and still go over the findings until a choice becomes obvious. Personally I think I’ll stick with Google Analytics.

Next was Tyler Sticka’s AMAZING presentation on using WordPress to develop your own portfolios, using ~3 snippets of PHP code. This really turned some heads, and got a lot of attention from the #wcpdx Twitter stream. I’m not sure I could do the presentation justice, so here is his sideshow (hoping web streaming from the event will be up soon)

WordPress-Powered Portfolios

Then John Hawkins demonstrated creating a plugin to fetch author graphic and information from gravitar.com. He so kindly provided lots of documentation for his presentation on How to Write a WordPress Plugin on his site. Sometime after this, there was a breakout discussion on Advanced Plugin Development. Notes to take from this:

• Avoid custom tables
• Output buffers are bad, but Matt Mullenweg loves them
• Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation
• IRC Channels: #wordpress-dev or #wordpress on freenode
• WPHackers mailing list, WP mailing lists may need some restructuring

Very infotaining speech by Scott Porad of the Cheezburger network explaining the “Lazy, Messy & Backwards” mindset behind their business model. Found out they have about 47 blogs of mainly funny pictures, 10,000 images are submitted daily, and roughly 200 make it on to the sites. Every image uploaded is backed-up/archived in 4 places immediately, and moderated by real people.

Lazy, Messy, Backwards – Scott Porad

The conference ended with a panel of experts on an SEO SMACKDOWN. The debate was “Good Content” vs “Findability.” The consensus here seemed to be overwhelmingly that content is more important than SEO. But my take on the issue is to excercise “best practice” as far as SEO first, then forget about it so you can focus on content.

Other Plugins of Note:

• More-Fields
• Multi-Level Navigaion
• Flexi-Pages
• WP-DB-Backup
• Socializer
• All-in-one SEO Pack

Random Links:

• Starkers (a really barebones theme, use as a starting point for development)
• Web Worker Daily
• There, I fixed it!
• Picture is Unrelated

The major I’ve been working on for so long was in Digital Arts, and I found out about 3/4 of the way in that I probably should have been a Journalism major. It was too late to change, so I made the best out of things, took many diverse classes— from photography, to digital music, writing for media (a journalism class), to advanced video effects & compositing, I even took a class on programming circuitboards!

Now that I’m out of school, looking for jobs, I’m having to re-learn some things I’ve taken for granted, and teach myself new things that I wish my education would have covered. Things like personal marketing / branding, professional networking, and more recently this week, logo design. While I have a lot more flexibility doing these things for myself currently (as opposed to a class assignment, or in a professional context for a client), I’ve also come to appreciate the semi-structured nature of the classroom. I also look forward to the opportunities to work in a professional realm working with clients in real-world scenarios.

• competed in a city league ski racing league, and our team won the whole season
• had the worst Christmas ever #christmasfail08
• been [positively] excited about a presidential inauguration
• played a UO officially sanctioned flip cup tournament with the club sports olympics, and we WON
• broke a slalom ski
• went from 5 down to 2 e-mail accounts, and one of those may be going a way soon
• met a girl, her name is Angela, many of you have even met her by now
• graduated from college!!!!!!!!!
• successfully survived a road trip with Angela through 9 states
  • Yellowstone, Ren Faire, Badlands, Wall Drug, SLC, etc…
• partaken in a few dancing lessons (ssssh! don’t tell anyone!)
• somehow convinced Angela to buy a Mac
• dealt with 2 flat tires in 2 different states I don’t live in, and neither one on my personal vehicle
• turned 27
• competed in 9 waterski tournaments in 6 different states, and waterskied in a 7th state
  • including Collegiate National All-Stars for slalom+trick, and AWSA Western Regionals for 3-event (and qualified for but didn’t go to AWSA Nationals)!
• upgraded my wordpress blog, twice, without posting anything
• volunteered with a church group on a construction project
• bought a Playstation 2 from a thrift store for $12.50 and repaired it myself
• sold my old DSLR and bought a spiffy new one, and taken thousands of photos with it
• attended a number of concerts
• given up on my football team, due to some unFavreable circumstances
• finally started getting my online portfolio and résumé up-to-date

…and some other stuff too, I assure you. But now that you’re updated on my life, maybe now I can get this site fully back on track again?

(above: Canon 50mm f/1.4, Canon 50mm f/1.8, Canon 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro)

Note, I did not test the faster lenses stopped down to match the slower ones. I suppose the DoF/fall-off is mostly as expected for the different apertures. But the main reason for the compact macro is it can do this (read on):

Notice just over 1 line of printed 10pt text is in focus, this lens can focus much, much closer to the subject.

Now, on to David’s fancy new lens, the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 macro. We intended to compare this one to the Canon 28-70 f/2.8 I’m borrowing from Tom at work, but were a little too unscientific about the testing. However, because of the price of the Canon (and figuring they should be fairly comparable as a medium-telephoto), I was more interested to see if the Tamron could also take the place of having a dedicated macro lens. Here are a few tests (Tamron 28-75 left/first, Canon 50mm Compact Macro right/second):

(above: Admittedly, my cropping here wasn’t perfect, but it appears the DoF fall-off on the Canon is more rapid, and both are very sharp where they should be. So from a larger distance, the Tamron does it’s job. However, it simply cannot get as close to the subject as the Canon, meaning you would have to crop the digital image to produce the same result)

(above & below: The Canon is clearly more clearly focused, look at the “teeth” on the edge of the coin. I can’t be entirely sure if this is because of the lens, the setup of the shot, or because the photo from the Tamron needed to be cropped big-time to produce a comparable framing)

The fact that both of these final tests produced the same result indicates to me that having to crop the final image down and the resulting quality is substantially less, and so the Tamron is not an adequate replacement for a prime macro lens, if you intend to use it for extreme close-up macro photography. Let it be noted that the Tamron isn’t marketed as a dedicated macro lens, so these tests were merely done as research to see which lenses I want to plan on getting… eventually.

I hope to do another test soon comparing the medium telephoto lenses in a controlled environment. Stay tuned, but don’t wait up for it

A little backstory leading up to this entry here. About 2 weeks ago, I checked out a really nice lens, and took it with the rest of photo kit to a waterski tournament where I shot a little over 1500 photos. All this with the hopes of selling a few prints to people. Now on with the research….

The first place I looked at was ExpressDigital’s PhotoReflect (I’m not providing a link, they’re not worth it, keep reading), because it’s where the 2008 AWSA Western Regionals photos were posted. I looked around the site, looked a little clunky but usable. Their rates sounded high at first glance (I’ve since found out they are indeed relatively low). For low-sales-volume accounts, they scrape 18% off the top, but don’t charge any bandwidth or storage fees.

The second place I looked at was PhotoWorks which also has free upload and storage, but their pricing markup is severely limited. The only options are a solid $ increase (ex. adding $10 to the cost of the print, regardless of size), or a solid % increase (ex. add 400% to the cost of the print, $1.14 4×6 and $209.70 for 20×30)

I kept on looking, asking a few photographers I know for recommendations. Unfortunately most people I know don’t sell their work online. Enter Zac. He suggested a few sites to check out. The first, PhotoShelter, is what he’s used in the past, and they have a “free” account to try, cool. The others DigitalRailRoad and RedBubble seemed to be capable, but targeted at other audiences.

Now for comparison, PhotoShelter seems the best option, as they handle all the printing and shipping stuff, and they scrape 30% off the top. But there is a $50 setup fee, and I would soon need more storage for $7-10/month (so $50 setup + $120/yr). DigitalRailRoad does not have a free account option, starts at $50 setup + $50/month, and they scrape 40% off the top. Most expensive, lowest margins, not a good combo. RedBubble seems to be targeted more towards art stuff.

These all seemed a litle overpriced now, and I remembered that PhotoReflect was free except for the 18% scraping. So I signed up for an account to try it out, excited to try their plugin for Apple’s Aperture. Low and behold, the plugin crashes Aperture every single time I try to connect to the website with it. Doing some research, other than providing the crappy plugin, they provide ABSOLUTELY NO MAC SUPPORT. Bullox.

Another option is using SmugMug Pro account which costs $150/year and they scrape 15% off your markup. The biggest selling point for SmugMug is also it’s biggest downside, the website is really Ajax-heavy. While it is a SWEET looking site, I’d worry that the glam of the site might be offputting/intimidating to some customers.

Ultimately I don’t think I’m ready to throw myself into the world of pro-photography, which is what it would require to justify the investment of joining most of these sites. I do want to start making some money from my work so I can justify spending more money on equipment, and more time in the field. So for now I’m still stuck thinking about what I want to do.

EDIT: I just realized with PhotoWorks, you can use the % markup with a minimum $ markup. For example, I can say 300% markup, but a minimum of $5. This seems to create a nicer price scale, though I wish I could markup the larger items less, since I don’t think I’d be selling many.

Tiny bit of back-story. General Tso’s Chicken is one of my favorite Chinese dishes, especially at Maple Garden near campus. I’ve never seen any other resteraunt make it anywhere near close to the way they do, and I have no idea what it’s supposed to be like, but it’s damn good. So it’s been a goal of mine for the past 3 years or so to figure out how to make a decent batch of it. I’m getting closer… I’m guessing another 2 attempts and I’ll have a recipe worthy of sharing.

That’s what Toni asked me about 2hrs ago. Followed by:

Me: getting my calendars set up to sync through google
Toni: sounds exciting there
Me: you have no idea
Toni: lol
Toni: you are an odd one

Anyways this is fairly brilliant. Google Calendar is the brains of the operation, where the data is stored and whatnot. Sure I exported most of my calendars straight from iCal, but then I set up the calendars to utilize Google Calendar’s new calDAV service (Google’s instructions). So now I can edit events on my iMac at home, the iMac at work, even on my iPod Touch, and it’ll sync up to the gCloud, and back down to my computers/iPod, and essentially be the same everywhere.

Caveat here is regarding the iPod Touch. I only see the “live” calendars when using Google’s mobile interface, the Apple Calendar interface needs to get plugged in at home to sync. Same with posting, it if i post to Apple Calendar, nothing goes live until I plug & sync at home. And obviously Google Calendar needs to be within earshot of wi-fi access.

This is all acceptable though, wi-fi seems ubiquitous enough for when I’m hopping between computers, and when I’m not (say, when I visit the family cabin in Minnesota), the iPod Touch will be the only device I have for keeping schedules, so it’ll “just work”.

The one thing I don’t understand, is why do each of my Google Calendars need seperate CalDAV accounts in iCal? This is makes it a pain the ass to set up, but after the fact is mainly cosmetic (see image above, and click to enlarge).

Hmm.. ramblomatic blogger? I’m going to bed.

I’ve skied at Mint a few times, but only at the Emerald Valley’s Northwest Championships tournament. This was the first one where our club wasn’t as required to do the work. I still helped out with scoring and judging, it helps to practice at a variety of locations, learn the quirks of the computers and whatnot.

22nd ANNUAL MINT LAKE OPEN
TourID: 08W133C
Yacolt, WA
7/12/2008 to 7/13/2008

Slalom Rd 1: 4 @ 58k, 23m
Tricks: 810 pts (personal best!)
Jump: 64 ft (personal best!)
Slalom Rd 2: 2H @ 58k, 16m (personal best!)

I also took some photos from the site (click image above for gallery):

Mainly writing this post to see how they integrate with other blog postings.

EDIT (8/2/08): So that didn’t last long. I was tweeting way more than I ever blogged, and a page full of tweets just doesn’t look that good. So I’ve dis-integrated the tweets from the blog, for now you’ll see ~5 at a time in my sidebar.