London WordPress Meetup had its 3rd meetup 28 July 2011. It is still a relatively new Meetup group, but has grown at a very nice speed. Three people attended the first meetup, where as fifteen attended the second. The third, hosted at Headshift, was a ‘sell out’ with a capacity of fourty.

The meetup started off with ice-breakers. People attending had the opportunity to introduce themselves and show off a few WordPress projects. This was followed by 3 presentations.

1. yeah! Hackey

Emily Webber talked about her amazing sideline venture yeah! Hackney. yeah! Hackney is a website, serving as an online community for Hackney locals sharing local knowledge. It is a WordPress website using the BuddyPress plugin, that creates the function for members to join and interact ‘as a community’.

This platform has become a great way for local people in the borough to share, discuss and collaborate about the great things around them. Thus in essence it is the community that creates the content and not administrators. The main features of yeah! Hackney website are the groups, discussion forums and members.

2. Beginner Theme Development

Keith Devon‘s talk was a nice summary of all the basic elements when starting out with theme developement in WordPress. Starting off with the basic theme structure, such as the necessary files WordPress require, The Loop and the heirachy of WordPress files. Followed by an explaination of Child Themes and using Custom Page Templates.

He also share a handy bundge of WordPress resources, tools and functions. Keith’s presentation can be seen at Prezi.

On the topic of Prezi, it was the first time I have seen Prezi. If you have and iPad, make sure to check it out. Great for presentations and it takes the in and out zooming of iPad to the next level.

3. Getting to The Loop

The presentation of Chris Adams dig right into the core of WordPress. By looking at some of the key items in the ‘brain’ of WordPress and how it works, gives a better understanding for developers when developing themes and plugins.

The 5 key topics of the presentation:

1. Load in files for bootstrap phase
2. Set up Plugins
3. Turn the request URL into a data base query
4. Choose a Template
5. Start The Loop

You can also view the presentation at Slideshare.

The next London WordPress Meetup is scheduled for 16 August 2011.

I am really happy about my find on Brain Pickings, where they listed top 10 cross disciplinary conferences. I joined PechaKucha 20×20 group on Facebook and went to their second London event at The Archers. PechaKucha means chit-chat in Japanese. The 20×20 is a presentation of 20 slides while talking for 20 seconds about each slide.

PechaKucha Night started in Tokyo about 7 years ago as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has now moved its way around the globe, covering 268 cities. The event is open to any topic to talk about. Photography and art seem to be the most popular.

The Speakers of Event #2

In Nerys Mathias‘s 20 slides, she showed off artwork of more explicit nature in mediums such as photography, painting and illustration. Including work of Marlene Dumas.

Trashed is the new online platform for teenagers to get creative! It is packed with news in the creative industry in the UK. Teenagers can also pick up new skills for projects and get access to work experience placements and workshops.

I enjoyed Valerie Pezeron‘s illustrations. Her style is the kind that I am rather fond of. She also presented it well with a bit of wit. She went through some of her archives and shared the beginning of a new project she is working on.

Bruno Wizard from the The Homosexuals / The Rejects presented with a lot of passion. Entertaining photos and (quick) stories about their career and friends of The Homosexuals.

Martin Barrett is an artist who likes making apocalyptic installations/art. At the event he preferred to share his experiences hanging on a rope off a mountain in mid air. The photos that he had in his presentation had stunning views of different mountains all over the world.

Jane Kellock has a lot of experience in the fashion industry. She is a trend forecaster, designer, writer, lecturer and creative thinker. I fully regret the fact that I missed out on this presentation {blush}.

Zoe Holloway showed some of her photography and shared the stories, with some travel related. She is also making tees from photos of street art.

Richard Adams talked about the new School of Communication Arts 2.0 that will be opening soon, operating as a not-for-profit organisation. It is a school that will focus on the practical side of things to prepare talented students for a successful career.

Minxy McNaughty ended off the evening on a high note. Very entertaining, excellent sense of humour and I loved the way she presented the slides about Deptford. I so want to go to Deptford!

It enlightens me to hear a person talk so passionate about his/her work or hobby. It really opens up a personality to grasp and appreciate. There was also enough time during the evening for socialising and getting to know some of the attendees, sharing the same interests and passions. From what I have heard, there is a PechaKucha Night every second month. I am already looking forward to the next one!

BarCamp London 7 was 24-25 October 2009 at IBM, Southbank, London and it seems like the dust have not settled yet. BarCamp London 7 was my first unconference and my excitement beforehand turns out to be not for nothing. Also read Ben Fletcher’s more in depth experience about this unconference.

It was an early start (for a Saturday) to get to the premises. Registration started from 9:30am. After the opening talk at 11:00am there was an opportunity for everyone to book a session on the time table.

My Schedule for Saturday

• BarCamp Bootcamp - It was a nice way to get into the groove of things and to get to know some peeps.
• How Facebook broke the tube
• Information and real options
• CSS nuggets
• @font-face – new fonts for the web
• Side project with Lego
• Graphic design of LOST
• The Government to release more data
• Ranting: Everything that is wrong with the world
• Why to say no to clients
• Web scale identifiers, use and abuse

My Schedule for Sunday

• The perfect match
• 10 F*$%ing awesome bands
• Developers Happiness
• The thing called Social Media
• Contradictions
• Lightning Talks - few peeps had 5 minutes to say something
• Clothing design as a constraint
• Combined session with Asian snacks and chatting about science and religion

Even though I made use of most of the time slots available to attend a session, it came to my attention that there was a lot of interesting topics I missed out on (I am still in the process of searching the web, hoping to find some).

The BarCamp was made possible by a great team: Cristiano Betta, Paul Brannigan, Mary Rose Cook, Tobias Kunisch, Robert Lee-Cann, Caz Mockett, Tom Morris, Kevin Prince, Melinda Seckington, Dan W and volunteers. Last but not least, great sponsors: IBM, Nestoria, TechSmith, The Team, Be Broadband, The Proactive Accountant, lastminutelabs, Nudge Social Media, Vodafone Group, Geekery.in, JISC, Nexus Globalnet, Starbucks VIA, PayPal, Guardian Open Platform, myMuesli, Nokia.

Everything was well thought through. I even received the Sunday newspaper to read with my breakfast and coffee. The only thing I can think of that could have been better: – I should have taken better notes of who was running the sessions, a website link etc.

Photos of attendees have been uploaded and can be viewed at the Flickr Group.