Category: WordPress

Winding down from 2009 WordCampNL – My Heroes

Happy-Hotelier-at-WordCampNLA rare photo of this photographer in action at WordCampNL.
Thank you Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat of PunkMedia.nl, of Flickr | Eventbranche and  @Punkmedia !

General
I attended the first ever WordCampNL. It stands for a Dutch WordCamp or a WordCamp in the Netherlands.

At first I had decided not to go, because I was very very busy. I do have to admit I thought a WordCamp would be a gathering of WordPress Newbies and/or Geeks and/or Nerds only. However, this first Dutch WordCampNL proved me wrong in that respect and in many other aspects! The people attending were normal people like you and me, some savvy and some very savvy, but all passionate in reaching out, connecting and sharing.

Unexpectedly three people gently nudged me to come… so I decided to come… eventually and last minute.

I’ll wind down in three posts:

  1. My Heroes part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL
  2. My Heroes part 2 – The Speakers of 2009 WordCampNL
  3. My Heroes part 3 – The People of 2009 WordCampNL

Lessons Learned
WordCampNL confronted me and made me realize a couple of important things about myself in relation my attempts in proper blogging here at Happy Hotelier.

I’m not so much a talker by nature and I have to admit I’ll never be a talker. In addition I’m a two fingers typist. I’m more of an observer. I’m a reasonable photographer and I’m more than averagely interested in people. Portray photography is I the type of photography I like most. So I have to stop behaving as if I’m a writer. ll have to admit I’m more an observer who shares his observations. I think that is also important with respect to the styling and the lay out of this blog to acknowledge this more explicit that I did before. Thank you WordCampNL.

I’m not so good in multitasking as I would have liked. I cannot listen to presentations and tweet about it and make photos at the same time. It means that I also won’t be taking my eee book to future events and will not be twittering live from events. I will concentrate on taking high quality photos and adding some observations to the photos I’ll publish after the event.

The third thing is that it was a great opportunity to connect more with fellow Dutchman. Not that I didn’t connect already, but now even more so.

My Heros – Part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL

The organization and the venue Seats2Meet in Utrecht were impeccable. What impresses me most is the “after sales services” offered. Unlike other events, the organization is still fully engaged and do their utmost to make the experience complete by providing after the event content. All keynotes in the main room were video recorded and will be published soon. There were approximately 170 persons irl and approximately 300 people following the event via live streams and twitter. I count already 465 photos of at the Flickr group WordCamp Nederland

The heroes of the organizing team:

@KoffieKitten-_MG_1524aLisa Rouissi (@KoffieKitten) of KoffieKitten and Orange Buzz NL. I had met her already at the first ever #TweetUpTheHague that she had organized together with Suzy Ogé. I still have a post about that somewhere up in my sleeve. She was on the organizing team. Constantly yawning we drove together to Utrecht via a deviant way as the road to Utrecht was blocked due to maintenance that early Saturday morning. She was one of the persons who nudged me on Friday. Thank you Koffiekitten!

Kaj-Rietberg-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_2028
Then we have Kaj Rietberg (@KajRietberg) of Kaj Rietberg.

@DeFries-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_1925
Joeke Remkus de Vries (@DeFries) of De Fries.

@ErnoHannink-@-WordCamp-NL-with-@LorelleonWordPress-by-@happyhotelier_MG_2001
Erno Hannink (@ErnoHannink) of Erno Hannink NL and in English Erno Hannink Com a fellow Thesis Theme user. Boy has that man a big smile! Here he is in dire admiration for one of the speakers, Lorelle VanFossen, @LorelleonWP of Lorelle on WordPress, who was the second person who nudged me that Friday. Thank you Lorelle!. @Punkmedia here in the background.

@JeanPaulH-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_1960

And, not to forget Jean Paul Horn (@JeanPaulH) of Textopus and Iphone Club NL who I knew already, but that’s another story. He was part of the team, acted as a great speaker and also as a sponsor of the venue.

A Great Thank You! to all of you for a great event!

Last edited Last edited by GJE on April 3, 2012 at 4:47 pm. I hope they put the publish button somewhere else on the dashboard in a future WordPress release. Accidentally hitting that button happens too frequent. In addition I realized in 2012 that I only did one post about the event in stead of the 3 I anticipated…

WP Meetup in Rotterdam

 

Shortly after the first WordCampNL some WordPress die hards found Lorelle prepared to privately give some tips and tricks in Rotterdam in what was believed to be the first WP MeetUp of The Netherlands. It was Cool. Again first the photos.

The first photo shows the Unilever head office in Rotterdam. Behind that was the place of the meeting. While I took the photo It was a bit in remembrance of my late brother in law who was in charge of organizing the delivery of this building on behalf of Unilever and who orchestrated the moving from the old head office to this building by Unilever. That was eons ago. i also remember his sleepless nights when glass panels started to fall from the building…

2009 WordCampNL Photos

I’ve finalized the uploading to Flickr of the photos I took at WordCampNL. I will devote one or two posts to the camp later. For the moment I leave it with posting this slideshow.  The reason I link to my own stream and not the entire pool is that it is chronologically organized from the checking in to the final one thanking Erno photo.
All photos are also in the WordCamp Nederland Flickr group.

Lost under the Hood

Lost under the Hood - Tim Street / French Maid TV

Why I got lost under the hood of computers, software and camera’s the last couple of weeks which prevented me from churning out many new blog posts that I have in my sleeve:

  • I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, but had to upgrade to Thesis 1.5.1. first. I just had installed Thesis 1.5 last month on the recommendation of fellow travel bloggers Todd Lucier and Darren Cronian.
    In upgrading to Thesis 1.5,1 I lost a lot of my Thesis 1.5 settings. It seemed to be a bug somewhere, but I couldn’t pinpoint where and lost a lot of time getting the blog in order once more.
  • For future reference I’m listing some bloggers that use the Thesis Theme and give good advice on the ins and outs:
  • And Some Travel Bloggers who use Thesis:
  • I’m trying to really understand SEO for bloggers … a bit cumbersome. Time consuming reading. However i did install a robots.txt file for both my blogs and the Sitemap generator Plugin is now working correctly…
  • During a thunderstorm I closed my office server down. It had been running year after year under Novell Netware 5.
    I was prepared for this happening: A brand new server which was already loaded with Netware 6.5 stood ready for the occasion. One tiny problem: It appeared that I needed to redo the login scripting…having some special needs as I still rely on some DOS programs – not solved yet….
    Meanwhile I succeeded to lose all my Windows XP settings for e-mail, site logons and so on. Although I have reasonable backups…the backups of my settings just didn’t work. Lesson learned: Do operate as a separate user under Windows XP without administrator permissions: Once you change an XP administrator’s password (I was only hitting a password sync button in the Netware login screen that did not give the usual XP warning) all his settings are lost. Darn! A lot of time to reconnect e-mail accounts….login passwords….sites…etcetera.
  • Some hard disks are getting full. Dire need for some time consuming reshuffling
  • Next week I’ll act as a wedding photographer. While trying some lenses and new flashcards it turned out that inadvertently I had obtained not working white label flashcards for my camera’s. Yesterday was Veterans’Day in The Hague. I lost approx 180 photos I took.
  • In preparation for that same wedding shoot I’m also struggling uphill to understand PhotoShop better than I did.
  • Have had some discussions with Tripadvisor as to why some guest reviews did not appear on their site. Wanted to report about that, but didn’t have time (yet?). Why would I actually want to have any reviews there?
  • I was invited by e-mail to attend the opening of The Hermitage Openening in Amsterdam. I Filed the form they required to get a ticked, but never got the ticket…alas.
  • Then there is that discussion again about the Dying Blogs: in the Guardian by Charles Arthur by Shiny Shiny and by Copy Blogger

Deep Sigh…continuing struggling…and maybe updating this…

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on July 17, 2010 at 3:01 pm9

Thesis: A new Theme for the Blog

For those that know this site and see differences from a prior visit: Yes I have changed theme(s). From now on I am using just one theme: the thesis theme.

I am still working on getting everything in place and displayed in a way I like. But I got hooked to the theme after I got several recommendations by fellow bloggers. I just plunged ahead and installed it. The main reason for change is that I did some reading about SEO (search Engine Opimization) and installed some dedicated plugins.

I like thesis’ flexibility, professionalism and the care for SEO. I also hope it loads faster than my Misty theme did. As it is so flexible, I don’t see any need anymore to use the theme switcher. The disadvantage of a theme switcher with several themes running is that every nut and bolt you change, has to be changed on every theme separately. With three and sometimes four themes running aside, that kept me from focusing on producing content. In addition this theme is so flexible that with few alterations I can completely change the look and feel of the blog, without even losing it’s main features.

In an update of this post I will flesh out some thoughts and findings.

Update 1 May 8, 2009:
Thusfar I have paid attention to:

  • Getting a favicon.ico. Now you will see my little avatar next to the URL. Why? because I saw that many browsers that hit the site want one and get a 404 message. I discovered a nifty WordPress Plugin 404 Notifier from Alex King that logs 404 hits and put them in an RSS reader for you to check them out. Higly recommended!
  • Added avatar, background image (needs a bit of tweaking as yet), background color, played around with sizes, borders and so on to get the look and feel I’m so used to. Two columns lay out. And still a lot of scrolling. I won’t place back the header image as you get more space to read the last post.
  • Placed back the various widgets. This is done via snippets of code you can insert via text widgets. Ideally you bring all tweaks in one of two seperate files that you can carry along. But then you need a lot of special Php knowledge and that is a bit steep a learning curve yet.
  • Next steps will be either a 3 column lay out, or special pages for Archives and for Links, that will result in less scrolling.
  • As a keen photographer I will have more space for bigger photos.

Still my question remains: What are your first impressions?