I’m just a newbie in this thing called blogging. Roughly getting on the first year since my WordPress installation generated its first Hello World. Since then, I grew more and more excited on learning everything about WordPress.

Last September 19, I attended WordCamp Philippines 2009. It was my first WordCamp experience and first event that concerns WordPress. It was organized by MindanaoBloggers.com headed by Mr. Blogie Robillo aiming to gather enthusiasts all over the Philippines and share talks from experts and developers of WordPress. I and my colleagues were the first to arrive at AIM in Makati where the event was held. I finally got the chance to meet Mr. Robillo after months of sending him emails (via the contact form of wordcamp.ph) asking questions about this event. He was with other organizers who cheerfully greeted and welcomed us. We waited a little while before our group was complete and after that, we headed straight to the Stephen Fuller Hall of the building to register for a day of WordPress and nothing but WordPress.

Upon registration, I was surprised that the venue got smaller. Just last July, I attended the Philippine Web Design Conference at the same venue and it was a lot bigger. The organizers divided the room into two, the conference site and the other I didn’t know until lunch time. The kit they gave was full of freebies like Mozilla ballers, WordPress stickers and an OLX mousepad. The Camper ID was well designed but I felt a little awkward that it indicated my full name. Under my name is the URL of my blog which I submitted at the online registration form. The lanyard’s design was indicating Mozilla Firefox as it was a co-sponsor.

The program was started with the singing of the national anthem then an introduction of MindanaoBloggers.com by Mr. Blogie Robillo. He shared the group’s aim of sharing to the rest of the world how beautiful the island of Mindanao is. Following him was Mr. Beau Lebens of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. He first showed a clip from Mr. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. Mr. Mullenweg apologized for not being able to attend this year but still, he wished us to enjoy and have a great time. Too bad I brought my WordPress for Dummies 2^nd edition for his autograph. Back to Mr. Lebens, he discussed some of Automattic’s latest open source projects like BuddyPress, bbPress and GlotPress. I’m pretty updated with this because I regularly check Automattic’s homepage.

Then after Mr. Beau’s talk, he was presented with a plaque of appreciation from the guys at Mindanao Bloggers. While the next speaker was preparing his presentation, the organizers told everybody that there are free snacks at both sides of the venue, specifically cookies and coffee. My classmate took some cookies and brought it back to our seats. I really needed that break because I didn’t eat any breakfast that morning. After settling down, the next speaker, Mr. Markku Seguerra, started his talk entitled “Wordpress in the Wild”. His talk revolved around basic and some advance security measures that everybody must make with their WordPress installation. I already did some of the measures he enumerated like deleting the admin account and changing the prefix of the tables in the database. He also talked about spam comments and content theft. I already met these and still do so the things that he said were really helpful. Another thing he tackled was SEO and how to rank higher in the search pages. He suggested plug-ins that was already installed on my WordPress blog so I got the feeling that I’m on the right track.

Shifting from the technical to the content side of things, the next speaker, Mr. Danilo Arao discussed “Citizen Journalism in the Context of the 2010 Elections”. His talk revolved on how we, as bloggers can give to the awakening of responsible voters in the coming presidential elections. Though his points were satires of the politicians and as well as personalities in journalism, I learned so much from him and had a clearer view of how I should express my opinions as a blogger and as a responsible journalist. After a pause from the jargons of the technologies that revolve around WordPress, the next talk revolved on my (and every web designer I guess) favorite browser, Mozilla Firefox. A quick look into the Mozilla community through the lens of localization is the theme of Mr. Seth Bindernagel’s discussion. He expressed his appreciation to the Philippine market’s enthusiasm over Mozilla Firefox since its conception after the fall of Netscape. He asked the questions from the audience about how Filipinos would want Firefox to be more Filipino. He guessed making its language in Tagalog is a bad idea because some Filipino disagrees. With the efforts of Google and other internet giants that attempted to appeal to the Filipinos by translating their products in our native tongues, it came to be too academic and not how we speak our language.

After all the speakers scheduled for the morning session were finished, we headed to the other part of the hall where I was in for a surprise. They prepared a buffet style lunch accompanied by a catering service and all. One of my classmate only arrived at lunch time because of his class that morning and he was glad to see so many food. We had a bountiful lunch and it was a really great value for what we paid to attend this event.

Before the afternoon session started, we took the opportunity to take our pictures in the designated photo wall. We savor the moment by posing to our cameras, from serious to wacky. After settling a little bit, the second half of the program was on track. The first speaker that afternoon was Mr. Jeff Villafranca. His talk was entitled “The editorial voice and taste in writing tech”. He shared his experiences in writing his tech blog and dos and don’ts for such. After him was Mr. Coy Caballes, an expert of video blogging (or vlogging). Just like Mr. Villafranca, he shared his experiences in this field and the common misconceptions of people about his craft. He showed some clips from other personalities that are already established in making videos and its viral dissemination over the net.

The next talk was about some of the advance technology of WordPress (mainly in PHP). The speaker was Ms. Gail Villanueva, an institution in the Philippine blogosphere. She owns a web design company and engaged in several talks that I got the chance to see. Her talk revolved around some advance techniques for using WordPress to turn a website into something that is more than just a blog. I applied the things I learned from her in the TomasinoWeb.org website that I’m currently designing. After Ms. Villanueva was Ms. Karla Redor, a fellow from WooThemes, an online custom theme store. Her was talk was focused on how to make WordPress a fully customized Content Management System like Drupal and Joomla. Then she gave away gift certificates that can be used to buy the cool themes available on their site.

An open forum followed and everyone was given the chance to ask question to the speakers for the day. I got the chance to ask Ms. Gail Villanueva and Mr. Beau Lebens some questions bugging me. I asked Ms. Gail what are the chances that I can be hired as a WordPress theme designer and not being a Joomla or Drupal web designer. She gave me a positive answer that WordPress theme designers are getting more credit now. Then I asked Mr. Lebens a question about VideoPress. I’ve been working around with the package of the WordPress video server that I downloaded online. It’s quite complicated to run and requires some skills in operating in a Linux environment. I asked him if I can use the free space on my web server by installing the video server. Unfortunately, the folks at Automattic haven’t been able to discuss how to make such complicated technology into a simpler one. He suggested that I use the VideoPress available through WordPress.com, but of course, with a little fee.

The day ended with everyone cheerfully taking pictures and some buying some t-shirts from the event. We got our certificates and waved goodbye to the people who made this event possible. We arrived at our school just in time for our marketing class. Though a little stressed out, the experience back at WordCamp Philippines will be in my memory as my first blogging event until the next one will come.