Category Archives: Speakers

Speaker Interview: Will Hanke

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Will Hanke is a St. Louis local that specializes in SEO, and next on our Speaker Interview Series for WordCamp St. Louis 2015. Will is quite active locally. You can read up more about him on his official bio for the WordCamp St. Louis event.

Will be speaking on a subject I love and did last year in WordCamp St. Louis 2014 – WordPress SEO. I’m extremely excited he’ll be taking the helm, and also thankful for him taking part in this interview. 🙂

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NILE FLORES: What got you interested in WordPress?

WILL HANKE: I was creating websites back in the FrontPage era, and WordPress was a natural progression for me. The ease of use, ability to customize and engagement options hooked me.

NILE FLORES: What is the most interesting WordPress-related project you’ve worked on?

WILL HANKE: Definitely FloatMissouri.com. I loved building the custom theme, business pages and the ability to help create a community.

NILE FLORES: Name 3 WordPress plugins that have always been on your MUST install list, and why.

WILL HANKE: Yoast SEO, Raven Schema, and Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP).

NILE FLORES: What is something interesting about you that the WordPress community doesn’t know?

WILL HANKE: I was using the Internet before it was called the Internet during my military days.

NILE FLORES: In regards to new WordPress users, what one or two pieces of advice would you give them that could be very helpful?

WILL HANKE: Definitely get a backup plugin before you start playing around with things, and make sure it’s working. Then go wild! Click everything and learn as much as you can about the CMS. The possibilities are truly endless!

Please feel free to leave a comment below and ask Will any questions- either about him, what he does, or even about SEO. 🙂

Speaker Interview: Brian Goldstein

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As part of our WordCamp St. Louis 2015 Speaker Interview series, we asked Brian Goldstein to tell us a little bit about himself.

Brian is a St. Louis local, a University of Missouri University alumni and will be presenting on Building Responsible WordPress Sites.

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NILE FLORES: What got you interested in WordPress?

BRIAN GOLDSTEIN: I’m having a hard time actually remembering. I knew I wanted to blog way back in 2006-07, and didn’t want to use LiveJournal or Blogspot.

NILE FLORES: What is the most interesting WordPress-related project you’ve worked on?

BRIAN GOLDSTEIN: Anything that I’ve done with Billy and Justin (my partners in Our Collective.)

NILE FLORES: Name 3 WordPress plugins that have always been on your MUST install list, and why.

BRIAN GOLDSTEIN: I’m partial to Advanced Custom Fields, Custom Post Types UI, and Gravity Forms.

NILE FLORES: What is something interesting about you that the WordPress community doesn’t know?

BRIAN GOLDSTEIN: I require Chinese food once a fortnight.

NILE FLORES: In regards to new WordPress users, what one or two pieces of advice would you give them that could be very helpful?

BRIAN GOLDSTEIN: My advice is twofold. Always have your own domain, and enjoy tinkering with it, but learn how to develop locally and test it first.

Please feel free to get to know Brian at the event on March 14 & 15, 2015. You can also ask questions below in the comments.

If you haven’t got your ticket, please get your ticket while it’s available. 🙂

Speaker Interview: Russell Fair

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To start our Speaker Interview Series for WordCamp St. Louis 2015, the organization team decided for 2015 to send out a list of 5 questions to all of our speakers. Rather than ask different questions, they were the same exact inquiries. This is because each person has their own experience with how they started with WordPress.

We’re starting off at the bat with Russell Fair. Russell will be speaking about Debugging Common WP Problems. Russell will also be part of hosting the Kid’s Camp.

Enjoy!

wcstl-speakerinterview-russellfair

NILE FLORES: What got you interested in WordPress?

RUSSELL FAIR: Well that was a long time ago and WordPress wasn’t the mature publishing platform that it is today. Still, the thing that made it attractive was that I could give it to a total novice and they could publish content on their own, without needing to know html, have any special software, or rely any other protocols to publish their thoughts online.

The simplicity and ease of publishing was, and still is one of the biggest reasons I love WordPress. One of the other big motivators for my interest was the WordPress MU project. The Idea that I could run multiple sites off one codebase was awesome. When that was rolled into the core platform, my interest was renewed and I find more reasons to love WordPress each day.

NILE FLORES: What is the most interesting WordPress-related project you’ve worked on?

RUSSELL FAIR: Probably the Nixon Foundation Website (nixonfoundation.org). I worked on it several years ago and it was one of the first projects where I pushed my knowledge about themes to the limit, and even made an attempt at writing my first plugin. The amount and quality of content they have is amazing and was just a fun and interesting project.

NILE FLORES: Name 3 WordPress plugins that have always been on your MUST install list, and why.

RUSSELL FAIR: The Yoast family of plugins for sure, SEO, Google Analytics etc. They’re vital to making your website get found and figuring out what your users are reading.

GravityForms, The form builder itself is just great, but when you add in all of the external API integrations it is just amazing. I use it all the time.

WP Super Cache – this one is pretty much a must have for making your site zippy. Nobody likes a slow website so WPSC is a must have for my sites.

NILE FLORES: What is something interesting about you that the WordPress community doesn’t know?

RUSSELL FAIR: I’m an outdoor nut. I like camping, geocaching, hiking, and pretty much anything I can find an excuse to get off of my computer to do.

NILE FLORES: In regards to new WordPress users, what one or two pieces of advice would you give them that could be very helpful?

RUSSELL FAIR: 1 – There is almost always more than one way to accomplish a particular job – this is especially true with WordPress. If you’re running into obstacles, stop and think about a different approach.

2 – Backups are mandatory. If you’re not backing up your site, and testing the integrity of your backups you’ll might wind up loosing everything. If you don’t have a backup solution in place that you KNOW WORKS, stop and do that now before you do anything else.

A big thanks to Russell for his time in answering these questions. Feel free to ask him questions and connect with him at the event.

Community Day Keynote by Mika Epstein (aka Ipstenu, aka Half-Elf Support Rogue)

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We’re super-excited to let you know that everyone’s favorite Half-Elf Support Rogue will be joining us to talk about how you can fit into the WordPress community by being true to yourself. Mika will not only be joining us for the Sunday keynote, but she’ll also be helping out during the Community Day “Give Back to Core” session. This session is where you can learn how to submit plugins or themes to the repository or submit patches to WordPress Core.

For those of you who might not know Mika, we could list her achievements and interests but it would take me the better part of the day. It would probably just be easier if you checked out her website, .Org profile, or Twitter. We promise that you will be awed, inspired, and entertained.

If this sounds like a fun way to spend your Sunday, grab your ticket and be sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay up-to-date with all of our latest announcements.

Announcing Our Remaining Speaker Lineup

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Last week we announced out local speaker lineup, yesterday we announced Cain & Obenland in the Morning would be our Saturday keynote speakers, and today we’re really excited to announce our remaining speakers.  If you’ve been paying attention to Twitter or our attendees page, some of them might not be that big of surprise. 🙂

What a great list of great people.

That about does it for our speakers, but we still have a bunch of stuff to let you know about between now and March 14th, so don’t forget to subscribe to updates or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay up-to-date with the latest WordCamp St. Louis news.

Automatt­icians Konstantin Obenland and Michael Cain to Keynote WordCamp St. Louis 2015

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We’re super excited to announce that Automatticians Konstantin Obenland & Michael Cain, hosts of the popular Cain & Obenland in the Morning podcast, will be keynoting WordCamp St. Louis this year.  Some of you may remember Obenland‘s appearance on the WordCamp St. Louis rating scale last year.

https://twitter.com/coderaaron/status/439900516701593601

This year he is returning with his co-host Michael Cain to help start off your day at WordCamp St. Louis.

We could wax on poetically about the most famous morning show in the WordPress world, but the easiest way to find out what you’re in for is to check out their site, and watch their episode from WordCamp Maine below.

Continue reading Automatt­icians Konstantin Obenland and Michael Cain to Keynote WordCamp St. Louis 2015 →

Tickets are now Available for WordCamp St. Louis 2015

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Tickets are now available for WordCamp St. Louis 2015.

WordCamp St. Louis 2015 will be held March 14-15 at Washington University. Tickets are $25 and cover both days. The first day will be filled with two tracks (Developer/User). The second day is our Community Day where we’ll give folks an opportunity to learn about how they can give back to the St. Louis and WordPress community. Tickets include a spiffy t-shirt, lunch, and attendance to the after party.

We have some great speakers lined up this year. Attractive, eloquent, funny, knowledgeable, and smart folks from across the St. Louis community will be joined by WordPressers from various corners of the globe to bring you the best WordCamp in St. Louis.

The goals of any WordCamp – but you know, ours especially – is to bring together great people and foster a community where everyone is free to learn and share. Any WordPresser – blogger, designer, developer, small business owner, writer – is welcome. We know you’ll have a great time.

Get your tickets while they last. We had over 250 attendees last year and sold out a week in advance. This year we anticipate the same!

If you can’t make it, but still want to support WordCamp in St. Louis, there are still sponsorship opportunities available!

Announcing Our Local Speaker Lineup

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WordCamp St. Louis is first and foremost an event for the local WordPress community.

St. Louis has a thriving tech community with many talented and knowledgeable WordPress developers, designers, writers, and more.  The St. Louis WordPress Meetup has over 500 members  and meets twice a month to talk about everything from theme and plugin development to content strategy to security.

Many of the speakers who presented at past meetups have volunteered to speak at WordCamp St. Louis. These great presenters are being joined by other members of the larger St. Louis WordPress community to come together to form what we think is a very exciting schedule.

Without further ado, we proudly present our lineup of local speakers:

This is not the complete list of speakers, we will be sharing the rest of the group soon.  Additionally tickets will be going on sale very soon, so subscribe above or follow us on Twitter or Facebook so you don’t miss any upcoming announcements.

Speaker submissions are now closed.

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We’ll be back to you in a week!

Submission deadline: January 11, 2015

Do you work with WordPress?

Are you a developer, designer, blogger, journalist, activist? Do you run your business on WordPress?

Are you in or from the St. Louis metro? Are you part of Cardinal Nation?

Has WordPress changed your life? (That can happen.)

Whatever your story, we’d like to hear it.
Whatever your tips, tricks or techniques, we’d like to learn them.

Continue reading Speaker submissions are now closed. →