We’ve been making quite a lot of progress securing speakers and sponsors over the past few weeks. After the long weekend, Melissa and I will be posting a few new speakers, introducing a preliminary schedule and announcing the title sponsor for WordCamp Toronto 2008.
A lot of you have written in to share your excitement - and trust us, we’re excited too! This is going to be a great opportunity to learn, share and network!
I’m certainly no Web idiot but at some point between uploading our new logos to the Spread the Word page and making it live I did something horrible to the WordCamp Toronto Web site.
So if you have previously registered with a username and password and it’s not there anymore, I apologize. If something else looks wonky, I apologize. I did my best to restore the database to before the downtime but may have missed something.
Please e-mail me if you notice something totally out of whack.
We had an awesome Monday this week, confirming two more amazing speakers.
Brendan Sera-Shriar is a WordPress pro’s pro. He recently hosted a one-day workshop on all things WordPress. He’ll be speaking on Plug-in Power!
We’ve also just confirmed Mike Ellis, Editorial Director - Online Media with Chrysler North America. He’s the guy in charge of Chrysler’s blogs for both jounrnalists and consumers and will be speaking about blogging for big business.
Finally - David Peralty is a ProBlogger - he’s grown his blog from a small hobby to a robust and fulfilling space on the Internet and his posts regularly have the sound reasoning found in the world of academia. We’re super pumped to have him in the lineup.
From http://richmediainstitute.com/wordpress2.5
A Full day of WordPress2.5, focused on design and development. We’ll cover the essentials of setup, installation, and management. We’ll learn how to build custom themes using CSS, PHP, and image architecture. We’ll also jump into custom code and template files, best
practices for design and management, integrating Flash, and how to build and install WP and custom plug-ins.
This full-day workshop is being held at the Rich Media Institute - Toronto - 156 Augusta Avenue and is only $99. Eight hours of WordPress training pretty much will take anyone from total noob to expert, I’d say. And honestly, where else can you get software training at such a great deal?
Brendan Sera-Shriar is facilitating the workshop and will be speaking at WordCamp Toronto in October. We’ll be adding details about his topic later this week.
Below is our tentative schedule of sessions. We are currently putting together a list of speakers, so if you are an expert on any of these topics or have some ideas of your own, we would like to hear from you!
WordPress Talk
Business Blogging
Blogging for Boomers
Podcasting
30 Tips to Make Your Blog Better
Social Media for Dummies
Running Your Blog Like a Pro
Vidcasting
Entertainment Blogging: A Panel Discussion
It’s been a busy summer! Melissa and I have been working on all the background work - we’ve secured the facility, set-up Internet access for the weekend, made arrangements for food and are now just getting work done on our speaker list.
So far we have two confirmed speakers:
Matt Mullenweg: The founding developer of WordPress will be speaking at our conference, most likely on Saturday about an undisclosed topic. When he spoke at WordPress Dallas he introduced WordPress 2.5 (it was the premier and very cool to get a first-hand look at it). Expect something just as fascinating.
Michael O’Connor Clarke: Michael has been blogging since 2001, mainly about marketing, PR, social media and his Toronto based family. Melissa and I met with him previously to discuss strategies for business blogging and his tips paid off in spades! He’ll be covering the same topic at WordCamp Toronto. Expect to learn how to keep your content fresh, how to set-up an editorial calendar for your blog and how to keep your audience interested.