WordCamp Omaha 2015 Recap

We travel to Omaha often and WordCamp was another great reason to pay a visit. The two-day conference is focussed on WordPress design, development, and business with sessions for users at all levels. WordCamp is great for learning, networking, and finding answers. Also, for $40 it is much more affordable than the lion’s share of tech conferences today.

Giving Back

WordCamp Omaha was the first time I was able to contribute to the WordPress community with a session of my own. The topic of basic WordPress SEO comes up often and it was a good topic to tackle for my first presentation. You can see the full session in the video below.

After watching it myself, a few areas of improvement were noticeable. For one, I should have run through the presentation a couple more times to get the rhythm down. And the time limit was not as big of a factor as expected. The next time around I will plan to cover the topics a bit better. Speaking of which, I accidentally skipped over some of my own notes, like on styling text.

Another great way to give back to the WordPress community is to participate in the development of core. It is the backbone of WordPress and the need for developers, designers, and testers is constant. I haven’t been good about this myself and need to give it go. At a minimum, I’d like to help with the testing and gain some familiarity with Trac. You can learn more at Make WordPress Core if you’re interested!

Favorite Sessions

All the sessions were good and provided value for the attendees. However, there were two that resonated for me: ‘WP-CLI for the Rest of Us’ and ‘Being Classless’. The first session, by Frankie Jarret, was on command line for WordPress. Honestly, I didn’t even realize this was an option for WordPress so my mind was blown a little. Marti and I talked extensively after the session on how we can implement this feature for streamlining our support even more.

The other session was about being classless by Josh Collinsworth. The main focus was on taking advantage of classes that already exist in WordPress and leveraging them in your stylesheet. While this may not sound like a big deal, it is a great way to add styles without having a client see any CSS or the need for shortcode. A couple examples include adding a drop cap to the first letter a blog post or increasing the font size for the opening paragraph.

After Party

It’s not all work! It’s always awesome to meet other people and the Flywheel did an amazing job of hosting the after party. The best part was the kid-friendly atmosphere. That may sound weird, but we didn’t have a babysitter for the night and didn’t want to miss out so we brought Sullivan with us. He had a blast between the scooters, rope room (see pic below), and friendly people.

After Party at Flywheel - WordCamp Omaha 2015

 

Tyler Golberg

Tyler Golberg

I love writing about web design that inspires, figuring out Google's black box, and speaking to lively audiences. In my spare time, I enjoy reading Game of Thrones (waiting on Winds of Winter) and touring the lakes on my paddleboard.

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