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WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social Media

Friday, November 21st, 2008

As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

Automating your blogging and social media activity

A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?

This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.

And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:

WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants

Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008

??????? ????? 2008 – ???? ????? ??? ???? ?????

WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company

WordCamp Israel

Posted in News & Views | Tags: blogging, social media, Wordcamp Israel 2008, wordpress.com | 9 Comments »

How to rename widgetized sidebars in Wordpress

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

Why would someone have so many sidebars to begin with? Well, remember that you can also add widget-ready sidebars to Wordpress footers or anywhere in your design, to give extra content management options to clients.

Recently, we had a client with way too many widgetized sidebars to keep track of, so we had to find a new solution to change the standard widget sidebar names like “sidebar 1″ or “sidebar 2″ to something more meaningful like “Left sidebar” and “Right sidebar” in the admin area. I dug around the web and found 2 very helpful posts:

• How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog
• How to design a variable sidebar WordPress theme with widgets (by guest blogger Daria Black)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Go into your themes’s function.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, create it.

Add the following code:

<?php

if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’))

{

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Left sidebar’

));

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Right sidebar’

));

}

?>

2a. Add a widgetized sidebar to your theme. Open up your theme’s sidebar file (for exampe, l_sidebar.php) and look for the first <ul> or <ul id=”sidebar”> or something similar, and add the following code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

2b. If your sidebar is already widgetized, find the following code

<?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

and replace it with

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

Then, find the closing </ul> at the very bottom of the file, and immediately before that, place

<?php endif; ?>

3. Now, if you go into your admin panel, under Design>Widgets, you’ll see the new names like in the image below.

Now you can easily manage your Widgets without trying to guess which one is which.

Posted in Code Snippets, WordPress as CMS | Tags: functions, names, sidebar, widgetized sidebar, widgets | 1 Comment »

Review of Wordcamp Israel 2008

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Being that Wordcamp Israel was a bloggers conference in Tel Aviv, I’m sure there will be tons of people writing up their reviews in Hebrew. But maybe not quite as many in English, so here goes. This year’s Wordcamp was in the ZOA house in the middle of Tel Aviv, a schlep for Jerusalemites, but a great location for everybody else.

The Shmoozing

And they’re off, let the shmoozing begin. Instead of sitting in a corner, hoping someone would come talk to me, I started standing and sitting strategically next to people who looked friendly. The first guy I met was Eyal Sela, who plans to write about productivity on his brand new Wordpress blog, still in its Kubrick diapers. Throughout the rest of the day, I met Itzik Edri of Wikimedia(trying to get more people to use Wikipedia), Eyal Gura, CEO of PicApp (a legal image solution for bloggers), Eyal Beit-On, of Suntrader (online marketing consultant), and Amir Uval(new Hebrew blogger at Geek in the Kitchen). Are you keeping track? So far, that’s 3 Eyals. I also got to hang out with the founders of Nuconomy, Eran Kampf and Yossi Taguri. Toward the end, I sat with Ezra Butler, (of Twitter fame), Charlie Kalech,  Debby Benstein, Eyal Gonen, Idan Gazit(new Twitter friend), and Ido Shacham. If you’re counting, out of 13 people that I met, 4 happened to be named Eyal.

The Organizers

The conference officially started with co-organizers Tal Galili (who cut his hair) and Noa Danzig(who may or may not have cut her hair) welcoming everyone and telling us that they planned the conference in less than 2 months, and worked extra hard to include non-profits by creating an additional track of sessions.

The Sessions

I didn’t get a chance to go to every session, so I would love if people added their comments about the sessions they went to. You can see the full schedule here.

Session: Blogs built on Wordpress.com / Miriam Schwab

From what I heard, Miriam gave a great presentation on the features and limitations of Wordpress.com, and its viability only in the short term. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: 70 unusual uses for Wordpress / Sarit Amar and Tomer Lichtish

While it was hard to decide which sessions to go to, I ventured for the “70 unusual uses for Wordpress”. But, according to my desktop scientific calculator, only 4 were mentioned:

1. Contact Manager – Using a special template, you can enter each name as the link the a post which contains someone’s contact details.  You can also find people through the tag cloud.
2. e-Commerce/store
3. Portfolio – using thumbnails as links to each piece in the portfolio.
4. Lifestreaming – updates from Twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, etc. to represent your “online” life. A way to bring the focus back to the blog.

This session was a little basic for me and could have used specific links to themes and plugins that help you create these special Wordpress sites. I’m hoping there’s a link online to the other 66 interesting uses.

Session: Blogging with Video / Ron Yekuteal, Kaltura

Kaltura is the first open source video platform, and they have a plugin for Wordpress. Ron said that Kaltura is free, flexible, and most importantly, open source. This plugin supposedly offers a lot of functionality and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Session: Social Media Marketing / Miriam Schwab

Since I couldn’t clone myself and be at Miriam’s talk, even though I wanted to, I listened to other people’s reviews. People said Miriam encouraged quality content on your blog, your home base, and to be a part of the conversation on social media sites by contributing and helping others, since that’s where your audience is. She also listed Wordpress plugins that can boost your ’social proof’ on your website by displaying your activity around the web. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: Statistics / Zvika Jervy of Statistics Web Control and Yosi Taguri of Nuconomy.

Zvika spoke about the basics of Google Analytics to check number of visitors, referrers, time spent on the site, and top content, Technorati to check incoming links/authority, and Feedburner to check feed count.

Yosi spoke about Nuconomy’s plugin for Wordpress which offers statistics beyond pages, such as clicks on video and Ajax. It also lets you see stats on commenters and compare lots of different data sets for a bigger picture of stats and user interaction with your site.

Session: Virtual Collaboration, Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic

Originally from Israel, Raanan now lives in California working for Automattic (the company who created Wordpress), and playing Adam Sandler roles on the side (Miriam pointed this out, and I have to say, I agree, they do have a striking similarity). And, to my delight, Raanan delivered his presentation in English, a welcome treat for my Hebrew overloaded brain.  Raanan was a really great speaker and offered some tips on running a virtual company, since Automattic has 30 employees scattered around the globe in every possible time zone.

1. Empower your team – everyone should have ownerships of their projects, and set their own hours.
2. Go real time – yay for searchable, storable group chats and boo to email
3. Go semi real time – use internal blogs and  Prologue (group twitter)
4. Get together – coordinate conferences and meetups for real, in-person get togethers
5. Open Source – more opportunities to get help and gain insights from others
6. Metrics -  compare many different tracking services and data points
7. Go bite size – ticket tracking, break down a project into small pieces

He also gave a sneak peek into Prologue Groups, Wordpress’s project tracker, plus Twitter-like chat, which launchesin 2 weeks at Wordcamp Australia. And finally, he gave a heads up that BuddyPress, Wordpress’s Social Networking Platform will be available in December.

Session: Panel with Knesset Member Miki Eitan with host Jonathon Klinger

Set up like a late night talk show, Jonathon Klinger played host to Likud MK Miki Eitan and 3 other guys. I apologize, but I didn’t see their names in the program or online. Please feel free to comment with their names and organizations. [Update: Other panelists were Yoav Lerman from a blog about the renewal of Tel Aviv, Zvika Bashur from CityDov blog, and Yochai Ilam from Black Labor blog.]

MK Eitan was invited to be on the panel because he started a blog built on Wordpress. When asked why he chose Wordpress, he said, “it was the  cheapest option”. Other memorable quotes (probably not exact) included “You don’t need to be a Likudnik to believe in Miki Eitan”, a subtle plug, and “As you can see by my ability to choose a low-cost solution for my blogging, I also know how to create a balanced budget for the country”. As the wise Miriam pointed out, Miki is trying to take Obama’s strategy by creating a trendy site and a new slogan that translates roughly to: “To prove that things can be different”. What Mr. Eitan didn’t cover exactly was what those changes would be and how he would implement them. Sheesh, people, who can be bothered with details?!

When asked if Mr. Eitan writes his own posts, he said yes! Can you believe it?! Haha, Just kidding. He’s a politician who doesn’t see the ROI in blogging himself and therefore asked his assistant, hiding in the corner, how much time he invests in the blog. The assistant responded by saying 1 hour a day.

I’m sorry, but a Likud MK showing up at a bloggers convention reminds me of a similar situation (((Twilight Zone music here))) when Bibi Netanyahu showed up at the JBloggers Convention.  Why does every blogger convention end with a  rally for Likud? Am I missing something here? Have we finally caught on to their sly little plan?

Session: Introduction to Wordpress Plugins / Ziv Perry

This session was very high level, and I think should have been publicized as such. Ziv showed how to create a basic Wordpress plugin, but If you don’t already have a solid grasp of PHP or the guts of Wordpress, then this session was probably way over your head.

Session: Home, sweet Jerusalem

Sorry to say, I didn’t make it to the very last sessions, but Kol Hakavod to the organizers, and to meeting and seeing lots of fellow Wordpress junkies, er.. people. My recommendation for next year’s Wordcamp would be to have 2 tracks, one for beginners and one for advanced Wordpress users.

And last, but not least, I got a hilarious sticker that says “Lo Nachon” (Not true), and the purpose being that if you ever see a bumper sticker you disagree with, you can discredit it by placing your “not true” sticker next to it. Oh, people, you are so witty, how did you know that is exactly my type of humor?!

Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic, Wordcamp Israel 2008 | 9 Comments »