I discussed my experience at Seattle WordCamp 2012 in a previous post. This one is simply to serve as a collecting point for all the presentation slides from the event, or as many as I could find in any case. Feast below, there’s some great info to be had….

END USER/ BLOGGER TRACK

Using WordPress as Your Company’s Website
Kelli Wise
See the slides

SEO for Bloggers
Justin Briggs
See the slides

WYSI-WHA!?! Taming the WordPress Editor
Mark Root-Wiley & Christine Winckler
See the slides

How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul
Laura Kimball
See the checklist

Copyright Craziness: Reality, The Law and the Future
Aaron Hockley
Resources

POWER USERS / DESIGNERS

Going Beyond The Basics of WordPress
Lucy Beer
See the slides

How to Build a Custom Portfolio Feature Slider
Christine Rondeau
See the tutorial

Underscoring Theme development
Michael Fields
_s theme on Github
Monster Widget

DEVELOPER TRACK

WordPress at the Command Line – An Introduction to wpshell and wp-cli
Daniel Bachhuber
See the slides

The Capitalist in the Co-Op: The Art & Science of the Premium WordPress Business
Shane Pearlman
See the slides

Integrating WordPress with External APIs
Eric Mann
See the slides

There’s a Function for That: More for Less with Core Functions
Zack Tollman
See the slides 

Performance, Optimization and Scaling
Pete Mall
See the slides 

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This weekend I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at Seattle’s WordCamp. I have never attended a WordCamp outside of Southern California before and was pleased to experience the same feeling of community there that I have at other events.

My topic was “WordPress – Going Beyond The Basics: An Adventure Behind the Scenes of your WordPress Site!”

The goal was to introduce some key files, concepts and best practices for WordPress users who are not developers but are ready to take their knowledge of WordPress further than the dashboard. The presentation included a quick live demo of how to make a CSS tweak using Chrome Developer Tools, by way of a child theme.

I think the presentation went fairly well. Public speaking is not something that comes naturally, but I do it to challenge myself as well as to give back to the community by sharing what I have learned. The more I do it, the easier it becomes, but there’s always much improvement to be made! That said, I received good feedback from quite a few folks who came and chatted to me afterwards and throughout the day, and saw quite a few nice comments on Twitter. Thanks to all those people – your encouragement always helps!!

The event as a whole was rather awesome. The organizers did a great job, making sure everything ran smoothly all day long. Not to mention the fact that it was held at the beautiful Seattle Art Museum, and they provided a great lunch! I saw some great talks. Amongst the highlights, Scott Berkun gave the keynote and was engaging and insightful. Christine Rondeau’s presentation demonstrating how to make a custom feature slider without using a plugin was really cool! I met lots of lovely people that I hope to keep in touch with in some way, and had many stimulating conversations. As I always say, look out for your local WordCamp event – they are absolutely worth attending!

Were you at WordCamp Seattle? Or have you attended a WordCamp recently? Share your experiences in the comments!

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For a presentation I was giving recently, I wanted to find examples of WordPress sites that didn’t look like your typical WordPress sites. I wanted to show the versatility of WordPress, since many people still think it’s just used for blogs and think all WordPress sites look the same.

So here’s a few of my favorite examples of custom WordPress sites that break the mold.

Twisted Sista

A slick showcase of hair products :: Visit Site

Moment Church

A beautiful design and unique layout defy all WordPress expectations :: Visit Site

Wolverine Worldwide

Wolverine represents some major, worldwide shoe brands such as Cat footwear, Merrell, Harley-Davidson Footwear and more. If WordPress is good enough for these guys…. :: Visit Site

Think Space Gallery

A brand new WordPress site for Culver City’s Thinkspace art gallery provides a fitting showcase for great art :: Visit Site

Trevor Hoehne

Awesome portfolio site :: Visit Site

GETideas

WordPress site featuring a BuddyPress communit of over 2700 members. Check out the AWESOME rolloevers on the navigation as a way of presenting a lot of information in an organized way. :: Visit Site

The Kitchen Community

Beautiful full screen site featuring sticking photography for a Colorado-based restaurant :: Visit Site

If you have come across any ground-breaking WordPress sites, please leave them in the comments!

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One of the most important factors in off-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from another website, to your website. Search engines see links as “votes”, so the more links, and quality, relevant links at that –  you have pointing to your site, the better. All else being equal, if you can get better backlinks than your competitors, you can outrank them. Given its importance to SEO, it’s frustrating that there isn’t one solidly reliable (free) tool with which to do backlink research. Backlink research can help you :

• Find out what your website’s link profile is looking like, and what progress you’ve made
• Do some competitive analysis in your niche – how well are competitors’ sites performing
• Assess how much better you have to do in order to outrank your competitors.

There are several different tools available, some free and some requiring a paid subscription. You will probably need to consult a couple of sources to get a well-rounded concept of any site’s link profile.

Here’s three of my current favorite, free,  tools for this:

Blekko.com

You have to set up a free account, but it’s worth the couple of minutes that will take. Blekko provides quite a bit of helpful data on websites’ SEO profiles, including information on inbound links, crawl stats and more.

BackLinkWatch.com

This is quite an awesome tool for listing backlinks to a site. It will also indicated if a link is ‘nofollow’ and provide the anchor text for each link.

OpenSite Explorer.org

This tool is run by the mighty SEOmoz. As such, over time, the amount of info you can get for free has significantly decreased as they try and push their paid memberships. Still, when used in conjunction with other tools, it can still help flesh out your research.

Do you have any fave  SEO tools? Share in the comments!

Header image :: “The Right Tool” 

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Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. I’m always on the hunt for the best solution, and the method presented here is just one of several possible solutions.

Here are some of my ideal criteria for a backup solution:

1. Ability to back up both database and files
2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be screwed.Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups tend to get too large to email.

One of my newest favorite solutions is to backup to a free DropBox account. With Dropbox you can get 2GB of storage for free which will keep you going for a while, and should you run out, you can easily delete old backups.

I’ve been using a free plugin called Back WP Up  to accomplish this. It meets all three of my criteria above. The options panel may look a bit overwhelming to newbies so here’s a brief walk through it.

So first of all go to Jobs > Add New

This is a bit of a scary looking screen, but do not fear – the main things to pay attention to are:

1) Job Type, most importantly “Database Backup” and “File Backup” – these are the 2 core areas you want to include in your backup. If you want them both to be backed up at the same time, on the same schedule, you can create one “Job” that will cover both, in which case you want to keep both these boxes checked.

If you want to schedule them separately you will create 2 Jobs – one where the database is checked and another where only the files are checked. You can name your jobs appropriately so it’s easy to identify which is which in your dashboard.

2) When first setting up your jobs, you will need to allow the plugin to connect with your Dropbox account. This plugin also offers numerous other 3rd party cloud storage providers so you can use any of them, but I’m using Dropbox because it’s probably the easiest for newbies to get up and running with. So you’ll go create your Dropbox account then press authenticate to connect the accounts.

3) Job Schedule – select how often you want the backup to run. If you blog frequently you may want to do a daily database backup. if you don’t blog that much, weekly may be more appropriate. the hours/minutes are on a 24 hour clock system. Don’t forget to click “activate scheduling”.

4) Backup File – I like to add a prefix to the filename so that I can differentiate in my dropbox which are the database backups and which are the files backup so I use: file_backwpup_   or db_backwpup_

5) Send Log – I recommend you UNCHECK the “only send an email if there are errors” box at the beginning so that you get the logs emailed to you and you can make sure it’s running smoothly. Once you know it works you can then select to only get errors. Generally speaking, if backup plugins of any kind don’t work properly, it’s GENERALLY due to a server issue, so you want to know right away if it’s not working so you can talk to your webhosting company and see if it can be resolved. Once there’s a track record of the plugin working, you only need to be notified if there is a problem.

6) File Backup – The plugin can also backup other folders you may have on your server besides core wp folders so you can use this area to specify which folders you want to backup, such as only your current theme folder. You may want to exclude theme folders of inactive themes because it may be a waste of space to back them up. If you’re not using them, for secuirty purposes I’d recommend deleting old themes you’re not using.

Once you’ve configured these options you can click “save changes” and you should be good to go!

If you are not averse to paying a little money for a backup solution there are a couple of really good paid options.

Automattic’s VaultPress is an awesome solution for corporate or enterprise sites. It’s like running time machine for your WordPress site – it backs up incrementally as you change things and has other awesome features. However for $15/month for one site, it might be overkill for small sites or non-money-making bloggers.

My other recommended backup system is Locker by CodeGarage. They do daily site backups as well as security scans and uptime monitoring. You get a better bang for your buck here especially if you have multiple sites.

What is your preferred WordPress backup method? Share it in the comments!

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