I’m normally pretty crap at blogging post-event so I’m putting this together live – as I sit at the back of the auditorium at WordUp Glasgow.
WordPress for Family History by John Adams
A very personal story from Mr John Adams (@johnthegeo) which turned out to be a plugin tour de force. John has managed to put together a great site which tells his family story going back over 100 years with some great features like geo-locations, timelines, multiple authors and custom meta.
Some of the awesome plugins he used were:
- Category Custom Fields
- Default Sort Ascend
- Widget Logic (a must have on any site)
- Custom Post Types UI
- Post Type Converter
- Authors Widget / User Photo
- WP Geo (by one of my WordCamp buddies Ben Huson)
- WP SIMILE Timeline
Hand Drawing WordPress by Jim Convey
Jim gave another quite personal and passionate talk about art, blogging and the use of hand-drawn elements in web design.
One quote which stood out was:
Drawing difers from photography in that it requires imagination and shifts the emoptional balance of the viewer to their personal experience.
Jim also went on to predict that in future amateur artists will invade the web and introduce more decorative content to sit alongside the classic text/photo blog postings which currently fill the tubes.
EU cookie legislation by Heather Burns
I was really looking forward to this because no matter how many times I have visited this subject it gives me a headache.
Heather started at full speed with some advice about how this new law effects ALL website owners and then went onto display a LOT of text which outlined what the EU Cookie law IS and is NOT.
The whole thing kicks off in 110 days when website owners (all of you) need to start informing visitors about the info you are storing on their computers. This even includes Google Analytics code so will hit pretty much everyone in the room here today.
Heather then went on to explain that certain cookies are exempt from the law. These include ones that keep you logged into admin panels and ones for online banking. However, certain eCommerce ones that are NOT seen as being required for the shopping experience need to be highlighted.
Here is a great example of how notifications could work from South Ayrshire Council:
There was a lot of talk about privacy, Facebook, the government and the snails pace like speed that the law is currently taking to get anything started and quite a bit of ICO bashing.
As for WordPress – the core team won’t be adding this as a core feature but there are some plugins already available that will help get you started but are NOT the only thing you need to do in order to be complaint.
Heather finished off with some warnings about money-making seminars, ineffective ‘compliance-izing ‘ code being sold online and a final warning about how the goalposts are already being moved making a lot of work already being done moot.
Site Doctors: improve the WPScotland websites by Taryn Wallis, Martin Young
A typical group session with the noble aim of improving the ever-expanding WPScotland website.
The Emperor’s New Clothes by Kevinjohn Gallagher
The most hated man in WordPress takes to the stage! To talk about a crapload of subjects in a blunt and humorous way (he’s the speaker not the slide BTW).
This was an incredibly informative and pretty awesome. Here are some of the topics covered:
- Drink Often. Swear more. Code Less.
- Responsive Design is Irresponsible
- Why Free is too Expensive
- Browse Crappy
- Why you have to be High to use HTML5?
- Justified: Why you’re the client from Hell
- Basic != Standard
- Development Platforms, Processes and Purgatory
- Open Source in the Enterprise is like a Mail Order Bride.
- Good developers don’t automatically make good Jedi Knights.
- You weight 300lbs. You are not a ninja.
- Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
- Exit stage left: How we failed the world with CSS3
- Upgrades of Mass Destruction
- You are a Mogwai. Remember the 3 rules
- Lies, damned lies, and Open Source Statistics
Yeh, I know – LOTS to take in. Thankfully he’s speaking at The Digital Barnnext weekend so I get a 2nd chance to digest all this awesome info.
How WordPress Won! by Kimb Jones
Um, this is me. Here are my slides:
Not very informative without context – will blog the points when I get chance.
That’s it!
I will do a follow up when I get home.
