Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo

So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community.  I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome.  There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind.  Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then.  But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun.  It was all a bit… serious.

But you know, technology is cool.  Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days.  So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town!  Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…

And it was worthwhile.  Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it.  But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…

WordPress for News Sites

I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy.  And I thought… why the heck not.  Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific.  So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site.  I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo.  To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk – I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points.  If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better.  But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention.  Frankly I was surprised – I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions.  I think people enjoyed it!

Video Interviews

I ended up giving a couple.  I rambled.  I was tired.  Lack of sleep doesn’t help me.  I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.

1 Minute Pitch

Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office.  I was nervous, shakey and tired.  I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest.  The other guys did better.  They had stuff like preparation – I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine!  But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not?  It was a good crowd.

But Hey…

I had a good time.  But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday.  I hope everyone had a great time!