BlogHer - unBlogHer08 - Comments

A big issue at the

ByJane — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:46:04 -0500

A big issue at the MidLifeBloggers ROYO was tech-related. I'd vote for anything that enabled bloggers of all levels of expertise to participate, but not necessarily at the same time. I think that means that there need to be several tracks within the main tracks.

By Jane

http://byjane.blogspot.com

http://midlifebloggers.com

Hooray for Comaraderie

Frances Ellen — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:00:24 -0500

The most appealing thing about the BogHer Conference for me was everyone's willingness to help and I received plenty of that, especially at the un-conference as Virginia mentioned in her post.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in pulling me together!

Frances Ellen is the Narrator of the Story of Nadia - The continuing fiction story of a card reader named Nadia.

I myself was at the

sparksfley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:28:01 -0500

I myself was at the unconference. I sat in at two tables, and both were so helpful. I loved that I could talk back and forth with the people running the table, and then we all brainstormed, and offered what we knew. That face to face individual attention was instrumental in my actually retaining information. I'm so glad I decided to stay on for it.

Michele

Sparks and Butterflies

<a href="http://www.sparksandbutterflies.com/butterviews">Butterviews</a>

Virginia, thanks for posting this!

Skye — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:12:25 -0500

I'm excited to see what we come up with for next year.

-Skye Kilaen

Love this post....

Denise — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:15:41 -0500

And I really love that these types of interactions took place.

That's exactly the type of thing I wanted to happen when I offered myself up for the first session of the unconference - to offer assistance in getting familiar with BlogHer.com.

I did a bit of that but most people who sat down didn't come with specific questions or problems - so I just offered up I info about various things they can do on the site and answered the questions that came up as a result.

Love the unconference and next year (knock on wood) I plan to stay for the whole thing.

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings

That's my idea of 'Camp

Laura Scott — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:21:23 -0500

Presentations have their place, but it's the informal gathering, code- and design-sprinting and general mash-up BOF atmosphere I prefer to really get into things re tech stuff.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design, snap, blog, tweet

Less camp, more hacking pairs

Liz Henry — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:14:44 -0500

I think we need less presentations and talks in this area and more hands on workshops and pairing up, and more of a culture of collective, team, or paired hacking on problems. Making spaces where the point is to siit there and go through troubleshooting and debugging with another person. We did have that kind of environment at WoolfCamp and I'd love to see it happen on a larger scale, or just individually. Try having a blog fixing up date with a blogfriend or real life friend and see how you can help each other. Honestly even if neither of you has huge coding skills you can often solve problems just by looking at something together, for brainstorming, for the inspiration to stick to it until you figure out the problem, and for moral support.

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Liz Henry
lizzard@bookmaniac.net
Contributing Editor, World and Latin America

Fixing and teaching, tech knowledge is empowerment

Liz Henry — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:08:00 -0500

I had a great time helping people out, and that's what I did for nearly the entire time of the unconference. Virginia, Sarah, and Angie and also Minnie, were all blog help heroes.

I have two to follow up on, one issue I was helping Frances Ellen with and one to make sure that Tre from Thought by thought gets her account on track and knows how to ftp things to her new hosted wordpress installation. I worked for probably an hour on Mary from Owlhaven's comment_count problem, Angie looked too, Micah was puzzled as we were, and then Sarah ended up solving it by running through Mary's sql database to reassociate the posts with the comments, which all had the feel of fantastic teamwork.The more puzzled we were, the more determined we got to figure it out and fix it. Plus, once we knew that Mary had TEN CHILDREN I think the determination level got raised a few notches out of awe for her.

I really liked our list of ideas for what we'd like to see in a tech track, maybe a blog tech 201 track. I loved hearing what everyone does with WordPress and Drupal. The list of favorite WP plugins was great.

And, I got great advice from Angie too on setting up MAMP on my MacBook and which basic Drupal modules to install to get me started on playing with drupal in my own development environment.

I bet that a session on Apache and mod_rewrite and .htaccess would get a suprisingly huge amount of BlogHers in attendance. A lot of us end up running our own web servers and we have to dive in and figure that stuff out. So, sharing what we know is amazingly useful and empowering for the community.

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Liz Henry
lizzard@bookmaniac.net
Contributing Editor, World and Latin America

This sounds like something to have more often

Laura Scott — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:47:39 -0500

Call it "BlogHer BarCamp" -- a tech focused event with ad hoc presentations, BOFs, etc. ?

Next weekend I will be at DrupalCamp Colorado. Mostly guys, but many women are coming.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design, snap, blog, tweet