Tickets are now available for WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012.

Tickets are currently £35 early bird, which will increase to £45 full price on 1 June 2012.

Please note the email you receive in acknowledgement of your purchase is your ticket – no paper tickets will be issued.

This event is being organised by WPUK.

The start of ticket sales for WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012 has been delayed for a week.

Due to outside work pressures amongst the team building this year’s event site, it has not been possible to complete the design and post all of the content by the original deadline of 6 May 2012.

Therefore, there is now a revised target of Sunday 13 May 2012 for the launch of the site, which will include ticket purchasing facilities.

Ticket sales will commence with discount £35 early bird, and will increase to £45 full price four weeks later.

This year’s wonderful WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012 logo is by Jonathan Harris.

This event is being organised by WPUK.

The bitter, brewed by Robinsons, proved to be a most excellent quaffable brew.

A nice touch was a CD being used as the basis of the beer pump clip.

Is this the first time a band have had a bitter specifically brewed for them?

To make things even better their website is powered by WordPress!

Plus a significant percentage of all profits raised by the sale of the beer will go to the Oxfam Famine Appeal.

Brilliant!

I went to meeting number eleven of the WordPress London local group on 19 April 2012.

Areas covered were:

• Dan Thornton and Robert Rhoades gave a presentation on their Jigoshop WordPress ecommerce plugin – an area of plugin development where improved usability is definitely required.
• Steve Jones gave an interesting talk on using PHP classes for plugin authoring.
• Lee Rickler led a lively and informative WordPress Q&A session
• And finally I gave a quick presentation on WPUK and the forthcoming WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012; slides (55kB PDF).

Afterwards it was (inevitably) beer at the Sutton Arms.

WordPress London meets on a monthly basis – many thanks to Keith for organising the gathering.

If you’re not based in London, see if there’s a WordPress local group near you on the WPUK wiki.

The event site, currently under development, is scheduled to be launched on 29 April 2012 to include a range of information about the event.

Ticket sales are planned to start on 6 May 2012 – initially they will be early bird discount tickets, similar to the process followed for last year’s Portsmouth WordCamp.

In the meantime, content ideas for the event can be posted on the WPUK planning wiki.

To post to the wiki, you need to be a registered user. To register contact me, detailing your name and website URL, with the subject line “WPUK wiki registration request”.

The process of renaming WordCamp UK to WPUK has been completed with the final stage of introducing a new WPUK mailing list, which replaces the old WordCamp UK list.

If you have been a subscriber to old list, and have not received an email automatically subscribing you to the new list, you should manually subscribe to the WPUK mailing list.

I went to the tenth meeting of the WordPress London local group on 1 March 2012.

The main talks were:

• Graham Armfield detailed some of his, and other group members, favourite WordPress plugins.
• Rich Holman gave an introduction to building multi-lingual sites with WordPress.
• Tammie Lister outlined how to design for humans, not robots, with WordPress.

Afterwards it was beer at the Sutton Arms.

Another interesting and illuminating group meeting.

WordPress London meets on a monthly basis – many thanks to the organisers Keith, Chris and Emily.

If you’re not based in London, see if there’s a WordPress local group near you on the WPUK wiki.

The confirmation of the successor to WordCamp Portsmouth UK 2011 follows WordCamp Central processing and venue booking.

This year’s WordCamp venue was proposed by Taryn Wallis and Martin Young, who, along with the Core Group, will be involved in organising this year’s event.

The event website is at the early stages of development by Jonny Albutt and Jonathan Harris – whilst this work is being undertaken go to the planning wiki for
more details.

The Core Group are now seeking sponsors for the event, if you’re interested contact me.

Those who have already expressed an interest in sponsorship will be
contacted shortly.

Microsponsorship by individuals, as last year for Portsmouth, will be
available when tickets go on sale at a date to be announced in due
course.

To keep up to date with developments subscribe to the WPUK mailing list.

What is WPUK? WordCamp UK has recently been renamed to WPUK in recognition of the wider range of activities undertaken by the group.

I attended the eighth meeting of the WordPress London local group on 7 December 2011 – the Christmas social!

Beer (courtesy of Headshift) and chat, replaced the usual presentations (and beer).

The Blue Lion proved to be an excellent venue with a great range of real ales.

Pictured is the new WordPress London badge, produced by Emily Webber.

I went to the seventh meeting of the WordPress London local group at the Headshift offices in Shad Thames on Thursday 17 November 2011.

During the meetup, Keith Devon gave a clear and succinct presentation on working with custom post types, and how they can be used in conjunction with templates, custom taxonomies and meta boxes.

Chris Adams (pictured above) gave an update on recent news developments in the wonderful world of WordPress, including drawing our attention to the WP Install Profiles plugin, which looks like it could be a bit of a timesaver.

David Bain also talked about the various possibilities for improving WordPress SEO.

The excellent evening concluded with liquid refreshment at the local hostelry Anchor Tap.

WordPress London meets on a monthly basis – if you’re not based in London see if there is a WordPress local group near you on the WordCamp UK wiki.

I attended BarCamp London 9 during the weekend of 29-30 October 2011 at the City University London Social Sciences Building.

I last attended the event at BarCamp London 6 in 2009, and although the format was the same for this year’s BarCamp, a digital grid was used for the first time, allowing attendees to populate the half hour sessions using the site.

If you haven’t a clue what I’m taking about, see Wikipedia for an explanation of what BarCamp is.

Here’s some of the sessions I participated in during the weekend:

• Lanyrd: From side-project to startup – Natalie Downe and Simon Willison (pictured above) entertainingly explained how Lanyrd, started as a side-project on an extended travelling honeymoon, ended up turning into a startup after spending three months at Y combinator. This was not part of the original plan for the honeymoon! Interesting quote by Simon from the session: “Data is a sympton of design. Watch for duplicates and bad data: these bugs are important to fix quickly because they affect the quality of your data”.
• How does IBM Watson work? – Dale Lane, from IBM, outlined how the Watson learning system works, which appeared on the US quiz show Jeopardy!
• Engaging universities – A look at the motivations for universities to host events like BarCamp led by Kate Reader. This useful session gave me some ideas relating to events I’m involved in organising.
• We are Wikipedians, ask us things – Tom Morris (Wikipedia editor) and Oliver Keyes (Wikimedia Foundation employee) answered questions about Wikipedia and gave an insight into the content editing process, against a current background policy of quality over quantity.
• How we do Agile at the BBC – Jamie Knight, BBC Client Side Developer, outlined how Agile methodologies are applied to the development of iPlayer in BBC Audio and Music. Jamie outlined how user stories (personas), acceptance crteria (defining how you know when a specific piece of work has been completed), 15 day task sprints, SVN, the use of white boards to track progress of sprints, and the pairing of developers and designers, are all used as part of iPlayer development.
• OpenStreetMap developer ecosystem – Harry Wood reported on the OpenStreetMap mapping system. Harry succinctly explained the project development process and how mapping data is served over the web. For some reason I didn’t realise until this session the project originated in the UK.
• Identity, authorisation, personalisation – An interesting discussion led by Tim Nash, which included looking at how confirmation of identity on the web can get confused with authorisation, leading to the unauthorised release of personal data.
• 5 Tips for progressive enhancement and RWD – Jamie Knight talked to two elements of web development: progressive enhancement and responsive web design (RWD).
• Semi-organised Barcamps and WordPress – I gave a session (PDF) on an alternative approach to BarCamps, using a wiki and mailing list, and it’s application to organising an annual two day WordPress conference, along with the WordPress community ecosystem in the UK. I put together this session on the Sunday morning, to address questions I’d been asked the day before, and subsequently ran a session in the afternoon. One of the great things about a BarCamp is being able to respond to events at this speed.

Plenty of other stuff happened during the weekend: including pies for all (pictured above), YouTube bingo, the Saturday evening quiz along with beer and wine.

Regrettably I had to duck out of the traditional crashing out overnight at the venue this year.

Many thanks to the BarCamp London 9 organisers and sponsors for a fantastic and fulfilling weekend.