The highlight of the afternoon was for me, as it turned about, PhotoCamp. That’s the session on photography led by Kris Krug, President of Bryght. I’ve been to this session in past years, but this year Kris had a slightly different format (although he had done PhotoCamp this way at other venues like BarCamp): A group of different experts in a variety of photographic techniques and topics followed. Tim Bray talked about what ideal small camera to get, even if you already have a larger Digital SLR (and I was glad to see that he promoted the site DPReview, a site that Steven had recommended many times when I was shopping for a camera.) Local art photographer Rachael Ashe showed some stunningly psychedelic effects you can get by using long exposures in a dark room along with various kinds of coloured lights; a kind of light painting. You can see an example done today here. I’ve seen other examples of this online, but the ones she did had an almost iconic (in the religious sense) quality. Novak Rogic of Microsoft showed how you could make elegant and almost picturesque little planets from stiched together panoramas, Duane Storey (who I am hoping to purchase one of his stunning photomurals of the Vancouver skyline from) talked about how to set up a store to sell your photos on SmugMug.com and Miranda Lievers, a local portrait and wedding photographer, gave a superb show of how to make the best pictures from available light. It was that last presentation that particularly impressed me, and I hope I’ll be able to use some of what I learned in future photos.
After Photocamp, I went to the session on WordPress (partly as a prelude to tomorrow’s keynote by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, one of the most successful blogging software packages today, and the software I use to publish all of my blogs.) While that was mainly a breakout session where we all had the opportunity to avail ourselves of local experts, it was followed by a terrific presentation called ‘More than Cat Blogs’, which was how WordPress can be used to build web sites that are either not blogs at all, or don’t look anything like blogs. (unfortunately I didn’t get the presenters name and he hasn’t posted any links to his session or himself on the Northern Voice Wiki).
After all of these presentations, I went with several others to the nearby Mahoney’s bar, where Voxant Newsroom, a digital news video hosting service, was offering free drinks and t‑shirts in return for filling out a short survey regarding blogs and other demographic information. It was nice to be able to get drinks (and eventually dinner) so close the the conference, and I was home at a decent hour, ready for a full second day of Northern Voice tomorrow. It starts early (at 8:30 AM), so hopefully I’ll be up and ready.
Good summary, David.
The presenter in the last session was Alan Levine a.k.a. CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com)
I took some good notes in his presentation. I’m too sleepy to (reliably) format this up in HTML right now, but here goes:
His original “presentation blog” done for a conference presentation about this same topic was http://cat-diaries.blogspot.com/
Some of his other blogs/designs that he showed us:
— sl.nmc.org
— virtualworlds.nmc.org
— pachyderm.nmc.org
— wp.nmc.org
Particular pages he showed to demonstrate points:
— virtualworlds.nmc.org/portfolio/colorado-tech
— wp.nmc.org/mashups
Blog post detailing how to go about customizing WP:
— http://cogdogblog.com/2008/02/14/wordpressing-dissected/
Tip: Take the HTML copy&paste code blocks generated by Flickr, etc. and experiment with their generated code.
For the intrepid non-programmer-geek: If necessary, do similar type of experimentations with MySQL queries to get the exact results you want pulled from WP’s database.
Delicious tag for this type of sites: notcatdiaries, i.e. the URL to see examples tagged by Alan (and everybody else) is http://del.icio.us/tag/notcatdiaries
Some of the sites mentioned by audience members:
— http://www.takuresort.com — done in WordPress, but doesn’t look at all like a blog
— http://allthingsd.com/ — done in WordPressMU (WordPress multiuser). But it is possible to separate the contents of different users on a regular WordPress blog by way of categories, etc.
— http://truemors.com — based on WordPress.
Thanks, Jan. Between the 2 of us, I think we’ve got it covered.
‑D
David — great write up! It was great to see everyone again. This is one conference that you feel most “at home” with as it seems you know a lot of people but also meet so many. I found the presenters either very good or mediocre. Should have picked better. See you in a few months! Glad the cold is over.
Hi David,
I remembered your blog because I liked the name — anyway, just wanted to say it was nice meeting you at Northern Voice. It’s nice to put a face to a blog or more accurately, the blogger behind the blog!
Take care,
Antoine
Hi Antoine,
Thanks for the comment. Hope we meet again at the next event around town. From your blog I can see that you’ve had an extremely interesting and varied career. I’m looking forward to reading your posts as well, since I now know the blogger behind your blog as well. 🙂