This is the original WordCamp. Every year has been fantastic!  There is no other event that brings so many of WordPress’s elite together.

They’re friendly people to boot! Thankfully, the elite are welcoming and generous with their time, knowledge, talent and bad jokes (puns). It’s a great learning environment.

The best kept secret about WordCamp is that the speaker line up includes many technology and web luminaries – Matt Cutts, Philip Greenspun, Tim Ferriss, Tara Hunt to name a few of the incredible speakers.

Can you believe it is near free — the $25 cost doesn’t even cover the cost of the food. Thank you sponsors!

Even if WordPress wasn’t your thing (shame!), if you’re in the web, it should be a must attend event. It’s a great event for all bloggers and anyone publishing online.

There is also an after party celebrating the sixth anniversary of WordPress!

And Sunday, we’re hosting a barcamp-esque WordPress developer day:

…expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now…

There are only 64 spaces left for WordCamp, so sign up now! (Already 536 people have registered.)

I hope to meet you there.

Budd Family helping at Genius Bar WordCamp SF 2008, as seen at http://central.wordcamp.org/

About half way through her session she talks about “T-Shirt First Development (Guy Kawasaki)”. I have about 7 WordPress shirts. Occasionally, the ones with the WordPress logo will lead to a conversation — even here in quiet Victoria — with a blogger or web developer, but the ones that spark the most conversations are the WordCamp ones.

Here are some photos from Flickr of people rocking each year’s WordCamp SF shirts:

Joshua Wiltshire in WordCamp 2006 Tee

Chris Heuer in WordCamp SF 2007 Tee. Photo by Laughing Squid.

Alan Levine in WordCamp SF 2008 Tee.

Although WordCamps are happening all over the world, understandably, for most, shirts are not in the budget.

Shirt not in the budget for Dane Hurtubise. Photo by Michael Cummings.

I have found only one photo of a WordCamp tee from another WordCamp:

WordCamp South Africa 2008 Tee

When wearing a WordCamp shirt, conversations with strangers often start, “WordCamp, do you do spelling bees?” After I get over my initial little bit of embarrassment, I explain “WordCamps are WordPress conferences. WordPress is the blogging software that I use and contribute to.” It’s a great ice breaker, and lets me pimp the Press.

I haven’t had any particular funny conversations or found myself in any strange situations, but I like to imagine that others have.

Kris Krug captured what looks like master of creating conversations Francine Hardaway giving everyone a flash of WordCamp during her Gnomedex session:

Jokes. Kris’s next photos reveal that Francine was doing an on stage costume change, or maybe transforming from mild mannered Francine (can’t imagine) to part of Generation Y (which her session was about). I can’t wait for the video!

Has a WordCamp shirt taken you to any strange places?

Photos Used (because WordPress captions feature doesn’t yet support links):

1. Joshua Wiltshire self-portrait.
2. Chris Heuer photo by Scott Beale.
3. Alan Levine self-portrait.
4. Dane Hurtubise photo by Michael Cummings.
5. Photo by Flickr member StrategyOnline.
   
6. Francine Hardaway photo by Kris Krug.

Thursday Update: Aiza sent me a link to “WordCamp [Philippines] Preparation”

WordCamp Philippines 2008 Tee.

So, one of the WordCamp SF sessions that I was eagerly awaiting the video being available to share is Kathy Seirra’s “Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users”:

Kathy Seirra is one of my favorite speakers, because she makes me feel like I can kick fleshy parts you sit on too!

There are a couple of things immediately apparent from David’s tweat:

1. He has never exported a blog from TypePad
2. He has never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Never exported a blog from TypePad

I know this because I’ve done numerous TypePad exports and also working through my customers trying to get support from Six Apart in the export. For most TypePad blogs, it’s impossible to truly export the blog. Six Apart provides no tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.

About a year ago, I approached members of the Six Apart leadership team in the hopes that they would commit to fix this issue. I was really nice back then and the whole time until recently. Now, I’ve concluded they were playing games.

Six Apart CEO Christopher Alden’s even promised “A Bright New TypePad in 2008“, “TypePad is the only blogging service that gives you complete ownership of your blog”. Appreciate the humor of that? You are trapped on TypePad.

Chris, and all the leadership team will wave their hands, “AtomPub is the answer.”

Never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Having tried to guide Ronald Heft Jr in creating AtomPub exporters for TypePad and Movable Type, my only conclusion is that no member of Six Apart has written a blog exporter using AtomPub.

Six Apart VP Anil Dash likes to brag about them having helped create Atom and AtomPub. An exporter would have been one of the perfect real world applications to create as part of the creation of the specification. And wouldn’t you think if they were going to tell everyone that is the solution to exporting from TypePad that they would have built such an exporter? They couldn’t have because you can’t without hacking around AtomPub, a lot, which is what Ronald has done.

Then as we had it working, hacks and all, this past weekend, TypePad changed it, fixing one aspect of their AtomPub (drafts are identified), changing a few things that we can adjust to (changed the URL endpoints, switched to MT tag names for consistentency), but also breaking our importer:

• Can no longer retrieve comments on posts.
• No longer contains Pages.
• XML-RPC for trackback retrieval broke.

These issues have been reported to Six Apart and hopefully they will be fixed soon, but there is absolutely zero transparency. There is no way for us to check on the status of these issues.  Wouldn’t you expect the changes to be documented on the “The Official Everything TypePad weblog” and mentioned on “Six Apart Status“?

I cringe to think of the mess it would have been if we had already included the TypePad AtomPub importer in a release.

It seems that independent developers are left out in the cold.

The open web starts at home

Although, I’m excited by the work Ronald is doing, should it really be necessary for TypePad customers to come to the WordPress community to export their blogs?

I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s excellent article “How to do data portability” which includes “The best way to achieve data portability is to just do it”. That article really moved me, data portability, and by extension the open web, starts at your own company, on your own product.

How much longer do TypePad customers have to wait before they can export their blog?

WordCamp San Francisco

I’m putting together a genius bar for WordCamp where people will have their questions answered one-on-one. Are you able to volunteer your WordPress expertise? You don’t even have to be physically there, but then no brisket for you.

Do you have a question you hope to have answered at WordCamp SF?

At last year’s amazing WordCamp (videos of most talks!) a lot of people were coming up to me and asking me questions. I really enjoyed the conversations, but it was busy and we didn’t have a chance to look at the issues on a computer.

Looking around I noticed a lot of people with questions in their mouths, but hesitation in their movements, not knowing who to ask or not wanting to bother the busy WordPress experts catching up with friends.

There wasn’t a great space to do it in.

This year I’d like to create a space for it, inspired by Apple’s Genius Bar. We’ll have an area specifically for people to discuss their WordPress challenges. I plan on rounding up some of the experts I know, and post a schedule of when they will be available, but the space will also be for you to get technical if you’re having a conversation with someone about a problem you’re having.

This is an experiment, so if have any experience with similar initiatives — what works, what doesn’t — please let me know. In February, I hosted “WordPress and your Problems at MooseCamp“, it was successful, but there are a lot of ways for me to improve that format.

Here I want to have one-on-one help, quality over quantity. No pre-booked time slots. One or two experts on a schedule for first come first served.  Plus, possibly one remote expert over iChat . There will be a 15 minute time limit with a hard cap at 20 minutes if anyone else is waiting for help.

I’m thinking I’ll need a table that sits/stands 8, reserved power supply and internet access, and a mac computer with built-in camera and a headset for chatting with our remote experts. Oh, and a couple kitchen timer that do 15 minute count downs and water put aside for the experts. Anything else?

What do you think? What types of questions do you have? Upgrading? Theming? Performance? SEO? A particular plugin causing you grief?