All posts by Michelle Lowery

WordCamp San Antonio is Tomorrow!

Can you believe it?! WordCamp San Antonio day is here! We’ll see you at TriPoint Event Center tomorrow morning for a day of learning, networking, and loads of fun!

We have been so fortunate these last several months. WordCamp San Antonio is finally here, starting tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. sharp, and it couldn’t have happened without all of these people:

Our phenomenal organizing committee, all of whom have worked very hard to make this event come together in just four months. An extra-big thank-you to Kori Ashton and the WebTegrity team for taking the lead on organization and getting us to this point.

We hoped for a handful of WordCamp San Antonio sponsors, and instead, we were inundated with support from numerous local and national sponsors, and even one from Europe!

We also weren’t sure we’d be able to entice enough speakers for San Antonio’s very first WordCamp. We worried for nothing. So many fantastic speakers pitched, we wish we could have chosen them all! We can’t wait to hear everyone’s presentations!

Our enthusiastic volunteers who have graciously offered their time to help make WordCamp San Antonio a success. You’ll recognize them tomorrow by their #WCSATX T-shirts and big smiles!

Our awesome attendees, all 300+ of them! You far surpassed our expectations. We hope to do the same for you tomorrow!

Every single person who tweeted, liked, and shared any and all of our social updates, and who spread the word about WordCamp San Antonio. Thank you for helping us get the word out!

Here’s to a successful, educational and fun WordCamp San Antonio 2015!

Pressable: A Gold Sponsor and Much More

Just when you thought we couldn’t possibly have any more awesome sponsors than we already do, here comes yet another!

We’ve been fortunate that so many fantastic organizations have stepped up to support WordCamp San Antonio. It’s due in large part to them that we’ve been able to increase attendance from 200 to 300. But gold sponsor Pressable is doing much more than just sponsoring the event.

Since 2010, Pressable has been a Content Publishing Platform (CPP) dedicated solely to making WordPress hosting easy, fast, and reliable at scale. From mom-and-pop storefronts to Fortune 100 companies, savvy organizations rely on Pressable’s CPP to deliver content millions of times every day.

In addition to supporting the event itself, Pressable is our social sponsor. They’ll be co-hosting (along with Radix) the 1st Annual WordPress Trivia contest taking place right after lunch.

Pressable is also hosting the officially unofficial WordCamp San Antonio After Party (location to be announced). As if all that weren’t enough, they’ll also have some fun surprises for #WCSATX attendees!

See you tomorrow!

Food, Drink and WordPress

We can’t expect you to stick around for a whole day of WordPress goodness without fueling your brains, right? Of course not! That’s why we made it an imperative of WordCamp San Antonio planning to include delicious food and beverages for everyone.

We’ll start off with the most important meal of the day—coffee. What? You didn’t know coffee was its own food group? Luckily for all of us, coffee and water will be available throughout the day so you can maintain a perfect balance between caffeination and hydration.

We’re showing our appreciation to all our speakers with a special Speaker Breakfast that starts at 8 a.m., and will consist of:

  • Fluffy scrambled eggs
  • Breakfast meats
  • Breads
  • Fresh Fruit
  • Doughnuts
  • Water, coffee and tea

Those doughnuts won’t be just plain ol’ round doughnuts, though. We’re bringing in a special treat: spur-shaped doughnuts from Panifico Bake Shop! We’re proud of our five-time NBA champions, the San Antonio Spurs. What better way to show it than with soft, yummy spur doughnuts?

But wait, there’s more! Want to caffeinate without suffering from coffee breath? One of our In-Kind sponsors just happens to be Red Bull! They’re providing plenty of cans for everyone because in addition to wings, they also give you WordPress.

After a few hours of listening to our fantastic speakers, you’ll probably be getting hungry again. But don’t worry, you won’t have to go anywhere because we’re bringing lunch to you! We’ll have a hot Italian buffet that includes:

  • Lasagna (with vegetarian and gluten-free options)
  • Salad
  • Cookies and brownies
  • Water, coffee and tea (sweet and unsweet)

Don’t worry, you won’t have to balance that plate in one hand while you wrestle your fork with the other. TriPoint is setting up tables and chairs for all of us—yes, all 300+ of us—to be able to sit down and eat comfortably. There’s a reason why we chose them for our venue.

If Italian food’s not your thing, or you want some other snack during the day, TriPoint also has a small café where you can buy soda, sandwiches, chips, and plenty of other things to keep you going all day.

And you’ll want to make it to the end of the day because once all the official stuff is over, we’ll move on to the unofficial WordCamp San Antonio After Party (location to be announced) for more yummy food, beverages and fun!

Bring your appetites along with your laptops!

CSSIgniter: Gold Sponsor from Across the Atlantic

WordCamp events take place around the world, in dozens of cities. With so much reach, you expect sponsors to support the events closest to them. What you may not expect is a sponsor to reach out from across the Atlantic, but that’s exactly what happened for WordCamp San Antonio—one of our gold sponsors is located in Greece.

CSSIgniter is a small team of designers and WordPress developers based in Greece. They provide beautiful WordPress themes to small Web design agencies, Web development agencies, freelancers, and small business owners around the world. They make sure there aren’t any confusing parts in their themes so users can concentrate on what really matters—their content. They say people really love them for their technical support, too.

When they got in touch with us, they expressed their desire to support the event, but pointed out that they wouldn’t be able to attend. It’s a bit of a hike from Greece to San Antonio, you know.

Not only did that not stop them from signing on as a gold sponsor, they also asked us to give their sponsor tickets away to someone who might not otherwise be able to attend. That kind of generosity is one of the many reasons we so enjoy being part of the WordPress community!

We hope you’ll take a moment to visit CSSIgniter, and we hope to see you this Saturday at WordCamp San Antonio!

Rackspace Cloud Sites a WordCamp San Antonio Premier Sponsor

We feel pretty fortunate to call San Antonio home. Did you know the Milken Institute named San Antonio one of the best-performing cities in 2014? Their study rates cities on job growth, wage and salary growth, and the size and concentration of high-tech industry. One part of our city’s high-tech growth is undoubtedly thanks to Rackspace, which is headquartered here.

And it just so happens, their Cloud Sites is another WordCamp San Antonio premier sponsors.

As the most powerful managed hosting platform, Cloud Sites fanatically serves billions of page requests every year through their professional-strength, purpose-built cloud, made to empower their customers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Backed by top tier experts, they manage the infrastructure so customers can manage what’s important—their business.

We hope you’ll check out Rackspace Cloud Sites. Better yet, we hope you’ll be at #WCSATX this Saturday to check them—and a lot of other great sponsors and speakers—out in person!

See you Saturday!

Flywheel Becomes WordCamp San Antonio Premier Sponsor

OK, how did this happen?! One minute, we were just talking about the possibility of putting on WordCamp San Antonio. The next minute, it’s this Saturday already! Not only that, but we have sold out to the tune of 300 attendees. Amazing. Thank you for the support, San Antonio!

We also owe a debt of gratitude to all our fantastic sponsors. Speaking of which, Flywheel is another of our premier sponsors, and we’re grateful to have them on board.

Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting platform built specifically for designers and creative agencies. Flywheel makes it simple to build, launch, and manage client sites with its easy-to-use dashboard built from the ground up for the modern web designer.

With nightly backups, blazing-fast load times, WordPress-specific security, and an awesome support team comprised of WordPress developers, Flywheel helps thousands of designers across the world launch projects every day.

If you’re a designer, developer, or creative agency looking for managed WordPress hosting, be sure to check out Flywheel! And if you’ll be at WordCamp San Antonio this weekend, you can get more information about them—and all our sponsors—on event day.

See you soon!

Radix FZC Signs on as WordCamp San Antonio Premier Sponsor

When we first began planning WordCamp San Antonio, our goal was to secure two premier sponsors. We thought two would be achievable, and would provide good contributions to help us get this event off the ground.

It’s not an exaggeration to say, we have been simply astounded by the interest in WordCamp San Antonio, and in the generosity of so many wonderful organizations who have so generously offered to sponsor the city’s first WordCamp. In fact, we now have no fewer than five premier sponsors, and we’re so pleased to introduce one of them to you: Radix FZC.

Radix’s mission is to become the registry operator for a variety of rich and memorable top-level extensions that will serve as the foundation of the new era on the Internet.

They aim to obtain rights to operate several new generic top-level domains that will help in bringing together and enriching the respective communities they serve. Radix is in the running to operate 20 extensions, including: web, .music, .blog, and .shop.

Radix has already successfully launched .website, .press, .host, .space, .pw (the professional web), and .in.net as a new domain name extension whose focal point is India.

We’re so excited to welcome Radix as one of our premier sponsors. We’re grateful to them—and to all of you—for the fantastic support, which is sure to make event day a huge success!

More Speakers, More Time, More Awesomeness

Hold onto your hats—we have even more great news about WordCamp San Antonio!

As we mentioned in our last couple of posts, after the first 200 tickets sold out, we added another 50. After those sold out in just 24 hours, we added 50 more. As of this writing, that last batch is down to 15, so if you haven’t done it yet, get your tickets now because they’re going fast!

With 100 more attendees at WordCamp San Antonio, the venue just got a bit more crowded. But that was when we were going to have just three tracks in three rooms. One of the many reasons we chose TriPoint Event Center as our venue is because of the fourth room available for just such an occasion!

We’ll now have four tracks occurring simultaneously, and each speaker will now have a full 45 minutes for their presentation and for Q&A. You, as our guest, will have more options, and more time to learn even more great stuff. The only downside may be having to choose among four speakers at a time!

Check out the updated schedule to see who’s been added, and when everyone is speaking now so you can plan your day and attend the sessions you most want to see.

Everything else remains the same. Registration starts at 8 a.m., we’re still serving a yummy hot lunch (which we’ll talk about in an upcoming post), and now you’ll get to mix and mingle with 100 more WordPress enthusiasts.

See you there!

Last Call for WordCamp San Antonio Tickets

We’re still in shock. After WordCamp San Antonio sold out yesterday, we put another 50 tickets up for sale.

They sold out in 24 hours.

So we’re doing it again. We’ve made another 50 tickets available. But here’s the catch—this is it. If and when the last 50 tickets sell out, WordCamp will be at capacity with 300 attendees.

This is truly your last chance to buy tickets for WordCamp San Antonio, if you haven’t already. And if ticket sales in the last 24 hours are any indication, you don’t have much time left to get in on this awesome event.

Hurry! Buy your tickets now before they’re really gone, and you have to wait until next year!

WordCamp San Antonio Sold Out—Almost!

Good news! WordCamp San Antonio sold out! All 200 of the original tickets available were claimed as of Monday, January 5.

Even better news—we added another 50 tickets!

We know what a fantastic event this is going to be. But to be honest, because it’s the first-ever WordCamp in San Antonio, we weren’t completely sure what to expect. We didn’t know whether we’d be able to get 50 people to attend, let alone 200.

Well, we’ve heard you guys loud and clear. You’re just as excited about this event as we are, and we couldn’t be more thrilled about that! We also heard a couple of people were disappointed when they came to the site to register and found all the tickets were gone. We couldn’t let those people miss out!

We’re less than three weeks away from event day. As of this writing, only 34 of the added 50 tickets remain. They are going fast. If you’ve been meaning to register, but you put it off, don’t delay any longer. Get your tickets now.

If you’ve been trying to decide whether you want to attend, take a look at the agenda, the speakers, and the topics that will be covered. Once you see all the valuable information that will be available to you, head on over and get your WordCamp San Antonio tickets before they’re gone again!

By the way, did you know you can also see who’s attending WordCamp San Antonio? If you’re looking to network, hobnob, or just hang out with your fellow WordPress nerds, this will be the place to do it.

See you there!