Author Archives: Wayne McWilliams

Speaker Announcement: Garrett Heath

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Garrett Heath

About

Garrett has blogged about San Antonio food and culture on SA Flavor since 2009 and believes the best cheese enchiladas in town are found at Oscar’s Taco House. He currently works at Rackspace as a social media marketer and has held roles as an operations analyst, cloud project manager and content marketer. You can read his blog about digital marketing at MarketingBytes.io.

Topic: Has your blog become a vampire?

Remember what it was like when you first set up your blog? You were full of piss and vinegar and incredibly excited. It may have sustained you during a rocky time at work or in your personal life. It was a life force that energized you. After all, people would be reading what you had to say.

Then it happened. Your blog moved from being a life force to a life suck, taking away all the joy that you originally had. Updating it became a chore; you exhaled an audible groan every time you opened up wp-admin. Your blog turned into a vampire (and not of the Twilight variety).

This talk is geared around the four types of blog vampires I’ve encountered and strategies to help make personal blogging fun again. Regardless of where you are on your blogging journey, vampires abound, including:

The No One Is Reading My Blog Vampire—this is where a blogger becomes so despondent after realizing that no one, not even their friends and family, are reading their blog

  • The Keeping Up with the Jones’s Vampire—this is where a blogger starts comparing themselves to others and has a feeling of inadequacy/jealousy
  • Getting Caught Up in the Fame of (Minor) Celebrity—this is where the blogger gets an inkling of fame and PR people reach out along with the endless invites; but it’s to things they may not care about
  • The Administrative Vampire—this is where the blogger gets mired down in all the SEO/tagging/socialing/posting minutiae and hates life

All these vampires make you want to just give up. But that flicker of light from the life force still draws you in. You feel confused on what to do and mostly trapped—I mean, isn’t this supposed to be fun? Having personally experienced all of these types of blog vampires, I’ll walk through strategies to vanquish them so you can enjoy the joys of blogging once again.

Speaker Announcement: Alan Bush

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© Kate L Photography | www.kateLphotography.com

About

Alan Bush is a Community Manager at Rackspace by day, a husband, daddy and comedian by night. Alan likes beer, coffee, puns and the Kansas City Royals. He dislikes writing about himself in the third person.

Topic: Improv-ing your content

Can improv help you be a better content creator? Does Big Red go with Barbacoa? (The answer to both, is “yes.”) I’ll show you how I apply improv philosophies, such as “Yes, and,” giving gifts, and many more, in my roles as blogger, Community Manager and co-host of multiple podcasts. You’ll leave learning how you can use these same philosophies to create new and interesting content on your own or in collaboration with others.

Speaker Announcement: Zach Charo

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zach-charo

About

Zach does customer support for Pressable. He is an attentive and creative problem solver who is quick with a smile or a funny joke to brighten up your day. When he’s not busy neutralizing script kiddies, shutting down spam bots or optimizing stores, Zach enjoys long walks on the beach, playing guitar, fixing cars, HAM radio, watching old movies, and hanging out with his amazing wife.

Topic: How to review a Plugin or Theme in-depth

Turn your familiarity with WordPress plugins and themes into valuable content for your site’s visitors by writing a review! In this talk, we discuss how to write an in-depth review of a plugin or theme. This talk will cover what data to collect, how to put a plugin or theme through its paces, and how to share the review in a compelling format for the benefit of your reader.

Thank you to our Global Silver sponsors!

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Great sponsors make great WordCamps possible, and we feel lucky to be sponsored by Plesk, WPML and DreamHost, Pantheon, and GoDaddy Pro as part of the global sponsorship program.

Plesk is the leading WebOps platform to run, automate and grow applications, websites and hosting businesses.

WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. Thank you to everyone who makes WPML for helping us make our WordCamp excellent.

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites, and apps hosted. They sponsor all WordCamps in the US and Canada, including (and most importantly?) this one. We just can’t thank them enough.

Pantheon is a Website Management Platform for Drupal & WordPress that provides elastic hosting and web development tools for teams.

GoDaddy Pro helps you manage all your GoDaddy clients with ease and gives you access to dedicated designer and developer tools.

Early Bird Tickets Are Here!

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We’re offering 100 Early Bird tickets for WordCamp San Antonio as of RIGHT NOW. Get yours today and guarantee your spot in San Antonio’s one and only WordCamp conference! You know the drill, with your ticket purchase you will receive lunch, some really great swag and a day full of WordPress “nerdery” you don’t want to miss!

Click here to buy your Early Bird tickets!

Sponsors, speakers and volunteers get into the conference for free!