Archives for "Speakers"

If you thought our last round of lightning talks was solid, wait till you see this month’s line up!

Headlining the lightning talks  is new Providence resident John James Jacoby – one of the core developers of BuddyPress, the official social networking add-on for WordPress. John has spoken at WordCamps around the country and helped organize a WordCamp in his previous home town of Miami. He just moved to Providence at the beginning of November, and we’re thrilled to have him in our community and participating in our meet up. John will be presenting BuddyPress in 5 Minutes, a great introduction for those of you who have not yet checked out BuddyPress!

Coming in at the #2 slot is Bill Dennen, who has been a participant in our community since the first meet up. Bill is a Web Technologist and Sysadmin at Wheaton College. He has worked with web technologies since the days of NCSA Mosaic. Bill will be presenting Under the Hood: How Wheaton uses WordPress. Wheaton College, in nearby Norton, Massachusetts, has been migrating from a home-grown CMS to WordPress with Multisite. Even with thousands of pages spread across dozens of sub-sites, they have found that WordPress can handle just about anything. Bill will provide an overview of the project and talk about what is running behind the scenes, including a mix of off-the-shelf plugins and custom code.

In the #3 spot is Mike Marinelli, Co-Founder of The Healthy Design, a website creation and design and online marketing firm aimed at helping wellness professionals grow their business online. Mike will be presenting Clean Up Your Media Library and Increase Site Speed. All of your unused images and other media may be dramatically slowing your site down. Mike found a handy plugin that helps you clean out your media library called the Upload Janitor. This plugin allows you to reclaim disk space and clean up your uploads folder by deleting old uploads you are no longer linking to. Upload Janitor will even automatically make an archive of all files to be erased, including their original paths, so you can restore if necessary.

Lightning talk #4 is by regular meet up participant Jonathan Derosiers. Jonathan is the in house web developer for Slocum Design Studio in his home town of Dartmouth, MA. He enjoys taking on new challenges, and has developed everything from WordPress plugins to Twitter Applications. Jonathan will be presenting More is better….. Right? As a society this is drilled into our minds. And generally yes, more content is better. However in a time of infinite information, it is important not to overwhelm your users. Organization is key to a good user experience. Jonathan will go over the progression of new and old ways to do this, and how WordPress has made this much easier to do over the last few versions with new features such as custom post types.

Rounding out our holiday talks at slot #5 is J. Hogue, Creative Director for C. Murray Consulting and former owner of Highchair Designhaus. J. will present Innovative WordPress: Behind ThinkingArizona. J was the creative lead and project manager for ThinkingArizona.com, an innovative, WordPress-powered website edited and produced by the former editor of the Boston Globe. J. will give a quick tour of the website, and demonstrate how ThinkingArizona takes advantage of custom post types and custom taxonomies on the back end to create a well organized, easy to manage online magazine.