Scaling WordPress for Hi-Traffic

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Jason

Ryan AllenRyan Allen of Envato is visiting from Melbourne. He is reponsible for managing (server) performance at some of Australia’s busiest websites.

Managing traffic spikes is crucial as projects get bigger and Ryan will will speaking about what to do when that happens to your WordPress site.

If your website gets hit by massive trafic flows what are your best options?

In October 2010 the

“Envato marketplace network (ActiveDen, ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, AudioJungle, 3dOcean, VideoHive, GraphicRiver and the Tuts+ Marketplace) reached a considerable milestone of a combined membership of 500,000 members around the world, more than double its membership of just one year ago.”

from PR Web so Envato knows a fair bit about managing high volume traffic across its range of websites. Envato is also a WordCampNZ sponsor so be sure to check out some of their websites and market places.

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WordcampNZ on WammoLive

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Jason

Glenn Williams runs a great live show in the mornings on KiwiFM where invited guests get to talk about projects and what they’re up to. RadioWammo

We got to talk about WordCampNZ with Glenn so along I went. It’s all one take and no script plus Glenn live mixes website shots and streams the show on ustream.

There is a tiny video camera somewhere near the microphone but Glenn is over to the left and so the challenge is to talk directly to him and try not to think about the camera.

P.S. Jayson Bryant of  WineVaultTV and Vaughn Davis are regular guests and have both been to WordCampNZ where Jayson presented last time.

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Julie Starr – Evolving the News

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Jason

Julie Starr - Evolving New RoomWordCampNZ welcomes Julie Starr as a speaker and contributor. If anyone knows about the huge changes in the way that media is produced and consumed it is Julie.

The Evolving Newroom is her blog – “a place to think out loud about how the internet is changing the news business and journalism.”  Bravo – we like that.

A journalist by trade, she has worked in the media for 20+ years in NZ and the UK.

In that time she’s been a reporter, sub-editor, page layout sub, chief sub-editor, radio presenter, workflow specialist, change agent and editorial manager.

She was part of the team who designed and launched the Daily Telegraph‘s integrated web-and-print newsroom in the UK, having a particular focus on future workflows.  She continues to consult on newsroom design and workflow projects.

Now based in New Zealand, Julie runs allaboutthestory.com, a place to buy and sell news features, reviews, cartoons, caricatures and other stories of interest to newspaper, magazine and web publishers.

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BuddyPress Comes of Age

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Jason

Paul GinnsPaul Gibbs is a core BuddyPress Developer from UK and has recently been contributing to a number of NZ projects. His website is : http://byotos.com/

Paul will be speaking at WordcampNZ about BuddyPress related topics and about the Achievements Plugin that he has developed.

Paul has previously presented at WordCamp Ireland and WordCamp UK . He was also at  WordCamp New York in Oct 2010.

Inspired by video game achievement systems, Paul has developed Achievements for BuddyPress gives your community fresh impetus by promoting and rewarding social interaction with challenges, badges and points.

For example, you may reward users for commenting on a blog post or uploading a picture to their profile. There are different ways of awarding and rewarding positive contributions to each community.

Achievements has its own website

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KiwiBlog is the Comment King

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Jason

David Farrar - KiwiBlogDavid Farrar has probably the busiest WordPress blog in New Zealand. What makes it all work is lots of comments – up to 500 per day…

David will be speaking about running a busy blog and what is involved making that all work.

“I blog on any issue or thing I find interesting. Now this is mostly politics, but also quite a bit on technology and the Internet. And as my friends use the blog to keep track of what I am up to, there’s a fair amount of personal stuff also, photos of places I have been, food or movie reviews, or just anything I want to share.

Kiwiblog gets around half a million pageviews per month. I normally blog six to eight items a day, and we often get 500+ comments a day. There are around 6,500 registered commenters.”

David is a widely respected media commentator and also runs market research company curia.  All of that is covered in his disclosure statement.

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SEO for WordPress – Michael Brandon

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Jason

Michael-Brandon-SearchMastersWe are very pleased & delighted to bring back Michael Brandon of Searchmasters as  a speaker.

Michael presented some very practical insights last August at WordCampNZ. He works with many WordPress sites and is winner of NZ SEO competition.

“More than 50 search engine specialists battled it out over the past three months to attempt to seize the top position on google.co.nz for the keyword – “quadracentifiable” – a fictitious word invented specifically for the competition.

Top of the list when the competition closed at 5pm on November 28th, was the website run by Michael Brandon of SearchMasters , the winner of the inaugural New Zealand SEO Challenge.”…

“In the end it was, according to the winner, sheer hard-work, determination and time that won the competition. “The competition has been all about linking. Who has access to the most links, and the most powerful links from other websites into their competition website. If you need hundreds of other websites to link to you or to client websites, you need a good strategy, and you need it to be cost efficient. We wrote articles that contained links into our sites, then republished unique versions on many websites. The way we executed this proved to be the difference,” Brandon says.”

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Justin Sainton on Group Deals

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Jason

Justin SaintonJustin Sainton is the founder of Zao Web Design, LLC, a web firm based in Portland, Oregon USA. Justin will be speaking at WordCamp NZ about WordPress & Group Deals.

Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Targus to Pitney Bowes to the National Education Association to HTC.

When not managing Zao or enjoying his beautiful wife and lovely one-year-old daughter, Justin can be found enjoying the finest coffee Oregon has to offer.

The story of Group Deals Plugin, the latest premium Plugin from Instinct, is a classic example of the power of the WordPress community. While presenting on WordPress E-Commerce at WordCamp Philadelphia, someone in the audience asked if anyone had made a “Groupon” WordPress plugin.

Now, at WordCampNZ, we’re excited to unveil the first stable release of GroupDeals, soon to be known as the Groupon Killer :)

Update: 20th Jan Spreets Online Group Buying was sold to Yahoo for $40m. In the same article Anthill notes that Retail Me was also a very large play in the same space.

Tech Crunch quotes “After SEO and email, affiliate type deals/coupons are the most profitable way to get new customers, says WhaleShark.”

Justin is Js_Zao on twitter.

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John Ford Speaking

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Jason

John FordJohn Ford has been to NZ last year and presented at WordCamp SF 2010. We are delighted to announce he will be speaking at WordCampNZ 2011.

In Wellington he will be giving special attention to security ( & just guessing but probably backups) as well.

John works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress, and he is currently focusing on VaultPress, a realtime backup service for WordPress.org users.

He has been a blogger and a blog builder for the past 7 years, but started programming full-time in 1998, threw in a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics for good measure, and in 2004 went into business for himself until Automattic dialed his number.

Johns website has a more background over here. On twitter John is @iamjohnford – he was previously aldenta.

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Te Papa Venue Confirmed – (2011)

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Jason

We are very pleased to be able to confirm that the Oceania Room at Te Papa is the 2011 venue for WordCampNZ.

Oceania-Room - Te Papa

To quote :

“Oceania offers plenty of natural light and spectacular views of both Wellington’s Marina and Waitangi Park.

Oceania is hugely versatile: the venue can be divided into four spaces, making it ideal for conferences and meetings that require separate areas for catering, trade displays and breakout groups. And with 519m2 of available floor area,

Oceania is spacious enough to accommodate large-scale set-ups and installations, and offers direct access to our large goods lift for easy set-up of trade displays or staging requirements. Oceania can seat up to 400 guests banquet-style, 520 theatre-style, 300 classroom-style or 200 guests cabaret-style.”

Cabaret style sounds very good to us. The address is 55 Cable Street, Wellington 6011.

Now it’s is time to book flights, hotels and tickets. See you on Feb 19th & 20th straight after Webstock.  To buy tickets go here.

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#wordcampnz 2010 What You Thought

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Jason

Naturally many of the attendees at #wordcampnz 2010 have blogged about their experience and some even have photos. Here are some of those links and we will add more as they come in. There was a live blog ( + some live video – but we stopped that because of bandwidth constraints) by Sim.

@simantics is Saquib Ahmed but my friends (and some of my more well acquainted foes) just call me Sim. I am a 20 year old student at the University of Auckland.

Saquibs website is Saquib.me and he used a live stream style tool called Coveritlive (thanks SocialMediaNZ) so that external people could ask questions and follow in the presentations in more detail. We said Status

“The live blog stream is very good if you were taking notes & wanted to check something Good work @simantics #wordcampnz http://ow.ly/2noMr”

There were many tweets from both rooms and much of that was also captured over at Be in the Room thanks to fine support by Lucy  @estateofflux and Be in the Room @eventsonfire.

  • Rachel Cunliffe linked here saying, “Last weekend I had the pleasure of being the secon …”
  • Jason Kemp linked here saying Thinking is What I Do and included some more photos by Kristina
  • Kristina DC Hoeppner linked here saying, “WordCampNZ (Part 2). Aug 9th, 2010. by Kristina D. …”
  • Kristina DC Hoeppner linked here saying, “(with apologies to Bill Bennett for writing 5 time …”
  • Kristina D.C. Hoeppner. WordCampNZ (Part 3) My summaries of the presentations I listened to at WordCampNZ 2010 continues.
  • Michael Brandon (Searchmasters) linked here saying, “Live Blog of WordCamp Auckland This page will be u …”
  • Simon Young linked here saying, “WordCamp NZ, 7 August 2010 Unfortunately, I won’t …”

Here is another shot of Bill Bennett (by Kristina) whose presentation on Writing for the web in 300 words was a huge hit. (33,721 35,003 impressions on Twitter so far with clicks and FB actions not far behind)

Bill Bennett by 4nitsirk, on Flickr at #wordcampnz 2010

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