Hi Everyone,

I had the opportunity to present “Safety First!,” a presentation about security for WordPress at the WordCamp Fraser Valley event on Wednesday, July 16th.

Thank you to OpenOffice and SlideShare, you can view my slides below.

And thank you to Gary from BlueFur for this video of my presentation. The audio is a little poor and my voice is pretty monotone (sorry!) so I kind of got a headache after watching the video again. I wouldn’t suggest watching the full 30 minutes in one shot. BUT it’s good for you (like medicine), so check it out and let me know your thoughts!

To be completely honest, my life leading up to the event was a little busy, I wasn’t able to fully prepare the delivery. Otherwise I would have been more interactive and summarized some points in order to make time for Q&A. On the flipside, I am glad a lot of people took notes throughout the presentation and are implementing the tips on their blogs.

If you have any questions please feel free to post in the comments here.

-k.s.

Hey everyone,

Back in the day (as in.. a few months ago), you would have your entire Facebook friends list as one. Inviting people to events was both tedious and risky. You might invite the wrong person, and your finger would be tired by the time you got through the list.

Whether you’re doing marketing and promotions on Facebook for businesses or non-profits, you’ll want to make sure your event, group and page invitations get to the right people. So how can you do this? Well I’ve already talked about making multiple profiles. Although FB doesn’t like it - I think it’s a matter of choice. I have several profiles. One for strictly personal, family, fun stuff. Another for professional, work-related stuff. And yet another for marketing and community relations.

So how do you manage all those lists? The way to do it is to SEGMENT. You  need to go to your Friends list, and make individual lists of your friends. You can do this in the right-column beside where all your friends are listed. You can make as many lists as you like, and add friends individually or in bulk to each list.

Here’s an example of practical usage. You are on Facebook doing marketing for Barack Obama. You have 300 friends, from various locations throughout the USA. If you make seperate lists for the region of the country in which those friends live, such as East Coast, MidWest, etc., you can invite particular people to relevant Obama campaign events, groups, and pages. This will allow you to more effectively target your campaign marketing. Segmenting your audience list is a standard practice of email and conventional marketing, so it is no stretch to also apply it to your Facebook marketing.

Are you using lists? Any extra tips on this topic? Please share :)

-k.s.

Hey everyone,

The past two WordPress events in BC have been great! A great turnout for each one of about 100 people, and everyone was really receptive to the topics, involved in the discussion, etc. The organizers in both events were really dedicated to the cause (if you can call it a cause!) and very helpful to the speakers and audience in my experience.

However I realize that we have a variety of folks here in BC with a variety of ways in which they approach WordPress. If I dare to group people (and I recognize there are shades of grey between each group), I would say we have newbies, hobby bloggers, career bloggers (people who make money from their blog directly), business bloggers (blogs associated with a business operation), website developers & graphic designers, and programmers (people who customize WP, make plugins and themes). It’s a little difficult to accomodate all of these audiences in one 3 hour event. However, I imagine we could accomplish this feat through a well-organized multi-session whole day or two day WordCamp.

So that’s something I’d like to work on, maybe with a group of other fellow WordPress enthusiasts. An event like this would provide great learning and networking opportunities for different audiences, while showcasing the power of WordPress as a blogging and CMS platform. At an event like this we could also discuss WordPress MU (multi user), which is a whole other (exciting) ballgame.

The location should be easy to reach for people coming from various cities across the Lower Mainland.

So … just thinking out loud. I welcome any comments from anyone.

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.

Hello Out there,

Today, I’m presenting at WordPress Fraser Valley, the meetup of WordPress bloggers & developers hosted by BlueFur Hosting in Langley, BC.  I’m talking about WordPress security in general - tips for website developers and bloggers.

My blog has really slowed down over the past few weeks. I plan to take the momentum from WP Fraser Valley and channel it into the relaunch of this thing as a proper website with proper sections (and consistently updated content!). I’m also working on learning more about theme and plugin development so I can share some of my designs and concepts with you to extend your own WordPress installation.

I’m planning to also launch a WordPress as a CMS Q&A forum so that people can post their questions about how to develop websites in WordPress. I will answer the questions and invite responses from other esteemed guests.

So that’s all for now - hopefully the site redesign will go up in a few days, before I start my new job.

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.