Well it was a crazy past few days and I am glad to get a little rest before we start a new week all over again. But I wanted to give everyone a quick recap of an event that I helped organize with Aaron Brazell (Technosailor.com), Wordcamp Mid Atlantic 2009. While Aaron did much of the heavy lifting, I was very happy to help and be a large part of what I would call resounding success.
From the speakers dinner, where I was fortunate to be able to meet some great industry folks like Anil Dash of Six Apart, Mark Jaquith a wordpress developer extraordinaire, Eric Skiff of Amplify.com, Jared Goralnick of Awyfind, and Brad Williams of WebDevStudios, to the actual conference and all the great attendees that came from near and far, it was an incredible experience
It is very hard to relay all of the great speakers and information that we all took in, but I will try to highlight a few of the major points. One ironic thing about one of the speakers, Anil Dash, is that he works for what some would consider a major Wordpress competitor and many were curious about what he might have to say. Well after his keynote we were all very happy he was there. He talked a bit about blogging and how now it is time to come together and present common goals. In that vein, he even went so far to announce that Six Apart was releasing open source free plugins that work in wordpress. It was big news that was broken locally by Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions and later picked up by Techcrunch with the initial interview video from the floor of Wordcamp !! Big news.Anil Dash Interview
Other topics during the day included Thesis theme hacks, SEO for Wordpress blogs, Photoblogging with Wordpress, caching Wordpress and MattJaquith wrapped it all up by giving us a State of Wordpress. The comments were all very positive.
Some of the sessions were recorded on video and we will try to pull it all together and repost here and on the Wordcamp Mid Atlantic site as well. For now enjoy the video collage I made of the pics I took during the day 
Below are a list I have compiled so far of the slide decks the speakers used. I will update as I gather others
- Brad Williams – Advanced Thesis Techniques and Tricks
- Mark Jaquith – State of the Word
- Brandon Savage – Wordpress Caching
