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Eli wanted eggs. He asked “Is the yoke a duck?”

Have to say this was my best WC yet. First the bad:

• I left my phone on the beach the first day. Thankfully someone found it and called my hotel, but I spent the whole evening trekking it across SF getting it back.
• I wanted soo bad to take SouthWestern up on a delay for travel voucher, but just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Next time!
• I forgot my business cards.
• I forgot my laptop power cord.
• I brought shorts.
• I totally screwed up my travel plans by not extending my stay through Sunday, and thus missing out on contributor day. What is wrong with me? This was by far the biggest screw-up of the trip.

Now the good:

• I met some really great people: Brad Thomason, Robert Rusnack and Vincent Burkhead, Vijay Vasu, K. Adam White, and many more; got to see Matt Mullenweg and too many Automatticians to list, and generally be around the most awesome people in the world.
• I was happy to see that Yuri Victor uses  timeline.js and the JSON API to convert WP posts to a timeline for the Washington Post. I did  an entire project on this last summer (password there is 123fh321)
• I thoroughly enjoyed Siobhan McKeown and Mika Epstein’s talks.
• I got to do a lot of sketching.
• I ate really good Mexican almost every day.
• The flight was absolute cake, and I got halfway through World War Z.
• I got a shout-out from the grand wizard himself, Matt Mullenweg (jump ahead to around 36:00)

A few thoughts:

• It was really well organized.
• The amount of love for and pride in people’s connection with WP was everywhere. It’s just amazing to see a piece of technology have such a strong connection with the people who use it.
• The sponsors were almost all hosting companies. Not that I have anything against it, but I would like to see more premium plugins sponsoring. Gravity Forms, iThemes, you heard me!
• The Mosser Hotel is a great little place to stay, and half the price of anything around. Yeah, you have to share a bath and toilet with your floor, but c’mon people, stop being so pampered!
• Matt Mullenweg is truly an amazing speaker. The challenge of putting a year’s worth of full-throttle development of one of the fastest growing technologies on the planet into a one hour presentation must be daunting. But he pulls it off every time. It’s fun to try and read into some of the stuff he says.

Maybe the most loaded topic was on WordPress as an app framework. WP as a foundation to build on is a controversial topic, and faces a ton of skepticism and criticism. WordPress will outgrow itself, it’s getting too big, it’s losing touch with the simplicity of just writing, etc. are all sentiments that seem to be all the rage these days, but it’s hard to go to one of these giant WordCamps and not feel confident that the WP world will always remain a truly user-focused, community-driven, open source, and free.

I’m nearsighted and when I take my glasses off I can see pixels on a “retina” display clear as day.

We see because of light reacting with our crazy eyes and ocular nerves and brains.

But there’s a lot to learn about where that light’s coming from. It’s either being emitted or reflected.

The primary point of emitted light, for most of our existence on this planet, has been very hard, even dangerous, to look at. I’m talking about the sun. Other points are intriguing and inspiring: fire, candles, fireflies, stars, lightning, but they’ve been fleeting. We’ve never stared at them for more than a few moments, dreaming of things.

Our eyes were always concerned with reflected light. Light that revealed the skin of those we loved and feared, the places we lived and travel to, the words that formed our literature. The light that reflected off gardens that enveloped us and blades that killed us.

Our eyes now focus on emissive sources. We’ve harnessed the power of the sun and stars and flames and can represent those things with a single binary point of light. We call those points pixels, and they can be as big or small, bright or dim, red or blue as we want. They can be wherever we want them to be, and change according to our magnificent instructions. They constitute our stories.

I’ve taught Web Design for many years now. I started out teaching students how to use the now defunct Adobe GoLive. I realized quickly that wysiwyg editors such as GoLive and Dreamweaver were effectively bad ways to teach students how to build websites, and moved into html and css.

I”m seeing a new trend in web design that may make me rethink how I teach it. It seems that the big open source CMS packages, drupal and wordpress, are taking over high-end website design. If your site isn’t built on one of these two platforms (OK, maybe there are one or two others), it ain’t cutting edge.

This summer I’m undertaking two major site designs, one in drupal and one in wordpress. The drupal one is finished: http://www.msja.org (assuming they’ve launched it). The wordpress one is under construction.

My hope is to gain a deeper understanding of how to build within these two environments, and begin to shift the focus of my classes from building sites from scratch, to starting with basic CMS templates. This fall, I’m teaching Intro to Web Design again, and my summer projects will definitely bear some weight on the material.

A theme you hear is how parents want to make sure their kids have all the things they didn’t. I don’t get that. I had everything; my parents gave us lots of toys and good food and everything. Maybe it was being a child of the 70s/80s, when things were pretty plentiful.

Today I was proud to see my kid Grif riding his bike with his helmet on, while his friends went bare-brained. Growing up, I never wore a helmet, and I rode my bike everywhere. Most of what my kids have I had too, but at least they’re a little wiser.