Wordcamps are events organised by the Wordpress gang to pull together developers working on the popular blogging platform. The latest event took place recently in San Francisco, pulling together some of the top brass working on Wordpress. The affable inventor of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg led the proceedings.

Wordpress sessions of interest:

• SEO for Wordpress
• Secret of virality
• BuddyPress: Social network for Wordpress

Andrew Mager made this wonderful blow-by-blow account of Wordcamp San Francisco 2008.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to attend this session, but thankfully, through the beauty of blogging, there are numerous other accounts online.

BuddyPress grew out of a series of plug-ins that added social functionality to Wordpress MU (the multi-user edition). It is being touted as Facebook-in-a-box, ie. you can setup your own personal Facebook for your community.

More screenshots from Andy Peatling’s blog.

Andy graciously added his presentation to…

Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts led this well-attended session on how to maximise search visibility using Wordpress. Generally, blogs work well for search engine optimization (SEO) due to their emphasis on generating lots of regularly updated content. However, there are steps you can take to optimize the standard Wordpress installation.

Key points:

Internal linking

Try and ensure your internal links (from one page on the blog to another) are as relevant as possible. Using a tag cloud in…

So, it finally happened. After years of happily importing images into Picasa and clearing the disk in the camera, we finally pushed the wrong button and cleared out a whole set of debauched bachelorette photos, many of which could have possibly held some quite senior San Francisco socialites to ransom.

We fretted and Googled and finally came across PC Inspector Smart Recovery. Phew. This simple app scoured the disk and pulled off all the data…

It looks like we’re only at the beginning of seeing the uptake of Wii as an input device for gaming. As it’s a bluetooth device there’s numerous hacks that tie it up to a PC. Businesses are capitalizing on this and developing immersive training experiences. Perhaps that killer app is just around the corner?

Wii and Second Life

Taking the basics of how the Wii could be used in Second Life, MIT research fellows have been…

ok, i had a million other things i was meant to be doing this friday, but hell - the rest of france ‘faire le pont’ (have taken an extended holiday after all soul’s day) so i can allow myself to get a little sidetracked.

back in the day i remember looking up websites that had wedged/notched diagrams showing you the basic structure of dance music and talking about getting records in tune. that was in…

hellishly expensive at over $2,500, but for some reason i keep getting drawn back to this piece of kit. designed with ableton and traktor in mind (they’ve included overlays and pre-programmed midi maps for both), the xone 3d seems to be about the only piece of kit that combines mixer, midi fader/knob controllers and jog wheels.

they are pro’s in the mixer market and have been working hard on the digital front (the xone:92 mixer…

OK, I thought there would have been a whole lot of documenation on this, but I’ve been trying to crack this for a while (read: find something useful from somebody clever online).

I’ve tried a few implementations of PHP and XML-RPC myself, with probably the closest approach being using Keith Devens’ XML-RPC classes using this Sitepoint article. However, I wasn’t getting much back from Wordpress.

All that changed when I finally stumbled on this wonderful code snippet courtesy…