Maui Wordcamp: a WordPress conference in paradise

The subtitle is hard to resist. Paradise. Conference. WordPress.

For $35, you get a T-shirt, lunch and refreshments for two consecutive days. I registered when it was half-full and eagerly looked forward to it.

Part of me feared that it would be dominated by developers and WordPress pros. I would learn how much WordPress and its “affiliates” had grown, and how far behind I fell.

I was wrong.

The room for the beginner’s stream was packed to the rim on day one. There I met women who had the right intentions years ago. They registered their domain names. Some even paid for hosting. They wanted to blog. They were content experts. They had a passion to share with the rest of the world.

But they never got started.

Maui Wordcamp 2015 Day 2 in Multipurpose Room, UH Maui College

I began blogging in 1999, before the word was coined, because I wanted to write. Life was too interesting to gloss over the details. I was traveling a lot. I was composing. I was creating and experimenting.

After posting my compositions whenever the mood hit me, I forced myself to blog every single day for a year. 365 days of the “Diary of Anne Ku.” It was a vow that I announced. For integrity’s sake, I had to keep my promise.

I’d open Front Page or Dreamweaver, type and edit in HTML. Open different Internet Browsers to make sure it looked okay. Then I’d FTP over to the webhost. To create images, I had to edit in Photoshop. It was a tedious process, but I persisted.

I, too, had bouts of writer’s block. Being a writer, editor, and publisher — the three in one — was new for me. Later on, being found easily became a newer experience still.

WordPress made it easy when I launched the Concertblog.  Search engine optimization (SEO) became a game of cat and mouse. How well did I choose my words? I even made bets with friends that my post would make them famous, that they’d be found within the top ten of Google Search a day after posting.

Before WordPress, you needed three kinds of people to make a good website: content expert, technologist, and graphics designer. At the conference, I learned there were thousands of free themes you could choose for the look and feel and thousands of free plug-ins for contact forms and other useful stuff that used to require a team of developers to code. This leaves the content expert — you the blogger.

I didn’t get to speak to everyone at the conference, unlike the way I used to blitz through energy conferences and made sure I exchanged business cards with every single delegate and speaker. I focussed on the few to hear their story.

There’s the 24-year old entrepreneur who shared his marketing secrets. Keep your e-mail addresses, he said. Segment and profile them.

There’s the surfer and his globetrotting friend who left the Mainland to start shop in 2009. The lime green T-shirts they gave away fit me so well that I decided to grab extras so all my students and family members will echo the same organic theme.

There’s the Vegas developer who created the first event ticket engine and released the plug-in for free. He and his partner supported the plug-in for free as well. The interviewer was perplexed. “You mean you’d work on this project in your spare time, expecting no pay at all?”

As it turns out, we all want to finish the work that gets paid and meet our deadlines so that we will get paid. But we also want to work on projects and tasks that interest and, more importantly, motivate us.

And these are the activities that don’t pay — at least not immediately. It’s not even obvious if they will ever get a positive return on their investment.

Now how is that different from blogging? Or composing when the music comes to me? Or staying up late to arrange a tune for my students?

Or giving away free advice and T-shirts, such was the case in those two days of Wordcamp Maui 2015.

One thing for sure,  it’s time to start my own tribe. It will help those who want to get

  • started
  • unstuck
  • inspired
  • tips
  • feedback
  • empathy
  • motivated
  • hold of that missing piece to continue
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