I had the opportunity to put Matts gift to work while attending WordCamp Raleigh. I have over 45 minutes worth of video to upload, one interview at a time. In this interview, I spoke with Jonathan Davis. In it, we talked about what is new with the Shopp plugin, what to expect once WordPress 3.0 comes out and other e-commerce related topics.
I encourage you to watch the video at full screen.
I just finished watching a great video presentation by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman that discusses open source projects and poisonous people. I have seen this video and idea referred to numerous times but when it was referenced today in the WordPress Hackers Mailing list, I finally decided to sit down and devote an hour to watching the entire presentation.
While listening to the presentation, there were a number of instances in which I could relate certain things that have happened in the WordPress community to poisonous behaviour. I also had a better idea as to who some of these poisonous people are in the community or have been at some point. My verdict is that everyone who participates in the WordPress community or any online community for that matter should watch this video and then do a self review. I know there have been a few times especially with certain topics on the Tavern forum where I’ve harbored poisonous behavior but that is the not the goal of this website. I’ve stated this before and it’s worth saying again, WPTavern.com does not exist to poison the project or to inject conspiracies, hatred, or disgust into the project. It exists out of my enthusiastic views and uses of the software and the community surrounding it. I think a lot of people could do better to analyze how they discuss ideas or how they apply criticism without insults or taking it to a personal level. I also think there are a couple of people that could learn how to not respond to everything time and time again as if it’s their way or the high way.
Ultimately what this video showed me is that I have a lot to learn when it comes to the human element of open source software and managing a community.
I was tipped off by Brad Williams on Twitter, to this video based interview between Matt Mullenweg and Andrew Warner on Mixergy.com which focuses on interviews with ambitious folks. During this video interview, Matt pretty much covers all the bases between his first involvement with open source software to the creation of Automattic and much more. While just about every interview with Matt covers the same general information, I always listen to the interviews because I always pick up a few new things such as this one regarding Akismet. In the interview, Matt mentions that because his mom wanted to start a blog on WordPress.com, it served as a large portion of inspiration to create Akismet to battle spam since it usually contains some nasty stuff.
The interview is a long one, just over an hour long but it’s filled with good stuff. If you’re interested in the audio portion only, Andrew has that available for download.
So I finally got around to doing a preview video of GravityForms, the much talked about form generation plugin aimed for release sometime this month. However, I learned that there is so much to this plugin that it doesn’t lend itself very well to the screencasting format. While my screencast is about 11-12 minutes long, it doesn’t even cover everything this plugin can do. While producing the screencast, I learned a thing or two about Camtasia such as adding transitions and how to edit the audio. I’m getting better but these things get tougher the longer they are. Also, I have no idea why but the video on Viddler for some reason can not be seeked. When you fast forward or rewind, it resets back to the beginning which is very annoying. I tried two different production methods in Camtasia but both produced the same results on Viddler. That is why I recommend you to download the source file which is in .MP4 format and view it in QuickTime or your favorite MP4 player.
*NOTE*
The video can now be seeked either through fast forward or rewinding without being reset to the beginning.
*NOTE*
Live video stream of WordCamp Dallas thanks to Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.TV.