My Wordcamp Philippines 2008 Experience

September 6, 2008 is an memorable day for the Philippine Blogosphere. It is the day of the First Wordcamp in Southeast Asia!

I woke up at around 6:30AM and rode with Tita Jane to De Lasalle - College of Saint Benilde. I didn’t bring my laptop with me because I failed to register with the ingress form and I was scared LOL so I printed my campers pass, the class schedule and all the emails sent by the Mindanao Bloggers.

I saw familiar faces in the gate entrance - Jeric with his Mom, Doc Tess, Juned, Arbet, Winston, Arpee and more. I am not sure if the pins were given exclusively to the early birds, but I am happy because I received one with the Wordpress sticker.

Photo Credit: Tess Termulo

Once we went inside the “big classroom”, everyone was plurking through their laptops. In my case, I used phPlurk. All the lappy people were looking for outlets and thank God someone provided one near our place.

The bloggers wholeheartedly sang “Lupang Hinirang” and there was a short introduction after. The bloggers were divided into two groups in a bit:

I attended the class of Ms. Gail Villanueva about Creating WordPress Themes & CSS Power.  It was in this lecture that I learned about the importance of proper CSS and php coding stuff that will affect the rest of the pages. Too bad I wasn’t able to take down notes because the lights were turned off but I heard that the copy of the presentation will be uploaded at Kutitots.com soon weee In the other room, Jayvee Fernandez lectured about Blogging 102 — Basics & Beyond.

I went to Blogie Robillo’s talk about Building A Blogging Community. I was particularly looking forward to this discussion because I know that the things I’ll be learning from the lecture will be a big help for my job. I felt like a student once more since I patiently took down notes (though Blogie said that the presentation slide is included in the CD).Now I know the importance of having a community blog, a blog directory that is divided into many categories or subgroups and yup, events! Other professors in other rooms were Hans A. Koch (Wordpress for Corporate Websites), Markku Seguera (Developing Wordpress Plugins) and Ely Apao (Organizing and Optimizing your Wordpress Blogs).

The last morning class I attended is the lecture of the funniest and sexiest professor of all time - Kring Elenzano! Funnysexy taught us about Video Blogging - taking videos (dapat hindi sumasagad sa taas yung ulo or dapat alam mo din anggulo mo), being resourceful in making your videos (lamp shade is good kapag gusto mo ma-achieve ang makaluma effect), editing tools and some of the popular internet celebrities. She also gave us some pointers about TV Production, which I find useful because I still have one pending short film to do yay! We also learned that the TV Network executives are the ones who actually dictates on who is going to make it big in the biz (diba Marian Rivera? Awww!) and there’s this one blooper hehehe

Jane, Doc Tess, Alan, Joy, Mica, AJ and Faith

Photo Credit: Doc Tess 

Thanks to Chowking for providing our lunch and Spot.ph for the cupcakes! I saw Karen and Karl once again.

Matt Mullenweg talks about the Future of Wordpress

Photo Credit: Jehzeel Laurente (ay wag na pala.. I’ll claim it as my own later LOL )

The plenary sessions started with a bang when the young and softspoken Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg went onstage and discussed about The Future of Wordpress.Everyone was paying attention to his talk. He answered some of the queries of the bloggers later on and had a photo session with the other bloggers.

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