WordCamp Ireland» Speakers at WordCamp Ireland

Josh Holmes

sabrina — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:36:19 +0000

Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as a UX Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a UX or Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region.

Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash.

Session: WordPress on Windows

Hanni Ross & Sheri Bigelow

sabrina — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:21:56 +0000

Sheri Bigelow is a designer, developer, and photographer currently living in Saratoga Springs, NY. She earned a Bachelor’s in Business and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before spending eight years managing websites for Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. She has always considered herself a WordPress evangelist, and now her endlessly positive nature makes her a perfect fit as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

Tinkering with WordPress since before it was WordPress, Hanni Ross hails from both Warwick, UK and Bordeaux, France. When not engineering happiness, she spends her time studying law. The hilarity of trying to fit everything in means she often feels the need to, in the words of Monty Python, run away.

Session: WordPress 101

In this session, Sheri and Hanni will take you through the basics of setting up a blog with WordPress and creating your first posts.

Frank Prendergast*

sabrina — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:57:02 +0000

As a freelance web designer, Frank develops websites for small to medium sized businesses using WordPress a content management system.

Somewhere around ten years ago Frank began living on the web as project manager with Zenith Solutions in Cork, followed by the position of technical director with Pulse Learning. He then helped found Aonach, a consultancy specialising in internet strategy, before becoming a freelance web designer. Frank still works closely with Aonach as a design partner.

Frank drinks a hell of a lot of tea and occasionally sneaks out to Karaoke bars.

WordCamp Ireland 2010

Presentation | Video | Notes

Session: WordPress as a CMS

WordPress is much more than blogging software, it is used by many companies, including some Fortune 500’s, as a Content Management System. This talk will cover the basics of setting up WordPress to act as a CMS, and several invaluable plugins for any site delivered using WordPress.

Rosemary Mac Cabe

sabrina — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:54:07 +0000

Rosemary Mac Cabe is a freelance journalist and sub editor. She currently works for The Irish Times in production and as a journalist, and writes Fash Mob, the Irish Times fashion blog. Before joining The Irish Times, she had short stints with The Star and The Irish Mail on Sunday. She holds an MA in international journalism from DIT, and a BA in English and (bad) Italian from NUI, Galway.

She lives in Stoneybatter and her main passion in writing, as in life, is fashion. When she’s not writing, blogging or tweeting, you can usually find her shopping for shoes.

Session: A Bit of a Blather with Beaut.ie

For many bloggers, the story of Beaut.ie is a fairytale dream come true; Kirstie and Aisling McDermott have built a blog with humble beginnings into one of the most powerful online properties in the country and two full-time jobs. Rosemary Mac Cabe sits down with the gals from Beaut.ie to talk about the history of one of Ireland’s most popular sites, the growth of their business, how they manage their active community, and what blogging has meant to them in a wider context.

Kirstie & Aisling McDermott

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:10:35 +0000

Sisters Kirstie (left) and Aisling (right) are the brains behind one of Ireland’s most popular and widely read blogs, Beaut.ie.

Blogging has allowed them to parlay a passion for all things cosmetic into full time jobs.

Aisling’s book, The Beaut.ie Guide to Gorgeous, is now in the shops and Kirstie has a regular column in the Evening Herald.

Session: A Bit of a Blather with Beaut.ie

Jason Roe

sabrina — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:51:57 +0000

Jason Roe is an Internet consultant who specialises in web development, search engine optimisation and social media. He was involved in a projects such as CRO.ie, Independent.ie, Herald.ie and more recently in Wordpress powered innovations by Enterprise Ireland. Jason was elected to the board of the Irish Internet Association (IIA) in late 2009.

Session: Making Money with WordPress

Making Money with WordPress will provide you with answers to the question “How do I monetise my blog?” and look at a variety of ways to make money online using WordPress through AdSense, direct advertising, affiliate schemes and more. The session will include real world examples and guide you through extending WordPress capabilities using templates, plugins and a bit of common sense!

John Handelaar

sabrina — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:29:56 +0000

John Handelaar is an experienced web developer who has been beating Drupal, Django and WordPress into submission since 2003. In June, one of his email addresses will turn 22, which is probably older than you are.

When not developing websites and running servers and mailing lists, he runs KildareStreet.com and can occassionally be heard on air at festivals and on local community radio stations.

Session: WordPress MU

This session will look at WordPress Multi-User and why you’d want to use it. It will present multiple use-case scenarios to illustrate the potential of this platform, along with an overview of migration issues and essential plug-ins for smooth rollout.

Jane Wells*

sabrina — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:28:52 +0000

Jane is the user experience lead for WordPress, and has worked in the web industry for 10 years.

Though her apartment is in the East Village, she spends much of her time traveling to WordCamps and meeting WordPress users to incorporate their feedback into each new version.

WordCamp Ireland 2010

Presentation | Video | Notes

Session: Keynote

Jane will be delivering the keynote speech at WordCamp Ireland at 12pm on Saturday.

Alastair McDermott

sabrina — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:54:02 +0000

Alastair McDermott is Technical Director of WebsiteDoctor.com, a consultancy and training business focused on online marketing. Alastair specialises in the technical side of online marketing, particularly search engine optimisation and web programming.

Alastair often speaks at business and technology events about online marketing, technology, online communities and related topics.

Session: 10 Must-Have Word Press Plugins

From spam protection to mobile versions, SEO tools to Twitter functionality, Alastair McDermott will take you on a tour of essential plugins for WordPress, their Use Case Scenarios and their installation.

Heidi Jermyn

sabrina — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:30:00 +0000

Hailing from the sunny Sunshine Coast, Australia, Heidi has been professionally active in the web industry for a decade. She got the taste for web development back in the bad old days of tables and inline styling and has since sunk her teeth into flash app development, games, project management and her big loves of website design and front end dev. Late 2008 she formed Cookie Web Consulting with Orla Duncan and together they’ve been on a mission to develop beautiful, functional and affordable websites – almost all of them on the beloved and most wondrous of platforms… WordPress.

Session: WordPress Use Case Scenarios

After complaining that I never heard about stuff happenning in my adopted home town (a common woe of many a blow-in) I decided to build a community website to showcase events, local news and comment and promote the town of Kilcock in general. I did it on practically no budget and little spare time – using a free WordPress template, some wonderful plugins and some hard slog. It’s been up since June 09 and coupled with a very active Facebook page it does very well in visitors, interaction and even selling ad space to cover basic costs of hosting and promotions. I have gained 2 excellent writers to help with post diversity and am always looking for more articles from local ‘knowledge experts’. I’ll share my story on the WordPress User Case Scenarios panel and pass on how you might be able to setup something similar in your community using the peerless, open source platform – WordPress.