Next stop on my WordCamp Tour is WordCamp Montreal! I will be giving a presentation on WordPress Security at the event.
My presentation will cover how to keep your WordPress powered website secure from hackers and exploits. I’ll show examples of hacked sites, share tips and plugins for keeping WordPress secure, and talk about my experiences with WordPress and security overall.

WordCamp Montreal will take place in Montreal, Quebec on July 11-12.

I’m taking the scenic train ride from NYC to Montreal (12 hours!) and also plan on attending the Jazz Festival while in town. WordCamps are awesome and so is traveling so I’m really looking forward to this event, aye!

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The WebDevStudios team survived WordCamp Chicago 2009! We flew in Friday night, after a much delayed flight, and arrived just in time for pizza and drinks at Lou Malnati’s. During dinner we met Lisa Sabin-Wilson (author of WordPress for Dummies), Jeff Chandler (WP Weekly host and WPTavern.com owner), and a few other WordPress enthusiasts.

Saturday morning came very early, after staying up until 2am the night before, but we managed to wake up and make it to WordCamp Chicago! I met a lot of great people at WordCamp including Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Jeremy Wright (CEO of b5media), David Peralty (co-host of WP Weekly), Dan Schulz (Advisor on SitePoint), Erin Blaskie, and lots of other WP Enthusiasts.

The presentations at WordCamp Chicago were great. I would have liked to seen more of a focus on WordPress, rather than blogging and branding presentations, but I understand that users outnumber designers and developers at these conferences. The presenters all did a really great job.

If you have never been to a WordCamp, GO! These events are awesome and I can already tell I am starting to get addicted to them.

Next up, WordCamp Montreal in July (which I am speaking at)!

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I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2009!

WordCamp Mid-Atlantic will take place in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16th from 8am to 5pm. I will be giving a presentation titled:

Advanced Thesis Techniques and Tricks

Thesis 1.5 was just released yesterday so I’m very excited to share some Thesis knowledge with other WordPress enthusiasts, including new features! If you are planning on attending WordCamp Mid-Atlantic drop me a line. See you in B-town!

Popularity: 11% [?]

This past week was an insanely busy nerd week for me.

On Tuesday I recorded the 7th episode of the SitePoint Podcast with special guest host Sarah Milstein. We dedicated the episode to talking about Twitter and the many uses it has, both personal and business.

On Wednesday my business partner and I attended the New York WordPress Meetup for a presentation by Johnathan Andersen on WordPress as a CMS: The Strategy of Content Publishing. Johnathan did a great job presenting how he utilizes various plugins and custom fields to transform WordPress into a CMS.

On Friday I joined Jeff Chandler on the WordPress Weekly Podcast to ask Dan Milward of the WP E-Commerce plugin some questions. It was a fun show and I’m looking forward to getting back to the round table discussions like the earlier days of the podcast.

I’ve also been pretty active on the WP Tavern Forums. WPTavern.com is a new site started by Jeff Chandler of WordPress Weekly with a focus on all topics WordPress. It’s a great site for sharing your experiences with WordPress and learning lots of valuable information. Get registered and get involved!

Oh and did I mention my company launched two new website redesigns in Thesis? MattBites.com and RetroRenovation.com. MattBites.com was migrated from TypePad and launched with WordPress and a fresh clean look provided by the Thesis theme. RetroRenovation.com was redesigned using Thesis with help from Kenneth Smith. Both sites look amazing and we are really excited to see them go live!

This has been an awesome nerd week and I hope to have many more like it!

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By StrangeWork.com: New Jersey now has an official WordPress Meetup Group! My company, WebDevStudios.com, is organizing the event and working to build a fun group of WordPress enthusiasts.

The WordPress Meetup Group is meeting on

January 7th, 2009 in Belmar, NJ

This blog has been powered by WordPress since it’s launch over 2 years ago. Most of you know I’ve been a big fan of WordPress since then. We use WordPress on many different projects, some we can talk about, and some we can’t. Our goal is to create a fun group of WordPress users that want to come to the beautiful Jersey shore in January!

We plan on discussing a variety of topics including WordPress usage, designing WordPress Themes and styles, creating WordPress Plugins and Widgets, and using WordPress to its full potential. This is going to be a fun and informal way to meet WordPress fanatics just like yourself and share your experiences with the popular open source software.

We are also planning on learning about and working with WordPress MU, BuddyPress, and bbPress! Be sure to RSVP for the event on the Official New Jersey Meetup Group registration page. We’re looking forward to meeting all of you there for a fun evening of WordPress!

Popularity: 10% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: Starting a company is hard, and staying organized is even harder. I started full time at WebDevStudios.com back in April of this year. At the start I was tracking invoices using a mix of spreadsheets and word documents. This method wasn’t too bad until I actually started getting more clients. I quickly realized this solution was not going to work for my invoicing needs.

Enter FreshBooks.com, the online invoicing system for small businesses and contractors. FreshBooks in a few words, is freaking amazing! For just a few dollars a month I can now track all of my invoices online and it’s completely themed to match my business, including our logo. All of my invoices are now sent through the FreshBooks web portal and can be scheduled to send automatically if needed.

FreshBooks couldn’t be easier to create, maintain, and track invoices, clients, estimates, projects, and time. Invoices are emailed directly to my clients, who can then gain access to their own FreshBooks account to track all of their invoices from my company. It provides my clients with an entire new set of tools they didn’t have before. They can view what they have paid to date, view open invoices, and can even pay current invoices online.

At the end of the day being paid if the most important part of any small business. FreshBooks is a no brainer for online invoicing, but if you haven’t checked them out yet do it today! You won’t be disappointed.

Popularity: 8% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: I’ve been very slow to write new blog posts lately, but with good reason. I’ve been blogging primarily on my company’s blog at http://webdevstudios.com/blog/. Obviously the blog posts are less personal and more focused on news and information related to my company, so I need to get back in to the swing of blogging at StrangeWork.

I also changed the title of this blog. As my life evolves so will this blog, and we have entered a new era for StrangeWork.com. The new blog title is: Life of an Internet Startup

When I first started blogging, almost two years ago, I wrote primarily on web 2.0 news, websites, and industry information. My career has taken an obvious change since leaving Batteries.com and pursuing my own website development company full time in April of this year. This blog will now help me track my progress as the founder of an internet startup company. There will be ups and downs, but I plan to document the knowledge I learn here for all to read.

Expect to see blog posts more frequently as I travel down this bumpy road of an Internet Startup!

Popularity: 7% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: Yesterday I had the privilege of being interviewed on The Tech Buzz Show, live on Ustream.tv. I had a great time chatting about web development with Steve and Shawn.

The interview is broke up into three parts and runs about 30 minutes long.

Brad Williams Interview part 1

Brad Williams Interview part 2

Brad Williams Interview part 3

Popularity: 9% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: WebDevStudios.com, the New Jersey based software development company I co-founded, just launched a much needed new site design! Not only is the design new, but we also completely changed our website platform to WordPress.

WordPress is a leader in the open source software community, and a perfect fit for what we needed in a content management system.

Yes, I said content management system. WordPress is a great fit for any size company to manage their public website, and can become a powerful CMS with just a few plugins. Since we specialize in open source website development, it only makes sense to practice what we preach.

WordPress also gives us the much needed ability to blog! Thus the Official WebDevStudios.com Blog has launched. This blog will focus more on open source technology news, tips, source code, publicly released WebDevStudios plugins, and more!

Stay tuned as more website updates are sure to follow!

Popularity: 10% [?]