Saturday was WordCamp San Francisco, and Rebecca & John Bollwitt, John BIehler, Dale and myself all attended. The night before we thought it was a good idea to sit around and drink margaritas until around 2am, so we were all a bit tired during the event. But it was a great event, and we’re all glad we made the trip down.

Several fairly exciting things happened during Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word Presentation. First, Matt showed a slide which displayed some of the new profile information that is going to be coming to WordPress.org — BraveNewCode has actually been helping with that effort, so it was great to finally have some of it shown to everyone. Second, Matt displayed a list of the coolest three WordPress plugins, as voted by people on his Twitter stream. The first plugin that was shown, the third coolest plugin, was actually WordTwit. Dale and I were both pretty floored seeing it up there in all it’s glory on Matt’s slide in front of about 700 people. The second coolest plugin was a related posts plugin. And then, Matt flipped to the number one coolest WordPress plugin, none other than our WPtouch iPhone plugin. So, we walked away with the #1 and #3 spots for the coolest WordPress plugins — a pretty exciting event for us to be sure. A big thanks to everyone who voted for us.

Later that night we attended the social down at Automattic’s new offices at Pier 38. I had the chance to meet a lot of great people in person, many of which I had only talked to online before. The bar was completely open, so most people did fairly well in the liquor department. Afterwards all of us found a little hole-in-the-wall diner and had a nice greasy meal to close out the evening. I’ve been really enjoying guacomole lately, and I managed to find a hamburger that had a healthy dose of the stuff on it.

Dale travelled back late last night and today I’m going to be making the long journey back home, then we’ll both rest up and get back on the saddles.

A big thanks to everyone involved in putting the event together- it was a great time and we’ll be back next year.

Matt Mullenweg, our fearless leader has officially dubbed today, January 28th as Thank A Plugin Developer day. We would be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to other plugin developers we love for their fine work.

Here’s a short list of some of our favourites:

• Akismet is a comment filter that uses a karma-type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. Does a killer transparent job at handling the nasties.
• Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
• WordPress Database Backup: You gotta gotta gotta backup your DB, folks. This makes it easy, and you can schedule them to be sent to your inbox daily/weeky/monthly too!
• WP-Cache is a caching program which takes the weight off your database, and helps with Dugg posts significantly, or if you’re like us and on Media Temple, keeping those GPU’s low low low.
• All-In-One SEO Take your search engine optimization seriously, kids. This plugin will help you take the pain out of painstaking SEO for your site.

There’s just too many great plugins available for WordPress, so head over to the plugins directory and poke around to check some out for yourself if you haven’t done so for awhile. If you like to find the plugins we’re behind, visit our downloads page.

Exposure

• Official WordCamp Whistler website
• Duane’s interview with the Whistler Pique newspaper about WordCamp Whistler
• WordCamp Whistler Flickr Photos
• Miss604′s live blog of the event
• Live video of the event
• Twitter hash tags: #wcw09 or #wcwhistler09
• Kris’ videos on YouTube

We’ve had a great time being a part of WordCamp Whistler ’09, From organizing it with Rebecca & John and the team at sixty4media, and an awesome time meeting some very awesome people from our great sponsors to longtime WordPress evangelist Lorelle VanFossen.

Lorelle VanFossen

Today we started off with a great hour-long keynote presentation from Matt Mullenweg’s minion of all thigns WordPress Lorelle VanFossen. Her presentation touched on all things WordPress, going over some general but important do’s and don’ts, and explored learning some of the important tasks associated with installing, maintaining and upgraging WordPress. She entertained the crowd with her energetic and passionate presentation.

Dale Mugford (me)

Next up I gave a half-hour presentation on mobile WordPress, and gave a short rundown of the past/present/future of mobile internet and working with WordPress. I also demoed WPtouch 1.6, and showed everyone here how they can quickly and easily add WPtouch thier WordPress website and support the iPhone, iPod touch & Android with its full-featured goodness.

Following me was John Biehler, who gave an incredible rundown on media publishing with WordPress, including exploring some flick and video plugins, and showcasing some of his work.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten was up next with how to emancipate yourself from the shackles of a blog when dealing with WordPress. He went through what defines a blog and how though WordPress is a blogging platform, you don’t have to use it simply for personal journals. An example he uses is DeSmogBlog, where even though blog is in the title, it’s more article-driven and breaks the mould when it comes to traditional thinking on blogs. What defines a blog is not really the content, it’s how the content is presented. Morten offers up a few amusing and updated definitions Ancient Norwegian Proverb blog is only a blog if it looks like a blog.

It’s time for lunch, and we’ve got a lot of hungry souls in here. I’ll be back later with some more on what transpires this afternoon, I know there are many eager attendees waiting to hear from a couple of our afternoon speakers Andy Peatling and Dave Olson.

Lunch was great! Very Delicious!
If you’d like to check out some photos of from WordCamp Whistler, visit the tag for WCW on Flickr, WCWhistler09.

Tris Hussey

Tris is currently discussing taking WordPress further than the defaults, and offered up a great list of must-have plugins like SEO, Google XML Sitemaps, and our very own WPtouch (touch mobile plugin).

Andy Peatling

I think will everyone was blown away with his talk on his very own work, BuddyPress, the social networking transformation for WordPress MU. Andy’s work is exemplary, and the full breadth of what BuddyPress is going to do on the web and in intranets everywhere is simply too exciting to really wrap your head around at this time. Andy showed lots of screenshots from the beta of BuddyPress.org, but to really see how awesome it really is just go see for yourself.

Quentin Muhlert

Quentin discussed all things SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and WordPress. Quentin listed and showed lots of WordPress options for SEO, and detailed just why if you’re looking to increase your page ranking and site exposure in search engine results.

Dave Olsen

Dave gave an enlightening, refreshing, analog discussion on the path of creative works throughout the ages, revealing the true power of today’s publishing mechanisms for independents, giving everyone true appreciation for the ease with which the internet has given power to independents to publish anything they wish. Humorous, insightful, and unique, Dave Olsen was the perfect closing speaker for the day.

So thanks again to everyone for coming, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and we hope you did too! We’ll be updating this post writing again with more links to content as the weekend progresses, but for now, it’s time to relax and enjoy the company of the WordPress family that gathered here today down at the Longhorn in Whistler Village.