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Reflections: WordCamp San Francisco & 10up’s Annual Meeting

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Last weekend I had a blast attending WordCamp San Francisco, the original and largest WordCamp. For the price of one incredibly cheap entry ticket (well, plus travel from my home base in Washington DC…), I saw interesting speakers, ate great food, met friendly people, listened to live jazz, and was given complimentary WordPress gear. The conference was filled with WordPress users, enthusiasts, developers, and everyday people who just wanted to learn more about the platform, bonded by an affection and appreciation for the open-source WordPress project. Tied in with our annual company meeting, all of team 10up was flown into San Francisco for the purpose of attending the WordCamp and having some time for team bonding.

The most anticipated WordCamp event was, of course, Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” – a light-hearted expression of his aspirations for and reflections on the current and future state of WordPress. As a web developer and plugin maker, Matt’s thoughts on unit tests for plugins stood out. Matt underscored the importance of elevating the quality of plugins in the official repository; units tests would be a great way to start this process off.

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Bates College wins eduStyle Judged & People’s Choice “best site” award

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Last summer, we had the privilege of collaborating with the brilliant designers at Tellart and the IT team at Bates College to rebuild the college’s website on WordPress. Our mission was to build a durable, modular framework that would balance the consistency and unique features envisioned by Tellart with some department personalization and a clean administrative experience consistent with the needs of each departments (apparently, Food Services didn’t understand why there were sports scores; food fights are not scored). We were proud to hand off just that framework to the talented developers at Bates who ran with it.

Today, I learned that the project won both the “Judged” and “People’s Choice” category for “Best Overall Website”  – the top category – in the 2012 eduStyle Awards. Bates was also nominated for “Best Home Page” – the second highest honor – which it won the “People’s Choice” award for. The awards, in their 5th year, celebrate the best work in college and university websites.

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Tammy Hart joins 10up

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“Howdy ya’ll!” I’m the new girl that hails from the South by way of Alabama and Oklahoma. Don’t let my country girl roots give you the wrong idea; I’m a geeky introvert that spends most of my time wrangling code and producing original user interface designs from the comfort of my air conditioned office space. When I’m not hunkered over my keyboard working on my latest project, I can be found playing wife to my husband of 11 years and mom to our three daughters.

I’ve been in the business of creating websites for over 7 years, much of that time spent working for myself and honing my craft. My years as a freelancer have fostered an appreciation for both creative design and solid coding. I am passionate about pixel perfection and love to see a project from blank canvas to final launch.

WordPress is my favorite playground. I’ve designed custom themes and plugins for clients, and released free themes and plugins for the WordPress community. I’ve  spoken at over a dozen events, most of which were WordCamps, and have taught classes on blogging and building websites with WordPress.

 

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10up – A Featured WordPress.com VIP Partner

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Today, Automattic officially announced an expansion of their WordPress.com VIP featured partner program. Among other changes, it will now include consulting agencies for the first time. Here at 10up, we’re proud to be on a list that includes elite WordPress.com partners like Facebook and Flipboard.

“The WordPress.com VIP team vets each agency that applies … to ensure the agency’s capabilities fit the needs and scale of VIP customers.”

At 10up, quality and customer service is number one. 10up’s President is a core WordPress contributor with over a dozen top rated plug-ins to his name. Understanding what it means to build a high quality web solution goes all the way to the top. With a modern, distributed workforce, 10up has been able to hand pick some of the best talent from around the country; talent like Helen, 10up’s Lead User Interface Engineer, and the team representative for User Interface on the Core WordPress.org project. No fewer than five of 10up’s employees are credited core WordPress contributors, more than any other agency in the program – with more on the way.

If WordPress is the best platform in the world for managing a website (and we think it is!), WordPress.com VIP is the best platform in the world for hosting high volume WordPress sites. On WordPress.com VIP’s unique, highly scalable, cloud infrastructure 10up clients never have to worry about their sites going down when their popularity surges. That’s why 10up has brought fast growing clients like Hip2Save – the official deal blog of the Today Show – and Twitchy – an innovative editorial news site centered on Twitter – to the platform.

10up has been privileged to work with an exciting mix of WordPress.com VIP clients, from the world’s top technology news site, TechCrunch, to cable TV sports network Universal Sports, to Canada’s top news portal, Canada.com, to 9to5 Mac, one of the top 100 blogs on the web. 10up is working on its most exciting VIP projects yet, and we can’t wait to tell you more.

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Jake Goldman

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This weekend is the biggest WordPress event of the year – WordCamp San Francisco. So where else would team 10up be? No, we’re not just sending a couple of executives or a few top developers – you’ll find all of team 10up at this annual anchor event, running around in our 10up gear. At 10up, WordCamp San Francisco is our annual anchor, so we’ll be heading down the day before and sticking around for a couple of days after the camp for some face to face team work and some on site visits with local clients. Hope to see you there!

10up takes WordCamp Boston 2012

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WordCamp Boston 2012 occurred on a hot and steamy weekend on July 14 & 15 at Boston University.

My WordCamp experience started with a vibrant presentation by our own Jess Jurick on some lesser trumpeted capabilities that WordPress offers. She covered some of her favorite plugins such as Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and BuddyPress while showcasing some sites that push the boundaries of WordPress far beyond blogging.

Sam Hotchkiss offered attendees another atypical take on WordPress with Using WordPress as a Web App Framework. If you have an idea for an app, you can produce that interactive, secure, desktop-like program using WordPress! Features like user support, admin management, security, rapid deployment and many other essential requirements of app development are all part of WP’s framework.

Jake Goldman, our President, gave a polished presentation focused on applying WordPress to enterprise environments where complex, scalable and mission-critical web development is essential. Topics included marketing to enterprise level clients, demonstrating WordPress’s value as an open source CMS with an enormous developer community, and the advantages of VIP Hosting.

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WordCamp Portland 2012

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It’s WordCamp season for 10up! Well, actually, are always traveling to various WordCamps, but in the next few months we’ve got a few. Near to my heart is WordCamp Portland, rapidly approaching on August 18th. We have four 10uppers attending, two are featured speakers, and 10up is a top-tier, Bald Eagle sponsor.

The three 10up Portlanders: Zack, Taylor, and Jeremy will be there and, since it’s our hometown, we will be volunteering throughout the day. Among the 12 selected to be featured speakers are Zack and Taylor. Presenting development anti-patterns is Zack, with his session titled _doing_it_wrong: Improving Your Development Skills Through Examining Bad Practices. Taylor is presenting a talk about how we, as authors, designers, and developers, should focus our attention on the interaction between users and content. His talk, titled Why We Click Publish: Advocating for User-Centricity through Interaction Design, as well as Zack’s are scheduled simultaneously, first thing after the morning announcements.

Because 25% of 10up employees call Portland home, 10up is sponsoring WordCamp Portland as a top-tier, Bald Eagle sponsor and Jake is flying in to keep tabs on us. If you’re in town for WordCamp, we’d love to meet you: find us in our grey 10up shirts or better yet, attend one of our sessions.

Helen Hou-Sandí

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Before I move from Wichita back to the East Coast (my original home) in a couple of weeks, I’m going to meet the fine folks of the Kansas City WordPress MeetUp and reprise my WCNYC talk on “Making Custom Content Management Disappear into the WordPress Admin”, since I wasn’t able to speak at WordCamp Kansas City. We’ll be meeting at 1PM at OfficePort (details). If you’re in the area, please come join us!

Interview on CodePoet.com

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Rebecca Collins, an editor over at the recently refreshed CodePoet.com, has published an interview with me that explores 10up and our WordPress-focused web development business. Rebecca asked some great questions, and really challenged me to expand on topics I may have otherwise breezed over. In addition to articulating our focus on building really rich administrative experiences and supporting high scale sites, we really dived into what communication looks at a distributed company and how we respond to work opportunities that, on the surface, might initially seem like a poor fit. At 10up, we pride ourselves on transparency and sharing, and this very intimate look at our operational philosophies is no exception.