Category: Updates

We get by with a little help from our friends

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Oh, we know this is not what John Lennon meant exactly but the feeling of gratitude is the same! Here are our friends at WordCamp Pune 2015:

Dr. Tarique Sani

tariqueA Pediatrician and a Forensic Expert by education. A passionate PHP geek. Currently CTO, SANIsoft. Also a photographer, bird watcher, nature lover and a FOSS enthusiast, in no particular order.

InkMyWeb

inkmywebInk my web is a Digital Agency based out of Mumbai. We build websites and themes using WordPress. We believe sponsoring a WordCamp is not a marketing opportunity but opportunity to contribute to a local WordPress Community.

13 Llama Studio

13llamaThe nice people at 13 Llama Studio,

  • Develop awesome websites & apps using WordPress
  • Use cutting-edge web technology to solve your business problems,
  • Help you with strategy for promotion & customer acquisition through the web,
  • Help you monetize your web properties, and
  • Turn your world-conquering ideas into working products.

MilesWeb

mwMilesWeb is a web hosting service provider that runs on the belief that web hosting should be fast, reliable, simple and affordable. They started off with the aim to support the ever growing online business and meet the expectations of business users at an affordable price.

Web hosting services offered by MilesWeb comprises of technology, uptime and 24x7x365 exclusive customer support. They offer hosting services to all sectors and businesses of all sizes and have product and service offerings from basic hosting account to complex dedicated server clusters on multiple platforms.

BlogBrandz

new logoBlog Brandz’s deepest desire is to help their clients create more visibility and branding online, as well as generate more leads and sales, using blogs and social media marketing. Their clients include entrepreneurs and corporate organisations who want to boost their visibility and become the leading authority in the eyes of their customers using blogs and content marketing.

Blog Brandz sets up and maintains your blog for you, and creates the kind of content that attracts customers looking for your products and services online. They also manage your social media presence and build active, engaged communities interested in what you have to offer. If you want to boost the reputation and credibility of your business, Blog Brandz can help you achieve your goals.

WordCamp Pune for Bloggers

We’re almost through with developer sessions and speakers. Interesting speakers and sessions are coming your way this week, writers and bloggers. You could walk in a novice and walk out as the expert blogger you always wanted to be!

Also, here’s a little poster for you. Click to get the full size (1200px X 1157px). It’s a transparent PNG and can work with most backgrounds. Source SVG Vector is here. Enjoy!

Translation: Why are you staring like that? Blog!

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CC0To the extent possible under law, Saurabh Shukla has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to WordCamp Pune Blogger Warli Poster. This work is published from: India.

rtCamp is one Angelic Happy Camper at WordCamp Pune

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rtCamp is a leading WordPress based consulting and products based company in India, started in 2009.

rtCampers love open-source culture and are often seen contributing to WordPress core and community work.

Although that’s how little rtCamp wishes to say for themselves, we’d like to go a little out of the way to bring their contributions to light.

For instance, three of the organisers are current employees and four used to be employees. Their employees have the distinction of having the largest number of core contributions from India!

In fact, initially when we had reservations about letting rtCamp sponsor this event (because the CEO is an organiser as well), they offered to sponsor anonymously! Kudos to the team and we look forward to having this camp over at ours!

Why bringing your visiting cards to WordCamp Pune is a BAD idea

Let’s start with a question. Do you roam around with a stack of business cards, neatly indexed and pull that out whenever you need to contact anyone?

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If you do, congratulations, you are a dinosaur!

Our guess however, is that you use a smartphone or some sort of CRM to manage your contacts. Afterall, we are WordPress users and hence IT aware automatically!

Quick Facts about your Visiting Cards

  1. The nicer the paper used for your card, the more the number of trees that have been chopped and the harsher and more toxic the chemical used in manufacturing the nice paper! Better looking business cards are the worse criminals. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_paper
  2. We don’t have to say anything about those plastic visiting cards.
  3. If the inks used in printing visiting cards were not toxic, they would use it in food. Your visiting card finds itself quickly in the trash and the toxins get into the soil, the water and our food whether they are plants or animals.

If not, then What?

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  1. Don’t use a business/ visiting card. Use QR codes, photos (seriously, you can just swap photos or designs of your visiting card over smartphones) and maybe vCards. We’ll print a QR code with a vCard on your name badge at WordCamp Pune.
  2. If someone offers you one don’t take it, click a photo instead!
  3. Carry just one card that people can take pictures of!
  4. Create a twitter handle and share that instead. It’s short, public and easily shareable. We’ll print it on your badge at WordCamp Pune 2015.
  5. Use the List of Attendees to get in touch with people you meet at the WordCamp.
  6. If you can’t bring yourself to not use cards, at least try and minimse the damange by using recycled paper and eco-friendly dyes. Ask your printer for options!
  7. Here’s a nice article for you to consider http://www.earlytorise.com/my-anti-business-card-approach-to-self-promotion/

We can’t stop you from using business cards but we sure can request. All those nicely designed cards and pamphlets lying in a pile of trash at the end of an event, is not a pretty sight.

You’d be surprised how much of a difference can it make to the environment if you stop giving and accepting cards! With that we leave you with an appropriate song, shall we?

The tickets are already on sale and we’re announcing new sessions and speakers almost everyday. Book your ticket now before you miss the bandwagon!

SliderVilla is now a Hero at WordCamp Pune

SliderVilla has a large collection of over nineteen feature rich WordPress Sliders with unique designs and multiple skins. With more than 600K downloads of their free and premium sliders, they reach a large number of WordPress users. They offer features like WooCommerce and Events compatibility, RSS Feed Slider, Recent Posts/Category Slider, Video Slider, Social Media Integrations like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram using their API, WPML compatibility, Easy Builder, Drag and Drop Reorder and Smart QuickTag in all slider plugins.

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Customer service and support get the highest priority at SliderVilla and they offer premium looking carousels with best possible after-sales support and that’s what makes them a proud memeber of the WordPress community.

SliderVilla wamts to welcome the WordPress community members to its motherland, Pune. Pune is the birthplace of SliderVilla but now it operates from Nashik, India under its parent company, WebFanzine Media Pvt. Ltd.

The Wordex Conference Part II is another preview of the WordCamp

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We had the Wordex Conference I last week and it was amazing. We got two speakers, Priyanka Goyal and Jitesh Patil for the WordCamp from it.

This Saturday we are hosting the second part and have yet another line-up of interesting WordPress related sessions from probable and confirmed speakers of WordCamp Pune. We’ll also be joined by Praveen Selvasekaran of WooThemes via teleconferencing from Bangalore. More details are on the Meetup page and the lineup is as follows:

Creating passionate customers through Great WordPress Support Praveen Selvasekaran
Content Creation and Promotion in 2015 and Beyond Priya Florence Shah
Theme Development Best Practices and QA Nisha Singh
WordPress is not PHP Rahul Bansal
WordPress for HR Amrit Israni

Jitesh Patil knows how to make your Website Useful!

We had never heard of Jitesh before his application turned up in our inbox. At the first Wordex Conference, he was a revelation and we’re proud to host his talk on How to Design Useful Websites in a mix of Marathi and English.

Jitesh is a mobile and web programmer from Solapur. He has been using WordPress for the last 2 years. Apart from building small business websites using WordPress, he regularly conducts theme development workshops for beginners.

When he doesn’t build with WordPress, he shifts his attention to building Android apps and is quite good at it. In fact, he was the winner of the Samsung Appsolute Challenge in 2012.

Jitesh doesn’t just write and teach code. He loves to read, loves to eat and sometimes likes to cook. He’s also an active Rotarian and enjoys organising youth programs.

He lives in the quaint city of Solapur with his parents, wife Vaishali and daughter Tanisha.

OpenSRS is openly an Angel to WordCamp Pune

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OpenSRS is the wholesale unit of Tucows, exclusively focused on the needs of resellers. Through a network of over 13,000 web hosts, Internet service providers and Web companies, OpenSRS manages domain names, email addresses and digital security products for millions of end users worldwide. We offer white-label, brandable end-user interfaces, easy-to-use management tools, extensive technical documentation, scalable, reliable systems, competitive pricing and outstanding customer support.

That’s a lot on offer under one roof, we think. How many up for starting an end-to-end WordPress business now?

Promoting your Plugin/ Theme is a breeze with Shilpa Shah

Shilpa works with a whole repertoire of WordPress plugins and themes at her organisation and hence we feel she is the best person to help you with the best ways to Promote your WordPress Plugin or Theme. That’s exactly what our second woman speaker is going to do at WordCamp Pune 2015!

She joined the WordPress party a little late but has been completely enamoured by the WordPress community sincethen. She co-founded Hummingbird Web Solutions in 2011 which nurtures a number of popular WordPress products ( SlideDeck, CyberChimps , WPeka Club, WPAuctionSoftware and SurveyFunnel).

She was bitten by the travel bug pretty early on and was lucky enough to have a job (in her earlier corporate avatar) that took her to various countries, meeting some truly wonderful people everywhere!

She enjoys dancing in the rain, trekking, camping in the wild. She has also been learning to play the guitar for 5 years now — hopes to play an entire song properly some day. Soon.

Priyanka Goyal will help us deal with JSON API

Priyanka is a first time WordCamp speaker. She is also our first (but not the last) woman speaker. Her session would be primarily in Hindi with a little Hinglish thrown in for good measure. She’d be speaking on the WordPress JSON API

Priyanka is a web developer with a special interest in WordPress. She has been using WordPress for developing websites for clients for about 2 years now and loves to explore the possibilities of WordPress.

She likes to extend features of existing plugins to match her clients’ needs. She’s developed her plugin and theme development skills this way. The WP_Query class is her favorite of everything that is WordPress. She’s looking to develop a plugin for easier Contact and Enquiry management in the near future.

Prior to exploring her coding chops, Priyanka was a teacher and still loves to train new hires in her team. She loves interacting with beginners and regularly conducts training sessions at CityIT, her organisation.

WordCamp Pune 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!