Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we are going to be diving in on how to create a great WordCamp presentation. I’ve seen lots of great WordCamp presentations and I’ve seen a lot not so great WordCamp presentations, so we’re going to debunk and de-myth some of those things that you may or may not know about creating a perfect presentation for a local community event, like a WordCamp.

Before we do that, though, I want to dive in and talk about a couple announcements. This show was going to be talking all about WordPress 4.9. It was scheduled to be released today, on Tuesday, as I’m recording this. It is actually being delayed by one day. There were some issues with short codes within widgets and changes to the editor that occurred during release preparations. Since they didn’t want to release code with bugs in it and then automatically roll out the point release, they’re going to do – they did a dry run this afternoon to make sure everything was okay, and then they are scheduling to do the release today, the day that this is published, on November 15, 2017.

Next week we’ll talk all about WordPress 4.9. One plugin that did get updated this week was Jetpack. That is now at Version 5.5, and that rolled out some connection improvements and some WordPress 4.9 compatibility. One of the issues that was fixed was changing the connection process between Jetpack and WordPress.com. The changes that they made have reduced the number of issues that may happen when a site goes from an HTTPS connection to an HTTP connection or vice versa.

They’ve also improved the process to make sure that other WordPress plugins don’t interfere with your connection and accidentally disable features, something like CDN related posts, etc. Then, Syntax Highlighting is now on CSS is handled by 4.9, so this was something that was going to be coming in Jetpack, and now it’s being handled in 4.9, which will be coming out next week.

Also, Jetpack’s gallery widget will be migrating to WordPress. This is something that is going to be obsolete in WordPress 4.9 because WordPress 4.9 will have its own gallery widget. If you want more information on some of the details of the specs, you can head on over to Jetpack.com and look for that post about the 5.5 compatibility or you can see the link in the show notes for Episode No. 363.

Another thing in the news this week, is talking about WordCamp Europe 2018. You can now get an early bird ticket today. It is starting to – they’re starting to roll out the process to get started. They let go or released 1,000 early bird tickets went on sale and will be available until December 31st, and it includes a special, limited edition swag item. Hurry up and get your ticket today. If you are interested in where WordCamp 2018 is going to be, it is June, June 14th through the 16th in Serbia. That is where WordCamp has moved.

WordCamp US gets to move every other year and then WordCamp in Europe actually moves from country to country every year, so it is in Serbia in 2018. Speaking about WordCamp US, I will be heading there in just a couple weeks, if you are going to be at WordCamp US I would like to hang out and say hello.

I am a volunteer there and I’ll be hanging out at the WooCommerce booth and answering any questions there. By all means, let me know that you’re coming. You can send me an email at dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com or you can send me a twitter message @DustinHartzler. Be sure to let me know that you are on your way and we can hang out in Nashville, in just a couple weeks.

A quick recap of WordCamp Cincinnati – it was a spectacular event. I had a great, fun experience opening the event with a keynote. I spent the rest of the time pretty much going back and forth with a friend of mine, Brian from Dayton. We talked through and we taught a WordPress 101 course all day on Saturday. On Sunday it was WordPress 201, which included how to build a plugin and how to build a theme. I was very, very sore voiced. You can kind of hear it still in my voice right now, but it was a lot of fun.

It was so neat to watch people who had never used WordPress before, being able to walk away and be able to start creating a WordPress site. That was really cool. It was really cool to see the lightbulbs going off with people when I was sharing about how to create a plugin, and it’s a simple as just adding a little bit of code at the top of a PHP file and dropping it into the plugin section of the WP content folder inside of WordPress. You could just tell like, “Wow, that’s as easy it is.” I could tell that some people were going to go home and do that right away. So, that’s a little bit about the WordCamp Cincinnati.

That’s the last small, regional WordCamp that I’m going to this year, and then, of course, WordCamp US in just a couple weeks. Then, my WordCamp tour of 2017 will be over and I’ll be looking to do some WordCamps in 2018.

All right, moving right along to the “Is there a plugin for that?” section, I’ve got one that I found this week and it’s called Clearfy and this is a plugin. It’s a really interesting plugin. It allows you to disable unused features on your WordPress site, so some of these may be that you could disable the REST API or Emojis or RSS or XML-RPC, revisions, remove Yoast SEO Comments, reduce HTTP requests, heartbeat, revision control. There’s a lot of features in here that you could remove.

Even remove jQuery Migrate, disable embeds, disable Emojis, and like I said, remove Shortlinks. Lots of stuff in here. If you want to kind of stream down and get rid of some the stuff that you’re not using in WordPress, this would be a plugin to check out. It’s a new plugin. It was updated in the last month or so, but it’s got 8,000 active installations. I recommend if you need that granular control over some things within your WordPress site, check out Clearfy. You can search for that on the WordPress repository or, as always, you can find the link in the show notes for Episode No. 363.

All right, today let’s dive in and we’re going to talk about creating that great WordCamp presentation. I wanted to talk about this a little bit because this was the first keynote presentation that I gave last week, and it was the one that I spent the most time on, of probably any presentation that I’ve prepared forever. I just wanted to talk through some of these things that I thought about as I was preparing, and just some of the general practices when it comes to what they recommend on WordPress.org for preparing your site or the WordPress WordCamp website.

What I want to just share is, there’s a just a few of quick things there and then we’ll talk about some of the ideas that I have about creating that great presentation. The first one is, WordCamps are open to everyone. This means that your audience is able to be a mix-up of all types of people, whether that be different ages and backgrounds and inclinations, so you want to make sure that you keep your presentation G-rated. Try not to make any jokes that would alienate anyone in your audience.

Another thing is, in this bullet point list that the Make.WordPress.org website has is, capital P, dangit. It’s what they say. Just make sure that when you’re using WordPress on any slides that you use the capital P. It’s WordPress with a capital W and a capital P. I’ve noticed there’s been some presentations, and even when people have submitted talks before to come to WordCamp Dayton and they’ve spelled WordPress incorrectly. It’s like do you really know what you’re going to talk about if you can’t even spell WordPress correctly? That’s something else to think about.

You also have to remember that WordCamps are official events, even since you’re not paid for these WordCamps, most attendees will see you as someone who represents WordPress. So, in your presentation you want to make sure that you’re only recommending WordPress products or companies that honor the WordPress trademarks and embrace the WordPress license.

WordCamps are about WordPress. If your subject doesn’t center all around WordPress development or design, your audience is to learn about working with WordPress. The expectation is that WordCamp speakers whose topics are not specific to WordPress or WordPress-centric, will use examples from WordPress websites or admin or code bases to illustrate their points.

The last point is to prepare. WordCamps are casual events and the audience is usually forgiving, however, if you are chosen as a speaker over many other applicants, the attendees probably chose to see your presentation over someone else’s, so know your topic, have your slides ready for organizers to review a few weeks before the event, and practice your talk. Those are the notes that are given for WordCamp speakers on the WordPress.org website, specifically in the WordCamp area.

Now, I’ve come up with a few of my own. Let’s go ahead and talk about some of those things. They’re not in any real specific order, just kind of as I thought them up. The first one is show snippets of code, not pages of code. A lot of presentations are out there that are really developer-based and they’ve got a lot of technical details and a lot of code, but make sure that you’re not just throwing up all types of code on your presentation. Make sure that it’s readable, if you do have to have some sort of code.

This is a great opportunity to make sure that your code is short and sweet and make sure that font size is very, very big, in order for you to see it. That’s another hang up when you’re doing a live session. When I was doing the plugin session, I made the text on my text editor in Sublime just ridiculously big so everybody can see it, even all the way in the back. When you’re using code in a presentation, you want to make sure that’s large enough, you don’t want to have like dozens of lines of code on a slide for people to try to read and comprehend. That’s one thing that I’ve thought about.

You also want to leave a lot of time in your session for questions. This is something that’s particularly useful when you’re preparing your talk. Make sure that you know how much time you’re allotted. Ask the presenters or the people of the WordCamp that is being organized, how much time are you actually going to have? The schedule may say that you have from 10 a.m. till 11 a.m. but is there any time there for transition between one session to the next? How much time do you have for questions?

Given that opportunity, I always like to leave 10-15 minutes of question time, just because there’s a lot of times that people just want to know a little bit more. Maybe you didn’t explain things exactly the way that you needed to or should have. Leave some time for questions. You’re considered the expert, as somebody that’s standing up there in front of this group, so you want to make sure that you give time to give adequate answers for questions that may come up.

You also want to have lots of energy when you do this and I know – this isn’t a problem for me, like I’m always jazzed up and ready to go, and usually talking about 100 miles an hour because I feel like I’ve got so much important things to say, but just have a lot of energy when you do it. You want to make sure that you’re presenting and excited to be here. You don’t want to have one of those boring, mundane presentations and just spend the whole time just kind of monotonously talking about whatever your subject is.

Act like you really care, and you’re excited about what you’re ready to teach, and excited that you’re ready to share the information that you’ve learned, and that you’re ready to help somebody out on their journey to learning more about WordPress. You also want to have fun with it.

I know that I love doing it because I love giving presentations, because I can try to get a laugh or two out of it. Now that’s just usually me and that’s usually me making fun of myself during a live demo, like saying “Oh, don’t look at this code,” and I’m copying and pasting this code so that I know that it’ll work or, “Let’s pretend this worked,” instead of like, because it didn’t work. Or, “Oh, I’m having a problem here. Of course, this happens in a live demo. Does anybody have any questions while we’re waiting?”

You’re just trying to get a laugh out of people, just makes it a more enjoyable experience. I tend to poke fun at myself when I do something wrong, or especially if I’m pointing something out or whatnot. Make sure that you have fun with it.

Also, don’t talk about yourself. Sure, you can have the first minute or so in your opening talk about you and what your business is, or why you feel that you’re a good person to be talking about this opportunity at a WordCamp, but this past weekend when I did a keynote, I didn’t even hardly say that I was a happiness engineer working for Automattic. I just kind of like gleaned that part out. That was part of the introduction by one of the organizers and just kind of went with it and didn’t really say a whole lot about me or myself or anything like that. I mean, the people are coming to learn more about – they’re the ones that want to get benefit out of it. So, don’t talk a lot about yourself.

Another thing you want to think about – and this all really depends too on how you submit the session – usually when you submit a session as a speaker applicant, you will have the opportunity to check which track you want be in. Is this a beginner track? Is it advanced? Is it code? Is it business? Is it marketing? Whatever, track it is, but then you want to know your audience skillset. You know if it’s a beginner class, you don’t want to be talking about an FTP editor, or doing anything outside of the WordPress dashboard. That’s not going to be a good fit for people that are brand new and beginners. Think about the audience skillset; take the time to understand where your session is.

Look at some of the sessions that are earlier in the day. This is another thing that I like to do. If you’re going to be at the end of the day, maybe pop in on a few other sessions and see. You can kind of tie those things back into what you’re talking about. When I did the session with Brian in WordPress 101, I sat into some of his sessions so that I could refer to some of the points later, like, “Oh, well remember when Brian talked about this? That’s what we’re doing now.” Or, “Brian will talk about this in a little bit,” and then you can kind of work with that. I like doing that and knowing that audience skillset, it made it much easier to present a 101 class.

You also want keep control of the audience. You’re in control, standing in the front of the room. You want to make sure that you are not allowing some people to overwhelm your presentation and tell everybody else the important things that you left out. You also want to make sure that people aren’t asking questions the entire time. You want to make sure that you have – you know, you can kind of control those. Sometimes you will allow questions in the middle and say, “Okay, I’ve got this coming up in the end, let’s go ahead and we’ll continue the presentation and then we’ll get to your question in just a little bit.” You want to make sure that you think about that.

Another key piece to think about is practice. Practice, practice, practice. The WordCamp website said that, to make sure that you practice, but you want to also make sure that you practice and you know how much time your presentation’s going to take up. I know that I’ve been to WordCamps before where they’ve given an hour-long block for a session and then 12 minutes in they’ve covered all of the material, and there’s nothing else to do for the rest of the hour.

That’s really uninspiring – if you will – that you want to learn, you want to get as much information as possible, and then somebody breezes through a bunch of slides and doesn’t really explain things. All of a sudden there’s so much time left and there’s nothing to do.

On the flipside you want to make sure that you do leave enough time for those questions, like I said earlier. You want to prepare and you want to make sure that you don’t have a lot of time left. I know that at WordCamp Ann Arbor there was somebody that was doing a lightning talk and had like 20 more slides left when his 15 minutes was up, and this was just something that didn’t practice and wasn’t prepared for that amount of time and that length of presentation.

Last, but not least, be prepared and be polished. What does this mean? That means that we are prepared a couple days in advance. We have a copy of our slides on a memory stick ready to go or somewhere that we can access in the cloud in case our computer doesn’t work for some reason. We have uploaded resources. I always like to include resources for people to download later, where all of my links are in the presentation. Normally, since my slides don’t have a lot of information, I do kind of like a blog post summary afterwards, and they can have all of that information, as well.

You want to be prepared in the fact that you have the correct dongles if you need those for your MacBook, that you have water, if you have a clicker if you’re going to use a clicker or whatnot. You want to kind of gauge out the room. I like to do this at the beginning of the WordCamp, go to the room where you’re going to speak and then check out the technology. Am I going to have to hold a handheld mic the whole time? Will I have to stand behind a lectern, and not be able to move?

This happened to me on Saturday and I simply asked the AV guys if they had a wireless lapel mic because I didn’t want to be restricted to holding a microphone the whole time, or standing behind the lectern and not being able to move. Luckily, there was plenty of time. This was like 8:15 and then my session didn’t start till 9:00, and they were able to get me all the gear that I needed to work out. We were able to test it. My computer worked fine and we were able to test all those things in plenty of time.

I like to do this even at WordCamps when you’re not the first speaker, but you still get there early, you go to the room. You kind of set the scene. You can get a good mental image so the rest of the weekend, you’re thinking about, “Okay, this is where I’m going to set my computer up. I’ve checked it out. The computer turns on. The projector projects things. The colors look good. The fonts are good.” Those are all things that you have to do to be prepared. If for some reason that doesn’t happen, at 8:00 in the morning when you’re there, you’re getting all set up, then you’ve got plenty of time to find other arrangements.

If you have to give your presentation to somebody else you can do a PDF copy and put it on their computer. You have some options to find the technology that you need. And then to be polished. What does that mean? That just means that you’re practicing, not only to just fill that allotted time, but making sure that you know the material. Make sure that you prepare ahead of time. “Oh, these may be some of the questions that I get.” Think through how you’re going to present, what screenshots if you’re going to do a live demo, work through, “Okay, these are the things that I want to see.” Kind of work through that live demo, see how much time that takes and kind of get with it.

The more times that you do this, the more familiar you’ll be. The WordPress 101 course and the 201 course, I didn’t prepare at all, other that thinking through, “Okay, this is what I would do. This is how I’m going to step through talking about themes. This is how I’m going to talk about plugins and where to find plugins in the repository. Okay, here’s the code that I’m going to use, I’ve got that prepopulated, I know what it’s going to be.

Then, we’re going to talk about building a plugin. As we build a plugin, I knew that we were going to do it live and if we run into issues then we get to work on debugging.” Don’t get frustrated if you have to debug in the middle of a presentation. That’s just another way to show off that you have the skillset, and that this is sometimes what happens when you build a plugin. Things like this happen.

There’s lots of ways to get prepared for WordCamp and I just want to emphasize, don’t brush it under the rug and do it very, very last minute. You’ll be stressed out. You won’t be able to pay attention to any of the other presentations at the WordCamp. You may have to go sit off in a corner and try to get things done. Then, you won’t have it all done exactly like you like it. It’s just a better experience if you take the time, you’re ready early, and usually a couple days before the WordCamp, especially if they’re asking for your slides. A lot of the times they ask for slides days in advance, and so you get them all ready, you can send them over.

That gives you time to think about your presentation. You practice it once or twice, and you know, “Okay, this is where I’m going to go. These are the stories I’m going to use. This is how I’m going to create impact and meaning with my presentation. This is how I’m going to make sure that people walk away from my session as knowing A, B, and C when they’re all said and done.”

I could probably talk about preparations for WordCamps a lot. I think this was my, maybe 15th WordCamp that I talked at this past weekend and that’s the one that I had presentations for. I’ve done a couple impromptu ones, and done ones without any slides, but those were the ones that I have locally here on my computer, so I have some experience and I really enjoy it.

I’m looking forward to next calendar year when I can spend some more time. It’ll be a little bit easier as my kids get a little bit older; it’s not quite as big of a burden on my wife as I go out of town for a weekend.

I’m looking forward to maybe spreading some more knowledge about WooCommerce now that I’m knowing and learning more about WooCommerce. It’d be great to do some of those presentations at WordCamps as well. That’s the information that I want to share with you this week. Episode No. 363 is now complete. There’ll be just a couple more episodes until you can listen to one episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast every day of the entire calendar year. I don’t know who would want to do that, but that is going to be available real, real soon.

That’s what I wanted to share. We’ll talk about WordPress 4.9 next week, the week of Thanksgiving, here in the United States. Then, I’ve got more great tips and tricks lined up for the week after that. Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.