Tyler Sticka

WordPress-Powered Portfolios: The Movie

If you didn’t grab a ticket to WordCamp in time, missed the live stream and/or found my presentation slides seriously lacking in the audio department, you’re in luck! The video of WordPress-Powered Portfolios has been published to WordPress.tv, or you can watch it below.

A technical problem resulted in the footage starting a few minutes into my presentation. All you missed was an introduction of who I am, and of my background as a cartoonist.

I apologize for having to look down at my notes so often; I didn’t expect to be holding the microphone! Other than that, enjoy.

Graphic Storytelling in Old Media

I have no idea how this eluded me the past four months. Christopher Knaus (@gniP_gnoP on Twitter) devoted a portion of his notebook to swiftly sketching nifty visual notes of various WebVisions presentations.

Although Chris “found it hard to do visual notes for a presentation about cartoons,” I thought he did an excellent job capturing some of the key messages of my Graphic Storytelling presentation. Enjoy!

WordPress-Powered Portfolios: Slides & Snippets

I really dig WordPress, but not nearly as much as I enjoy spending time with my fellow geeks and colleagues in Portland’s bustling and vibrant open source and web community. It was a pleasure presenting this afternoon!

My presentation was meant to solve the problem of simply and easily associating imagery with pages and/or posts in order to build a killer portfolio theme. I hope designers, artists and hobbyists will use these tips as a springboard for pushing what we can do with this constantly-evolving platform.

Thanks to all in attendance! Here are the goods.

See the presentation and dig some PHP

WordPress-Powered Portfolios this Saturday

Wow, time flies! I last wrote about WordCamp Portland back in June, and already the event is upon us. This coming Saturday, I’ll be closing the first day of the sold-out shindig at WebTrends with my presentation, WordPress-Powered Portfolios. (Don’t panic, they’re streaming it.)

My presentation won’t revolve around the visual design of portfolio sites for two important reasons:

1. The principals of compelling interaction design are not exclusive to the WordPress platform.
2. I’m still way too new at this to represent myself as any sort of authority on the art of portfolio design.

What you will learn is whether or not WordPress is the right platform for your online presence and, if so, the surprisingly simple snippets of PHP you’ll need to get there.

As excited as I am to present, I’m even more excited to see the other wonderful speakers, including WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

I was surprised and delighted to hear that the premier sponsor of the event is Microsoft. I acknowledge their generous support by drafting and publishing this post in their intuitive Windows Live Writer application.

See? WordPress brings people together.

Register for WordCamp Portland 2009

Registration for WordCamp Portland 2009 is now open! Any designer, developer or blogger will want to attend. The WordPress goodness happens September 19th through the 20th at WebTrends, and the ticket price is a bargain:

Tickets are $20 per person which includes access to the event, lunch on both days, snacks/refreshments, a T-shirt, some swag, and the ability to meet a couple hundred really great people including some really great speakers

In addition to my presentation on how to build a killer WordPress-powered portfolio, there will be armfuls of wonderful sessions from the likes of Micah Baldwin, Jason Grigsby, Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal, Will Norris, Scott Porad, Garron Selliken and Duane Storey.

As both a speaker and attendee, I urge you to relinquish a single Andrew Jackson for two full days of open source wonderment.

For more information, visit WordCamp Portland or @wcpdx on Twitter.

I’ll see you there!

Icons and Comics on Strange Love Live

If you missed viewing my Strange Love Live appearance when it was actually live, you can now view it on Blip.TV, in iTunes, or right here:

I had a blast being on the show! Thanks again to Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal for being such gracious hosts. I’ll be sure to post my comics essay (as promised) in the coming weeks.

Icon designers I should have mentioned (but didn’t for some reason) include Susan Kare, the Iconfactory, John Hicks and Adam Betts.

Some of the comics I talked about (not all of which are safe for youngsters) were Amulet, Sonic the Hedgehog, Bone, Groo, Usagi Yojimbo, Cerebus, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. For a larger list of keen comics to check out, see my WebVisions follow-up.

If you’re hungry for more comic book, indie rock and tech geekery and don’t mind the occasional expletive, older audiences can check out the less structured Afterhours episode (with appearances by Peter Wooley).

Join me on Strange Love Live this evening

I’ll be a guest of Cami Kaos and Dr Normal this evening on the wonderfully entertaining video podcast Strange Love Live, a show that spotlights “movers and shakers of the social web, live from Portland Oregon.”

I had a blast talking with Cami at this year’s WebVisions and I’m really looking forward to chatting again.

I hope you’ll join us live online at 10PM tonight or on the TV box if you happen to be in the Portland area. Dig it!

Designers, developers and bloggers unite: WordCamp Portland is this September

It’s no secret that I dig WordPress. Heck, this very site is powered by it. In fact, that’s the subject of my session at this year’s WordCamp Portland: WordPress-Powered Portfolios.

A great summary of the event excerpted from Rick Turoczy’s Silicon Florist writeup:

Without a doubt, one of Portland’s favorite blogging platforms is WordPress. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s open source. It’s easy to tweak and extend. And it’s got a great developer community both here in town and throughout the world.

And there’s no better place to learn about using, manipulating, and generally mucking with WordPress than WordCamp Portland.

I’ll have more to say about my presentation as the event approaches (September 19-20 at WebTrends), but I have to point out how stellar my fellow speakers are: Micah Baldwin, Jason Grigsby, Scott Porad and Duane Storey. I think I’m even more excited to attend than to speak!

You can keep an eye on WordCamp Portland developments on their web site or on Twitter.

Music Trifecta

First: Book

Run (don’t walk) to purchase a copy of Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction, subtitled “The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.” The book is wonderfully entertaining, revealing the industry’s current state of implosion as an event decades in the making and the result of individuals with distinct (and often entertaining) personalities.

A particularly memorable (and telling) section:

In 2007, Doug Morris, sixty-eight-year-old chief executive officer of the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, gave an interview to Wired magazine that left many in the record industry frowning in stunned silence. He was talking about major labels in the late 1990s and why he and his contemporaries didn’t plunge into internet music more quickly. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” he said. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?” Responded the Wired writer: “Personally, I would hire a vet.” Morris shot back: “We didn’t know who to hire. I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person—anyone with a good bull**** story would have gotten past me.”

If only there were a cheap, intuitive, accessible network of information he could have used to instantaneously do some basic research…

Second: Show

Because I’m a sucker for media saturation, I repeated last year’s weekend extravaganza and followed up the goodness that was WebVisions with Saturday and Sunday at the Sasquatch Music Festival.

Mallory and I had the pleasure of seeing fourteen shows which, coincidentally enough, is the exact same amount we saw last year (go figure). My favorite show? Definitely St. Vincent, who blew us away with her intelligent brand of cinematic art pop that stayed crunchy, even in milk.

There were too many great shows to list here, but I will express my surprise at how much time we spent in the comedy tent. With acts like Maria Bamford, Zach Galifianakis and Todd Barry, we had plenty of reasons to camp out in the shade whilst having our sides split. A truly wonderful time.

Third: Album

Art Brut vs. Satan might be my favorite album recorded since LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver in 2007. I admit that I nearly wrote off the band when their sophomore release sounded a little stale, but I’m happy to report this quickly-recorded follow-up (12 days) produced by one of my favorite songwriters of all time (Black Francis) actually outdoes their debut.

This album seems to rise above the current crop of indie and Brit rockers by pushing otherwise cliche musical references and ironic self-awareness to an absurd and positively post modern cacaphony of pop and punk swagger mixed with a palpable (yet tragically hip) sense of uncool.

Full disclosure: I adore modernism, I read comic books, I hate driving and I love to hear artist’s frailties come out in their work. It’s like this record was made for me.

Listen to the Art Brut record after the jump