My site is hosted through an awesome company called Siteground who are the most helpful people I have ever met. When I was putting my site together their live chat specialists were incredibly patient with all my questions and knowing I was learning they even went as far as to mock up emails for me to send to Google who were proving to be painful! Every month or so Siteground send a newsletter with updates and sometime in January I entered a competition to win tickets to WordCamp London. It is the annual event where those that use, support and develop for WordPress (the blogging site I use) come together and share ideas. A few weeks later I found I had won the tickets and a few weekends ago I headed to the conference.
Held at the London Metropolitan University the two day were divided across three rooms all with different speakers. There was plenty of free swag, if you needed a tshirt this was the event for you and plenty of people to speak to about how the digital world will look like in the future and tips on how to improve the blogging that is done. It was also some of the best vegetarian food I have had at a catered for event!
I learnt plenty from all the different speakers so here are three things that stood out you might be interested in;
Blogging. Claire Brotherton spoke about establishing a schedule to blog like blocking out time with a client. She recommended Sarah Arrows course Zero to Blogger in 30 days for anyone starting to blog who needs guidance and inspiration. There is also a great facebook community built around this challenge who are incredibly supportive and the best bit is you can start the challenge any day of the week!
Hacking. One of the most popular sessions of the day was listening to Tim Nash from 34sp.com talk about what to do if your site has been hacked. He scarily showed how quickly a hacker could add themselves as an admin to a site and then take over! The biggest thing I learnt about was two factor authentication, the technical term for proving identity through two forms of identity, and how it should be activated in all aspects of our life. We all use this every day with our bank cards and a pin number at the cash point but on blogs we can use passwords and mobile phone codes to ensure others can’t access our work. I have previously been reluctant to provide my mobile phone number to the likes of Google to do this but am now changing all my passwords as the bots are coming!!
The Myth of a Normal Brain. Leena Haque from the BBC spoke to us after lunch about her autistic brain and how she views the world. It was really interesting to see how her world revolves around visual stimulation, plenty of sensory overload and face blindness. A fantastic speaker, Leena told us how a year ago she wouldn’t have thought she would be up in front of us doing this and it is the work that the BBC are doing with diversity that has allowed her to bring her skills into the workplace. Watch this video she made to show her workmates what life is like for her on a daily basis.
PF xo
