If you have spent anytime talking to people in either the Montreal or Toronto WordPress communities, chances are that at some point you have heard the name Brendan Sera-Shriar, or as he is more likely referred to, Digibomb.

Brendan Sera-Shriar from Make Web Not War on Vimeo.

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It was great to spend a weekend geeking out with the Toronto WordPress community. What was even more fun was being able to explore Toronto and attend WordCamp with a bunch of Montreal’ers, it was like a WCMTL reunion. There were a bunch of speakers on the bill from Montreal, @jeremyclarke @ggiiaa @zoonini @SandySidhu @lieslbarrell @cafenoirdesign, not including a handful of Montreal’ers that made the trek out to Toronto to attend the WordCamp, the Rennicks ( @andrea_r, @wpmuguru) and of course Big Al!

It was truly a blast hanging out with everybody, meeting new people from the community, bumping into old friends, and seeing family.

What made it successful

• Venue -George Brown St. James Campus . Big comfy rooms, plugs at every seat, good lighting, and big screens.
• Location – Downtown Toronto, near hotels, shopping, food, bars, transportation, and more …
• Speakers – An exceptional list of speakers from all over tNorth America! It was also nice to see some familiar faces.
• Attendees – Friendly, outgoing, smart, and interesting. What more could you ask for!
• After Party – Hernandos was a cool Mexican resto/bar in the St. Lawrence Market area. It is also now the birth place of DirtyGoogle!

If you missed my presentation you can check it out here.

Some magic moment

With so many great people you can imagine how many “Magic Moments” there were, however the most re-memorable experience for me was the birth of DirtyGoogle, thanks to a girl in a mustache at a Mexican bar and to all the founding members, you know who you are

DirtyGoogle Founding Members

… and finally … BIG THANKS to the organizers (Al Davis, Craig Taylor, Andy McIlwain)for all the hard work they put in and congrats on a successful WordCamp!

See you all next year!

I’m very excited to be speaking at WordCamp Toronto this year on behalf of Mega Bloks and PressWork. As an ex Torontonian and WordCamp Toronto organizer (2209) I’m looking forward to heading back to my old stomping ground. I’m really looking forward to seeing how far WCTO has come over the past few years, re-uniting with old friends, and seeing family.

I’ll be honest, I don’t make it out to TO often, I’m a jaded ex TO’er living in French Canada, but I’ll try to keep an open mind

This year I’ll be doing a dual presentation. I’ll be speaking on behalf of Mega Bloks and how we are using PressWork to grow our social presence. I’ll also be giving a few cool Mega Block prizes at my presentation so don’t miss out!

See you soon Toronto!

On Wednesday August 3rd at 7:42 am I became a father for the second time! Nathaniel Joseph Sera-Shriar ( or as I refer to him digibomb 3.0, my first son being digibomb 2.0) was born.

As with my first son so far it has been an amazing, but exhausting, experience. My wife and I could not be happier. He’s strong, healthy, and already growing up before our eyes

This alone is a life changer, however it’s only the tip of the iceberg. As many of you know my other full-time job is Social Manager at Vanilla Forums, or should I say was. After 2 incredible years at Vanilla I have flown the coup and started my own Startup “PressWork” with good friend and now co-founder @cbavota.

My years spent at Vanilla taught me a lot about the industry, Startup life and culture, and gave me the necessary skills to move on and start my own thing. I have mad respect for the team at Vanilla and wish them the best of luck!

A little more about PressWork …

PressWork is a free, open-source theme framework built for WordPress 3.2 using HTML5 and CSS3. It was created out of a need for a framework that catered to all types of users. As developers, we needed it to be powerful enough to allow for complete customization, which is why every element in PressWork can be hooked into. But we also didn’t want to scare away beginners and that’s why we came up with the PressWork front-end toolbox, which gives users the ability to change their site’s layout and design in a live preview environment while taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that WordPress already has to offer.

We just launched our first premium theme “InstaPress” which we are really excited about and a premium suite of plugins for PressWork called “BriefCase“.

I know what you’re thinking, I must be mad to start a new business venture with a 2 year old son, a new born, and a wife on maternity leave. Well, you’re right! However sometimes in life you need to take risks in order to succeed. I feel great about this decision. Don’t get me wrong, it’s scary, and it will be a long hard road, but totally worth it in the end. We have already seen some success with PressWork. PressWork has been downloaded over 30,000 times in the last month, we made the top 15 most popular themes on WordPress.org, and Matt Mullenweg mentioned us in his “State of the Word” at WCSF this year.

dropping digibomb’s from coast to coast …

You may have notice that I have slightly re-designed and re-organized the blog. It’s currently running PressWork and a modified version of a premium child theme called “Postly” which will be released soon. I plan on using my blog as a sandbox for PressWork over the next few months testing out new themes and features. So keep watching the blog and let me know what you think.

This is only the beginning of digibomb’s REDUX – I have some other projects up my sleeve

People always ask me “Why do you it? It’s a lot of work with no return!” This is almost half true. It is a lot of work, tremendously time consuming, costly (even with sponsors), and very difficult to balance with a family and full time job. But, the return is HUGE! You have the opportunity to make an impact on your community and you get to work with some really awesome people.

With WordCamp the return is even greater for me. I’ve been a WordPress designer, developer, and “evangelist” for over 5 years. WordPress has paid my bills, put food on my table, help support my family, and most importantly giving me the opportunity to meet some exceptional people and develop long lasting friendships.

This years WordCamp was a massive success. We, Jeremy Clarke, Shannon Smith, Carl Alexandre, and myself, the organizers could not be happier with how everything turned out. We had an incredible lineup of speakers from all over the world in two languages, generous sponsors that not only helped make this event possible but even took part in helping out during the event and actively participated in talks.

There’s more! The creators of WordPress, Automattic, set up a “Happiness Bar” staffed with employees. This was a great opportunity for attendees to get questions answered from the masters themselves one on one, or just hangout when not attending a talk. To top it all off Matt Mullenweg was our keynote speaker and was also available to answer questions and hangout with attendees.

It was also cool to run the first ever “WordPress Hackfest“, in Montreal, organized by Stephane Daury, Andrew Nacin, and Carl Alexandre. The Montreal WordPress community came together to jointly work on WordPress core tickets and submit patches to help put Montreal on the WordPress map in style.

What made it successful

• Venue -UQAM’s Cœur des sciences.
• Location – Downtown Montreal, near hotels, shopping, food, bars, transportation, and more …
• Speakers – An exceptional list of speakers from all over the world! It was also nice to see some familiar faces.
• Keynote – Matt Mullenweg held a town hall on day 2. Interesting to note, that during Matt’s talk WordPress hit 50 million sites!
• WordPress Happiness Bar – Experts from Autommatic hang around and help attendees with any questions they have.
• WordPress Hackfest – The Montreal WP community came together to jointly work on WordPress Core tickets.
• Food – St. Viateur bagels every morning and Woo Themes sponsored Starbucks coffee. Catered lunch on day and pizza lunch on day 2.
• Attendees – Friendly, outgoing, smart, and interesting. What more could you ask for!
• After Party – Free beer! Telus sponsored and AMAZING after party at the St. Sulpice where both myself and Big Al (Al Davis Telus sponsor) ran the bar, our drinks “the Caribbean digibomb” was a HUGE success and even trended on twitter.
• Ice Cream – Microsoft Web Matrix sponsored and Ice Cream on day 1. Who doesn’t love a  tasty cold treat on a hot day

Some magic moments

For me every moment was magical It was truly flattering to see so many people, over 300, come out and support WordCamp Montreal this year. I feel truly honored to be a part of a such strong local community and amazing global community of passionate, vocal, motivated, and happy WordPress users. This was a year not forget and next year will be epic!

See you all next year!

Photo Creds: Elida Arizza

Vancouver – beautiful, clean, friendly, and wet! It rains so much that most hotels provide their guests with complimentary umbrellas, seriously. If it wasn’t for the rain and the cost of living, which is by far the highest in Canada, I may actually consider moving there one day. Despite the weather, I had a FANTASTIC time in Vancouver during open source week. I had the opportunity to check out a handful of small events, meet some really cool people, savour some fantastic seafood, take in beautiful sites, re-unite with family, and of course the honor of speaking at WordCamp Developers and Make Web Not War.

If you missed my presentation at both events you can check it out on slideshare.

For easier reading I have broken this post down into 2 parts:

• WordCamp Developer recap
• Make Web Not Wat recap

WordCamp Developers

I thoroughly enjoyed each presentation at #WCDEV, and it was great to see some heavyweights like Andrew Nacin, Lorelle VanFossen, Steve Heffernan, and Justin Sainton come out and play.

It was unfortunate however I did not a get a chance to see Mark Reale, and old friend, colleague, and student of mine talk. I was really looking forward to hi presentation, and from what I heard it ROCKED the house!

In terms of my presentation, I took a gamble this year and decided to do a developer talk, in the developer track, and show no code. At first people were confused, and a little disappointed, but when I turned on the digibomb magic I soon won over the crowd. As usual a WordPress presentation turned into “tell me more about Vanilla”.

I’ve been to a lot of WordCamps, and I have to say this was by far the best organized. The organizers, @vanessa_chu, @Mor10, @AnnyChih, thought of every little detail leading right up to the event and during. Most impressively was how well they stuck to the schedule, everything was on time, which as we all know can usually be a fail.

I also really enjoyed the keynote, most of the time you get some hot shot who stands up there tooting his own horn This time it was more of a town hall with the one and only Lorelle VanFossen doing a one-on-one interview with great Andrew Nacin (ex firefighter).

More pics on flickr.

From one WordCamp organizer to another “kudos” job well done guys, I can’t wait until next year.

What made it successful

• Venue -SFU Harbor Center, great views, centrally located, easy to get around.
• Location – Downtown Vancouver, near hotels, shopping, food, bars, transportation, and more …
• Speakers – It was great to see so many diverse speakers. It was also nice to see some familiar faces.
• Food – Coffee, some really sexy tea “Yumberry”, bagels, and other sweet morning indulgences,  and a nice selection of sandwiches for lunch.
• Attendees – Friendly, outgoing, smart, and interesting. What more could you ask for! The people of Vancouver are very friendly but not as rambunctious as us Montrealers.
• After Party – Free beer and food! Ok, there were some cool people there as well.. Unfortunately I had to sit through a Canucks game, which is so bad, I do like the team but I felt like a schmuck sitting there in my Habs jacket

Make Web Not War

This was my third year attending and presenting at Make Web Not War. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to take part in this great web festival in 3 different cities (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver), 2 languages, and 2 coasts. As a professional speaker and community manager it has been quite the unique social and web experience to see how different function from one end of the country to other. It has also been interesting to see how the open source perspective on Microsoft has evolved over the past 3 years as they (Microsoft) continue to reach out and expand their open source initiative.

There has been an obvious departure from the “Microsoft sucks and is evil” attitude as both communities begin to understand each other better, develop mature relationships, and most importantly learn how to adopt each others technology. It’s interesting to note how many open source communities have ported their software over to  Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer : WordPress, MODx, phpBB, TikiWiki, and (soon) Vanilla, just to name a few. It works both ways, not only are open source communities adopting Microsoft technology Microsoft is also adopting open source, not that long 13.5 million Microsoft LiveSpaces switched to WordPress, that’s a huge move for Microsoft and an even bigger win for open source.

What I find most fascinating, after 3 years of attending this event, people are s still asking “Why is Microsoft doing this?”.

That’s what make this conference so important. It attempts, and succeeds in many ways, to show the diversity of web and how open source communities and proprietary  software developers/producers are making attempts at working together for a better web, hence “Make Web Not War”.

Ok, enough preamble … I really did enjoy the conference this year, it has come a long way and continues to surprise me each year. Also, it was great after 3 years to get the main stage for my presentation and be able to ROCK IT OUT to over 200 people at 10 in the morning, there is no recapping my talk, you had to be there to live the digibomb magic

It was also really great to hang out with the Web Not War team again specifically @interopqueen and @lydiamale (these girls rock!). Plus I got the chance to see Mark Reale do his thang, considering I missed it at #WCDEV 2 days earlier.

More pics on flickr.

What made it successful

• Venue -MASIK, a funky art gallery, really chill and cool atmosphere, but not central.
• Speakers – It was great to see so many diverse speakers. It was also nice to see some familiar faces. Most importantly covered the gamut of the web.
• Food – Props to the caterers! The food was awesome.
• Attendees – Friendly, outgoing, smart, and interesting. What more could you ask for! The people of Vancouver are very friendly but not as rambunctious as us Montrealers.
• After Party – Very cool spot called Raw Canvas, you eat drink and paint! Something I would totally expect in the plateau (Montreal).

Good people, good times …

As I’ve already mentioned, my biggest take away are the people I met, the agencies and firms I discovered, and most importantly the friends I made. I would be remiss if I did not shout out to the wonderful people that made this experience worthwhile. I would list them all here, but that would be a ridiculously long list. You know who you all are, thank you for a wonderful experience and I hope to see you all next year!

Oh, and I will totally be back next year, this time I’m bringing rubber boots and an umbrella!

May is another really busy month for me and Vanilla. I will be heading out to Vancouver for a week to speak at WordCamp Developers and Make Web Not War. I am very excited, I have never been to Vancouver before and I am looking forward to checking out the city.

I’m also stoked to be speaking at the first ever WordCamp Developers, yep … you heard me right “Developers!“. As far as I know this is a first for WordCamps world wide, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I’m also looking forward to meeting the organizers (@vanessa_chu, @Mor10, @AnnyChih) so we can talk shop one organizer to another

I will be presenting part 3 in a series of presentations entitled “Building a Community Around your Blog“. Following WordCamp Developers I will be doing part 4 at Make Web Not War.

This will be my 3rd consecutive time speaking at Make Web Not War in 3 different cities, does that mean I earn a hat trick? It will be interesting to reunite with the MWNW team in Vancouver, we’ll have to see if we can top are crazy Montreal adventures (fill in the blanks ) from last summer.