As I wrote in Tuesday’s post, I’m always amazed by the power of the Internet. On Saturday I was reading about a meetup for Wordpress users and thought what a great that idea that was. I thought it would be great if I could find a group near me, so I plugged in my zip code into Meetup, and found a group that was meeting the next day for their second meeting ever. It must have been fate.
The meeting was being held at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View. I’ve passed by the place a few times (quite often when I lived in Mountain View and would go to Castro street for books, candles, and Mongolian BBQ), yet had never been there before for coffee.
At first I worried I would not be able to find the group, yet I soon found the meeting organizer, Christopher Price the CEO of MechaWorks, at table on the second floor wearing a name tag. The tag helped, and I knew I was in the right place. (The second floor has a large number of tables for groups).
Mechaworks staff use Wordpress every day literally. Their blog reports on the changing technological world. They use photos, many of which are on the page as small, click to enlarge thumbnail size ones.
One of the great things about this meeting was that the people who came were all at different levels of Wordpress blog usage and requirements.
Christopher was of course very Wordpress savvy and gave me some good tips for finding plug ins that would allow users to click on photos to make them larger (though I will have to host my blog on my own site for that), as well as how to turn off comments on a particular post (I love comments and appreciate them, so that is more of a theoretical bit of information).
It’s funny, when I’m at an event that I’m not an official photographer at, like this one, sometimes I’ll be shy about asking if I can take pictures. I was at the meeting for about half an hour, learning and listening, before I even asked the group if they minded if I took a few. Everyone agreed, and in fact gave me business cards at the end to get their photos.
I learned at lot at this meeting and look forward to future meetups, with hopefully even more people attending. The coffee (MechaWorks provided free coffee), was good, I had a white mocha which I usually get at places new to me, next time I might try something more adventurous.
While there I also noticed the place was very much into causes and community. The large white board style calendar downstairs was filled with group meeting information for almost every day. Additionally, both the artwork outside on the windows, as well as table literature was focussed on various causes in which the place supports.
by Danielle Stolman
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