About our Speaker: Darcy Clarke is a Developer, Designer & User Experience Advocate based out of New York, NY. He is the Co-Founder of Themify a Commercial WordPress theme company, and is currently a Senior Developer at Fantasy Interactive and a member of the jQuery Team. Darcy’s work has been featured in publications such as: .Net Mag, Web Designer Mag, Applied Arts and Smashing Magazine.

Oliver Wellington, from nrelate, will show you how you can easily increase your click-thru rate, and keep your visitors on your site longer, just by installing a few plugins:

• Related Content: Once a visitor is finished reading your post, show them other posts they might enjoy. This automated plugin can increase your click-through rates from 4%-9%, and help you recycle older posts.
• Most Popular: Easily show your visitors what your most popular posts are, and gain another click.

About Oliver: Oliver Wellington is the co-founder of nRelate – a content marketing company based in New York City. Under his leadership, nRelate has grown from a small startup into a technology company that now services more than 19,000 publishers across the web.

When it comes to putting up websites, having the internet domain name or web address you want is a first-come-first-served proposition. Or at least it is at the start. The old saying “the early bird catches the worm” applies to how things work here. This presentation will discuss the three things a late-bird challenger must prove in order to take control of a domain name, and so take it away from the “early bird” who registered it first. Also discussed will be how an early bird defends against this.

About Allan: Attorney Allan R. Pearlman is a former judicial law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Senior Court Attorney for the New York State Supreme Court in New York County. Now in private practice, he recently successfully represented New York Times best-selling author, Robin Cook to win control of Robincook.com.

Seems like a good candidate for a demo.

• nrelate: iPod Nano.
• SocialFlow: Kindle Fire.
• Datagram: Free VPS for one year.

In the past, our raffles were sort of boring… pick a name out of a hat and you win.  But this time I wanted to do something different.  These were some great giveaways, and I wanted to make it a little challenging.  So, not only was your name picked from a hat, but you had to answer a WordPress Trivia question as well.  Apparently, some of the questions were a little difficult and not all members appreciated all the hard work I put into it.  So we eventually nixed the trivia questions and went back to the hat idea.

I still think WordPress trivia questions are fun, so some of them are listed here for your amusement, in no apparent order. How many can you answer?

Hover over each link for the answer, or click on the link for a more detailed overview.

From Index.php to Index.php:
When each page of your website loads, the WordPress core runs through a series of files, to make hundreds of functions available, before it even gets to your theme and plugin files. In this presentation we’ll walk step by step through the WordPress initialization process, from the core index.php to your theme’s index.php, to try and discover where most of the more fundamental features and functionality comes from. If you customize or create themes, or build plugins to provide the features you think are missing, it’s vital that you understand how WordPress “boots up” so you can be sure you’re correctly taking advantage of everything it offers. How does WordPress core take the initial page request and give back such beautiful web pages?

About the Speaker:
Dominic Giglio is a computer science student at CUNY and open source enthusiast who tries to split any remaining free time he has to learning about WordPress, Ruby and helping people get the most out of technology through his tech support company, Universal Technology Advisors. He’s been developing WordPress sites for the past 3 years and was just recently bitten by the Ruby bug. He blogs about WordPress and other nonsense at humanshell.net.

Notes:
Notes from this presentation can be found at the humanshell.net.