Jacob Santos gave a lecture at WordCamp Dallas on WordPress testing in which he makes a strong argument for destructive testing of WordPress as a means to improvement.

When you think of a project like WordPress that powers millions of blogs, it’s hard to imagine all of the infinite ways that people will test the software and find ways to break it. But Jacob makes a case for automating the testing in order to have consistency and to find bugs much quicker than by simply releasing the code to the real world and watching what happens.
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I had the honor and privilege of moderating a power packed panel at WordCamp Dallas comprised of Matt Mullenweg, Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss and Aaron Brazell on the topic “The Business of Blogging”.

The panelists discussed how businesses of any size might better incorporate blogging and other forms of new media into their marketing and product development plans.
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Next in the lineup of WordCamp Dallas speakers is Chris Smith, Lead GravityStream Strategist at Netconcepts, who lectured on Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers.

Chris has five patents pending for his work on local search and presentation technologies, and his specialization centers around natural search optimization.

Incidentally, there are two more WordCamp Videos still to come, so for my regular readers who are not into blogging… it’s almost over and we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled silliness soon!
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Jonathan Bailey, of Plagiarism Today, gave a fantastic lecture at WordCamp Dallas 2008 in Frisco, TX entitled “How to Prevent, Detect and Stop Content Theft” which was a fantastic discussion about things you can to protect your content.

Oh, and you can also hear Jonathan over on the WordPress Podcast, which he co-hosts along with Charles Stricklin.

By the way, for my non-blogging readers, I’m almost done with the WordCamp videos… so we’ll be getting back to the regular silliness very soon. Please stand by!
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At WordCamp Dallas 2008, held in Frisco, Texas this year, Aaron Brazell gave a lecture on WordPress Frequently Asked Questions. If you are a WordPress blogger, you do not want to miss this lecture!

Once again, special thanks to Mayor Mike Simpson and the entire City Council for allowing the event to be held in the Council Chambers. And also to Tom Kraemer, the City’s AV Manager who worked tirelessly all weekend to record and catalog all of the WordCamp videos.

And don’t forget to spread the link love to our generous sponsors without whom this event simply wouldn’t have been possible:

• Layered Technologies
• Find My Host
• 3Tera
• Automattic
• B5Media

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Seriously, you gotta see this (about 5 times) to believe it. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a professional make a goal this awesome, but I know for sure I’ve never seen a kid do anything this cool.

9 year old Max Gerlach was competing during the intermission at a Dallas Stars hockey game when he pulled off this incredible shot. It was so great it made the ESPN highlights as the second best shot of the day (yeah, including the actual pro games)!
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Down here in Dallas we get hail. I’m not talking about little flecks of ice like sleet… I’m talking about golf ball to baseball sized hunks of ice falling from the sky at 80 miles per hour. These things rip through roofs, destroy cars, and kill people.

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Within the last two weeks American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, along with the cities of Dallas and Ft. Worth, have come to an agreement to basically repeal the Wright amendment - a law which has prevented Southwest from flying directly from Dallas to anywhere other than within Texas and a few border states.

This is a huge deal for anyone that ever flys in or out of the DFW area. Since American Airlines is based out of DFW International airport they have had a stranglehold on flights inter-state flights.

To give one example, when I was living in Maryland I could get a non-stop flight on Southwest from BWI for $200 round trip. But to go to Dallas on AA cost at least $300. And Dallas is actually a shorter flight!
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