Webcamp #9 – WCKL All-Stars

WebCamp KL

What if you bring in all the most active members on the Webcamp KL Facebook group to give talks for the night? One word: EPIC!

Yes, this month we have the all-stars lineup of experts and go on a full-on technical track, topics ranging from Google Analytics to blazing fast web development. Diving into this month’s agenda, we have:

1. Ngeow Wu Han – Keynote: Tribal Leadership
2. Michal Pietrusinski – Everyone Can Do White-Hat SEO
3. Leong Seh Hui – Making the WCKL Podcast
4. Kai Hendry – The Ikiwiki Web Platform
5. Grey Ang – Blazing Fast Web Development with Jade and Stylus
6. Arzumy MD — “I, Paul the Octopus”
7. Brian Ritchie – Analytics on Steriods, Part 1

Summary

A fair warning before listening in: there are a couple of F-bombs and mentions of parts of a reproductive organs being and they are kept in-tact, so if you are easily offended even by mild references, stay away .

The event kicks off with Wu Han setting the tone for the event by sharing a five-point scale in the book Tribal Leadership, from “My life sucks” to “Life is great!” and shares the Webcamp KL vision of having a strong tribe of highly engaged and satisfied members.

Following into our first talk was Michal Pietrusinski sharing a great introduction to white-hat SEO and why everyone could do it. According to Michal, there is one very critical strategy in getting ranked on the first page of Google, and with that, the tactics will easily follow and adapt. Find out what that secret sauce is!

The second talk was brought to you by yours truly (as the writer of the blog post ) going through the steps of making a good podcast from a raw audio recording to a shiny entry in iTune’s podcast page. In this talk, I shared all the workflow, tips and secrets in getting up to speed in making your own podcast and what pitfalls you should avoid. If you want to explore a new channel to spread your message to the masses, tune in!

We also had a special guest all the way from the UK this month: Kai Hendry, who have contributed to the HTML5 specification (WOW!). In this talk, Kai shared about a project called Ikiwiki, which sports some really great features that geeks would really appreciate: it stores pages in a revision control system and uses Markdown as the editing syntax. Not to mention that you can edit your wiki pages from the command line.

The audience were in a roll when Grey Ang took the stage and demoed two great tools that greatly speeds up your web development efforts: Jade and Stylus, mainly due to the fact that Grey played along with Harrinder’s, umm, choice of word to be used in the demo. Get infected by the hilarious vibes from the Webcamp live audience . Due to the fact that you can’t see code through an audio session, you can grab the full source code from Grey’s Github account.

Arzumy was playing soothsayer that night with the title “I, Paul the Octopus” – sharing his experiences in using the Google Prediction API. In his demo, he shows how you could hook up with the Predictions API, feed it with a list of titles used in landing pages and the traffic received and have it predict whether our titles for our new landing pages will prove to be a smash hit based on historical data. Neat!

To wrap it up, Brian Ritchie go on deep in the first of a two-part talk on Google Analytics. In this technical session, Brian teaches beyond the basic of the pretty dashboard on Google Analytics: he dives deep to show you how custom variables and multi-channel attribution open up to a wealth of data to help you understand your website visitors better and how well does your marketing campaign perform. As a business owner, you should check out this great overview to this power tool.

Help Wanted

It is raining jobs since the beginning the year and everyone is looking for talent: among them are Mindvalley (Brian Ritchie), Quantips (Talat), InstantTaxBack.com (Mila) and CellKast (Johnson). If you are a web developer/web designer, feel free to contact them!

On a separate note, WCKL is starting up with a Jedi Knights Council, a.k.a. a mastermind group, where Webcampers can have face-to-face private discussions on solving problems and brainstorming ideas. So if you are keen on the idea, sign yourselves up.

In case you didn’t get the joke…

If anyone didn’t get the joke Wu Han made about mispronouncing Kai’s full name, Kai-lan (with an L; as opposed to Kai Ian with the I) is a vegetable used in Chinese cooking.