whapakk.

About the only thing I hated Saturday morning was that I had to drag myself out of the bed so early; 95% of what followed that was great simply because they were not on the usual weekend routine (that 5% was just me getting a wee bit tipsy hours later at Jyl’s debut). First thing I had to do was get my ass in Makati (at the Asian Institute of Management) by nine in the morning to attend WordCamp Philippines 2009, brought to Manila by the Mindanao Bloggers Community and co-presented by Mozilla.

2nd WordCamp Philippines 2009.

The last time I’ve been to a blogger event about blogging and the more technical aspects of it was the iBlog5 event, and this one had a lot of similar discussions, just skewed towards the local WordPress users. When I heard about it less than a week prior to the event itself, I double-guessed attending because of the short notice (okay, probably my fault for not knowing it was just around the corner), but I’m really glad I decided to attend and get everyone from the team to join in, as well. I mean, there’s a reason why I have Firefox and WordPress badges on my Spongies corner here on my blog: I’m a fanboy and I shouldn’t have hesitated attending.

Me, Patty, Marcelle, Anne. Not in the photo is Jing. Taken by Carlos.

Among the speakers were Blogie Robillo, Beau Lebens, Markku Seguerra, Danilo Arao, Seth Bindernagel, and Karla Redor; I’ll probably write about a couple of the presentations I was more into (with comments and additional input) in separate blog entries.

Blogie addresses the crowd.

Beau’s introductory presentation to the WordPress family was probably the most interesting one. Sure, it was elementary stuff that most people already know about, but he got my attention when he started discussing WordPress MU, bbPress, and BuddyPress. It opens up a few possibilities for a couple of web projects we’ve been planning, and since they run on a platform similar to the tried-and-tested WordPress, I’m really excited about trying them out.

I admit, a few speakers lost me during the more technical discussions, and that’s coming from someone who’s been tinkering on codes for a decade. Probably, I was just more into the bigger picture of the business I’m in. (And I’ll probably just let someone else handle that dirty work for me.)

Indeed.

Anyway, I enjoyed the event and I’m looking forward to next year. Oh, and apologies to all the bloggers I wasn’t able to greet. I was intentionally trying to fly under the radar because as I have said, I’m not a morning person and I think that I was like a walking zombie out there.

Geek meets baller, and it's orange!

Last note: I dig the geeky Mozilla baller ID they gave me (not just because it’s orange, mind you). If we gave away Nuffnang baller IDs, would Nuffnangers dig it, too?