Yesterday saw the release of the iPhone WordPress application - see video. This piece of software, downloadable from itunes, enables the phone user to create, post and edit articles for and on their website direct from their iphone - brilliant!

Not so brilliant if you don’t have an iPhone. But all is not lost - we can set you up with an email-to-WordPress-blog solution, which is in some ways better and more flexible.

So, if you’d like to blog about that exhibition, meeting, trade show or conference, for example, while you’re actually attending it and be able to send images to appear in your blog post as well, then just get in touch.

What a fantastic event! A whole weekend with geeks and no one telling us how sad we are. Just enthusiasm and excitement about a piece of software that makes our lives and the lives of individuals and companies so much easier and more productive - now I don’t call that sad!

I don’t have much time for this post so I’m just going to pick on one of the highlights (for me) from this event. Simon Dickson gave us a bit of an inside view on what is hopefully an emerging trend in UK government with regard to web development. Namely, the increase in adoption of WordPress to create quickly deployed and much more cost-effective government web sites. As in let’s talk in thousands not millions! As taxpayers I guess we’d all welcome that!

And secondly, Simon’s vision of a WordPress ecosystem of consultants, developers and designers, all with a committment and passion for WordPress as the web site platform of choice. The agreement with Simon’s views on this subject could be felt around the room.

And I sincerely hope that this ecosystem will develop from now on, and indeed we’re seeing this moving forward on the mailing list even as I type this post.

I may come back to WordCamp UK in later posts but I must go now.

A panel of programmers,Simon Wheatley, Peter Westwood and Mike Little ran the Code Surgery session receiving questions from the floor including sorting out a coding query on a delegate’s live site!

Chris Garrett took the Living From Your Blog session. He covered making money directly. This included banner ads, adsense, selling your own products and services such as ebooks, which often sell for 4 times that of print books.

Chris suggested using social media sites to spread the word. His watch words are patience, practice and perseverance, with that final ingredient - other people.

These other people are your audience and community. But you have to create and maintain the conversations. Once a community is established they will talk to each other. At this point it will continue to grow. At the heart of this is feeding the community with good content.

Chris majored on the point of being yourself and getting across your unique offering. Don’t copy other people, it won’t work.

Chris suggested using Stumble Upon, Twitter, Forums and Comments, guest posting and Flickr. And always refer back to your blog.

Another very good point was that what you know and what people want to know is what you should be blogging about.

Finally Chris covered the importance networking. This was an excellent talk and gave us all a lot to think about.

Next, Peter Westwood talked about Getting involved with WordPress. Peter is a lead developer at WordPress.

Areas covered were helping with development, testing, bug testing, writing new fixes, writing code documentation.

Of particular interest to WordPress are beta and release candidate testers.
Peter suggested mentoring for Google’s Summer of Code to help programmers improve their skills. Presumably the student would be working on WordPress code.

Last session of the weekend was the Humphrey Awards. Winner of the Themes section was Simon Wheatley. Winner of the Plugin section: Mike Little.

It’s been a brilliant weekend and I’m really looking forward to the 2009 event.