July Meetup: Understanding Your Audience and a Showcase of WordPress

This July 4th, the fireworks weren't just in the sky, they also were in our computers as WordPress 3.2, Gershwin, was released. We hope to continue the fireworks with two speeches and a genius bar on Tuesday, July 12th at 7:00pm.

Russell Heimlich will be presenting on using metrics to understand your audience. Before Russell's talk, we've asked a number of developers and experts in our group to host a genius bar, where you can seek help and advice for your web site, ask them any WordPress questions you might have, get help updating to WordPress 3.2. Want to tweak your theme? Tricky configuration question? Plugins issues? We'll try to help. If you'd like to volunteer, please email aaron@jorb.in and nacin@wordpress.org.

After, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (!!) will be doing a short presentation on some of his favorite WordPress sites, and I'm sure he'll be happy to take some questions.

Additionally, we hope you had a great time at $bbq last month. We did, and we hope to put on an event like that again soon.

We'd like to belatedly and again thank our $bbq sponsors. Without them the event would not have been possible:

Site5 Hosting and Ben Welch-Bolen - http://site5.com/ Graph Paper Press and Thad Allender - http://graphpaperpress.com/ JSConf and Chris Williams - http://jsconf.us/ and http://voodootikigod.com/ If you're interested in either the jQuery or DC PHP meetups, check them out on meetup.com:

http://meetup.com/DC-PHP/ (http://meetup.com/DC-PHP/%FEFF) http://www.meetup.com/DC-jQuery-Users-Group/ Thanks again to Fathom Creative and Anthony Paul for hosting WordPress DC and the $bbq.

Some more information about this month's speech and speakers:

Understanding Your Audience. This talk will detail how you can use analytics and other signals to gain insight into what your users want from your site. I'll cover how to set-up Google Analytics and start collecting data, some helpful plugins, and what to look for when reviewing your results.

Russell Heimlich is the one and only in-house developer at the Pew Research Center where he toils away on WordPress for various needs within the organization. In his spare time Russell works on http://dummyimage.com (http://dummyimage.org) and his newest side project, http://VidCapper.com .

Matt Mullenweg, as you may recall, spoke in January and joined us at $bbq last month. He's the co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, as well as Gravatar, Akismet, VaultPress, and many other services. His website is http://ma.tt (http://ma.tt/) and he's on Twitter at @photomatt (http://twitter.com/photomatt).