[All Users] WordPress Social, New Venue, and Making WordPress Control Real LEDs!

We have been approved for free use of Knox Makers every 3rd Wednesday starting in July!

Knox Makers is a 501(c)3 nonprofit for makers, coders, artists, tinkerers, and more.

They have special work zones for community use like electronics, woodworking, 3d printing, etc.

They sponsor special interest groups and offer free use of their facilities on Wednesday events.

They had a spot left for 3rd Wednesdays at 7 PM.

I will be organizing and assuming responsibility for our group, but let's try a mixer and make sure we have some neat lightning talks for our new meeting place and see where we want to go from here!

I hope this new venue works out for us, and I have some presentation materials myself to help get us started and make sure we don't lose momentum this time.

This seems like a better fit in a more neutral meeting place that is also more convenient for more folks as it is just south of Chapman Highway after Gay Street Bridge leaving downtown about half a mile.

We can also look at meeting up at a local bar afterwards!

For this next Meetup, here is what is on the roster:

• Social time: Show up early at 6:30 pm to network, check out the new venue, and just take it easy.

• Show and Share / Introductions (10-20 minutes): Feel free to introduce yourself, your experience and what you want to learn, and any projects you could use advice on in private after the Meetup

• Lightning plugin review (5-10 minutes): Yoast SEO

• Main presentation (30+ minutes): Controlling LEDs with a RaspberryPi through WordPress?! An Ongoing Case Study

• Free time before moving to a local bar (30+ minutes)

This is a kickoff meeting for the new venue, and is appropriate for all users.

Small business owners and plugin/WP implementors or project managers may enjoy the lightning review of Yoast SEO - we will do a layman's overview and not look closely at technical information for developers or speed optimizers.

WordPress developers, especially those interested in electronics projects, may enjoy the main presentation. However, this will be a general audience tone as we highlight the main steps my team and I have been working through for our project. We successfully have gotten an LED to blink Morse code, translated from a WordPress post. We are looking at more modifications and examples, are making it modular, and will be releasing GitHub files and documentation for learners. The main presentation is more of an introduction to the main concepts with some limited time for technical questions. I can answer more questions offline, or in a later developer-centric track.

In the future, I'd like to rotate out main presentations with focuses for developers, designers, and other users, but hopefully this is an interesting start for a wide range of WP folk in our area.

Come get social, have a good time, learn some new nerdy concepts, and let's see about building our local WP community to be much stronger and supportive of each of the types of users in our area!

I will try to make sure we get this recorded for those who can't make it this time.