WordSesh the WordPress Olympics

For the first time in my life, I might have the podcasting jitters.

WordSesh is in full swing and I’m about to take the mic.

For those of you that don’t know, the 24 hour marathon of WordPress “stuff” kicked off Friday evening (EST time.) This Olympian event hosts a cast of WordPress professionals, developers, designers, founders, characters and a perfect mix of personalities — including yours truly.

Every hour for 24 hours, you’re consuming gobs of information like running a WordPress plugin business to designing better websites. All for free.

Let me repeat that — a free global 24 hour LIVE event — welcome to the WordPress Olympic stage ladies and gentlemen.

The Olympians

I see it like we’re all gathered to represent our own little WordPress “country” if not our own niche in the WordPress world.

So how do you become a WordPress Olympian?

Well that’s what makes WordPress so darn great — there’s plenty of ways to get involved. From documentation to becoming a developer, you can give back in the way you feel comfortable. In fact, you’re giving back by using WordPress in your business or by spreading the good gospel of the software on a daily basis.

Just starting out? No worries, dive into the support forums. 5 Year veteran? Help someone get started.

My way of giving back

My little contribution to WordPress is this very podcast, advocating the use of WordPress and demonstrating how it can help you succeed.

How others give back

• Brad Williams writes software and books
• Jeff Chandler blogs daily about WordPress headlines
• Dre Armeda wrestles bears and security vulnerabilities
• Pippin Williamson builds some of the best plugins
• Brad Touesnard snowboards and helps us migrate databases
• Jason Tucker hosts a live weekly web show

This is just the beginning of the talent involved in today’s marathon. 24 hours only affords us a sample size of the awesome people in our community.

I’m not a WordPress geek — why do I care?

I know that some of you in my audience are not interested in the community side of WordPress. You use WordPress as a tool and focus on other areas of your business.

And that’s OK — that’s why I do what I do.

But, I want you to take a moment and thank the people helping power the foundation of your online business or e-commerce site. Sure you could have picked another piece of software, but would you have been as successful?

Would you have found the support you needed or the plugin that helped rank you on page 1 of Google?

Would the overhead have been as low as it is on the web’s #1 content management system?

The WordPress community is like none other that I’ve experienced and it’s all for the sake of helping each other. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to achieve what we have in the last 10 years.