Blogathon: A great weekend with blog

Spent a great weekend with blog at Blogathon. Just like to share some experience.

It was a two days workshop (24th – 25th Aug 2013) about building a blog in wordpress from scratch.

Day1:

Registration: The event place was in The Plyace. Its in Marathon Maxima, Mulund (After 4 building from my flat- Its 5 min walk 😉 ). I reached at the place. I forgot to print out the ticket. I have to show the ticket on my Tab. They provided us an ID card, notepad and pen.

Introduction to Blogathon: Given by Niranjan Yadav ( Founder of StartCup and SwitchIdea ). He was an awesome speaker and full of energy and confidence. Though some times he talks little bit extra and repeat a thing multiple time 😉 but he is a very good organizer.

WordPress – Basics and Core: Again by Niranjan Yadav (Think wordpress as a human body – that concept was awesome).

Hosting concept and some more about WP: Utkarsh Agarwal (Founder of inc42). He has given lots of information about wordpress.

Break: Had a lunch with samosa, kachori, dhokla, jelebi.

Content Curation and Publishing Insights: Denzil Lewis (Chief Editor at WAT Blog) was looking smart and obviously speaking smart. No time pass (may be sometime boring to some yo people), to the point, resourceful.

Story of Campus Diaries: Samata Joshi (Curator in chief of Campus Diaries) told us the story about their Campus Diaries.

Blogging Law: By Tanveer Malhotra. The smart guy with knowledge of law. You must know Section 66A.

Network Building: We had to create a team of 5 people. No one was known to me but finally able to find 4 new friends 🙂 . We had to create a blog next day. They told us to give a concept. We thought to a lot but not able to find one. Decided to add all in watsapp and lets chat online.

Day2:

Practical: Finally we able to find one concept. It was about local stuff like food, music, culture etc. They had provided us space to create a blog from scratch. Installed wordpress in subdomain and did a experiment with themes, widgets bla bla bla…

Break: Today we got McDonalds burger as lunch.

Performance of The Bare Feet Project: The performance was awesome. A mix of classical, rock, blues…it was really fantastic. The guitarist (with the wooden textured guitar – I liked the pattern) plays pretty well. He played awesome lead in some places. The guy with long open hair plays lots of instrument – Dugi, something like big tabla (don’t know the name), Junjhuni etc. He is Bengali. In between the performance he asked is there any Bengali? I was the only person who raised the hand (most probably…I was sitting in the middle and haven’t looked behind). He asked me my name. I had to tell my name with Bengali accent :D. In one of there song he sang some part in bengali (Khachar bhitor ochin pakhi…kemne aase jay). The flute player was also very good with his different shaped instrument. He was looking like the big boss of the band. It seems he was very much sounded with classical music. The voice of the lady member was good. The rest guitarist looks little disturbed. Within the performance he played with mobile phone. Most of the time he was playing rythm. Though it was not very notcible but he was filling the whole music. The whole performance was great.

Monetization of Blogs: By Niranjan Yadav and Utkarsh Agarwal. The very important part 😉 . How to make money from the blog.

Some Useful Plugin: By Akash Angle (Editor of Anglehit and creator of Angleos). Though he has not enough time to speak but has given information about very good useful plugin. On his birthday Akash is going to launch his custom OS: Angleos – Its a light weight, debian based, cool looking OS. In between his talks he told, “There is only person here who is using linux – Mr. Sarkar”. His hand was pointed to me. Oh! everyone was looking at me…its little embarrassing 😉 .

There was CSS Hacks on the topic but was not covered (May be it was the basic of wordpress and we can expect it in the next time). At last we all got certificate, 5th Issue of Campus Diaries magazine, good friends and a lots of experience. It was a really wonderful and worth weekend.

photo courtesy: Blogathon