EdCamp NYC Badge

Since returning from EdCamp Philly, I've been working on helping to organize EdCamp NYC. Yesterday, I started working on the official web site: www.edcampnyc.org. I received a great deal of help from EdCamp Philly organizer extraordinaire, Dan Callahan. My co-web organizer, Sean Freese, purchased and set up the domain name. Dan helped us get WordPress running and I've been playing around with the web site one step at a time.

Moving In To the New Space

Since the domain was live, I wanted to move into the space so that anyone who stumbled upon it would not see a Hello World message. I have never used WordPress, but it's enough like Blogger that it was intuitive to change. The theme was set up for a masthead image, so I went to Flickr to download the logo created by Dr. Timony. Using Gimp, I resized the image so it would fit in the 940x198 pixel space. I placed it on the left side of the image and added the date and location of the event. Using the eye dropper tool, I grabbed the color of the apple and used it as a color for the date.

Next, I borrowed some wording from the EdCamp Philly web site. They have everything licensed as Creative Commons content and I was told to borrow freely. Content on the home page will change, but for now it announces the what, where, when, and cost (free) of the event with a link to the Wikipedia definition of unconference.

As I looked at the default web site I realized I had to add content to the preset About tab. The wording was just right on one of the EdCamp Philly pages. I used that for our About page.

Day Two on the Domain

Now that we had a presence, I wanted to look into how EdCamp Philly took care of tickets and registration for the event. I thought it was very smooth from a participant standpoint. They used TicketLeap. As I looked at their web site, I learned "If you’re hosting a free event, you can still ticket your event through TicketLeap. Our event registration services and marketing tools are free to use, regardless of whether your event is free or not. We only charge service fees on events that cost money to attend." I signed up for a free account and a few clicks later had an event that was accepting registration for free tickets. They have logos that link to the service. Tickets are available now at edcampnyc.ticketleap.com. Now we have a Registration tab on the official web site.


Karen Blumberg set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a gmail account for edcampnyc. I thought it would be useful to have a page with all of our connections, so I added a Connect page this afternoon as well. Looking at the Facebook page, I found a tag line of Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. I added it as the tag line on WordPress.

Badges for Everyone
As I end the night, I started thinking about how the K12 Online Conference helps promote their event. One of the things they had was a badge people could post on their web site, blog, wiki, and other web spots. I started hunting around the web for widget and badge creators. I decided to check out the K12 Online page and did a search for badge. I conveniently found the K12 Online Badge - Spread the Word page with HTML. I've been teaching my students HTML for several years. I explain to the students how it can be handy to know some basics. Looking at the code, I realized they had an image hosted on their WordPress page. I downloaded the small version of the EdCamp NYC logo to my computer and uploaded it to the WordPress installation. When I uploaded the file, it conveniently told me the location of the image.


Now, anyone can add a badge to their blog, wiki, or whatever to promote EdCamp NYC by adding the following code:

Blogger wanted to turn the code into the badge, I found a web site [Felgall Internet - Displaying HTML Source Code in Web Pages] that let me paste the code and it turned it into a series of special codes that display the less than and great than signs without allowing the web page to recognize it as HTML. I'm hoping it will let you copy and paste the HTML in what ever web page you wish.

<a href="http://www.edcampnyc.org/"><img alt="Register for Edcamp NYC" width="120/" src="http://www.edcampnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/edcampnyc-small.jpg" height="56" /></a>

Tomorrow is Another Day

I still want to work on mirroring more of the content from the EdCamp Philly web site. I think it was really well laid out. I wanted to preserve these thoughts for myself and any one else working on the edcamp model. I think we're doing pretty well considering Sean obtained the domain just about 24 hours ago!