Team Café
In the last couple of years, especially,
blogs have emerged as the new medium of information and naturally, have proven
to be a viable platform for advertising. The potential to sustain oneself
through the revenue generated by such a blog has lured many a youngsters to
start their own blogs specializing in themes such as fashion, food, travel,
gadgets, adventure, and many more. While it’s been about 5-6 years since
blogging became mainstream in the metros, in Goa, it has been a relatively new
phenomenon. The blogger community is in its infancy but growing at a steady
pace.
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The evening of August 18, 2017 witnessed a
horde of young creative individuals making a beeline towards the swanky new
office of a creative web agency, Diet Code, at Dona Paula. It was a very casual
get-together of seriously creative and passionate individuals Viresh Vazirani,
a prominent growth hacker was one of the speakers, and Anuradha Goyal, one of
India’s top travel bloggers, made herself comfortable in the audience. The
WordPress Goa Monsoon Meetup, hosted by the WordPress Goa – a community
officially acknowledged by WordPress as its Goa chapter, brought together
bloggers, developers and anyone and everyone who uses WordPress and was an
opportunity to network, interact and ideate to get to the next level, whilst
contributing to the growth of the community. The community is now over 400
members strong, and growing. The best part – everyone is welcome and it is
absolutely free!
For the uninitiated, WordPress is a free
and open-source content management system (CMS). WordPress is reportedly the
most popular website management or blogging system in use on the Web,
supporting more than 60 million websites – about 26-28% of all websites, across
the world.
In the last couple of years, Goa has been
witness to a lot of interesting action in the space of Information and
Technology. The number of startups are on the rise and with rumours of Google
looking at setting up shop in Goa doing the rounds, things are looking more
promising than ever before. Siddharth Ashok, a front end developer who is
rather excited with all things WordPress, is one of the key persons
instrumental in building the WordPress Goa community. He says, “Back in 2015,
when the IT scene had just begun to gain traction in Goa, my colleague created
a meetup group – Goa Web Folks – with the intention of getting a glimpse of
what’s happening in Goa on the IT front. We invited members of the then
scattered IT community to meet up and realised that many things were happening
in WordPress Goa.” Siddharth moved to Goa about five years ago and now
functions out of his creative web agency, Next Big Thing, that he founded with
his friends. Siddharth has participated and has been a speaker at a lot of
WordCamps in India, where all things WordPress are discussed.
Abhishek Prabhu, a freelance full stack
developer based out of Dona Paula, and another person instrumental in building
the WordPress Goa community, spent 14 years in Mumbai working with
multinational companies before moving to Goa. Speaking about the growth of the
community post its inception in 2015, Prabhu says, “It has been a steady
process. Of late, we are witnessing more creative people getting involved,
thanks to the awareness created by meetup groups. The interactions have grown
and a healthy exchange of ideas ensues.”
The community has a lot of exciting things
in the pipeline for the near future. On September 30, later this year, the plan
is to celebrate ‘Global Word Translation Day’ – a phenomenon that WordPress
organises globally. Siddharth says, “We invite people who translate WordPress
into other languages. There is Live Feed going on and on this particular day,
everyone in the world does it together. Last year, on the same day, we made
Hindi go live on WordPress. Now anyone who prefers to use Hindi as opposed to
English can use the WordPress interface in Hindi, along with a host of other
regional languages.” Other plans include having a mini WordCamp in Goa in the
future but the priority now is to build the community to make it stronger.
Simply put, WordPress Goa meetups are
nothing short of a party of like-minded people and free-flowing ideas. And
everyone’s on the guest list.
