Suffice it to say, Ana and I have been over-the-moon happy. Here’s a look at the last nine months, building up one very special day.

Last weekend I spoke at WordCamp NYC about what we’re building out on InJersey. WordPress is the software that makes InJersey possible, and my talk focused on how we use it here, as well as how we employ BuddyPress to help build up and communicate with our network of community bloggers.

It was a great session — despite being held at 5pm, very near to the end of the day, when I imagine most attendants were more interested in getting their drink on than in learning about hyperlocal journalism. Still, I’m still flattered that we had such great attendance and such engaging questions. Thanks to everyone who turned out, and please, don’t be shy about shooting me any and all questions about how we use WordPress.

Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things that Day 1 of WordCamp has inspired me to do is upgrade BuddyPress to the latest version. Please excuse any wonky behavior while I set out to do this in the next day.

The latest of these is a video I created for a site called SeeClickFix. I’ve been working with these guys a lot lately, getting up a variety of widgets and embedded maps onto the InJersey blogs (Cherry Hill, Collingswood, Flemington, Freehold, Madison, Vineland, and Somerset Hills). The maps allow you to submit reports on potholes, graffiti, and other things in your neighborhood that need fixing. What I did was create a short video for them that explains how users can also create “Watch Areas” — which in turn allow them to be notified every time somebody submits an issue in their area. This is how, say, the Public Works Dept in a town can get notified about each and every new pothole.

Just my way of saying thanks to the developers there for all the hard work they’ve been doing to get their snazzy new widgets fully compatible with InJersey and the Gannett NJ newspaper sites.

The whole focus of the redesign, and across Yahoo in general, says Bhat is to increase what he calls PageYield. The yield of a page on Yahoo is measure of how engaged consumers are with that page. (As opposed to PageRank, which is how Google scores pages on the Web in its search results). PageYield is a measure of how much time is spent on each Yahoo page and how many pageviews it gets, but also how much downstream traffic the page generates, and how often people come back.

So often when we look at building websites, we’re focussed on metrics like page views and unique visitors and time on site. But I think this concept of PageYield gets to the heart of what a website really should be aiming to do: get users to interact with it. A great page on a news site gets users to read an article, play a video, make a comment, and share to Facebook or Twitter. If the user just skims the page and moves on, so what? Sure, both count as page views and eyeballs, but if the engaged user is infinitely better.

And not just from a usability standpoint. It also makes sense if your website has an ad-supported business model. If they’re engaged with everything on the page, it follows that they’re far more engaged with advertisements, too.

Anyway, here are the biggies on my list:

• Nov. 9 – New Media Women Entrepreneurs, Washington D.C.: A day-long gathering of blockbuster speakers, all of them women, and almost all of them working on hyperlocal news sites. Although I may not be able to make it to D.C. for the event, I’d particularly love to hear Debbie Galant, of Baristanet.com, and Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger.com.

• Nov. 11 – Hypercamp, NYC: This is one I absolutely won’t miss. I’ve been working with Jeff Jarvis and his team at CUNY (“New Business Models for News”) to set up a day-long event devoted to how to improve the quality of hyperlocal news sites, and also how to monetize them once they’re built. Should be an amazing lineup of speakers, including Jarvis himself.

• Nov. 14-15 – WordCamp NYC: While not technically hyperlocal, since InJersey is all built on WordPress MU and BuddyPress, as are most of the blog-based hyperlocal sites out there, this is going to be a very important event for me. It’s arguably the biggest and best WordCamp event outside of the San Fran one.

• Nov. 18 – Citizen Journalism Conference, Monmouth U, West Long Branch, NJ: I’m scheduled to speak at this free half-day event being put on by the Citizens Campaign, a non-profit aiming to help promote citizen journalism and civic engagement. My panel’s discussion: “The New Media Climate: How the internet is transforming journalism and its impact on local government & politics.”

Should be a wild couple weeks. If you’re planning to go to any of these as well, drop me an email and let me know.

Loren Fisher, the editor for MyCentralJersey.com, interviewed me, and we used LiveStream‘s Procaster app in order to do the video/screencast switching. Enjoy!