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More than 500 people gathered this weekend at Boston University’s Sherman Center for WordCamp Boston 2011. What is WordCamp? It’s an annual forum for sharing, learning, influencing and talking about WordPress, the free web publishing tool that’s so easy you can have a website up and running for as little as $6 in a couple of hours.

WordPress boasts some impressive statistics – Worldwide there are more than 4,500,000 WordPress-powered sites, and 99,700 of them, or almost 10%, are in the top 1 million rated sites. At ‘only’ 1.6 million sites, Joomla is the nearest competitor.

I’ve learned some tools and concepts that have potential to make a significant difference for many amateur and professional astronomers. Here’s a tool that’s easy to use, free or really cheap, and can help promote our hobby/vocation/passions in Astronomy, Telescope Making or frankly whatever floats your boat that you want to share with an audience.

This site, ScopeMaker.com has used WordPress for almost 2 years. About 1 year ago I set up a site for the Clay Center Observatory using WordPress, and my artist wife Donna Berger is converting her site from a pure HTML to WordPress site. Major upgrades on in WordPress’ future, and I hope to follow them and utilize new technologies like CSS3 and HTML 5 in the coming months.