My co-founder Dan has been using WordPress since, well, before it was forked into WordPress. On the other hand, I’m non-technical and can’t code to save my life. Luckily, we’ve got a team of 4 developers to take care of our 24/7 WordPress support service, so I focus on what I’m good at. Strangely, it’s offline where I am most effective. I love making new connections at conferences, events, and meetups. In the last 7 months, I’ve fallen in love with the WordPress ecosystem and community and I want to explain why in this post. Abundance With 70,000,000+ (and growing) […]
Managing a Distributed Team: Is It for You?
It’s certainly not uncommon in the WordPress ecosystem for team members to work remotely, but is it right for you? And, if so, which rookie mistakes should you try to avoid? In this post I’ll share some of my experiences working on, and managing, a distributed team. From an outsider’s perspective, the novelty of having a virtual (non)office is probably one of the most talked about characteristics of companies like Automattic. However, even in 2014, I get the sense that much of the business world still has hangups about this concept. Many people still seem to believe that if you can’t walk […]
Great Plugins for WordPress Beginners
A few weeks ago, I shared a few developer plugins that I’ve incorporated into my WordPress workflow. The feedback was extremely positive, but not everybody out there is a developer. There are a lot of people coming to WordPress, or even CMS’s, for the first time, and the transition can be a bit overwhelming. The following is a list of great WordPress plugins for beginners, that can hopefully get anyone started on the right foot. Again, I give you the list in reverse alphabetical order. WP Caregiver: FREE As you get started with the WordPress admin, there will be a […]
The Most Important Role in Your WordPress Professional Service Business
We Often Start in the Same Place When freelancers get their start, they often use the term “one-stop shop” with their friends, clients, and networks. People hear the phrase and their reaction depends on their experience. Younger folks nod in agreement; more seasoned folks smile with empathy and compassion. Because they’ve been there. We’ve all been there. Eventually we discover that our clients had a more pressing objective in mind. They just wanted the work done. Complete. Whole. With a single point of contact. That doesn’t suggest, nor should it, that the client was asking for a single person to do […]
Moving From WordPress Development to Back-End Development
As a front-end developer, most of my back-end experience has come from developing WordPress sites. In fact, the first back-end language that I “learned” was PHP, and even that was just enough to develop WordPress. For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with back-end languages a little bit, building (very simple) apps using first Laravel, then a little bit of Python, and finally NodeJS. I’m sure that there are some developers out there that are looking to take the leap from WordPress development to proper back-end development. As I’m starting to get more and more involved with these languages, […]
3 Things Every Entrepreneur Can Learn from Shiva Keshavan
Have you been watching the Olympics? Let’s start with the fact that his country’s not known for its cold weather. Or that its favorite sport is cricket. Add to that the fact that its own Olympic committee was recently suspended because it elected criminals to its leadership. Oh, and top it off with the fact that there’s not a single place to practice the luge in the entire country. There’s just no way to explain Indian athlete Shiva Keshavan’s appearance at this year’s Olympic Winter Games. Until you realize that he’s been practicing by putting wheels on his luge and taking it […]
The Day WordPress Took Back the Internet, Again
With each new leak getting consecutively worse, stories of NSA surveillance have caused quite an uproar recently online. We’ve gone from gawking at amateurish PowerPoint presentations explaining the level at which PRISM operates, to hearing about government sponsored Malware convincing the head of Microsoft to refer to the NSA as a serious and persistent threat to internet security. And headlines continue to reach new levels of absurdity with events like the NSA phone-tapping the German Chancellor and creating tools for hacking Cisco, Juniper and Wahwei routers with ease. It’s time, once again, to take action. Tomorrow, on Feb 11, people from all corners of the web (and […]
The Second Freedom
If you drive down the street I grew up on too fast, my dad will yell at you. You will not hear him because you’re inside a car, and you’re already half way down the street, but my dad will still have yelled at you to slow down because he’s worried about the kids in the neighborhood. I grew up in a pretty tight-knit community that’s focused on its children. Unsafe drivers are a risk to one of the things the community of the neighborhood is built-on: children. Recently, in the WordPress community we had another site pop up re-selling […]
Updates to the Jetpack Plugin
Late last week, the Automattic team released the newest version of Jetpack, which included a few notable updates worth taking a look at which should make some people’s lives easier. Full disclosure: I use Jetpack, but not all the time. For content-driven sites I find it useful, but with larger sites I’ll usually leave it off. That’s just where I stand. Markdown Support I remember when John O’Nolan first pitched Ghost to the WordPress community, one of his major sticking points was a cluttered post editor with lack of Markdown support. With the newest version of Jetpack, Markdown is now […]
Dissecting WordPress: Customizing footer.php
My journey to WordPress began by learning basic HTML, laboriously typed out in Notepad. Over the years I added CSS, then some JavaScript, to gain a bit of interaction with website viewers. File “includes” for reusable page elements like a header and footer, or a menu, made building websites a bit more streamlined—though I still did a lot of hand-coding—and I was comfortable with it. I knew of the existence of WordPress, and CMS systems, and eventually the day came when I sat down and committed to learning WordPress so I could turn over sites to clients and they could […]
No Comments
Start the conversation