WordPress Wednesday

On Wednesday, Justin and I headed to CoCo, a coworking spot in downtown to work for the day. There they do WordPress Wednesdays. This usually entails a row of tables with people all working away on their WordPress projects. I mentioned a need I had for a client and it turns out one of the other guys at the table (Toby Cryns) had built a similar solution. He sent me his code and I was able to tweak it to my needs within about 15 minutes. We spoke more about the solution and we’ve agreed to collaborate on the plugin and end up releasing it to the community pretty soon.

They also do a weekly “Book Club.” This consists of reading a portion of the Professional WordPress: Design and Development book and then talking about it. We had a good conversation about some functions and Justin ended up agreeing to lead a further discussion on arrays in the coming weeks.

WordPress meetup Thursday

The 4th Thursday of every month they hold their monthly meetup at the Nerdery. Just another awesome venue for holding events. There was a really solid turnout for the event and I had a great time doing a short intro to Restrict Content Pro. My favorite part of my presentation was when a guy in the crowd mentioned that he had a live site with a very active RCP installation. I invited him on stage to take over my presentation and give us a tour of his site. I sadly can’t recall the name of his site, but hopefully he’ll see this and leave a comment.

Grant Landram gave a great presentation about customizing the WordPress admin panel before handing it off to clients. It really made me think about how we hand off projects to clients once we’re done. I think it’s time to sit down and take a serious look at revamping that process. Here’s Grant’s slides if you’d like to take a look.

WordCamp Weekend

Friday night was the speaker/sponsor dinner, which is always a nice opportunity to catch up with people I’ve met at other Camps across the country and to meet some new WordPress peeps, too.

Saturday was the big day. WordCamp MPLS. I don’t know what their actual attendee count was, but it was pretty decently attended. 3 tracks plus an overflow room and every session I attended was 3/4 full or more. Even the ones late in the day. I was tremendously impressed with the attendance and engagement. Great content, great questions from the crowd. An all around fantastic WordCamp.

BuddyCamp

Day two of WordCamp was centered entirely around BuddyPress. Vancouver and Miami have each held a BuddyCamp recently, making this the 3rd such event. I wasn’t really sure how well it would be attended. But, once again, Minneapolis proved they’re all about all-things-WordPress. There was a nice progression of speakers kicked off by Lisa Sabin-Wilson doing an introduction to BuddyPress and wrapping up with John James Jacoby opening it up for a nice long Q&A session. I did a talk with Justin about using BuddyPress as a directory where we talked about some client projects we’ve done in the past that use BuddyPress without using all the BuddyPress options. I had a blast giving the presentation and there were some great questions from the audience which I always enjoy.

One session that really stood out for me on Sunday was called Mind-Blowing Online Engagement by Tania Jones and Toby Cryns. Toby is the developer and Tania is the client. Together they walked through several before and after screenshots of MANY of the sections of BuddyPress that they customized along the way after listening to user feedback from both their staff and end-users. Toby would explain the technical side of the changes and Tania would then explain in what ways the change was vital to the success of their community engagement on the site. It was fascinating to hear from both sides of the project, developer and client, all in one session. I would absolutely love to see more sessions like this at WordCamps in the future.

So, yeah. WordPress has a strong community in Minneapolis and it was great to have the chance to take part in it for a few days. I’m already looking forward to heading back for WordCamp MPLS 2014.

First round

Western Conference

Blackhawks – Wild: Congrats Minnesota on making the playoffs on the last day of the year… No worries, you’ll be golfing in about 10 days. Chicago’s got this one.

Ducks – Red Wings: I don’t care for either of these teams. But, since both can’t lose in the 1st round, I’ll go with Detroit to take out Anaheim in this one.

Canucks – Sharks: Another series where I just don’t like either team. Because it’s fun to watch San Jose lose their minds each year in the playoffs, let’s go with Vancouver to advance.

Blues – Kings: It’s been 2 years since the Blues have beat the Kings even once. No chance they’ll find a way to do it 4 times in 2 weeks. Kings are moving on.

Eastern Conference

Penguins – Islanders: I like the Islanders. I think they are an up and coming team. But, the Pens are just going to be too much for them this year. Pens will make this a short series.

Canadians – Senators: Is this the first all-Canadian series in quite a while? I don’t know a lot about either team, so, gonna just pick based on seeding here. Go Habs! whatever.

Capitals – Rangers: I actually think this may be a really exciting series to watch. I’m on the fence about who wins this. Think I have to go with Lundqvist to carry the Rangers through.

Bruins – Toronto: I think the Bruins’ playoff experience is going to carry them past the Maple Leafs in this one.

Second Round

Western Conference

Blackhawks – Red Wings: End of the line for the Red Wings. Hawks got this.

Canucks – Kings: This should be another real good series. Kings moving on.

Eastern Conference

Penguins – Rangers: Crosby will be back by this time. Rangers won’t be able to contain him. Penguins go through.

Canadians – Bruins: Wouldn’t it be neat if the Canadians were the only Canadian team to make it to the third round? Too bad it’s not going to happen. I’m going black and yellow here.

Third Round

Western Conference

Blackhawks – Kings: Congrats to the Hawks for being the best team in hockey during the regular season. Now, let me introduce you to the Playoff version of the kings. Kings will upset the Blackhawks on their way back to the finals.

Eastern Conference

Penguins – Bruins: Short and sweet. Penguins moving on.

Cup Finals

The Kings are a better team this year than they were last year. And, last year I didn’t listen to my heart and pick the Kings to win it all. This year, I’m not making the same mistake. I’m going with the Kings to repeat.

So there ya go. That’s my picks. Think I’m spot on? Think I’m crazy? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

A couple weeks back I had a particularly crazy week at work. The weekend rolled around and I felt like I still had a thousand things to do. I was feeling overwhelmed and realized I needed to step away so I didn’t explode. I remembered a conversation I had earlier in the week with a colleague who was talking about online learning sites like codecademy and teamtreehouse. On a whim I loaded up codecademy and found the JavaScipt track. I worked my way through the first few examples and I was hooked. Over the next week I forced myself to spend 30-60 minutes each day going through more examples. I wasn’t having any trouble with any of them (other than spending 30 minutes to locate an error that turned out be a typo) and was really REALLY enjoying it.

I finished the JavaScript track and moved over to jQuery. I couldn’t leave it to my normal 30-60 minutes a day. I was too excited. I wrapped it up in under a day.

Putting it to use

I’m currently working on a plugin project with a couple guys. We meet online each Monday evening and do a bit of a hackathon to keep the project moving forward. Usually I’ve left all the JavaScript to them. But this time I decided I’d at least see if there was a ticket or two that I could tackle. I opened up a couple files and was amazed at what I saw. It’s as if the files had gone through a transformation over the past week. It sorta felt like…

I was quickly able to tackle the ticket and mark it complete. To say the least, I was excited and encouraged.

After wrapping up the jQuery track I wanted to take a quick look at JSON. I worked through the API example of using JSON to send emails through Mandrill. Again, I was able to work through it, and more importantly I was able to understand it rather quickly.

Since diving in to codecademy I’ve found myself asking myself “What took so long? Why didn’t I do this a year ago?” My wife answered it best when she said, “Well, you’re doing it now.” As usual, she’s right. I AM doing it now, and loving it.

Big thanks to codecademy for the excellent tutorials. If you’re interested in learning to write some code, you should definitely check them out.

A few years back I wrote a post about wanting a coworking facility here in Vegas. At the time I wasn’t looking for a place to work full-time, but a place to go a time or two each week to work and mingle with other geeks. It wasn’t too long after that post that I heard rumblings of some possible places that were going to open up. But most would end up just being rumors with no real location ever popping up.

Then, #vegastech happened.

16 months ago, /usr/lib opened up. It is a community space that was VERY much needed. A place where the tech community would start to blossom. Several nights a week the place would be swarming with groups of all shapes, sizes and interests. Not just tech groups met their, either. It was really a place for DOers to do stuff.

I was so thrilled to have this location available that was drawing such an energetic and engaging crowd that I found myself spending time there multiple evenings each week. And, since the place was pretty quiet during the day, I would sometimes pack up the laptop and use it as a place to work every now and again. It was everything I wanted in a work space… Or so I thought.

Happy-ish third anniversary

February 1st marked the third anniversary of my working from home. The lack of a work/life split at this point is really getting to me. I have been considering working from /usrlib more often, but I just haven’t made the commitment to doing it. Part of the reason is because I knew something else was on the horizon. Something I have been looking forward to for a long time. A real coworking facility within a reasonable distance from my house.

In early February Work In Progress finally opened their doors. Located in downtown Vegas, it’s a short 12-ish minute drive from home. I immediately signed up for the base level membership which gave me access to the common work area during business hours. That first week I worked out of WiP twice, and by the end of the second day, I knew I had found what I was looking for.

So, what’s the difference?

I know what you are thinking, /usr/lib and Work In Progress sound an awful lot like the same type of place. What makes them so different? For me, there are a couple key things that make for a pretty significant difference:

1) Purpose. I have found that when I leave the house and head to WiP, I am “going to work.” when I get there I sit down, focus and dig in. At /usr/lib, it never entirely felt that way for me. The place, in general, is a place I go for social events, so my time spent there isn’t as focused and isn’t as productive.

2) My Spot! (I immediately thought of Sheldon Cooper when I wrote that) I have upgraded my membership at WiP which gives me the ability to pick a desk and make it my own. I have brought in a nice sized monitor and stand, so when I am working at WiP it is a setup I am very comfortable with, since it matches my home office pretty closely. When I am working at /usr/lib, I am always working on my laptop only. That is just never going to be as productive as working with more real estate.

3) Facilities. /usr/lib wasn’t designed to be a coworking facility, so many of the things I would talk about in this category aren’t fair to compare. Having a locker to store belongings, a staff on hand to help when needed, a fridge to keep drinks, a kitchen, a phone room to step in to take a quick call. Hell, the option to have a dedicated desk where I can leave my monitor is a huge benefit.

Work/Life split

Originally my plan was to head down to WorkInProgress a couple days a week, similar to how I was using /usr/lib, but after those first couple days I was noticing that I was already feeling more productive while I was there. This past week was my first full week at WiP, and while I don’t expect to all of a sudden stop working from home in the evenings, I at least feel that I am on the right track to getting back to some sort of normalcy. Hopefully the days of spending 16 hours in front of the screen are behind me and I can start to regain that work/life split that I have been missing.

Wish me luck!

Whoops, I meant, what could be worse??

Up until a couple weeks ago, my normal practice would be to get up in the morning, sit down at the computer, open my email and open Adium. It was basically like shouting “Hello World! I’m awake and ready to answer all your questions!” The flood of emails is bad, but the flood of IMs are worse. Mostly because my (self diagnosed) OCD wouldn’t let me just ignore ‘em. I felt like I had to answer every single one. I basically felt like this:

“So why not just shut off IM?”, you say. Simple answer, I have a team I work with and it’s nice to be available to them. Unfortunately that meant being available to roughly 1400 other contacts at the same time. I was in serious need of a solution. And as usually happens, one presented itself at WordCamp.

I was sitting in the back of the room with Dre and looking over his shoulder as he was doing some work. Up popped a messenger window and he started typing to a coworker. I asked, “What IM program is that?”

“Hipchat, it’s awesome”, he said.

He explained that it let him be in direct contact with his team, and just his team.

Holy crap, why had I never heard of this? I downloaded it immediately and sent invites to everybody on my team. I now had direct access to my developers, I could create rooms to talk about specific projects with sub-sets of the team, and it even let me receive notices on my phone if something came in while I wasn’t at my desk. I was instantly in love.

The first week of not having the IM distraction was a bit weird. I was so used to the distraction, when it wasn’t there, I sorta didn’t know what to do. But, after a couple weeks, I’m really noticing a difference in my productivity during the day. It’s not perfect, but it’s a HELL of a lot better.

I still need to sort out a way to deal with emails, but, for Instant Messenger, Hipchat is definitely the answer.

Photo credit:4nitsirk, on Flickr

Just after entering the city of Hurricane, I saw the bench. I pulled over and had her take my picture. I posted it to Instagram with a note saying, “if I’ve ever told you the story of a bench in Utah, this is the bench.” I got asked about the story and since it’s too much to type in a comment, I promised to post it here. So, here you go… The Bench in Utah story.

Several years back, Chris and I came up to Zion and really enjoyed our time here. We liked it so much that we decided we wanted to come back and bring the kids. Part of the reason we liked it so much had something to do with one of the best burgers we had ever had. A bacon bleu cheese burger from Wildcat Willies. The bacon itself was amazing.

One Saturday we woke up and entirely out of the blue decided that for breakfast we wanted to go to Wildcat Willies for bacon and eggs. We woke the kids up, threw ‘em in the car and headed out for a 3 hour drive to get bacon. Around that time I was heavily in to photography. So I was excited to be heading back to Zion with all my equipment to take a bunch of photos. But really, the bacon played a big part in our motivation that morning.

As we made our way up highway 9, I saw the bench that was painted like and old-time American flag. I told Chris, “on our way home, I want to stop and take some pictures of the bench.” We continued on and stopped at Wildcat Willies. During breakfast our daughter spilled an entire cup of tea in her lap. This put a serious damper on our plans to go in to Zion and do some hiking. So instead, we stopped and got her some sweatpants and then hopped back in the car to head back home. So it really did end up being a 6 hour trip just for breakfast.

On our way back home, we saw the bench again and I pulled the car over to take some pictures. Chris and the kids were going to stay in the car. I hopped out and popped open the back of the car to grab all my gear. I crossed the street, took a couple dozen photos and headed back to the car. I opened up the back, put all my gear back inside and closed it up. I opened up the driver’s door, got in and said, “If you look behind us right now…” at which point all 3 of them quickly turned around to look out the back window, “you can see where I farted.”

We all had a big laugh. OK, probably me more than them. But, I’m happy to report that the phrase has remained and is still used from time to time.

So there you have it, the Bench in Utah story.

I already knew that I enjoyed helping people learn (especially about WordPress), but what I didn’t realize was exactly how much I enjoyed it. That moment when you see the lightbulb go on over somebody’s head when it finally clicks for them, I’m telling you, there’s nothing like it. It’s addicting and I want more.

I’m trying to figure out how I want to move forward in 2013. I want to make available what people are interested in learning about and more importantly HOW they want to learn. For some, the small classroom setting is great. They can ask questions and don’t feel like they are holding up a huge room of people. For others, they’d rather be at home in their PJs watching a video online.

With that being said, I could use your help. I’ve put together a form with some questions about training options and what you’d be most interested. Your input will help shape where I focus my efforts leading up to 2013 and beyond.

[gravityform id="5" name="pick your training" title="false" description="false"]

Photo Credit: Nationaal Chief on Flickr.

A few months back I was absolutely humbled when I received an invite to a fairly exclusive event; The WordPress Community Summit. This was to be the first of its kind, invite only meetup/conference with about 100 people from the WordPress community in attendance. People from all over the globe were planning to attend. We were told this wasn’t going to be just another WordCamp event. The plan was to bring a wide range of people crossing all different aspects of the WordPress community in to one location and have discussions about anything/everything to do with the WordPress project.

I’m not going to lie, for as amazing as this sounded, I had some concerns. The event wasn’t going to have any scheduled talks and would be run as an unconference. I’m a fan of the unconference format, but the process of having the crowd write down topics they want to hear/talk about and then getting them in to some sort of schedule can take up a fair amount of time. And since the event was only going to be one day, I was afraid that we’d lose out on some valuable time and that we wouldn’t really have the time necessary to actually get in to any real discussions. Plus, you know how it can be when you get a group of people who are all REALLY passionate about a topic together in one room. It has the possibility of turning in to a bitch-session where people continue to raise their voice to make sure they are heard.

I’m thrilled to say that all of my concerns were put to rest before lunch time.

In the next day or so there will be a series of posts on the community summit site detailing the notes taken from each session, so I’m not going to dig too far in to each. Each session also had an action item or two that came out it. I’ll save those for the CS blog as well. But here’s a list of the sessions I attended.

After a bit of a delayed start, we all met upstairs to pitch session ideas. The overwhelming majority of the people had topic ideas. As expected, it took a bit of time to let each person have their turn on the mic to pitch their topic idea. Once all the pitches were done, the schedule was laid out and we broke out in to groups for the first session of the day.

The first session I attended was “Getting recognition for non-coders”. The idea being, there are tons of people who spend countless hours building WordPress in ways that don’t get the recognition on the credits page like developers do. For example, documentation, help screens, wireframes, etc.

Next I attended the “WordPress Foundation Transparency.” As a WordCamp developer, this was one of the topics that was really important to me. The conversation started by each of us tabling our main issues/concerns. e all had very similar concerns. Money, control, who’s doing what. It was refreshing to hear that many of the concerns we had have more to do with perception and information dissemination.

Before lunch, a rep from each of the discussion groups gave a quick summary of what was talked about and the action items for the group. This was great because after hearing all the topics that were going to de covered, I really wanted to attend almost all of them.

After lunch there were back-to-back sessions to discuss WordCamps and meetups. My plan in the morning was to sit in on both of those. But, my concerns were handled really well in the foundation conversation so I decided to check out a couple other sessions instead.

Next I sat in on the “How WP Businesses can Give Back” discussion which ended up centering more around how business and work closer with the core team to figure out where their efforts could provide the biggest bank for the buck.

And the last session was “The death of a plugin”. We started out talking about how to go about killing of a plugin you’ve released to the repo, but no longer want to maintain. We talked about forking dormant plugins or taking over development of abandoned plugins and all sorts of variations on the theme. We also talked about how we push the related information to the plugin repo pages.

Once the sessions were over, Matt led a quick discussion about what we need to do to make sure WordPress isn’t dead in 5 years. He had some pretty interesting stats around mobile usage and performance. We then had a bit of a group Q&A before we wrapped up for the day.

The things I liked most

• Action items. Instead of just talking to hear ourselves talk, each session ended with a set of action items. Some pretty damn good ones, too.
• The format. Even though an unconference format has the possibility to go awry, it really is the best way to let everybody have a say in what gets talked about.
• Lack of social media. Ok, that’s going to sound like a weird one, but, rather than everybody being head down in their laptop or iphone, people were spending their time being involved and engaged in what was going on in the room. That’s not always how it goes at conferences.
• The attendees. It was great to meet people in the WP community from all over the world.
• Renting a house with friends. Rather than each of us renting hotel rooms, a group of us rented a 4 bedroom vacation house. It was great to to spend Saturday evening and most of Sunday at the house hanging out in a comfortable location and talk shop.

The things I would change

• Locations are so tough. Don’t get me wrong, Tybee is a great place to visit, but it would be great to be near an airport hub which I think would lower the cost for everybody.
• An planned dev-day. Many Dev days that take place as part of WordCamps end up just being a chat session. I’d love to have spent the final hour of the first day breaking up in to groups of people who planned to meet the next day and get to work on the action items that came out of the conference.

Even the things I’d change are pretty small in comparison to how great the day was and how much I got out of it. If I’m lucky enough to recieve an invite again next year, I’ll definitely make the trip.

High five to the organizers. Also, high five to the attendees who came with open minds and an interest in sharing, talking, listening and learning.

What’s new in version 2
- Has support for all standard Genesis child themes (not counting marketplace themes, yet)
- A new “advanced” option that lets you modify the side of the header from the Appearance->Headers page

That’s about it for now. I’m looking for any and all feedback. And, if there’s a feature you think I should add, let me know that, too.

For the past few weeks I’ve been compiling a list of plugins I like that cover a wide variety of functionality like spam cleanup, seo, contact forms and a ton more. 25 plugins in all. For the most part, these are all plugins I’ve used (a couple were suggestions from friends) on a regular basis. Even so, I decide to set up test installation of WordPress and walk through the process of installing each plugin from scratch, configuring it and using it. It wasn’t too long before I realized something; even though I’ve been using most of these plugins for a long time, many of them had far more functionality than I knew!

I use WordPress every day, but for this class I took a step back and tried to look at it using the eyes of a new user. In doing so, I found a wealth of new information. I spent several extra hours digging through each plugin and really getting to know the settings pages and the functionality within. The end result being a better class for the students and a ton of extra knowledge for myself.

I’m excited for the class tomorrow. I’m sure the students will ask questions that I haven’t anticipated. Just one more chance to dig deeper and keep learning. I can’t wait!

[photo by mike52ad on flickr]