As a general rule in life, you should not apologize for things that are not your fault. Years (decades?) of the half-true mantra of “the customer is always right” have infected the customer service industry to the point where we are now apologizing for things that are not our fault, and using apologies as a…
Yesterday, a blog post started making the rounds in the WordPress community with an incendiary headline. “WordPress Bans Developers from Using WP in Plugin Names” First, the news was mostly fake and I am not here to really discuss what has been better discussed elsewhere. Second, the response was a lot of people quickly freaking…
It’s easy to forget that your users may have never done this before. This morning I reported for jury duty to my local small town courthouse. As I left the house I remarked to my wife that I was intrigued by the prospect of experiencing first-hand something I’d only seen in overly dramatized TV shows,…
Over the weekend I updated Better Click To Tweet to a new version, and both premium add-ons got that glossy coat of paint to match. Since the beginning, it’s always been my training ground as I’ve learned to support a product, sell a premium product, learned to product manage a product (I outsourced much of…
I used to view buying a website like I view ordering a meal at a nice restaurant. Figure out what I want, figure out the price, and if the two concepts meet with no friction given the amount of money in my bank account, go for it. The meal is prepared and enjoyed, and then pretty…
I develop (and support) WordPress plugins. Recently a user of one of them had installed it and another plugin, and they were not playing nicely with one another, resulting in broken links on his site. The other developer was not responding to inquiries, and when I installed the offending plugin in my test environment, it…
Jim Richter probably didn’t wake up that morning planning to be the subject of international news. He was most likely just going to spend it like every other Thursday, being pastor of a small church in Johnson City, TN. I’ll bet there was coffee involved with his master plan. Instead, his website got hacked to…
Think of WordPress as a package delivered to your doorstep by the FedEx gal. Think of your WordPress theme as a supplemental package delivered by UPS. Think of your 20 different WordPress plugins as an stack of smaller packages delivered by UPS, FedEx, the US Postal service, a local courier service, and one or two…
I’m a web guy, and my site got hacked. There’s almost no explaining the sinking feeling when you log into your web site and find it hacked. But because I had a backup plan, getting my site back online and free of malware was simple and painless. It turned what would have been days of…
Even the best content will often not be shared online, despite hours of effort and even significant financial investment. This post is my deep dive into what makes some content get shared, and how you can tee up your content to be shareable. There are 3 reasons why people aren’t sharing your posts: People Don’t…
When you call something “simple,” “easy,” or “self-explanatory” in product documentation, you’re insulting your reader. You should stop doing that. Let’s put it in another context to illustrate my point. Scene: local auto repair shop. Your mechanic emerges from under the hood holding a small piece of rubber between grease-marked pointer finger and thumb. “Here’s…
But first, an attempt to empathize with the core team. The reality that many of us on the outside need to grasp is that Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 needs to ship, and soon. The urgency, far from being a conspiracy theory or hostile takeover, is that it’s already late at this point. Many of the…
The leadership of the WordPress project must be transparent with the “why” of the release date of WordPress version 5.0 and the new editor. Initially, Matt Mullenweg said “April” during the last State of the Word address. There was an audible laugh from my side of the room, but more importantly, there was no “why”…
This post isn’t really about the GDPR legislation, though it’s the latest piece of legislation out of the European Union that has the world’s attention, so it got me thinking again about what this post is really about. This post is about jurisdiction. Specifically, why does the European Union creating a law have any effect…
Starting today, you can beta test pre-released versions of Better Click to Tweet, to test new functionality, ensure compatibility with your environment, and/or lend a hand to aid in development. With version 5.5+, there’s a method for you to update to the release before it alerts you to an update on the plugins page of…
It’s two days after #WCRaleigh 2017, so I thought it’d be fun to get some Words Pressed about my experience this year as a first-time Lead Organizer. A lot has changed since the time I was an accidental organizer in 2015. The things that went really well Chris Lema unsurprisingly made for a fantastic Keynote…
Last week I added a feature to Better Click To Tweet for WordPress that continues to cause it to live up to it’s name. You can officially change the “Click To Tweet” anchor text on a per-box basis, now. Here’s what I mean: Before, while it was possible to change the text that is tweeted (kind…
Ever updated a plugin, and had it break some functionality on your site? First of all, here’s hoping that you didn’t do that on the live site, because shame on you for cowboy coding. But now’s not the time to chastise you for that: it’s time to fix the problem. If you still have…