February 28, 2015
Warming up to ManageWP.org
I’ll admit, I was skeptical when ManageWP.org launched.
“Here’s another Digg,” I thought.
Do we really need another source of WordPress news? Will this just turn into a link farm? A popularity contest is the last thing WordPress needs. So I would pop in every now and again, dropping in some links and up-voting here and there. I wasn’t fully engaged with it as a source, because heck, I was doing my own twist on coverage in the industry.
It even stung a few times when I would submit my content and it got flagged. I think hyper-focused WordPress developers still aren’t wiling to open up to other angles of business as it relates to the WordPress ecosystem — but that’s another discussion.
No worries, this is par for the course when you have a community rating system and at the end of the day, it ultimately makes it the compelling reason to be involved.
February 12, 2015
Interview with Matt Mullenweg
Today, I’m excited to finally have Matt Mullenweg join us on the Matt Report podcast.
We’re going to satisfy our typical entrepreneur appetite by diving into his day-to-day routine and we’ll learn what it’s like being the CEO of Automattic. Want to know where Mullenweg’s vision for WordPress is going to take us? No problem, we’ve got you covered.
For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty of the WordPress community, we’ll discuss his take on .com vs .org and our latest debate — the purpose of the Jetpack plugin.
February 5, 2015
Innovating WordPress Themes
Recently, Tom McFarlin brought the idea of innovating WordPress themes to center stage.
I always find his posts thought-provoking and I felt this one in particular warranted a blog post of my own. Sorry for not leaving you the comment love, Tom.
The following isn’t intended to debunk his idea of innovation or why we should or shouldn’t be thinking about it. What I’m about to discuss here is something that, as a product developer, I bake into the philosophy behind our product line at Slocum Themes.
For better or for worse, a lot of this stems from my time growing up in the auto industry and living within that culture for the first 26 years of my life. It’s the values that I learned from being in that business which have brought me to where I am today.
February 4, 2015
Reverse Engineer Part 2: Interviewing my target
Last week I showed you how I reverse engineer my competition in 10 minutes.
Today, Nathan Wright of Theme of The Crop joins the Matt Report podcast to tell us how accurate my findings were. We’ll also explore what he’s doing to improve on the weak points I had identified in this analysis of his digital business.
So how did Nate react to my “take down” of his website? Let’s find out!
January 30, 2015
The Plight of The Cobbler
One day you woke up and said to yourself that you wanted to control our own destiny. No more listening to the man or long hours stuck in a cubical.
“This podcast said I could do it!” you shout. So you went to work.
You found your first few customers through friends of friends and that extra $500 going into the weekend was damn nice. Back then it was easy, because you were honest. You were honest with yourself and your customer.
“Hey, I’m just starting out with this whole web design thing, but I can do it for ya.” You didn’t know it, but you were setting the client to consultant expectation. Somewhere along the way you’ve lost that.
The Cobbler finds herself lost in the work and not in the journey.
January 28, 2015
DigitalOcean for WordPress Hosting & Staging
My father grew up tinkering with cars and I grew up tinkering with servers.
Back in the day, I was a computer salesman at Circuit City. Small Office/Home Office was the name of the department – team SOHO. Funny, as if people were only buying PC’s and technology for office work! A customer came in one day looking for the cheapest computer he could buy as he rummaged through the open box specials. I sold him a $250 NEC tower 450mhz Pentium II w/ 512mb of RAM. Today’s smartphone is 25x more powerful (yet oddly enough still lags.)