Ben is a recovering pharisee, a web guy, a passable guitar player (as long as you're not near Nashville), and the type of guy you'd want on your team in a game of Mad Gab.
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Screams “I like to save money, but I still like nice things,” dontchathink?
I just got a new Retina MacBook Pro last month. The only sticker I put on it (so far) is the Republic Arc due to my love affair with Republic Wireless.
It’s a pretty simple decision, given that they’re the ones who paid for it.
Didn’t think so. ‘Bout time you switched to Republic, banked the difference, and bought yourself a MacBook Pro about 18 months from now, to say thank you for being so thrifty.
PS. You’re darn right those are affiliate links in this post. If you sign up, I get even more money. I’ll use it to put Republic Wireless stickers all over my yacht.
So I got my Karma Go, and have been excited to use it when I’m out and about. Just this week the Wifi connection went out at the local YMCA (which I visit but don’t work out at… totally there for the childcare #WorkFromHomeDadProbs) and had it not been for my Karma, I’d have been sitting there smiling at my laptop wishing I could check things off my Todoist.
I don’t think I’m alone among people who understand how data works when I see an image load slowly and think “This is a 4G LTE connection and a slow loading image is a big chunk of data singulair medicine.”
When I’m paying per megabyte, I have no need to see the gif that is all the rage. In fact, I’d prefer if Chrome blocked images, videos, and all other assorted things that I am not actively trying to see, and saved me the money.
Today I discovered a chrome extension that does exactly that. Toggle it on, and all the pages you visit in that window are gloriously image-free.
One click, and Amazon doesn’t load any images. Glorious bandwidth freedom!
That’ll save data for important tasks, and make my Karma’s affordable data last even longer.
Pay as you go data that never expires deserves to be spread across as many months as possible. Sign up for Karma today!
I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at <a href="https://wpsteward This Site.com”>https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.
Still Processing how great WordCamp Raleigh 2015 was for my first time pseudo-organizing and helping out. You can expect a post about that soon. But here’s a bit of a rant that I drafted before the conference.
I see too many DIY WordPress folks trying to do these four things:
I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.
Code is Poetry, and WordCamp is a poetry slam where everybody wins.We just finished WordCamp Raleigh 2015, and I wanted to take a few minutes to verbally process what went down.
First, I was not an organizer, and feel like the height of an imposter when I call myself one, but my name tag did say “Organizer” right there on the bottom, so I suppose I was indeed an organizer.
But to be clear, there’s a process involved with becoming officially an organizer that includes being interviewed by someone with the authority to make you an organizer, and I was not.
Steve Mortiboy, who is in all senses an organizer and has been since the beginning in something like 2009, made me an off-books organizer for my role in wrangling and managing speakers/the speaker’s dinner, some AV issues, and other miscellaneous pre-conference communication on the blog.
I’d love to officially help organize next years. Here’s my high level recap with some shoutouts.
If you like the poem, support the poet. My Case for WordPress Patrons.WordPress has a tagline: “Code is Poetry.” One of my favorite things about poetry is that there are no real rules, yet there are still good poems and bad ones. Generally speaking, poetry (and really any writing) is best described as a sort of word-sculpting, where the poet dumps the contents of their brain on the page, and then goes about sorting and refining it into a poem.
That’s how a lot of code works, too (which is what makes the WordPress tagline so helpfully beautiful).
The best poets in every age of recorded history, from Shakespeare to Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, have had patrons. Patrons are people who want them to continue writing poems, because the world is a better place with poems in it. Patrons are willing to pay the expenses of an artist, even though the “services” they get are not as direct as, say, a plumber or a chef.
Poetry is not the type of thing that does well when monetized directly, e.g. “write a poem that will sell 100,000 copies” (Exhibit A: Pop-country music.)
That’s where our “code as poetry” metaphor begins to really shine, so stick with me. See, WordPress is “open source software” which means that (among other great perks) a bunch of volunteers pitch in to help make it. In most cases, the people shaping and refining the code are doing it in their spare time, and not getting paid for it. These code-poets are doing something not directly for the money.
Code, when it’s monetized directly, has the potential to devolve quickly into popups, banner ads, and phishing scams—the Rascal Flatts of web development.
When it’s everyone’s side project, being done for the benefit of the world, code is (good) poetry.
Which brings us back to the need for patrons: people who believe that what we are doing in the WordPress world is worth supporting. That’s why, for my free plugins, I’m starting a Patreon page. Here’s a video that explains in one minute what would take me 15 to coherently write out about Patreon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-IDF809fQ
I’m still going to be making and improving the plugins for free, putting them out into the wild on http://wordpress.org for folks to download and use. I’m still going to make decisions that are in the best interests of the WordPress community, and do everything that I have been doing to grow my plugin’s user base to 10,000+ overwhelmingly happy individuals. Now I’ll just do it with a digital tip jar propping open my laptop case.
If you like what I’m doing, you can chip in.
Right now, my plugins are generating revenue for me only tangentially, as I meet folks in the support forums who then hire me to do things for them.
If Code is Poetry, It's time developers started thinking about monetization like artists Share on XPatreon is a way for me to monetize the actual plugin-building process itself. No longer will it be “when I get some spare time, I’ll look into adding that feature.” If enough people like what I’m doing to chip in a few bucks per minor release, There will be better, and more frequent, minor releases (but don’t worry, you can set a maximum budget so that in the event that I go crazy with releases, you won’t be drained).
If code is poetry, it’s time developers started thinking about monetization like artists
