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    Do We Need ANOTHER WordPress Hosting Company?

    WordPress hosting companies are a dime a dozen these days, and if you’re going to be one, you need to differentiate yourself. This could be by offering managed WooCommerce hosting, adding on a theme shop for all customers, or creating a fantastic local development environment that integrates perfectly.

    When it comes to WordPress host WPX, there are 3 features that differentiate them from competitors. Two of them, their CDN and Migrations, aren’t totally unique.

    But their support guarantee to get your site back online as fast as possible for free: now that’s a host of a different color. Check out the video to get my thoughts.

    Check out WPX

    Note: this video is a paid review.

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    A Simple Solution to Selling Workshops

    Back in August, I wrote about Occam’s Razor and a simple solution to launching projects. In fact, Occam’s Razor is something I write about regularly.

    And it’s because I’m an over-thinker who’s trying really hard not to be. I spend too much time thinking through implementations, finding the perfect tools, and doing it once. But the beauty of the web is that we can iterate. Plan enough to launch, and then continue to work on it. And with my latest solution to a new project, I think I’m finally learning.

  • The way to learn WordPress is not by contributing

    Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word speech, where he covered everything that has happened in WordPress this year, and what we can expect moving forward.

    He mentioned the incredible growth of WordPress over other platforms, and even mentioned learn.wordpress.org and the learning resource it’s budding into.

    As always, he extolled the virtues of open source and the importance of contributing. He spent several minutes on Five for the Future, a program encouraging companies who make money with WordPress to give 5% of their time to the open source project.

    He also talked about how creators could now contribute by adding their work to the Openverse.

    As I’ve stated many times, if you find value in something, you should absolutely ensure it continues to exist, either by paying for it, or in this case, contributing. WordPress has provided me immeasurable value over the years, and I’ve tried to contribute where I could.

    But when he was asked by Allie Nimmons and Michelle Frechette what new/young people can do to learn WordPress, he said that it’s easier than ever to contribute. Matt was basically saying if you want to learn WordPress, contribute to WordPress. While I encourage people to contribute, I don’t think the best way to learn WordPress is by contributing.

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    Announcing WP Learning Paths

    The WordPress ecosystem has seen big changes over the last couple of years. The acquisitions seem to be coming fortnightly, full site editing is rapidly evolving, and new areas of expertise, from site builder to DevRel are taking shape.

    It’s a lot to think about!

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    Should You Really Write in the WordPress Editor?

    Earlier this week, my friend Justin Ferriman wrote a great post called Matt’s Page Builder, where he talks about the block editor trying to be two things: a place to write, and a page builder…and it’s more like the latter.

    I’m in agreement. WordPress has considerably shifted from a simple blogging platform. Matt himself has said he wants it to be the, “operating system of the web,” which means a richer feature set, especially around creating and laying out content…but not necessarily writing.

    But I’d argue that the WordPress editor has never really been the best place to write.

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    Do we REALLY Need to Own Our Platform?

    Last week’s Facebook outage brought the onslaught of common takes we hear when something like that happens. Calls to go outside, read, achieve world peace — you know, the standard responds. But in the WordPress space, there was also the predictable platitudes about how you should own your own platform. But my question for those people, and something to consider: do we really need to own our own platform?

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    Stop Focusing on WordPress Searches and Serve Your Customers

    When my faucet was leaking water into the cabinet below, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t even know the question to ask. So I just googled, “Leaky faucet.” I found some YouTube videos, tried what they recommended, made it worse. Went to Home Depot…twice. They told me “Moen” was good for replacement parts. I ordered parts on Amazon. They didn’t fit. Nothing worked. 4 weeks went by.

    Turned out, until we got 2 different quotes from professionals, we didn’t know the problem was unfixable and it needed to be replaced. Maybe if I had known a bit more about how faucets worked, I would have known what to look for.

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    The Wix / WordPress Campaign Exposes Some Ugly Trends in Both Communities

    Let me start with a full disclosure: I got the Bose headphones. Wix reached out in January and cryptically wanted to send me “swag” because I’m a “WordPress influencer.” If it weren’t for my Year of Opportunity, I may have passed them up completely. I’m grateful they selected me, and find more humor in the campaign than malice. But as this, and the WordPress community’s reaction to it, has been rattling around in my head all week, there are a few thoughts I’d like to share.

    Read More “The Wix / WordPress Campaign Exposes Some Ugly Trends in Both Communities”
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    New Plug-in: Latest Post Redirect

    One thing I often forget to do is update social links when I’m promoting a new blog post or podcast episode. Especially on Instagram, I’ll say something like, “link in the profile,”1 only to forget to add the link to the profile! Services like Linktree help a little, but you still need to update. Well over a couple of days, I built a plugin to help me (and hopefully you) with this little problem.

    Read More “New Plug-in: Latest Post Redirect”