Digital Archives - Page 6 of 10

bbPress Complete – Announcement & Launch Party

Otherwise known as “my big news from April as my April Challenge“.

I have written a book.

A genuine, published, “buy it in Waterstones if you ask for it but can buy it off Amazon no problem” book.

I was approached a few months ago by a publishing firm asking if I wanted pitch for the possible writing of a book. After a bit of research, and a pitch, I was accepted and for the last two months I’ve been scribbling away at a book.

It’s been hard, it’s been tough (writers block is so much worse when you have deadlines), but on or around the 19th of July, bbPress Complete (a provisional title) is expected to launch, all being well.

I haven’t done it alone, so a huge thank you to various people: Cass Brookes, Shane Jones, Alex Moss, John Wilson, Jem Turner, Joost de Valk, Nile Flores, Emily Clark & Adam Croft who have helped me or offered to help me in the process.

During one of those periods of writers block, I went out for a drink with Shane, and we decided that the best way to celebrate the release of the book would be a launch party on or around the launch date. As tonight I finally confirmed the venue for the book launch, I feel it’s a good point to share it with people.

The event will be held in The Nook in Chorlton, and is invite only. There will be free tickets available the week before the event, but for now, to gauge interest, there are only paid tickets, which includes a signed copy of the book (either at the event or as soon as I get the copies), and a free drink. To know how much I love buying drinks for people, that’s worth the price of admission itself.

To buy tickets, or to read more about the event, please visit Eventbrite.

So yeah, it’s been a secret for ages, I’m just delighted to share it. Feel free to ask questions/congratulate/mock me now. All I can say is yes I had a proof reader and no it’s not written in Welsh.

When Theme & Plugin Developers Work Together – Everyone Wins

So a blog post that has been doing the rounds in the WordPress Community has been “Do not buy WordPress themes that bundle premium plugins” by Coen Jacobs from WooThemes. In it it is a exasperation of the arms race experienced by many plugin developers when dealing with some theme developers, who are happy to include premium plugins in their theme.

As introduced in the post, one of the issues of including plugin functionality in themes is that you increase the load time and – in the desperate attempt to be all things to all men – you actually end up bloating your site with features you cannot replicate or don’t need. For example, you may notice this blog running slightly faster over the last few days. This is largely due to removing one plugin that was a legacy from the previous design, who’s functionality is no longer needed. Imagine if that was buried deep within a theme? It would take me as an experienced coder a while to remove the code, and a less experienced individual would probably just be stuck with the functionality.

It has gotten so bad now that at 3 Door Digital we now try to avoid buying themes, as wrestling with them to get them working takes longer than say using Underscores or Peadig to design from scratch.

The Premium issue is a problem, and is something that it took me a while to figure out a solution with WP Email Capture as with WordPress, all derivative code needs to be GPL compatible (which, in my case, it is). It’s something I’ve dealt with a couple of times as theme developers bundled the premium versions of my plugins with their theme, promising extra functionality. When you buy a premium plugin, you don’t just buy the plugin code, you also usually buy access to support and updates, which people can remove should they desire (Gravity Forms – for example – is a GPL plugin but has a solid TOS. I’m speaking with somebody now to get a similar for WP Email Capture). Whilst GPL developers generally are quite a helpful bunch, if you stop them feeding their kids (or in my case, my Pie & Pringle addiction) then – if you knowingly buy a theme with premium plugins attached – you should be able to understand that they may not be so willing to help if things go wrong.

Unfortunately, customers are often caught in the middle of this, and suffer the headache when they are stuck between a plugin developer who has no record of the premium customer, and a theme developer who doesn’t have a clue what they’ve packaged with their theme. The worst case scenario has been for me when a customer used a cracked version of a premium theme (that injected footer links) that was bundled with a cracked version of my premium plugin (that emailed every signup that ever signed up to a dodgy email address). This hack broke when the plugin owner tried to remove the footer links. Of course, both the theme developer and myself were unable to support it, and in the end we gave a copy of our plugin and theme, unhacked, for free.

I should add that I do have great working relationships with some top notch theme designers. Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs has been absolutely crucial in making my plugins more friendly to designers (you should check out his themes by the way), and my top affiliate has just topped three figures in commission last month alone (on top of his theme sales), so it can be rewarding working when plugin and theme designers work together.

So please do it! It’s been a negative rant, but if it means that more theme designers and plugin developers working on ways of complementing their products, rather than stepping on each others toes, then the community and customers will all benefit.

May Challenge Update & June Challenge

So this month has been a huge month for me this month, with various projects finally coming to the forefront, and hard work paying off. I also made my glorious return to the ring, with me appearing in a Britannia Wrestling show in Prestatyn, North Wales in the Bank Holiday Weekend just gone. I was nervous but since the show I’ve been grinning like a loon, it was such a good night for all!

So onto the challenges? Well first of all, I’ve decided that “it’s a secret” is a terrible excuse for a blog post, so I’ve changed it and given the challenges cryptic names, rather than being overly explicit or quiet. As such, I’ve given May’s task a name.

May Challenge – “Limited Edition”: Completed (5 Days Late)

So I’ve had to quickly rewrite this section as instead of being secret, we’re good to go and announce this.

I’ve formed my own Limited Company.

It’s mainly for my plugin work and the stuff kept really secret in the April Challenge that will be announced very soon, rather than any desire to go freelance (I’m very happy at 3 Door Digital and not going anywhere, thank you!). It was brought about with a chat at the last Mini Sascon in The Ramada hotel (where – apparently – people from The X-Factor were staying). My plugins were beginning to earn quite a bit which meant two things:-

I didn’t want to be sued by some trigger happy ambulance chaser which would see me lose everything.
I wanted to be able to sleep at night knowing The IRS won’t be knocking on my door.

After sitting down with a small business accountant, and laying everything out for them (in particular a “am I really on enough to justify going Limited?”), we decided that going Limited was the best option.

It’s quite exciting actually, well not the whole tax paying and filing documents thing, but the fact that it’s come to the point now that taking serious steps with making the earnings from my plugins a wee bit more official is quite nice.

I’ve still loads to do, but the first big step is done. Exciting times!

June Challenge – Saving Stuff

One of the goals for 2013 back in January is to save more cash. I commented on that post that when I moved from Manual Link Building to 3 Door Digital, my savings took a bit of a hit. You will be delighted to know however that since then I have recovered and exceeded my savings amount from pre-moving jobs time. Hurrah!

But it’s a bit slow recently, I put away a tenth of my wage, and I kind of want to increase it, as such, my goal for June is to place one fifth of my wage into savings.

It should be fairly achievable, it’s more to realign my principles. At times I’ve been good (I now have home made sandwiches most days in work), and bad (including one incident when, in a rush, I bought a train ticket, yet forgot to pick it up from the machine when it dropped down. Bellend.), so it’s more to be more careful.

Thankfully, due to a lost credit card and no football season, I’m not expecting June to be particularly expensive. Something will crop up though. All in all, I have an (unjustified) reputation for being a mingebag. I might as well live up to it.

Domain Names For Sale

I’ve scribbled my monthly challenge post already (that’ll be live in the next day or two), but just a heads up for now: I’m selling a bunch of domain names.

At the moment, there’s auctions running on Domain Lore and a couple of Sedo Holding pages. These are projects that I had big ideas for but didn’t get off the ground. Hopefully somebody will find them useful. Prices are listed but happy to entertain serious offers for them!

Domainlore Domains For Sale

Sedo Domains For Sale

I probably should get a page up for this…

WordPress 10th Anniversary Celebrations in Manchester

So on Monday I attended the WordPress 10th Anniversary Celebrations Manchester, held in The Odder Bar. I believe it is the first time I have attended an event more than just the Manchester WordPress community as held at MWUG, as there were a lot of unfamiliar faces. Nevertheless, I roped in Shane to come along with me.

The night began with an interview with Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, on how the software was formed and how it grew. It was an interesting talk, particularly in how WordPress could further grow (Mike stressed he had a keen eye in the development of WordPress accessibility), so it was good to hear how WordPress grew early on in its development. I could imagine that the interview he gave would be less codey than the one he will give at Sascon. Not sure many of the delegates will know what Gopher is. Still check it out if you are there, it will be fascinating!

After a large helping of food, the next event was a quiz. But not just any quiz, oh no, a WordPress quiz! I must admit I usually go to quizzes being quite a useful member, but beyond correcting a question (as I heard of the Ella Fitzgerald release, and it was in the 2.X development cycle), I was nigh on useless and my team carried me. There were some elements of controversy, namely the “write the minimum code used to power a WordPress hook”, but overall, our team, ‘hilariously’ titled “TurdPress”, won. Hooray! Thanks to Interconnect IT for the prize of The Auditor & Human Made for the free year of WP Remote.

After it was mingling time, and this was where I realised how big the WordPress community was. Everybody there was fascinating. Also in the team thrown together was a Magician & a Hypnotist: James Anthony, who did this amazing trick.

The time came to cut the cake (that used the proper WordPress logo), and we were given a parting gift of true Mancunian style: a WordPress Pint Glass.

All in all, I had an amazing night! Loved every minute and I do need to get myself to more WordPress events. To Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little & any other WordPress contributor, big or small: thank you.

Here is to the next 10 years!