[ad_1] Tämä kirjoitus on luettavissa myös suomeksi. Here is Timi reading his own story aloud. From a young age, I’ve been interested in computers. That probably comes from our family tree, as my grandad was a home appliance repairer and father has had a career related to the Internet since the early 2000s dot-com boom. I remember looking at schematics of different household appliances at our grandad’s repair shop. Thinking how on earth the television game shows, where you could send a text message to “throw” a ball towards the goal on the virtual background behind the host, do work. Spending time at the computer, going thru different websites and being impressed by those. Father being head of e-commerce for a hairdressing industry chain and seeing the growth of e-commerce during the mid-2000s. At that time I was in primary school and didn’t understand much of what all that was about. And surely wouldn’t have even guessed that someday I would have a career in IT. Getting familiar with the Internet Sure, back in the days, you had MySpace, virtual horse stables, guestbooks, IRC-Galleria, and different “website builders”… everyone explored the possibilities of these tools and technologies. You almost weren’t cool if you didn’t. So of course I built a few websites mainly just for fun, like almost everyone else of my age at that time. I also purchased my first domains and made a few sites public. One of those, for a scout group, was “coded” with excel. That’s how I started learning HTML and CSS. When secondary school started, I did get really interested in sewing, and light-and-audio equipment for live productions. And politics. Copyright, patent law, freedom of information and net neutrality were hot topics around that time in Finland. I felt that the Internet I had grown with, was threatened. The Pirate Party movement had just landed in Finland and they were defending everything I believed in: open access to information and people’s online rights. Despite my young age, they welcomed me, so I got involved with registering the party for elections and in general. They used IRC for all the communications, and soon I became frustrated because of missed conversations due to shutting off the computer and thus signing off from IRC as well. That led me to assemble, install and run my first home server so I would always have IRC on. Of course, the new server intrigued me and almost invited to try out hosting the websites myself. That way I learned the basics about Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. My interest in these things was understood by only a few classmates and for everyone else, I was a bit of a weirdo. Because of that, I didn’t make many friends from the same age group with me – and that stays true to this day. Finding WordPress At some point in all this, I found WordPress. It was around 2009 and version 2.8 when I installed WordPress for the first time. I immediately started looking for ways to modify and extend the website. One thing lead to another. Soon I had installed WordPress quite a few more times, and even helped one of my friends to set up a website for their parliamentary election campaign. For getting the timeline right in this post, I looked up my old websites and found out that in 2010 I had published a guide on how to translate WordPress into Finnish and even offered some theme translations to download. And yet I still didn’t think that IT, servers, websites or WordPress could be my career. When secondary school ended, I applied to study live production. Like audio and lights in concerts and all that stuff. Didn’t get selected for that school, because of the low numbers on the diploma. That was devastating. But little did I know. The third school I applied to, selected me and there I was, going to study multimedia for three years. Photography, video editing, design and a little bit of web development. The most inspiring and toughest times of life at the same time Looking back, this was one of the most pivotal points in my life. Three years in that school taught me how to be creative with design and boosted my self-confidence in coding skills. Starting almost from the first web development classes, teachers saw my skills and encouraged me to continue coding. I started helping other students during the classes, as most of the web development stuff was already familiar to me. I really enjoyed the print design classes, photography and school in general after a long time. I had also become active in running one of the few Internet cafes in Helsinki that were left in the early 2010s. At the time, we were one of the few places which served only vegetarian food, had open wifi and laptops available for customers. As I was interested in tech and some knowledge, the natural thing was to be involved with maintaining those laptops and the website for the cafe. Some same founders of that cafe cooperative had founded another cooperative in the early 2000s, to offer reasonably priced hosting and email services for associations and other NGOs. After some time, they invited me to join and soon I started helping with server upkeep and customer service. I would also make a number of websites with WordPress for our clients. For the first time in my life, I was getting some money from doing things on the Internet. I started to feel that I had found what I want to do in my life. Then my partner at the time did get severely ill mentally. That started to affect me as well, and the last year of school with one half at on-the-job training and another half at school doing a bigger final project was very emotional and filled with deep worry. During that year we broke up and that led to depression. I didn’t go to school.
Continue readingTag Archives: World
Making The World A Better Place One Line Of Code At A Time
[ad_1] Este ensayo también está disponible en español. How I Met WordPress It seems like only yesterday that I thought to myself… There have to be a better way to do this? At that time I was working as a designer for a company dedicated to sports and we were working internally on a kind of CMS to digitize our Football News magazine, but the result was horrendous, the interface did not exist, it constantly crashed and it was full of bugs. That’s how in the year 2008-2009 in an Internet search I discovered WP, its version at that time 2.5, I couldn’t get us to use WP as a CMS and the internal solution won. But there was one seed planted. At that time I used WordPress in a very simple way, my background was a graphic designer, I didn’t know anything about PHP, much less about programming, but studying the WP code I was able to make my first themes, which by the way were terrible. I learned HTML and CSS, at the same time I started taking Programming courses, especially in PHP, and that’s how I started this adventure. The first years were literally learning on my own, in my bubble, then I started to add the word web developer in my resume, I found a job in a company as a designer and web master, I designed gif banners, magazine ads, brochures and the website , this company had its page in ASP and since it was very complicated to update it, at least for me, I gave myself the task of migrating it to WordPress, it was 2014 and WP was in version 3.9, this was my first job in which I did everything from the design to the development and programming of the theme, in it I put into practice everything I had learned until then. Community In 2016, I met Roberto Remedios, my tattoo artist who was also his tattoo artist, told him that if didn’t know me?, Costa Rica is a small country where one way or another we all have friends in common, he told him that my passion was WordPress, when we met we didn’t stop talking about how cool it was, but what caught my attention the most was the word Community. Community what was that?, I had spent so many years working on my own that I didn’t know that it even existed, my concept of Open Source was simply something free. Roberto convinced me that same year to go to WordCamp Miami, it was my first camp, meeting the community behind WP was something that impressed me a lot, the talks, the desire to teach and learn from all the participants, and above all to collaborate with the community, wow everything changed for me. When we got back, Roberto and I started talking about the possibility of holding a WordCamp in San José, Costa Rica. Part of that process is giving talks before the camp as a way to promote it, and as a member of the newly founded WordPress Costa Rica group, it was time for me to give a talk. It was the first time I spoke in front of the public since my student days, I remember how nervous I was, my talk revolved around page builders, there was no Gutenberg back then, I managed to get the Meetup sponsored, there were snacks, swags, A lot of people came, it was incredible. Colleagues who participated that day in that Meetup, are still an active part of the community. I gave that same talk at WordCamp and it was even more stressful, because my computer did not turn on, at that moment they lent me a computer, but oh surprise I could not run my test site, after 20min I was able to solve the problem, the JavaScript was disabled. I was already sweating profusely, red with shame, in the end I was able to give the talk and everything ended well. WordCamp San Jose, it was incredible, it was hard work, very rewarding, it was a success, never before had I felt so good professionally, years had passed, without sharing something that I like so much with anyone, suddenly we had a community, we meet regularly, and share about what we are most passionate about. Recently my talks revolve around making my local community aware of new WordPress trends, I collaborate as an administrator of the WordPress Costa Rica group. Outside Costa Rica The second year that I attended WordCamp Miami, I participated as a volunteer, and I had the opportunity to interact with many of the humans that I follow on social media, and then I was encouraged to send talks and participate in the WordCamps that take place in my region. Eager to share what I have learned, to date I have participated as a volunteer, speaker, and organizer in my city Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico and in the first Central American WordCamp which was held online. Then came the talks in another language, I have had the opportunity to give talks in Rome, Italy, I participated as a volunteer in the WordCamp US, where I had the opportunity to meet colleagues and the CEO of a company that I admire a lot, this was in Nashville , U.S. seeing colleagues with whom I have had the privilege of working today, my circle of friends expanded. Also had participate in online conferences, such as GatsbyConf, JavaScript For WordPress and at WordCamp EU 2021. I like to share and talk about JAMStack, especially with GatsbyJS and WordPress as a headless CMS. Professional Path I have a lot to thank WordPress for, the first thing it brought was the curiosity to learn programming, then remote work. I started working for an agency located in Austin, Texas, with several collaborators in Costa Rica, it was the year 2017, they hired me for my knowledge in WordPress, it was not only the first time that
Continue readingA World Where (Some) Block Development Is Merely a Templating System With No Build Process? – WP Tavern
[ad_1] What if WordPress developers lived in a world where we could create PHP-based templates that would output data on the front end and handle editable fields via the block editor? Or, we had a system where we could create blocks without a build step? While there are many reasons the modern WordPress editor is not the best fit for everyone just yet, one stumbling block has been building custom interface components. The ecosystem has a deep history of creating bespoke solutions for clients using PHP. These have been custom meta boxes and form fields in the classic editor screen for the most part. When WordPress 5.0 launched with its block editor, it turned the world upside down, often leaving agencies and freelancers with no way to move forward without dedicating massive resources to learning React to build blocks or interact with the new editing screen. The solution? Stick with what you know. It was cheaper and already seemed to do the job well. As we talk about the support window for the Classic Editor plugin, the WordPress project needs people to provide tools for this segment of the ecosystem if it ever plans on bringing them along for the ride. Solutions such as ACF Pro and Genesis Custom Blocks have bridged some of the technical gaps. However, the user experience can be sub-par when using server-side rendering in the block editor. That method works well for some types of blocks but not all. We need to take this one step more. Mark Jaquith, a lead WordPress developer, shared a few questions from Helen Hou-Sandí, another lead developer, around this idea and a basic concept about what this might look like: Weekend exploration, egged on and sparked by @helenhousandi: “What if building custom blocks for the Block Editor was as easy as supplying attributes and a block of HTML? What if this produced React editing code and PHP rendering code without a build step?” pic.twitter.com/r86Phu88SX — Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) August 30, 2021 Hou-Sandí followed this with a detailed post on the concept, but she pointed out that this is merely an exploratory phase. “The React-based WordPress block editor (sometimes referred to as Gutenberg) is a powerful tool for WYSIWYG editing that continues to prove to be somewhere between a speed bump and a roadblock for long-time WordPress developers who historically have been more PHP-centric,” she wrote in the post. If you are a WordPress developer, there is a not-so-small chance that you are thinking, Yep, I have hit a few of those speed bumps and crashed into that roadblock a few times. This is unlikely news to you. What might start winning hearts and minds is acknowledging and understanding where much of the problem lies for custom development. “By leveraging the familiar parts of PHP-based templating and creating a bridge that demonstrates the power of React when combined with the markup and styling already being done for the front-end, we can de-duplicate code, help demystify the critical role of JavaScript in modernizing WordPress, and serve as an on-ramp for PHP-centric developers to create compelling and delightful 1:1 live preview editing experiences,” wrote Hou-Sandí. This all boils down to the process of, essentially, writing some template code that works on both the front-end and editor without all the complexities of currently setting up and building blocks. That is an exciting prospect, evidenced by the numerous likes, retweets, and replies to Jaquith’s tweet. Hou-Sandí pointed out that the current thought process is primarily about easing the transition for custom client block solutions and not necessarily for WordPress itself. However, that does not mean that this or a similar solution might not be a part of the core platform’s future. Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura replied to Ben Gillbanks in the same Twitter thread that it was definitely something they were considering. “From a core perspective we had to ensure the primitives and interactivity is not compromised, but there’s no reason why that should imply a full JS toolchain for simpler blocks. Lowering barrier of entry is important.” Like several others, Gillbanks thought that such a system would have made an easier transition for PHP-centric developers from the start. However, the project was not ready for that at the time, according to Ventura. “It’s tricky to do something like this from the start until the compile target APIs are robust enough,” he tweeted. “We are getting to a point where many of the interactive properties are clustered into primitives and components, which makes a templating approach more appealing.” Automattic developer Riad Benguella shared a similar solution in the past week, launching the Blocky project on GitHub. With his approach, developers utilize the block.json file to create the template or view component and run it through a simple build step to generate the block’s code. While it is not too early to hope and dream, it may just be a bit premature to begin seriously considering whether such tools will land in core WordPress. However, seeing some of the lead WordPress and Gutenberg developers at least openly talking about solutions is something worth paying attention to. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAnnounce Your Plugin to the World, Shout It From the Rooftop – WP Tavern
[ad_1] The easiest way to kill your WordPress plugin is to fail to let the world know about it. If you cannot manage a tweet, blog post, or quick note on Facebook, you may as well sign the death certificate then and there. I get it. I have been there. Not everyone is a marketing guru, so putting out the right messaging might seem like speaking in a foreign language. But no messaging at all? That will not bode well for your young project. Part of my job is finding plugins and sharing them with the community. Every week, I am on the lookout for that next great idea. Or, at least, a sort-of-good idea. I scour Twitter, regular blogs that I read, and official WordPress directories for plugins and themes. What I like most about writing about our beloved platform is not big business deals or the latest drama. While those pieces can be fun, I am most interested in what people create on top of the software. Whether a large company or an individual builds a new plugin, I am always excited when Monday rolls around. I can begin my search anew. Often, I will find a new plugin that looks promising, so I dive into it. I install and activate it. At times, I find something so interesting that I have no choice but to share it. However, most of the time, I need a little push. To understand “the why” behind it. I do a quick check to see if they have written a blog post, tweeted about it, or shared it in some way. More often than not, nothing exists about it other than its listing in the plugin directory. And, reaching out to devs via email is often a hit-or-miss affair. When you do not announce your new project to the world, it feels like you are not passionate about it. I understand that some people simply hash out an idea and decide to drop it in the plugin directory. They are not in it for glory or even recognition. For them, it is just a piece of code they thought might come in hand for others. But, usage is the lifeblood of software. If no one else downloads, installs, and activates your plugin, can we really call it software? Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, whether it makes a sound is irrelevant if no one is around to hear it. I have been mulling over whether to finishing writing this post for months, unsure if I was ever going to hit the publish button. I initially scratched down some notes in early April, attempting to understand why so few go through the trouble of doing any marketing of their plugins. I reached out to Bridget Willard to get insight from someone with a rich history in the marketing world. She had just published How to Market Your Plugin the month before, so the timing made sense. However, I still felt too frustrated with the status quo in the WordPress community. A message from a reader wishing that we would mention alternative choices for plugin-related posts prompted me to revisit this. The truth is simple. So many projects fly under the radar because their authors begin and end their marketing by submitting to WordPress.org. “Marketing is communication,” said Willard. “At the basic level, you must ‘tell people’ you have a product. The basic minimum is a blog post with social posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It’s scary to market while you build, but that’s what the automobile industry does (along with others). You have to create the desire for the product — more than fixing a problem.” While she tends to focus on products and services, I asked her what developers should be doing regardless of whether their plugins are commercial or free. “I advocate with all of my being having a landing page on your main site (not a new site) promoting your plugin — while you’re building it,” paraphrasing from a chapter in her book. “Take signups for beta testers, start email marketing. The blog post is anti-climatic in many ways, and one or two tweets aren’t enough. Even better is to customize the sign-up ‘thank you page’ with something special — a video talking about your goals, for example. It’s not the time to have a tutorial or demo. This is about communicating your vision. “The sad thing is that many plugin developers don’t see the need to spend money on a ‘free’ plugin. The axiom is true, ‘it takes money to make money.’ If you want sales, you need marketing. The sale for a free plugin is a download, and those are just as important.” Part of me missed the old Weblog Tools Collection era. Every few days, the site would share a post with the latest plugins (themes too) with short descriptions of each. It was an easy win if you had no marketing skills. Developers could submit their new projects, and the team would share them with the community. When I was a young and upcoming developer, it was one of the only ways I knew how to reach folks in the WordPress community aside from pushing stuff from my own blog. Today, we have far more avenues for sharing our work via social networking. Of course, the downside is that you have to cut through the noise. In the long run, I would like to see an overhaul of the WordPress.org directory, focusing on the discoverability of plugins by feature instead of only popularity. Not all developers are known for their marketing skills. Having a little help from the directory they feed into could make it easier for budding developers to jump from hobby to business. Until then, let the world know about your plugin. Even if it seems like you are shouting into the abyss, you may just hear an answer from someone who noticed your passion. If nothing else, let us
Continue readingChanging The World, Changing Me
[ad_1] WordPress was created when I was 10 years old. I try to imagine myself at 10 and the only images I can conjure up are ones of anxiety. My world both felt so small and was so small yet what I felt seemed so big. I don’t look back fondly on those years. I was a ball of competitive anxiety who was just coming out of being made fun of for years for my speech impediments and finally starting to figure out who I might be. My 10 year old self didn’t like change and didn’t know how to cope. My 10 year old self had no concept of what was being created during these strange years and I’m filled with gratitude thinking about those who were paving the way before I could even conceptualize what a website was. WordPress has fundamentally changed who I am. I don’t say that lightly. I have an urge to jump into a monologue of, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” when I think about WordPress. Finding My Creativity The most profound change started in awakening a sense of creativity and belief in myself. I work hard at things but my earlier black and white point of view often limited any amount of creativity I might have had. I’ll never forget in college working for web.unc.edu, UNC Chapel Hill’s WordPress multisite installation, and discovering that I could create as many sites as I wanted. The ease of use and the unlimited possibilities led me to create site after site. This still happens now with https://letslifechat.com/ born this year out of my desire to share my love of questions and deeply connecting with others, especially during a year of profound disconnection. Along the way at UNC, I got to work with brilliant and kind coworkers who believed in me to the point of encouraging me to apply to Automattic after I had to graduate a year early. Knowing they believed in me helped me apply and the case of redbull they sent me for my trial helped me get the job! I never saw myself as creative since creativity was defined for so many years as being art focused (poetry, painting, etc) and I have absolutely no artistic abilities. Being able to make an idea come to life online has changed how I view myself – I now see myself as creative and capable. This shift in how I view myself led me to create initiatives like accelerate.lgbt and Mentor Everywhere at Automattic in my free time. I never realized that my handwriting and drawing abilities could be terrible yet, at the same time, my creativity could be powerful. The results of my creative actions have solidified a sense of belief in myself that is deeply profound. It’s something I fall back on during tough days of self doubt and tough problems. Finding The World Because of WordPress’ global and distributed nature, I have been afforded the opportunity to travel to far away lands and to be there for meaningful moments with dear loved ones. Being a “nomad” is something I never thought I’d be. Being connected to people all over the world felt unfathomable and still feels like more of a dream than a reality. It’s challenged every aspect of who I am and I am better for it. Combined with the ability to see the world, I get to work with folks from all over the world every single day thanks to WordPress. This has given me the honor of having a global mindset that I carry with me no matter where I go. I feel I have traveled enough for many lifetimes over. Once you begin thinking at that scale, whether due to a global mindset or due to the percentage of the web powered by WordPress, you can’t go back. Something in you changes for the better. Finding Who I Am I think often of LGBTQ+ people of years past and how many likely never would have had the chance at a life that I have. This rings particularly true during Pride Month. On top of everything else, WordPress has given me a platform and a job where I can be my truest self whether that’s sharing my mental health struggles, talking about my evolving thoughts on being born through surrogacy, or imagining a different way of existing with many little homes rather than one. With WordPress, I can share my words and I can be heard. I can fiercely be myself and be amplified rather than silenced. I can join community meetings and proudly share a rainbow emoji as I say hi. WordPress has emboldened me and has given me so many opportunities to use my newfound creativity to lead in various spaces. None of the above gets to the root of why I LOVE what I do and love what WordPress is to me. Beyond any personal change, WordPress has allowed me to help others and to increase my own impact on this world. Whether it was working with department sites during my time at UNC or helping a local non profit set up a brand new website to bring theirs out of the 90s, I am thrilled to have a job and a passion that centers on helping others succeed. It’s such a privilege to work with folks during different stages of their sites – it’s always so personal and so sacred. I can vividly remember the first time this gripped me. I was helping a professor at UNC set up a site and when we finally published it, he couldn’t believe it was “live”. He kept asking me whether other researchers, students, professors, etc. could find him. As I began to explain how everything worked, he was nearly brought to tears. “I can’t believe my life’s work can be found by anyone in the world.” I was just a freshman at this point and didn’t quite understand what I had stumbled
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