Five Cool WordPress Things

I gave a small talk today at the WordPress KL Meetup in which I discussed a few cool WordPress-related things that are happening in my world currently. This is presented in case folks might find some use from one or more of these!

Thanks to Sam Suresh and Mu Dot My for hosting the event.

Five Cool Things:

  • CiviCRM
  • Genesis
  • Soliloquy
  • WordPress powers a quarter of the web 😀
  • WordPress 4.7 and Twenty Seventeen

*Important note: I am not commercially affiliated with any of the plugins mentioned here; i.e., these are my own recommendations and I haven’t been paid to promote them. Tadpole Collective is a CiviCRM partner organization.

Download the slides [PDF]

DeadPress – My First WordPress Plugin

I have built and contributed to many WordPress websites, but in over a decade of WP development I have never built my own plugin from scratch and released it officially. Today I’ve finally done that.

My goal was to have a plugin in the WordPress.org repository, where it could be easily seen and downloaded by anyone in the world after having received a vetting from core team members. But I didn’t have any ideas for necessary plugins. So I made an unnecessary one!

DeadPress combines my love of WordPress and the Grateful Dead. Continue reading DeadPress – My First WordPress Plugin

Presenting to WordPress NYC

wpnycI’m speaking next week at the WPNYC Meetup group, talking WordPress to what will hopefully be a big crowd! I am super nervous and excited for this.

Last year I presented to this group for the first time, as part of a multi-speaker program on the WordPress Dashboard and setting up your site. But this is the first time I will present alone.

Specifically, my talk will be about WordPress sidebars and widgets. These are powerful tools when building your WordPress site. Come by and learn more about it 🙂

Here’s the video:

Twenty Ten

Don’t call it Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten. We’re done saying “Two Thousand” now. It’s a relic, appropriate only for history professors or others who want to sound dignified. That’s my two cents. We can still hang out.

Two Thousand Nine was a cool year, I think. A lot of people are down on 2009, with good reason. Lots of lost jobs and houses, for sure. I don’t want to sound insensitive to that, but things are going pretty great for me and I’m happy. I got problems, sure, but I don’t have life-threatening problems. And I’ve got a lot of good people around me to help out, starting with Xianyi, and extending through my family, to my friends all around the world.

What else was cool about Oh-Niner? I saw a bunch of good concerts, which was a goal of mine, so – mission accomplished. Black Keys back in February kicked it off. Phish on the lawn at Merriweather, where I ran straight into my cousin Nick while roaming the grounds and shared a beer with him. Phish again, this time at the Garden, with the incredible light show courtesy of Chris Kudora – WOW.

I was twice at Carnegie Hall, once as a date to the symphony with Xianyi, and once with her, Dave and Tom for Arlo Guthrie. Amazing theatre. My goal for 2010 is seeing more historic NYC venues – Beacon top of the list (sidenote: too bad Cirque de Soleil’s 6-month run will block the Allman Bros from doing their gazillionth show in a row at the Beacon this March).

We did two great weddings this year. One was an entire adventure vacation, and the other was an intimate affair at home, and our first trip to the Cape.

Finally, at year’s end, I managed to launch two sites for family members that I’d been working on with them. Check them out at alexanderbabies.com and suzannekellow.com.

Xianyi is in China right now with her parents, her Xiao Niang, and DouDou. They are probably waking up right about now to have some tang yuarrrrr… don’t forget,

吃八个