Wordpress

Question: If you had limited experience with graphic design software but wanted to do basic stuff for web design, what software would you use? Leave the answers in the comments or email me. As I play around with Vibe coding, I’ve decided to take a new topic each week. For context, look at my Dinostroids: My Journey into Vibe Coding . Or just go play Dinostroids . This week, I’ve been learning how to modify WordPress themes. My website has a complex theme that is impossible to change without getting under the hood. The Foundry website is also excessively complex for what it is, but they both turn out to be great to learn on. ...

Yup. I’m done with Facebook. However, it’s tough to delete your account. Read the message above. I exited out of this screen, suspended my account instead, but then went back 15 minutes later and actually deleted it. Well – I started the deletion process. I don’t know what day I’m on, but I think I’m close to 14 days. So, I’m still “deleting” apparently. The only inconvenience I’ve noticed so far are all the sites where I used Facebook as the sign-on authenticator (rather than setting up a separate email/password combo.) I think I’m through most of that – at least the sites I use on a regular basis. For the first few days, I accidentally ended up on the Facebook login screen which was pleasantly filled out with my login beckoning me to log back in. I resisted the siren song of restarting my Facebook account before the 14 days was up. ...

Thanks to the 75+ people who have reached out about being willing to help me with writing and WordPress stuff. I’ve read all the emails, answered some of them, and will get responses out to the rest on Sunday after I have a nice digital sabbath starting in a few minutes. On my run today, I thought more about what I was looking to do and decided that my approach wasn’t right. ...

I’ve decided to hire two people for 2017: a full time writer and a full time WordPress Goddess (or God – I’m good with either gender …) I’ve been very reticent to add people to our team. However, at this point it’s clear that I can get a lot of leverage from two very specific people. Writer: I’m looking for a full time non-fiction writer. This is not a research function, but rather a writing / editing / coordination function. The amount of writing I do is significant, but there is 5x more to do than I can handle. I’m turning down a lot of stuff that I’d like to write and putting off stuff into an infinite backlog which doesn’t feel good. So, having someone writing first drafts, editing stuff I slap together, writing some primary content, and helping get it posted in the right places would be a big help. ...

If you are reading this on Medium and have seen other posts of mine in the past month, tell me if you think it’s been worth it for me to republish what is on Feld Thoughts to my Brad Feld channel on Medium . I’ve been using the Medium WordPress plugin to republish my posts automatically. It’s generally not much effort, although there are a few bugs. The most annoying is that when I publish something on WordPress, update it, and then publish it again, it doesn’t update on Medium. ...

When your website crashes on launch day it really sucks. It’s ridiculous to me that that still happens today as a regular course of business. Every time a marketing team works with a web design firm, there is the usual painful and broken handoff between the outside agency and the technical operations of the client which culminate on launch day. So many things have to go right for your launch to be flawless: server configuration, load testing, and deployment. For our portfolio companies, this requires diverting senior DevOps engineers to ensure things go right, which of course comes at the expense of delivering and operating their product and even then there are no guarantees. ...

You may noticed from prior posts that we’ve had a difficult time at Foundry Group managing our growing portfolio of WordPress sites . We are not alone. You would think that by now, managing websites would be a solved problem, but that’s just not true. Talk with any professional marketer about their websites and two things will become clear: 1) websites are absolutely central to how digital marketing gets done and 2) websites are a giant pain in the ass. ...

Today our portfolio company BigDoor launched the first ever gamification plugin for WordPress. The plugin will allow a WordPress site owner to add leader-boards to their site as well as reward users with badges and points when they leave comments and check-in. It is a great way to incentivize repeat visits and help build a community on your site. The BigDoor team has built a powerful gamification API, but until recently it required a programmer to implement it. The team continues to make big strides in making gamification more accessible by streamlining and simplifying the process of adding points, leader-boards, badges and virtual goods to a site or app. BigDoor is progressing toward what they call the “15 minute install”. Their new WordPress plugin takes about an hour from download to being live on your site, but this is a big step toward making gamification, badges and leader-boards more accessible for bloggers everywhere. ...