Blog

Helen Hou-Sandi

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!!Con 2020 (pronounced “bang bang con”) features two days of ten-minute talks celebrating the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing. This pay-what-you-want conference is happening online May 9-10, 2020 and I am excited to share that I will be speaking at 1:00 pm EST on Sunday, May 10.

My talk, Sparking Musical Joy at Home With Magnetic Stripe Swipe Cards and Tiny Code, shares how I, a programmer and not a human jukebox, used a Raspberry Pi, magnetic stripe swipe cards, stickers, and a tiny Bash script to help my children enjoy curated music on their own terms.

10up Recommends UX Research Tools On Adobe’s Xd Ideas Blog

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Effective UX Research Tools

User experience research involves evaluating and capturing user behavior and interactions, and requires interactive collaboration and prototyping with participants and stakeholders. With remote work on the rise, leading UX researchers have adopted a new generation of tools that facilitate this research and collaboration without the need for in person interaction.

In the article 5 Effective UX Research Tools That the Experts Use, Adobe asked professional UX researchers and designers — including 10up’s own lead UX designers Ben Grace and Melissa Vander Wilt — to spotlight their user UX research tools of choice.

Ben shares how 10up leverages digital whiteboard and remote team collaboration software Miro to plan and prep for research, keep the team organized, and socialize findings.

Melissa highlights 10up’s use of Hotjar to perform user testing and behavior analysis, run surveys and polls, and gather insights for ongoing optimization.

If you’d like to do your next design and UX project with a team that knows how to achieve excellence without needing to be in the office, get in touch.

Optimize Your Work From Home Experience

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Kinsta Work From Home Webinar

10up is joining forces with Kinsta for a free webinar focused on optimizing the work from home experience. Featured on the webinar will be our own Brad Miller, a Vice President who has worked from home for several years.

Happening on April 15 at 12:30 pm Eastern time, the webinar will cover:

  • Tips for setting up an at-home workspace
  • Ways to eliminate distractions
  • How to create opportunities to casually connect with colleagues (and talk about something other than work)
  • How to prioritize time effectively
  • Insights on finding work-life balance when work and home are the same place

Learn more and register to save your spot!

Jake Goldman

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In response to COVID-19, many people are working from home for the first time. Recently, I shared insights from my experience working at home and leading a remote agency with one of our clients, T-Mobile. My tips are featured alongside some other perspectives in their story, Pants or No Pants? That Is the Question! For the record, I am team “yes, pants.”

Jeff Paul

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WordPress 5.4 was released this week, featuring new and better blocks, a cleaner block editor UI, improved user data privacy features, and a handful of under the hood performance and developer improvements. Seven 10uppers helped make this release possible, including myself, who was recognized as a Noteworthy Contributor.

Thank you for helping make WordPress: Ben Greeley, Fabian Kaegy, Felipe Elia, John Watkins, Ryan Welcher, and Tung Du!

Jason Clarke

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Today WordPress powers 35% of the web, yet there are still many myths and misconceptions about using the WordPress as an enterprise-level content management system.

10up is one of four enterprise agency partners featured in the new ebook, Faster, Smarter, Safer WordPress for Enterprise, by Pantheon, a WebOps platform for open-source Drupal and WordPress websites. The ebook shares valuable insights on how enterprises can best leverage WordPress and work with an agency partner. It also addresses common myths and misconceptions about the capability, security, and scalability of WordPress as a platform.

Bringing Out 9to5Mac’s Dark Side

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9to5mac Dark Mode Example

Brightly colored screens in low-light environments can keep people up at night, contribute to eyestrain, and even burn up battery life on newer devices with OLED displays. In recent years, all major operating systems — macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android — have added a dark-mode option. With this setting, the OS and any application that supports dark mode can switch from a light color scheme to darker tone, which offers UI personalization and reduces eye fatigue.

With all major web browsers now supporting the dark-mode setting, web developers can also serve either a light or dark theme, based on the user’s device setting.

Apple news site 9to5mac, a long-term client, added dark-mode support to its site just before the official release of iOS 13 last Fall — the first version of the iPhone operating system to offer dark mode.

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FanSided 250 Launches, Ranking The Top 250 Fandoms For 2019

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FanSided 250

Last week FanSided published its annual FanSided 250, the ultimate ranking of the 250 best fandoms in the world, from celebrities and movie franchises to sports figures and more. While my New England Patriots didn’t rank as high as I think they should have (anything less than #1 for us is a disappointment), I am ecstatic to be part of the 10up team that collaborated with FanSided to bring the bold new FanSided 250 website to life.

“We’re thrilled with the look and feel of the FanSided 250. Working with 10up has been an extremely rewarding venture. Every aspect of the experience has been upgraded from previous years, and the FanSided 250 has never looked and operated better.”

—Michael Dunlap, VP of Corporate Communications & Business Development

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10up Releases WordPress GitHub Actions To Streamline Plugin Deployment

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According to GitHub, developers have contributed more than 1,200 Actions to GitHub Marketplace since GitHub Actions was released in beta last year. Our mission to craft tools for content creators — including developers — and our passion for open-source contribution led us to make a solution that uses GitHub Actions to radically streamline and simplify WordPress plugin release management.

Automating Your Workflow With GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions enables you to create custom software development life cycle (SDLC) workflows directly in your GitHub repository. You can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. Workflows are custom automated processes that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub.

As a WordPress core lead developer and Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up, I immediately saw the opportunity to use GitHub Actions to make specific tasks easier for WordPress plugin developers, like deploying a plugin and its assets/readme updates to the official WordPress.org plugin repository.

We previously introduced early versions of these Actions, and now they’re ready for primetime following the announcement of general availability of GitHub Actions — an announcement that took the time to spotlight our “WordPress publishing” solution:

WordPress GitHub Actions Mention on the GitHub Blog

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Leveraging New Relic to Keep Content Flowing

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New Relic Guest Post By Vasken Hauri

When discussing website performance, most people zero in on page load speed and the front-end user experience. This approach, however, ignores a critical subset of people interacting with the website—content creators working in the content management system (CMS). In a guest post published on the official New Relic blog, I share how 10up leveraged New Relic tools to better support content creators and empower them to work more efficiently through back-end performance improvements.

10up uses New Relic’s performance monitoring to acquire real-time and trending data that can be used to troubleshoot performance challenges and diagnose problems quickly, which in turn, saves time and reduces cost.