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Staying on top: 10up Learning Summit 2014

Jake Goldman on April 25, 2014

Around this time in 2013 we held a Developer Summit – an in person gathering of our team focused on skill building. We covered everything from PHP unit testing to JavaScript performance optimization, and even rolled out Varying Vagrant Vagrants. From SASS to duck punching, that summit influences how I write code today, when I still have the occasion to do so.

10up has grown since April 2013, not just in raw numbers (we’ve tripled), but in scope. Add a talented design team and nearly a dozen web strategists and project managers and our second annual “developer” summit already needs a rebranding: let’s call it a Learning Summit.

10up Summit Git Talk

This time, we’re taking over a resort in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re kicking off on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 13, with practical activities focusing on the art of effective, consistent, and thoughtful client engagement. Wednesday we have three tracks filled with incredible workshops: design, engineering, and project management.

on April 25, 2014

10uppers Alison Barrett and Jim Barrett will be joining me (John James Jacoby) in presenting at WordCamp Minneapolis this Saturday, April 25, at the University of St. Thomas in downtown Minneapolis. Alison’s talk, Avoid Breaking All the Things: How to Develop Safely, offers mitigation techniques for the worst case WordPress maintenance scenarios. Jim is presenting IA Eessentials: How to Prioritize, Design, and Present Your Client’s Content, which explains how to identify a client’s most important content, and present it in the best possible light. I’ll be presenting WPRBACOMGBBQ, covering WordPress’s Role-Based Access Control (citing bbPress as an example), and shedding light on an otherwise invisible (and very powerful) API that you accidentally use everyday. Hope to see you this weekend!

Developing for Non-Profits at GiveCamp Boston 2014

John Eckman on March 31, 2014

This weekend (April 4th-6th, 2014), I’ll be gathering with over a hundred developers, designers, project managers, and strategists at the Microsoft New England Research and Development center for New England GiveCamp 2014. We’ll spend the weekend – with many participants quite literally camping in the building and working through the night – designing, building, and enhancing websites and applications for non-profit, mission-oriented organizations from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

GiveCamp is a fantastic event. I spoke at GiveCamp 2012 about Digital Strategy in the non-profit context, and then served as team lead in 2013. This year I look forward to just volunteering as a developer. Although many different technical platforms and languages are used at GiveCamp, my experience has been WordPress dominates the conversation and is used for the great majority of the projects.

If you’re in the broader New England area, and have experience with development, design, or project management I’d highly encourage you to check out GiveCamp and consider volunteering your skills.

Meet John Eckman, 10up CEO

John Eckman on March 17, 2014 • 8 Comments

Hi. I’m John Eckman and I’m truly honored to officially join team 10up today as CEO.

Jake Goldman will continue as President & Founder, and we will work closely together, as well as with the strong leadership team already in place, especially VP’s Jess Jurick and Vasken Hauri, as well as Directors Helen Hou-Sandi, John James Jacoby, Paul Clark, Taylor Aldridge, and Zach Brown. It’s truly an all-star team up and down the roster at 10up, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of it.

In broad strokes, Jake will focus on product development, recruiting, partnerships, business development, and company vision, while I will be more focused on operational management, client relationships, talent development, and execution against that vision.

Jake and the team have accomplished much over the last 3+ years, and I hope to continue that tradition of excellence while bringing additional processes and organizational development approaches appropriate to a growing firm.

I’ve spent the past 15+ years working in professional services agencies on digital strategy, user experience design, and software engineering, with a focus on content management, web publishing, and social. Short version: TVisions (which became Molecular, which became Isobar), PixelMEDIA, Optaros, and ISITE Design. (Long version: see LinkedIn).

Over the course of that career I’ve worked with clients across many industries and sizes, from early-stage startups to the Fortune 50, as well as higher education and the non-profit sector. I’ve had the opportunity to work as a user experience manager, a technical architect, a project manager (and program manager), an account director and a strategy lead. I’ve worn most of the hats one can wear at a digital agency (other than visual designer, a fact that may be reasonably inferred from my own personal sites), and love nothing more than working with a team to solve a client problem or exceed a client expectation.

10up and FiveThirtyEight

on March 17, 2014

We’re thrilled to unveil our second collaboration with ESPN, the new FiveThirtyEight! The site relaunched today with a fresh new Responsive design and content strategy on WordPress.com VIP. Over the course of roughly three months, 10up worked closely with ESPN to implement their new design vision, ensuring a fluid reader experience across devices using creative provided by their team. The WordPress theme powering the site features custom curation interfaces, advanced post editor controls (like footnotes), and sophisticated ad and analytics integrations.

The new FiveThirtyEight will continue to embody data journalism at its core, with Nate Silver at the helm now leading dozens of journalists reporting across verticals like Sports, Politics, and Science. In addition to traditional reporting, the site will also employ data visualization techniques to enable readers to better digest, interact with, and apply data trends to their everyday thinking. FiveThirtyEight will be housed in ESPN’s new Exit 31 content group, ” a creative enterprise that will combine the resources of three existing units – ESPN Films, Grantland and FiveThirtyEight – under one umbrella.”

We’ll have more to say about FiveThirtyEight in the future – for now, check out the new site!

10up at the First WordCamp Dayton

on March 8, 2014

This weekend is the first ever WordCamp Dayton, taking place at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. I (Dustin Filippini) will be presenting, and am proud to help get a new WordCamp off the ground. I’m looking forward to meeting a number of amazing community members, including a great organizing committee.

I will be presenting “Take WordPress Beyond Pages and Posts: Plugins and Customizations that can take your WordPress Site to the Next Level.” I will look at unique and amazing WordPress customizations from around the web, showing off WordPress’s potential. I’ll offer examples of plugins, customizations, and built-in WordPress functionality that can take a site beyond than what most people realize is possible.

If you are in the Dayton area this weekend, stop by and support a great new WordCamp!

PushUp: Push Notifications for WordPress

on March 7, 2014 • 5 Comments

We couldn’t be more proud to announce 10up’s first product, PushUp. PushUp makes it incredibly easy to deliver your content directly to your readers’ desktops, even when their browser is closed. In version 1.0, we’re starting with support for Safari Push Notifications on Mac OS X Mavericks, the best implementation of desktop notifications.

We couldn’t be more proud to feature launch partners like 9to5mac and Edelman, with committed beta customers like Deadline.com and GigaOM taking PushUp into production in a matter of days. Expect to see more familiar brands rolling out PushUp in the coming weeks.

We think on demand notifications from websites – from desktop to mobile – is an important evolution in online publishing. Having to actively check a website or feed reader, or even Twitter, for the content you really care about seems to us as antiquated as manually opening your email client to check for new messages. Our push notifications are 100% white-labeled: we send consumers directly to your content. Nothing stands between your and your relationship with your reader, not even a link in the middle to our services.

Needless to say, Safari Push Notifications is just the beginning.

10up goes to the Oscars with Entertainment Weekly

Vasken Hauri on March 2, 2014

As an agency with a reputation for building world-class solutions with WordPress, it may surprise you that one of our latest and most exciting projects barely even involves WordPress.

A new Interactive Dashboard experience, built for Entertainment Weekly’s desktop and mobile websites, presents real-time content from across EW’s vast network of industry-leading entertainment reporting. The Dashboard enables EW’s team to instantly post and curate relevant content from Twitter, EW’s network of entertainment blogs (powered by WordPress), and exclusive Red Carpet photos, serving up a true second-screen interactive experience for major entertainment events.

The Dashboard had its first successful trial run during the Grammys, and will be in full swing during tonight’s Oscars presentation!

Whether you’re on your computer, iPad, or mobile phone, we hope you’ll tune in!

WordCamp St. Louis gets a jolt of 10up

Thorsten Ott on March 1, 2014

This weekend I (Adam Silverstein) am speaking at WordCamp St. Louis along with fellow 10uppers Rachel Baker and Doug Stewart. The event is sold out and we are excited to share our knowledge with the St. Louis WordPress community and meet fellow WordPress fans.

Our talks are all in the Developer II track, in support of the burgeoning local developer community.

My topic is “Revising WordPress Revisions.” I will cover the story and code behind the Backbone.js based revisions interface introduced in WordPress 3.6 and why revisions are awesome. What goes into remaking a feature in WordPress?

Doug’s topic is “Making Your Whole Life Easier With WP-CLI.” Doug will introduce developers to the powerful wp-cli, the WordPress command line interface. Doug will offer his perspective as a systems engineer, and expose developers to the power of administering WordPress from the command line.

Rachel’s topic is “Code with Care: Write Secure Plugins and Themes.” Rachel will cover how to protect sites from XSS (cross-site scripting), CSRF exploits, and unfiltered input attacks during common WordPress development practices. She will provide the security best-practices “how and why” for securing your code.

Expanding autocomplete in the WordPress admin

Helen Hou-Sandi on February 27, 2014

Autocomplete is not a new concept in the WordPress admin – tags have had suggestions powered by suggest.js since their introduction six years ago in version 2.5. This, however, remained the only instance of Ajax-powered autocompletion for another four years, until adding users in multisite was enhanced with jQuery UI autocomplete for 3.4. It was originally committed with deliberately unpolished styling, so when I saw a request to make it look better, I decided to take it on. I may not consider myself a creative designer, but I do have an eye and passion for UI consistency. After a little iteration on both the design and code, we had a fully functional instance of autocomplete.