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WordCamp San Diego Talk: Caching for Coders

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I am privileged to have the opportunity to talk about caching for WordPress sites during WordCamp San Diego 2012. My talk, titled “Caching for Coders: How, What and When to Cache in WordPress”, will introduce WordPress developers to core concepts for deploying successful caching strategies in WordPress. There will be an emphasis on getting rid of a “cookie cutter” approach to caching design patterns in favor of building caching patterns that fit the needs of  specific WordPress sites. I am most excited to discuss the often neglected topic of “when” to cache in WordPress projects. Not all caching strategies are created equal and I will be addressing some of the more successful caching approaches inspired by my work at 10up LLC.

This talk also gives me the opportunity to try out a new model for developing slides for a presentation. I am using HTML5 slides, which I am managing on a GitHub repo. Hosting these slides on GitHub allows me to effectively “open-source” the talk. Having GitHub as the center of development and discussion of these slides will allow others to contribute to the talk and hopefully let it evolve over time. Who knows what will happen, but I am excited for the potential that this idea has.

We’re Hiring a Marketing Coordinator!

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Are you a tech-savvy, self-motivated marketing professional, or recent college graduate, with a passion for using online and offline tools to help companies better market their services and convert prospects into clients? Then you might be a great fit for 10up’s new Marketing Coordinator role! As Marketing Coordinator, you will be responsible for:

  • Scheduling introduction meetings with prospective new clients
  • Preparing one-page briefs on new project opportunities that will inform initial conversations with prospects
  • Developing lead generation channels to expand our prospective client pool
  • Collaborating with the strategy team to prepare proposals for new project opportunities
  • Maintaining, updating, and creating content for our website, including client case studies and blog posts
  • Building a content strategy for 10up’s Facebook and Twitter presences and managing interactions on those platforms
  • Preparing client status and billing reports
  • Managing basic operational tasks, including scheduling team trips and preparing monthly client invoices

While prior experience is great, enthusiasm and the ability to learn quickly on your feet will serve as great substitutes for experience. As with all of our positions, the Marketing Coordinator’s scope of responsibilities is expected to evolve over time, so you should have the willingness to be flexible and pitch in where needed. Ideally, after an initial training period, the person who fills this role will have the opportunity to take on more senior marketing and project management responsibilities, so excellent communication (both written and verbal) and organizational skills are required.

We envision the Marketing Coordinator position as a full-time role, but applicants seeking part-time work will also be considered. 10up is a distributed company, so you will have the opportunity to work from home, which is just one of the many perks we offer our employees!

Think you’re ready to join team 10up and help us grow our business? Then send your resume, cover letter, and three references to jake@get10up.com.

Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin

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Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin UI SlideI taught a two-hour section of WP401 (Advanced WordPress Development) at WordCamp Phoenix’s classroom day this past Friday, speaking on the UI of the WordPress admin and giving some examples and best practices for integration of custom content types and post meta. At 10up, we strive to create seamless and usable interfaces for our clients, reducing the amount of training needed to get editors up and running and keeping the WordPress side of content management easy and enjoyable.

The slides, which are built on Google’s HTML5 Slides, can be found at http://slides.helenhousandi.com/wcphx2012.html. In it, you’ll find resources, examples, and best practice code examples.

Next Generation Web: What HTML5 and CSS3 Are All About

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Here are the slides from my talk at WordCamp Phoenix 2012. Presented in the “Think Tank” track, it explores some ideas and concepts that underlie change in web development medium, and introduces coding techniques for the last HTML5 / CSS3 capabilities. Here’s the description from the WordCamp schedule:

We’ve all probably heard of HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Design, and other “future of the web” buzzwords. Maybe you’ve even dabbled in HTML5 doctype declarations and “header” tags, or used CSS3 rounded corners or gradients. But most of us have only scratched the surface of these technologies, and for good reason – not everyone is using Chrome 16 or Firefox 9 yet, and even they haven’t settled on uniform implementations. We’ll look at how Responsive Design is already beginning to change the way we approach building sites for different screen sizes, and peak into potentially transformative HTML5 techniques that are only beginning to appear around the web.

 

What Would Core Do?

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WWCD? Or, What Would Core Do? Yesterday, at WordCamp Miami, I finally debuted a talk that I had been thinking about for some time. I see WWCD as the third and capstone talk in my “extending WordPress administration” series, and it’s my favorite of the set.

The series began in 2010 at Chicago with “Hijacking WordPress Admin” – one of the first talks to focus on hooks and techniques to generally tailor the administrative panel to individual clients. You can only fit so much into a talk, so rather than focus on good user interface, I focused on sometimes over the top examples to illustrate the idea that the admin panel is actually remarkably flexible. After a few repeats at different WordCamps, I used WordCamp Chicago 2011 to debut the second in the series: “Editing the Visual Editor.” This time, the focus was solely on methods to customize the visual editor and refine the writing experience – the place where publishers spend most of their time.

The capstone talk is the lightest on code (two quick slides at the end). Rather, it gets back to the philosophy of extending WordPress administration, and challenges plug-in and theme authors to “do better.” It’s a fun look at some terrible plug-in practices, with a serious underlying point: when you build on WordPress, do you think about how the core development team would approach the problem?

We’ll hopefully have the video from WordPress.tv soon, as well.

Building Communities Around Your Content

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How do you build an audience and inspire them to actively engage with your content? That was the subject of my talk at WordCamp Miami 2012.

Start learning our secrets by checking out the slides. Hopefully the video will be published on WordPress.tv within a month or two; we’ll be sure to post that when it’s up.

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I had a blast guest co-hosting episode 3 of the WP Late Night podcast with WPCandy’s Ryan Imel and WebDevStudios’ Brad Williams. Hear my thoughts on default WordPress themes, BuddyPress growing up, whether the “widgets” concept is broken, how we build themes at 10up, and more. Or just enjoy the banter as Brad and I joke about friendly competition in the WordPress community.