Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and I’m excited to be here with you, today. I am so excited because I am energized from the fact that there was so many people that I got to meet at New Media Expo. It was in Las Vegas last week, and I was there for five days at the WordPress.com booth, and it was just an absolute blast.

It was a completely different event than I was expecting – well, I mean, it was a lot different than the last couple years; it’s been 3 or 4000 people for the last few years, and then this year, since it partnered with the National Association of Broadcasters, NAB, there was like, 100,000 people there. And it was four different areas – four different areas of the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was absolutely huge. I mean, I walked over 15,000 steps every day, and that was just a matter of just walking to and from the Convention Center, getting there, and walking around and seeing different things and different places.

So, I’m really energized. I went with a complete blank slate of, “Hey, I’m just going to meet people who stop by the booth and have questions regarding WordPress,” and I’ve met at least four people that I’m going to be interviewing on upcoming shows about cool different services, cool different products, all kind of different things – all related 100 percent to WordPress. So, I’m really excited about that. And just, it was a lot of fun getting to meet people, see some people that I’ve never met before who are listeners to the show, and so, that was an incredibly fun time, as well.

So, I’m here for the day, as I record this Podcast episode, and then, I’m leaving on a trip. And this is Sunday, I’m recording this on – let’s see, it’s Sunday the 19th, and then on Monday, I’m leaving on a work trip. And so, I wanted to make sure that I got this show recorded and out to you while I am on the beach next week, as part of my work trip. And then, I’ll give you a full recap of that the following week, when I get back from that trip.

So, today, I just have two quick announcements that I’m gonna share with you. The first one is about May’s WordPress webinar, and that is coming up very, very quickly – May 1st at 10 AM Eastern Time. That is just a few weeks away and on that day, we will be talking about how to add a custom Post Type to your website. And I’ve done this webinar in the past, but I never really get in and show any examples or dive into any of the code or anything like that, and so, that’s what we’re gonna do in this episode. I’m gonna show you all about how to use it, how I use it, and different things along those lines.

I’m in this mode of just revealing and kind of pulling back the curtain on how I’ve been running my website. So, you’ll see a little bit more of that during that webinar. You can register over at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar, or you if you go to the webinar archives page on my website, you’ll see a little pop-up box that comes up from the bottom right hand corner and you can go ahead and sign up there. Remember, you don’t’ have to be live to attend, or – I mean, you have to be live to attend, let’s put it that way. But if you can’t be live, be sure to sign up and I’ll send you an email reminder or replay after the event, and you’ll get all of that that same day.

Also, I wanna let you know that WordPress 4.2 is scheduled to release this week. Actually, today, the day that this podcast goes out, or the day that you’re released – it’s listening to it, on Wednesday, the 22nd. And so, I guess, with times and stuff, that last sentence didn’t make any sense, whatsoever. So, when you’re listening to it, the 22nd of April, 2015, should be the day that 4.2’s out. Right now, we’re in release candidate mode, which means that it is all set to go.

The code won’t change, only fix bugs and try to make sure that everything is taken care of. It looks like there’s been more than 140 changes since relating Beta 4, and so they’re in that release candidate stage. So, they’ll be there for a few more days, as I’m recording this. But as you’re listening to this, it should be live within the next day or so, so be sure to back up your site and get ready to update your site to the newest version of WordPress. And of course, next week, we’ll talk all about the latest version and we’ll go into that into a little bit of detail.

All right, this week, I wanted to share with you another plugin, of course. That’s always my favorite part of the week, is trying to find a neat or an unusual plugin that may help one person or may help thousands of people. So, this week we’re gonna be talking about WP Fastest Cache, and this is a plugin – a caching plugin – that claims to be the fastest and simplest caching options. I looked through some of the screenshots and it does look like it’s very – it’s a lot easier to configure than some of the other ones – the W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. So, it looks a lot easier that.

It kind of does a great job of explaining how it works and how it does serve up your website a little bit faster. And the settings do look pretty simple, in comparison to those other ones. So, if you have had zero luck with those other two plugins or any of the other caching plugins that are out there, I recommend checking this out. You can also block caching from certain posts and pages.

If it’s a page that you dynamically need to generate content on, or whatever – you can go ahead and there’s a button in the visual editor and there’s a button in the text editor, as well, that you can basically say, “I don’t want to cache the content of this page.” Which I thought that was kind of cool, and I’m not exactly sure if that is included with the other – those other plugins or not. So, that’s the plugin. You can find that at the WordPress Repository or in a link to the show notes for Episode No. 229.

All right, so for today’s show, I wanted to kinda highlight and share the workflow of creating this weekly show that I do every single week. I just wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes tour. I’ve been doing this – you know, last week, we talked about all the plugins that are used on YourWebsiteEngineer.com. So, today, I thought we’d just go in and talk about the steps that I take to create a weekly show.

I know a lot of you out there have your own podcasts, and I hope that this is helpful to you in just giving you some insights, and some of the time that it takes for me to build out and work through and create a show, every single week. I think it’s extremely ironic that I’m recording this on a Sunday, rather than the normal Monday or Tuesday that I normally record, so I’m not exactly going through my workflow. But that’s what happens when you go on a trip and you wanna make sure that everything’s scheduled to go live while you’re out of town.

I’ve done this – I haven’t missed a week in four and a half years, and that mainly is because I’ve scheduled things out and I just make sure I look at the calendar beforehand. I see exactly when I’m gonna need shows and when they need to be recorded. And so, this show was actually supposed to be recorded before I went to Vegas, but I just ran out of time and I knew I had a two-day buffer window. I was home for Saturday and Sunday, and then I’ll leave on Monday for the trip – for my work trip.

So, here are the steps that happen on a weekly basis. So, my show starts – they are published on Wednesday, so starting on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, I’m scouring the newsfeeds to see what’s happening in the WordPress community. What’s going on? Are there new plugins? Are there new things? What is happening in the WordPress space? And I do this in Feedly; Feedly is my RSS reader, and that’s where I go in and I have a whole section just devoted to WordPress information. And I just kind of scan through there and I see what I may wanna talk about on an upcoming show.

If I find something interesting, or something that I wanna make sure that I kind of do some more research on, or just want to talk about and cover on an upcoming show, then what I end up doing is I open Evernote. Evernote is where I save my show notes, and I have a short TextExpander Snippet that actually expands, and then I just have to fill in the information.

And so, basically, I create that new note. I will label it, usually like, this week would have been “2-2-question mark” or “2-2-9,” if I knew what it was gonna be. If I have an idea for an upcoming show, then I may do “2-2-question mark” because I don’t know when exactly I’ll get to that, or maybe “2-3-question mark” if I want to get to that in the 230 series, or whatever. But most part, if it’s the next show, I’ll just say, “2-2-9 dash,” and then, “question mark,” because I’m still trying to figure out what the big topic of the show’s going to be.

By Friday, it’s my goal to have that set in stone. What are we gonna talk about on an upcoming show? And that could be just as simple as writing, “Oh, we’ll talk about my most recent plugins that I have on my website.” Or maybe, “Well talk about how to get your site mobile-ready for the Google update.” Or maybe, “We’ll talk about the tour of the WordPress database.” Or whatever it is, I wanna have that topic, concrete in stone, by Friday. Of course, it can always change but that’s always my goal, to get it done by Friday so I don’t have to really think about it.

The hardest part about recording this show on a weekly basis is coming up with an idea of what to talk about. If I had a list of ideas that were a dozen long and all I had to do is come and record them, I could record 12 shows back to back to back to back. And I would have no problems doing that, and then I could add the news to the beginning of the show, later. But right now, it’s – I have some ideas and some of them will take more research and depending on how much time that I know that I have, like, I’ll pick a topic that either I have enough time to do the research or if there’s no research provided or needed, then I will go ahead and pick that topic.

By Monday, it’s my goal to have the show notes finished, by the end of the day on Monday. If I can get them done in the morning on Monday, that’s awesome. Maybe later in the day Monday, then I’ll record. But basically, I try to get my show notes done beforehand. And my show notes are basically the blog posts that you see and you read on – you know, when I say, “Go to the show notes at Episode No. 229, it’s at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/229.”

I basically will type up, in Markdown, I type up exactly what’s gonna get published there. That way, it 1.) Saves me a lot of time, so I don’t have to take short, brief notes and turn them into a blog post, and also, it just helps me organize my thoughts and it just really saves me a lot of time. That’s the main reason that I do it that way. So, Monday, my goal is to have the show notes finished. And these both – the Friday goal and the Monday goal – are recurring events that show up in OmniFocus. They show up every single week and I have to make sure they are done on those specific days.

On either Monday or Tuesday, depending on where it works, lines up with my schedule with stuff that I got going on at Automatic, and just different things, I try to record the show in the middle of the day, during my daughter’s naptime. I’ll record that, that naptime now is – it used to be from 10 to 11ish, and so I used to schedule all my recordings then. Right now, she’s sleeping from 12-2 and I’m actually recording this at 1:00 in the afternoon, while she’s sleeping.

And so, that’s kind of how I pick the time because I know that it’s going to be quiet upstairs. The main living room in our house is right above my office, and so there’s a lot of noise when she’s up there, playing. So, I wanna make sure that the recording as is clean as possible, and has as little background noise as possible. So, Monday or Tuesday, and it usually defaults to Tuesday.

Also, when I do this on Tuesdays, then I still – I don’t have to worry about trying to do it after my Team Chat, and then after dinner. For a long time, I was just – I was recording the episodes at 8, 9, 10, 11:00 at night, on Tuesday, to make sure they go out, and the later that I recorded, I knew that the more hustle that I had to go into and the less sharp that I was, the less detailed the show notes were. So, if I kinda schedule it out and have it done a few days in advance, it helps me out tremendously.

So, before recording, what I end up doing is I actually go in and I look to make sure, there’s any more notes that I need? Is there any more news that’s happening? Do I need to give some more details about a webinar that’s coming up? Just kind of scouring that – doing that last check, “Okay, what’s happening?” Okay, and then, I’ll go through and I’ll look for an updated plugin. I basically have a URL – which I’ll include in the show notes for this episode – that will search the WordPress Repository by the most recently updated plugin.

And that could be the recently released, or recently – like, point-revision released. So, you either see the brand newest plugins that have four or five downloads, or you see ones that have hundreds and thousands of downloads, but have been recently updated to the newest version. And I kinda peruse through there and I find things that will be interesting, and sometimes, I do two or three weeks at a time while I’m in there, and just find a few plugins that are kind of interesting to me, so I could talk about it on a show.

Once the show then is all recorded, then I will open up the file in Adobe Audition. I basically have a – I guess, one step before that is I have an Edirol digital recorder. I record all of my sound right into the digital Edirol recorder. Basically, the sound from my computer uses – I use a program called Sound Board, so the intro and outro music and any audio clips that I play all get played through the computer. It goes through a mixing board, and then the sound from the mixing board, after it’s all mixed together, goes into the Edirol recorder.

Once it’s in the Edirol, then I turn it off, I pull the memory card out of the bottom of it, and I plug in the memory card into my computer. And then, I will drag that file onto my desktop, and then I take that file and put it into Adobe Audition. Adobe Audition does nothing more than cutting the beginning and the end off, or if there’s any edits that I make during the show – normally, what happens is if I goof up a section, I just rerecord the whole section. So, I can cut just big portions of the show out at one time.

Now, sometimes, there’s a little – if I have a guest on or different things, I do do a little bit of editing, depending on how that goes or if there was a stall in the conversation or whatever, I’ll edit that stuff out. But primarily, there’s no editing in the show. Most of it is pretty much what I say is what goes in the recorder. And that’s only because I’ve done this for 200+ episodes, and I’m getting more and more comfortable behind the mic without worrying about, okay, how many uhs, ums, thes and you know, filler words am I saying during the course of a podcast episode?

So, once it’s pushed out as an mp3 file, then I open it up in an ID3 tag editor, which will allow me to tag the file with metadata and album artwork. And the album artwork is what I really care about, so I make sure that the image for my show appears in all the podcast feeder that you may be reading, or listening to this show in. And so, I do that. Then, I save that file, again. And then, it gets uploaded to Libsyn. Libsyn is the company that I’m using to host all my mp3 files, and then I – when I’m doing that, I will schedule it to be released in Libsyn.

Also in Libsyn, it asks for the title of the show, which I’ve already created. I create the title usually by the time the show notes are done, and then so I paste in the titles. It normally has like, “No. 2-2-9 dash,” and then the title. And then, I will also create the excerpt, and the excerpt goes with the WordPress – or it goes with – into Libsyn, and I also use that same excerpt on my website, within the excerpt section of my WordPress posts. And then, that kind of covers me, makes sure that I have a brief snippet of what the show is all about.

The file gets uploaded to Libsyn, it gets saved there. And then, I schedule it to go out at 4:00 a.m. Eastern. That’s just the time that I’ve picked as kind of a random time, and that’s the time that the show goes live. Once I’ve done that whole process of scheduling it, Libsyn then gives me a URL that is the link to the direct mp3 file, and then I take that and I actually plug that into a short code for the Smart Passive Player, which is the podcast player by Pat Flynn over at SmartPassiveIncome.com. And so, I do all of that.

I covert that, I put that episode in there. I actually put that into – right now, I’m putting it into the body of the post, and I also put that into a short code. And the short code at the bottom – it’s actually called a custom field – and that will actually put that player in certain places around my website, which makes it easy for me to control.

Let’s see … what else do I do, then? Once I do that, once the URL of the episode’s in and I’ve pasted in the excerpt and then, I come up with – I do a little bit of SCO with it. I basically put a custom title and a custom excerpt, and that’s about all I do. I don’t really care so much that I’m not finding key words and trying to rank for keywords and all that kind of stuff.

I then create the show notes from Markdown – which, that’s how they’re typed up – into HTML, with a program called – or an App called, “Mou,” M-O-U. And it’s just one that I found. I know that I can use the feature within Jetpack to convert it, but right now, it’s just the workflow that I’m using is using the Mou. I basically paste it into there and then copy out the HTML text.

The last step is probably the hardest – at least, personally, for me – and it is finding and creating an image. I use either Morgue File, so that’s, “Morgue,” like a morgue, M-O-R-G-U-E – file.com, and they have all license-free – or whatever – whatever it’s called – they have the images that are allowed to be used and edited. Or, Google and Flickr searches also have those that are common rights to – you can edit them and use them on your website. And so, I do that.

I find an image, what I’m looking for – something similar to what I’m looking for, usually overlay some text to it, usually crop it, modify it, make it what I need it to. A lot of times, I can’t find the perfect image on any of those sites, so I’ll head on over to Photodune.net and find a perfect image for me.

I upload the 839 pixel by 327 pixel image as the feature image, and then this will make sure that it’s in the right format and it’ll shrink to the right size. If it’s on the homepage, then it’s a much smaller version of the image. If it’s on the single page for the podcast – when you go to YourWebsiteEngineer.com/229 – then that’s in that full res and if it’s unresponsive – it does exactly what it needs as I save it as a featured image.

Lastly, I schedule the post to be released at 4:00 a.m. Eastern, and I tag the show as a podcast. And so, that’s kind of my steps. Those are the things that I work on and that’s how – I mean, that’s as efficient as I think I can get it. I try to do this all – my goal is to have everything done in an hour and a half. I know that that’s a stretch most weeks, but as long as I’m filling out the information on a weekly basis of the news that I find that I want to talk about and coming up with a topic by Friday – sometimes, it’s always in the back of my mind, “Okay, what am I gonna talk about? What am I gonna talk about?”

If I come up with that by Friday, it’s very, very easy for me to take a – create the show notes and create all the text that – the outline of what I’m gonna talk about in a half hour. Then, I record. The show’s obviously about 20 minutes or so – anywhere between 18 and 24 is kind of what I shoot for. And so, that’s another half hour, by the time I fire up the microphone, turn all my equipment on, all that kind of stuff. And the last half hour is doing that last processing. Okay, taking the mp3 file and doing the light edits that need to be done, uploading to Libsyn, creating my new podcast – or creating the new post within WordPress, filling out all the information, and creating an image.

So, that’s kind of what I shoot for. That’s my goal on a weekly basis, and I just try to do my best to get as high quality value that I can, and try to create that and duplicate that every single week. I know that because I have this kind of rigorous schedule and the rigorous steps – this is what I do and this is all the things that I follow – then that helps me an absolute lot to make sure that I’m consistently putting together a show that’s very, very consistent each week. There’s always the same segments in the show, and it makes sure that I don’t forget anything on a weekly basis, as well. So, those are the steps for the show.

I wanna give out a quick shout-out and a thank you to an affiliate program of mine – or an affiliate company, I guess, if you will – this is a company called, “A2 Hosting,” and you can find out more if you go over to YourWebsiteEngineer.com/A2. And this is my go-to company for WordPress shared hosting. So, every one of my sites – except for YourWebsiteEngineer.com, which is on Flywheel Hosting – is on an A2 Shared Hosting Account.

They do a phenomenal job of making sure that your website is fast and speedy. They actually – all their servers are on SSD drives, so that means there’s no spinning disks; they’re all solid-state drives. And they are always tweaking things to make things faster. I’ve met some of the developers at WordCamp Ann Arbor, and then, one of the guys actually came down to WordCamp Dayton and I was able to just really pick his brain and figure out, “Okay, how is this better than Bluehost, the GoDaddy, the HostGator, things like that?”

So, it was really, really cool. It was fun to meet somebody and just really build that connection. So, I do have an affiliate link, like I said. If you want to support the show in any way, shape, or form and you’re looking for a new shared hosting account, I recommend checking out YourWebsiteEngineer.com/A2.

All right. Well, that is going to wrap up this week’s episode. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for spending a little bit of time with me, this week. I hope that this was valuable to you, who – if you’re thinking about starting a podcast or you already have a podcast, maybe you can simplify some things and speed up your workflow.

Also wanna let you know about the WordPress – or I guess, the Google thing that’s coming out, that they’re gonna start penalizing sites that are not responsive. For more information, head on over to Episode No. 226, and listen to that show. That’s all I’ve got this week. Take care, bye-bye.