On today’s episode we talk about the things that I'm thankful for with WordPress, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode 312. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today is the annual Thanksgiving episode. It's almost Thanksgiving, tomorrow in fact in the United States. And it's just a great time of year to spend time reflecting on what you are thankful for. And today we're just going to talk about some of the things I'm thankful for when it comes to WordPress. But before we do that I've got a couple of announcements and a plug-in to share with you. The first thing is there's a WordPress 4.7 Beta 4 is now out and available.

And again this is development software; it should not be running on a live server in any way shape or form. And you need the WordPress beta tester plug-in downloaded from the WordPress repository. And they’ve made 60 more changes. They’ve fixed and tweaked a bunch of things, and they're getting ready for the launch in just a couple weeks after WordCamp U.S. Speaking of WordCamp U.S., there was an announcement this past week that WordCamp U.S. for 2017 and 2018 will be held in Nashville. And that's exciting for me as Nashville is a lot closer than Philadelphia. And they didn't release dates yet, so if it's the same weekend I'll still be traveling with my wife to the same pharmacy conference like we are this week – or this year we're heading out to Las Vegas for a few days, so I can support her and be with her for the pharmacy conference.

So I'm not sure if it's going to be the same weekend or if they're going to move it to the fall or what not, but it's going to be in Nashville for the next couple of years. And then lastly, there's been a public launch of the .Blog domains. Probably a few months back I talked about .Blog is not owned in the domain registration, has been handled by Automattic and WordPress.com. And you don’t have to connect it to a WordPress.com account, but if you want a blog name like Dustin.blog or Hartzler.blog, or a short URL, this may be a great chance to pick one up. They are registering for $30.00 per domain. And so if that's something that you're interested in definitely go ahead and check that out. I've got a link in the show notes too for all the details as well.

Okay, in the Is There a Plug-in for That Section, today I want to talk about featured images in RSS with size and position. That's the name of the plug-in. And it's a little bit wordy, but basically it allows you to add your feature image to your RSS feed. And you can add sizes and CSS positioning items, so that when people are looking at your feeds in FeedBurner or MailChimp or ConstantContact or anything like that, you have these images, the featured images that you’ve added to your WordPress post. It is a plug-in that has a lot of functionality and will kind of spice up your RSS feed. And it's got more than 10,000 active installs. So this is one that if you are just wondering how to spice up those RSS feeds to make them look a little nicer, so when people are reading them in feeds they can see the image that you’ve picked.

You’ll definitely want to check out featured images in RSS with size and position found on the WordPress repository, or as always there's a link in the show notes for episode number 312. Okay, today I'm just going to spend a few minutes here. We're not going to learn anything Word Press-ey today, but I just want to say some of the things that I'm thankful for. I think it goes without saying I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful for a place to live and all of the basic needs that I have that have been met every single day. But I really like the WordPress community, and I love kind of tying these shows back to the WordPress community. And so I decided that I wanted to talk a little bit about how I'm thankful for WordPress, and thankful for what it's done to my life.

And it's really changed the trajectory of my life. Back in 2009 – or let’s see – I guess it was 2007 when I graduated college. I was a corporate engineer at Whirlpool. And I had the awesome opportunity to work in this giant corporation. And I learned a lot, and I learned that I hated giant corporations. There was just so much bureaucracy. There were so many meetings. I mean, I would have six hours worth of meetings a day, and then be expected to get eight hours of work done in the last two hours that I was there. And it just wasn’t the right environment for me. It was just kind of a toxic environment for me and I just really didn't like it. Fast forward a couple years to 2010. We moved here to Dayton, Ohio. And my wife took a job as full time pharmacist, and so I was able to start building websites.

And the year before I had just kind of heard about this WordPress thing, so I started – I had built a website for my – on of my close friends from college. He was running for a local count seat in the local commissioner election, and so I built him a website out of WordPress. And it was super frustrating. It just took forever because I didn't know what I was doing. It just wasn’t very fun. Well, I continued to learn and tweak and play with WordPress, and pretty soon I decided that that was going to be what I was going to focus on. I launched this podcast in December of 2010. And just WordPress kind of took off from there and it helped me grow my own business. I had my own consulting agency for three and a half years before I started with Automattic.

And so WordPress is really just like ever since 2009, 2010, since I discovered it and started using it, like we're almost in the seven year mark that I've been using WordPress and just really enjoying it. And I'm just so thankful that I stumbled upon the software, and then I've been able to meet so many people in the community. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the things that I'm thankful for. I am so thankful that I have a fulltime job for the last – since 2010, so almost seven years. The first three and half, like I said were at Hartzler Digital Media, where I had my consultancy agency, so I had a fulltime job there. And now for the last three years I've been with Automattic as a fulltime employee.

I love that I have coworkers who are equally passionate about WordPress, and WooCommerce, and Jetpack, and all the different pieces of software that Automattic creates. So that just – I don't know how to – I don’t really even know how to put it into words, just I'm so thankful that 15 year – or 13 years ago WordPress was started and created, and now there's hundreds of people just like me, who are making fulltime livings and doing something that they love, and helping people create and succeed in their businesses. So that's kind of the first thing. The second kind of point that I'm excited about, or thankful for, for WordPress is with plug-ins and themes. There are so many plug-ins out there. There’s thousands of plug-ins out there on the WordPress repository.

And I'm just so thankful that developers have taken the time to build out free plug-ins, like Back WP Up, Yost SEO plug-in is free. There's social plug-ins. There's security plug-ins. There's speed plug-ins. All of these plug-ins are free, and developers have taken the time, and money, and resources, and just to build those out, just for the overall use for the general community. I think that is really, really awesome. I also am super thankful for all the designers, the talented people that could be building websites for thousands of dollars designing them and making them awesome, but they’ve chosen to design their websites and sell them on the theme repositories or what not for low prices. You know, a $100.00 or less and you can get an awesome theme that's already been completely coded for WordPress and all ready to be set up, and it just looks amazing out of the box.

And so I am extremely thankful for that. And I'm thankful that the plug-in repository and the folks over that – that approve the plug-ins are – they allow non programmers like me, and somebody who thought they could kind of be a programmer, but really can't write a lot of code. They’ve allowed people like me to submit plug-ins to the repository, to allow me that full experience of: okay, how do I build a plug-in, how do I market it, how do I get it out there? and again, I haven’t done a great job of that because I've been busy with other things, but I love the fact that people like me, who have zero experience can contribute back to the plug-in repository. We can find bugs in code and we can fix those. And it's just like because it's an open source community, like anybody can contribute and anyone can do anything.

I love the community aspect of WordPress. I love WordCamps. I've been to – I think I went to four this year, which is awesome, or five actually. Yeah, I went to five WordCamps this year. And just the people that I got to meet, the lessons that you learn by just hearing other people’s experiences with WordPress, you just can't put a price tag on that, and that's just so great. I've made tons of friends across the world, which is also really cool. So when I travel to different areas, like there's friends that I've met through the podcast, or I've met through going to WordCamps that are able to grab lunch, to grab dinner, they can show me around the town and stuff like that, and it's just really, really cool. And WordCamp is like I said, because they're not all in Dayton, Ohio I get to travel. And I get to spend different places and different cities.

A few weeks ago I was back in Louisville, which was a lot of fun and just an opportunity to see that city, Cincinnati, Nashville, all these different places, like you get a great opportunity to do that. And I was very lucky and fortunate enough to go to WordCamp Europe, which was held in Austria this past year. So I got to fly out to Austria, see Austria, See Vienna, and just spend some time there, which was a lot of fun. The community aspect is probably the biggest part about WordPress and how it feels like nobody ever holds back information. If you know something at a WordCamp, like you're one up to share it with other people. And you would say: oh, this is how I do this, or this is how I tackle this.

It's more of a givers mindset when it comes to WordPress, and so many people are just so willing to just give and speak their minds. I love this, and especially when I was first get started. I would go to WordCamps and just ask questions. And some may seem like the easiest questions in the world, but I had people that were willing to step up and give me just really thoughtful answers, and just not kind of brush me off because I was brand new to the WordPress community. I also have to say that I'm thankful for competition. There's great competition out there to make WordPress better. So there's now Squarespace, there's Wicks, there's Weebly, there's Medium, there's all these different platforms that are competing head to head with Wordpress.com, or just even self hosted WordPress to be the best software to run a website.

I mean, it's just making WordPress better. We always are looking at the competition and seeing: okay, what are they doing? How can we make WordPress easier, faster, better, you know, all of these different things? And so the competition is really, really great. I think that competition has helped to push WordPress towards the JavaScript ability. So a lot of things are being written in JavaScript, which is absolutely amazing. Like, I'm so thankful for that, especially with WooCommerce and a lot of the things that you do. You add items to your cart. You add your shipping address. And instead of like the entire page refreshing, it automatically refreshed on the same page via JavaScript. I love that because a lot of people’s sites that we troubleshoot are run very, very slowly, and so to wait for another page load is sometimes a little painful.

So I love that. And the new technology that's out there just continues to help WordPress improve, and it continues to go to get better and better, you know, 13, 14, 15, 16 years here and now into the future. So those are some of the things that I just – I thought of when I was thinking about what am I so thankful for about WordPress. I know that there's tons more items that i could list, but everything kind of comes back down into those four. It allows me to create a fulltime income. There's plug-ins, there's themes, the core WordPress, all of that software is free. You can get started very, very quickly, very, very easily. The community is great. That’s probably one of the best parts about WordPress. So many people – even there's so many people that are blogging and podcasting about WordPress, and it's just all giving everybody else their take on WordPress.

And you can learn a lot by just listening to podcasts and reading blog posts about WordPress, which is really amazing. And then the last thing is there's competition with other platform that are out there that just ultimately make WordPress better and a stronger platform for people to use and build their website on. So that's all I really wanted to share with you this week, just a quick episode saying about some of the things that I'm thankful for. And next week we’ll get back in there with another episode about how we can actually do something with this awesome technology that we get to be thankful for this time of year. And sorry if you're in another part of the world that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. That's kind of what's on my forefront of my mind right now, and so I wanted to share that with you this week.

And so with that take care and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye. For more great WordPress information head on over to your website Engineer.com.