Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and this is the first episode of 2017. It's hard to believe that the first episode was in 2010. That seems like the podcast has been going on for seven years, but it just celebrated its sixth-year anniversary just last month.

This is my favorite time of year to think through some new challenges, ideas, or things we want to accomplish in this upcoming year. I love doing this. I haven't done it as well as I have in years past. Before I started working at Automatic, I had my own business goals. What kind of revenue did I think I could generate in a year? How many podcast downloads would I get? They were all business-related goals.

This year, I'm going to be focusing on personal development and how I can improve some of the things I'm going to be working on. I'll share a few of those things in a few minutes.

First, I want to go through a few pieces of news that happened over the Holidays. On December 27th, there was a blog post over on Jetpack.com talking about the new personal plans. There is a Jetpack Personal plan now. This basically brings in a few core services that you may be paying for separately. So this brings in automated backups, which used to be called VaultPress, and spam protection, which used to be called Akismet.

These are rolling in, so instead of having two separate plugins and two separate payments, now there is a Jetpack Personal plan. There are a few other Jetpack plans, but this is the one I want to highlight today.

Also, with this personal plan, you now get priority support. This means you'll get your ticket answered much, much quicker than someone who doesn't have a personal plan. There are 25 dedicated Happiness Engineers that work every single day to try to figure out what kind of WordPress or Jetpack issues you may be having. They're across multiple time zones, so that means somebody should be available at any given time you may have a question or concern.

It is very simple to purchase the plan. You can go directly to the shopping cart within your WordPress site itself. You can head on over to Jetpack.com. You can look at their pricing page and see they start with a free pan. That's what most people have, because it's what comes standard out of the box. But then, they have a personal plan we're talking about today. That's $39.00 per year. And there's a premium plan for $99.00 per year and a professional plan for $299.00 per year.

You want to check that if you're interested in advanced features with Jetpack. Head on over to the link in the show notes, or just go over to Jetpack.com and browse around and see if it's something that's interesting to you.

The next piece of news is another WordPress podcast called Commit Access. This has been created by someone in the WordPress community that has had a lot of experience. He used to work at Automatic, and now he works as a freelancer. He is one of the primary developers behind bbPress and BuddyPress. His name is John Jacoby Jacobson. He goes by JJJ. He sits down and interviews WordPress contributors, past and present, who have earned an ability to commit changes directly to the WordPress project.

That's the conversation. There are three podcast episodes that are out there. They are lengthy. Episode zero is 96 minutes in length. I've subscribed, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and listen to it this week. As we talk about, in the goals section, becoming more involved in the WordPress community and ramping up my developer skills, that's something that's of high importance to me in the coming year.

This is on the Make WordPress Core blog, but it is a post by Matt Mullenweg, the cofounder of WordPress. It's an article talking about supporting the future of WPCLI. WPCLI is a tool that you can manage most of you WordPress backend dashboard from the terminal or command line. For example, if you wanted to activate a plugin, you could just type WP plugin activate and then type the slug of the plugin and it will automatically update. You can do a lot of things, and I do a lot of command line interface things, turning plugins on and off and doing a bunch of things within my day-to-day job.

Basically, this has been an open source project that has been taken on by a guy named Daniel Bachhuber. He's been doing a volunteer base this year. There are a couple of big announcements. The big one is the WP-CLI.org. Decode, the GitHub, the Twitter all are coming under the WordPress.com umbrella. There'll be a new CLI make site with a PG post. There is a Slack channel for all the community talk and development there.

They're also going to bring together a number of companies in the WordPress ecosystem to solidify financial support so that Daniel can devote more time making WPCLI better and better throughout 2017.

That's exciting, because this project could've been a spare time project and then just set by the curb because the developer wasn't making any money and he didn't have time to do it anymore. But this is one of the cool things about WordPress. You see so many times that it's a huge passion project and now all of a sudden it's not – I'm not going to say it's acquired by WordPress.org or the foundation or anything, but it's one that's been a high priority. Now, he's getting some monetary resources to continue the development and continue to make WPCLI better.

We'll talk more about WPCLI as features get rolled out this year. I like talking about it, but it's very difficult to talk about in a podcast because it's all terminal. It's all a bunch of commands. I'm learning to work on my speed in typing this year, continuing to get faster and faster at doing things. WPCLI definitely helps that a tremendous amount. Those are the three announcements I wanted to share with you today.

The other thing I wanted to talk about today is a plugin called TF Random Numbers. This is a responsive random number statistics plugin. It's very easy to implement and use at any post or page. It will ultimately supply you with beautiful sections with counting numbers. You can use it to display statistics or show off your work in numbers.

What I mean by random numbers is, you program it and tell it what number you want it to come up with. Maybe you want to show that you have 42 clients. As you scroll your website, it will come to this section and start at zero and the numbers will go all the way up to 47 or 46 or whatever I just said. It's built on WordPress. It's a plugin and very simple to add. I thought it was a neat plugin, something you may or may not need on your WordPress website. It's called TF Random Numbers. You can find it on the WordPress repository. It has more than 2,000 active installs and was just updated last week.

Let's move on to the main segment of the show. Today, we'll talk about 2017 WordPress goals. This is the time of year that I love. I plan out what I'm going to do. It's the third day of the year and I have to say I've been successful so far in the past two days with the goals and resolutions. I think of resolutions as habits I want to start implementing. And then the goals are things I work on throughout the whole year.

I'm a big stickler when it comes to the WordPress resolutions I've made. I have to make sure I do these every single day. If I miss, that's just – I don't like to break the streak. I've been working on some of my personal resolutions for the last – I think I started right after Christmas, so they've been going about eight to ten days on some of these things because I wanted to make sure it was something I was truly interested in and truly had a passion for.

Some of the personal resolutions I'm just going to talk about because I'm trying to be more open and transparent here on this podcast. The three big ones I'm working on this year – the first one is a hundred days of code. This is a challenge that's starting today, as I'm recording this, January 3rd. But I started about a week ago, because I needed to start as soon as possible because my wife and I are expecting a baby in March. When I started, I only have 80 straight days until the baby comes, by his due date. I was trying to get 100 days in. I know I'll probably miss some around the baby's birth, but there will be time once the baby has come that I'll have a chance to do this.

The hundred days of code is basically taking one hour per day for 100 days in a row and spending time writing code. I've been spending a lot of time reworking and trying to figure out why the heck I've used all of these variables. It seems like I've done a lot of wrong things with my plugin, as heard on the repository. So I've been taking a lot of time going through it and trying to refactor the code and make it simpler, faster, and more efficient. Once I do that, I can add some more features.

The whole premise of the goal is not to just learn how to code and watch lessons one hour a day. It's like go in, tinker, develop, and change things. I went into the As Heard On plugin and I opened it up and was like, huh. There were a couple of things on my to-do list that I've wanted to do for quite a while, but then I started looking at the code and it's like, "Oh, well this really needs improved. This needs to be fixed." I'm starting to work on all of those different things.

It's very surprising how little you can accomplish in one hour's time. I sat there and was reworking some variables and making a variable into a serialized variable or array and just working through the process. Then you have to remember that some people already have this plugin and they already have their settings. Just thinking through it and working through it – and it's a real basic PHP that I'm writing. It just took a long time.

Now, I have a better appreciation for developers who start things from scratch and have to plan out and figure out, "What am I going to need? How can I get this set up?" They try to release the best version they can in that first version so they don't have to go in and do a bunch of modifications like I'm doing.

So that's one of my WordPress resolutions, so every day I'm going to spend an hour doing some sort of code work either in the morning or late evenings. Those are my two timeframes where I will try to squeeze that in.

Another one I did a couple of years ago, and it was really beneficial to me, was to close down all applications each night. I don't necessarily power off my computer, I just make sure that I close all my browsers inside of Chrome, Safari, and all of my programs and apps that are open throughout the day. I close them all down and reset and then the next day I can start with a clean slate. I can't tell you the number of times that I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to work on this," and I move the mouse on my computer and all of a sudden I'm looking at Chrome tabs from yesterday that I didn't finish.

It's like, "Oh, that's not what I wanted to start with today." So I'm trying to do a better job of just keeping things organized and finishing out the task at the end of the day. By doing that, I'm trying to stop a half hour earlier with actual work and then spend about a half hour decompressing and trying to figure out what I want to do the next day.

The last thing, as I'm trying to hit inbox zero daily, in December I spent a ton of time just going through and unsubscribing to all kinds of email newsletters. There were a couple of days where I would do 50 a day. It was crazy how many I had subscribed to. Honestly, I don't miss it. I don't miss a single thing. I'm getting less email and I'm able9 to keep it under control. I'm able to empty that inbox and get it all the way to zero every single day.

Those are a couple of personal resolutions. I'll keep those in check and report back a few times this year, just to see how long I can keep these streaks going.

I did write down some goals that I think anybody could – this is more of a brainstorming podcast of opportunities that you could do or goals you could set for yourself to work on in 2017. Here are some things I thought of, and I'll interject my comments on ones I want to work on as well.

The first one was keep themes and plugins constantly updated for all websites. I know I do this for several websites, but then there are some that just are static and I forget about going in and updating all the plugins. That's something you could do. You could be better and once a week go in and update all plugins or something along those lines.

You could also develop a theme or plugin for the WordPress repository. Put some volunteer time in and spend some time developing a theme and then put it out there for free for people to use. This is a great project because either a plugin or a theme does a great deal of work for you to figure out, "This is how to set it up, submit it, and get it on the repository – how to keep things updated once you" – you know, you want to go from version 1.0 to version 1.1 – what are those steps and what's that process like?

There are a lot of great learning you can do by not only just developing a theme or plugin, but the process of getting it on the WordPress repository with all of the other ones is some great learning as well. You could actually learn to do some things, like learn the WordPress REST API. This is something that's still outside of my brain. I don't quite grasp or understand what this is, but that's something that is probably not on this year's goal list for me. It is something I definitely want to learn more about.

Something I will probably focus on, once I work through this plugin I'm working on, I want to add some JavaScript type features and just learn JavaScript and how it works and how the developers at Automatic and developers across the world are using it to make websites that much easier to use and browse without page refreshes all the time.

So that's another thing you could set as a goal for 2017. You could create a premium plugin or theme to sell. Make that part of your business that you're going to support this plugin and it's going to cost $39.00 per year. It could be a side revenue generating income that comes in every single year.

You could make a custom functionality plugin. So some of that code that you may be putting into a functions.php file on every single website you build – maybe you put it in a custom functionality plugin and you've got all that code in one place and can move it from website to website. And when you start a brand new website, it's very easy to get up and running because you've got all that code in a contained plugin. You just install that plugin on that website.

You can also spend five percent of your time giving back for the WordPress community. It's called the Five for Five and it was a couple of years ago – spend five percent of your weekly working time giving back to WordPress and the WordPress Foundation. That could be any type of volunteering service. That could be something that would really catapult WordPress forward and make it that much better of a platform.

You could volunteer your time doing a theme or plugin reviews if that's something that's interesting to you. They're always looking for people to volunteer to quickly read the code to see if it's a legit plugin or theme that's not got spam injected into it.

You can volunteer to help translate WordPress's to other languages. I believe I said a few weeks back that when WordPress 4.7 came out; it was available natively in 50-plus languages. That's incredible, but there are so many other languages that are out there. It would be really great, if you have that ability, that you speak another language, if you would spend some time helping translate strings. It's as simple as here are one or two words in a row and you translate that into the native tongue that you're helping to translate to.

You could speak at a Word camp. You could volunteer at a Word camp. You could organize a Word camp. You can spend time just going to a Word camp. These are all great resolutions or goals you could implement in 2017.

You could even start a side business. This is how I got started. I started a side business building websites for clients. I just started doing it on the side and it was a night and weekend project while my wife was doing her second job. She was a pharmacy resident, but she was working at Walgreens time – a national drugstore here in the United States. When she was doing that, I was working on my skills and trying to figure out what this whole website thing was. That's what catapulted me and launched me into creating my own business.

If you already have a side business, in 2017 you could take it to a full-time business and stop going to your "day job." You can just spend time building websites for people. I don't know if you've noticed or not, but if you do anything on the web, you always run across these terrible websites that need a lot of help and refreshing to make – small businesses, restaurants, local barber shops, lawncare services, and places like this in your community. I'm sure if you live in a very small community, you could still find five projects that you could work on.

Say you charge $1,000 per project, or $500.00, you could make some good, significant, extra income. I think the return on investments of learning some code and learning to build websites for people – I think you could make a lot more than if you were just going out and delivering pizzas or picking up a second job at the grocery store. There are a lot of extra returns you can make from becoming a WordPress developer or even just helping people.

You can consult with companies and teach them how to use WordPress. The possibilities are endless, and it's really incredible to see how many thousands of people make full-time livings on a free software that's made by millions of people across the world.

There are a lot of goals you can focus on in 2017. The big ones for me – I'm going to work on code and contributing back the WordPress itself. I know it was two years ago when something I found in the WordPress – it was one of the themes from 2015 that had an issue. I was able to help fix it and I got my name in the contributor list. That is something that's on my goal list for 2017. Let's see if that will happen this year, as well.

I wanted to share with you today an inspirational episode for you to think about some things that you want to do. How do you want to become better at using WordPress? What kind of goal do you have for yourself when it comes to WordPress in 2017? Take a week to think about that and we'll be back next week for another great episode focusing on WordPress. Until then, we'll talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.