My goal is to help you develop a high quality website. Yes, that’s right. You can have your own site. You can maintain it yourself and you can reap the benefits of a high, new, quality website. I’m gonna teach you how. Stay tuned.

Alright, that’s enough of that music. That’s a throwback to the beginning – the very first episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’re celebrating Episode No. 400 of this show and I’m so excited to be here with you because there is so much that I’ve learned, so many takeaways, and so many ideas or things that I’m gonna share with you today just talking about where I’ve been and what’s taken place ever since December 2010 when I launched this podcast. So, we’ll get to that in just a few minutes.

I do have a couple of announcements and a plugin to share with you, as always. So, let’s go ahead and roll those announcements. The first announcement is all about WordPress and the impact that it’s had on the web. There’s an article over on Speckyboy.com and there’s a link in the show notes for Episode No. 400 and it talks about how WordPress has had an impact on the web, how it started, how it fixed the early struggle of content management, how the community was born around this software platform that we’ve all seen and we know and love, and it talks about some cool things about how WordPress has impacted the web.

And so if you’re interested in finding that out, go over to Speckyboy and you can look it up there or you can click on the link in the show notes for Episode No. – yeah, that’s right – 400. Another piece of news that I want to share with you today is all about WooSess, and this is different than WordSess. WordSess was a virtual conference that happened a little while ago. It was in July and it was talking all about WordPress. It was 12 hours’ worth of content.

And now – just on the heels of that coming up in October – is a WooSess and this is going to be a all virtual conference for WooCommerce and it’s October 18th and 19th and there’s a link in the show notes where you can go and you can sign up and you can find out all about it and who some of the speakers are. Some of the speakers are plugin developers for WooCommerce. We’ve got folks that we actually have Todd Wilkins – who is the lead of the WooCommerce division inside of Automatic. We’ve got a bunch of people. Chris Lema is gonna be there and a handful of others. So, that is something that’s coming up.

If you are interested in that, head on over to WooSess.com and you can find out more. Then the last big thing I want to talk about is an article from over at WPTavern.com and it talks about how to convert your short codes and plugins and how to convert those into Gutenberg blocks. That is something – if you’re interested and if you want to learn a little bit more about that – you can go on over and check that out. So, those are the announcements of the week.

I also want to just mention – and kind of throw this out here – that starting now, I guess starting Episode No. 400, I’ve started a Patreon account. It is a small account where if you want to contribute back to the show and help to cover some of the costs of the server and whatnot and I know that my friend Adam over at Kitchen SinkWP just did this and it’s just a way to give back.

I don’t charge anything for any of the content on my website. You know it’s all completely free. I do it as my gift back to the WordPress development or back to the WordPress community and if you are interested in contributing to that, I’ve got some fun, different levels that are over there on Patreon. So, you can find it at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/Patreon.

Alright, moving right along into the “Is there a plugin for that?” section, I have one that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about. Maybe I did 100 episodes ago, but this one I want to share is going along with WooSess. I want to talk about WooCommerce Services. There’s a free plugin from Automatic and it makes basic eCommerce features like shipping more reliable by taking the burden off your site’s infrastructure. It has USPS and Canadian Post – Canada Post – built into the plugin and it will automatically generate rates.

So, your customers will come to your website, they’ll put items in their cart, and they’ll see, “Oh, it’s gonna cost $13.00 to ship via USPS.” And the cool part about this is it’s a free plugin and you can also with USPS – that’s the only feature yet so far, it’s not built into Canada Post yet – but with USPS is you can go in and you can print a label right from your WordPress dashboard. And so somebody orders something and they go through the purchase and then you can box it up and you can hit print inside your WordPress dashboard and it will automatically print out and you can pay for your postage right inside of WooCommerce, which is amazing.

It’s really, really cool. The other great feature about WooCommerce Services is it can do automatic taxes. So, if you’re in the State of Ohio like I am and you want to offer taxes, then all you have to do is click a button and enable it and it’ll charge anyone that has an Ohio zip code or postal code with their billing address. It will charge them taxes. And so it’s a simple plugin. It’s completely free. It works really, really well. It’s got more than 300,000 active installs. So, that is the news of the week and the plugin of the week.

Alright, today I just want to talk about wow, it’s a lot of episodes. Four hundred is a lot of episodes. I try to wrap my mind around how much things have changed since the beginning. You obviously heard the intro music there at the beginning, which was pretty lame-o, but that’s how I got started. I wanted to get started in the WordPress space and there weren’t a lot of other shows out there. I took a course by the Internet Business Mastery guys just trying to hone in on what I was gonna talk about. I had started a podcast.

I believe there was eight episodes of like it was called Business Online Podcast and I was gonna talk about all the online tools it takes to run a business. Now, obviously, that could have been a huge show because the tools are changing all the time, but I went ahead and – through the process of the course – I really focused and I learned that I wanted to focus on WordPress. WordPress was something that was still pretty new to me in 2010. I had just picked it up in 2009 – the early parts of 2009.

It was still really challenging. I didn’t know how to do a lot of things and I honestly learned a ton as I went. Those first few shows were like, “Oh, these are things that I just learned. Maybe I should teach other people how to do those.” So, back then, I think there was three other podcasts or maybe four total, including mine. So, two of them had nine episodes combined between the two of them and then there was the WordPress A to Z plugins and they talked about different plugins that every week they would just talk about different plugins.

Back then, you know, I don't know even know how many plugins were in the repository back then, but that’s what their show was all about. And so now I just counted on iTunes today – and I’m sure there’s more than that – but from what I could count, there’s more than 25 different WordPress podcasts in this almost nine years since this show started. So, that’s one of the things that I saw when I looked back and just tried to comprehend like how much time and effort and energy I’ve put into this site since 2010. WordPress was a 3.0.2 and we’ve seen 17 major releases since then.

So, that’s a lot of news talking about 3.1.1, 3.1.2, and all of those point revisions and all of the news that goes along with WordPress and its updates. So, 17 major releases since 2010. There’s been I estimated about 15 minutes for a podcast – 15 to 20 minutes for a show. That’s probably the average over the last eight or nine years and so that works out to be about 6,000 minutes of audio content – which is 250 hours. And then I did some little estimation. I was like, “Probably I did about two hours per week just looking for new shows and looking for all the information I needed to pull together a show.”

And that turns out to be about 48,000 minutes of prep and editing the podcast and whatnot. So, that works out to be about 13 full days of work over the course of my life, which is pretty crazy, actually. I’ve used three different tools when it comes to doing show notes. I’ve used WorkFlowy. That was an online tool that allowed me to create bullets. Then I could export the bullets and then I could import those into WordPress. I used Evernote for a really long time and I would format the show notes so they were in HTML so I could just type them up and then I could paste them right into WordPress.

And lately, for the last let’s see, I’m looking here – for the last at least since 270 – so for the last 130 episodes, for the last two plus years, I’ve been using just Apple Notes and it’s worked really, really well. I type everything up in markdown and then all I have to do is copy and paste right into WordPress and everything’s formatted right and it all works really, really well. So, that’s I’ve used three different tools for show notes. I’ve used different email providers. Here’s the ones that I could think of and the ones I talk about: so, MailChimp, Benchmark Email, MailPoet, which was the plugin inside of WordPress. I used that for a while.

I used Office Autopilot when I was launching a course and I wanted a payment gateway system all built in. So, that was one that I used back in 2013 I think. Then I went back to MailChimp for a while and then I went to Convertkit. So, I think I’ve had six different email and newsletter providers. And so I’m currently on Convertkit. I still like them so I don’t have any reason to move, but that’s just another example of like you never know which service is gonna be perfect for you and you can just kind of work your way through the ones that seem fit for the time. I had a lot of different hosting too. I started off with Green Geeks.

Then I moved to WPEngine. That was one because I got a free account for life with WPEngine from a WordCamp probably back in 2011 or ’12 and so I still have that account today. It’s a test account that I use. I was on Rackspace for a while. I used ServIT hosting for a while. I used A2 Hosting for a while. I used Flywheel and I’ve used Pressable. So, that’s seven different hosts in the outline or the course of the show. And then when it comes to desktop tools for using WordPress on my computer, I’ve used four different tools.

I’ve used MAMP. I’ve used desktop server. I’ve used Local by Flywheel and now I’m on Valet Plus, which I talked about in just a few episodes ago about how I set up Valet and how I really like that. I’ve learned a ton when it comes to the show. Obviously, I’ve learned about podcasting and what an RSS feed is and how to upload files to Libson and how to make all the things work so that my show goes to all the different places.

So, I’ve learned all of those pieces of the puzzle. I’ve learned that I need to slow down. I feel like I’m always super excited when I talk on microphone or in webinars and I just go really, really fast because I’m just so excited and I have so much good information that I want to share. So, I constantly have to think, “Okay, just go slower. Go slower.” So, that’s another thing. I think I’ve kind of honed in a craft of taking a visual thing – you know mostly code is visual – or dragging and dropping or plugins and all those types of things are very visual in nature.

And I think I’ve done a pretty good job of accurately describing what’s happening or the settings or whatever and making it easy to understand – or at least easy to consume – in an audio podcast. I’ve learned all the steps to create a webinar and I’ve used several different platforms for that as well, but the process of people signing up for a webinar and then moving their email address into my newsletter provider so I could send them the replay and all of these different, little pieces to do live webinars. There was a season – it was before I joined Automatic – that every Friday I had a live webinar and I just came up with ideas and I know that I did that for at least a year straight.

I probably have 18 or so of the webinar replays on the webinar page on YourWebsiteEngineer.com. So, you can go back and watch them and look at the old versions of everything and just see everything looks old you know, but I want to get back more into that and doing more active like, “Let’s teach via the video.” So, that’s always something that’s on my mind. It’s just that I run out of time so, so, so frequently. Another thing that I learned – and I learned the hard way – is about [inaudible] [00:11:27] how to properly edit files, how to not cowboy code, if you will, and change things right on the server.

I’ve learned that that’s a big no-no, that I shouldn’t be doing that, and so that’s a good thing to learn. I learned how to fix bugs in code. This is on the work side. I’ve learned how to fix some bugs and then do what’s called a pull request and so the developers can just pull in the changes and then they can fix it and release the code to the folks that have bought that. I also now know how DNS works. I was super shaky. I had no idea what I was doing when I moved people from one host to another. I did that a lot early on because I wanted the affiliate commission when they signed up for a new account. I wanted that as part of my fee as well.

So, then I would move them and didn’t understand the difference between DNS and A records and name servers and all that good stuff, but now I am very confident with the knowledge of knowing how all of those things work. And then I also figured out and created this workflow – and there’s a webinar on this – on how to keep my development site and my live site all in sync with each other so I don’t have to spend a lot of time keeping them in sync before I do any edits or changes.

So, those are some things, some rough things. I’m sure that I’ve learned five times as many things as that were, but those are some of the things that I’ve learned in the last eight to nine years. In the future, obviously, we’re gonna be talking more about JavaScript. That’s something that language that isn’t quite familiar to me. I’m taking a course on Treehouse right now just trying to learn a little bit more and just understanding and wrapping my mind around, “Okay, what’s the difference between JavaScript and Ajax and JQuery? How do you add those things to websites?” and whatnot. So, that’s something that I’m super interested in.

As part of the news today, we talked about how to change shortcodes into Gutenberg blocks and that’s something that I want to learn because I have a plugin with a short code and there’s lots of short codes out there that I’ve created myself that it’d be super nice if they were just a Gutenberg block and how we can work on how I can figure out how to do that and how I can teach and understand and share that knowledge with others. So, that’s something that I want to talk about. I’d love to be able to do more with command line and how to control both websites and servers with command lines. That’s super interesting to me.

And I love workflows built by Alfred. I’ve got a couple of them that I just use all the time to help me navigate the WordPress dashboard and to just navigate all the things within WordPress. So, those are some things that I’m looking forward to. I’m looking forward to tons of things. I think the next 400 episodes are gonna be huge. I had an interview with somebody yesterday inside of Automatic and they wanted to know like, “What do you think’s gonna happen in the next year?” I was like, “I have no idea what’s gonna happen, other than Gutenberg’s gonna come out and we’re gonna get all this new stuff for sure because our developers are continuing to get smart.

They’re continuing to learn things. The technology is changing. I think we’re gonna be in a full JavaScript environment real soon and we’re not even gonna – I don't know.” I don't know what the future holds, but I know that I’ll be here continuing to do WordPress podcasts for as long as I can. This has been 400 weeks in a row. As long as the very first few weeks I’m pretty sure that I published right on time, but every Wednesday for 400 episodes – or however many weeks that is – that’s how many weeks in a row that I’ve got a show for you.

So, next week, I’ll be out of town, but I do have a show that’s gonna be all lined up and ready to go. So, you can listen to that while I am – hopefully at that time – I’ll be sitting on the beach enjoying some sunshine with a little retreat with my wife and I. So, that’s pretty much what I wanted to share, just kind of an update and what’s been happening and what’s going on. I think I probably could have talked for an hour just kind of giving you all the cool things that have happened as part of the show. People have come up to me at WordCamp saying, “Oh, I recognize your voice.” That’s super cool.

Just being asked to be keynote speaker and other speakers you know and speak across the United States for different things, to be involved with WordCamp Europe that was happening a couple years ago. That was great to travel to all of these cool places because of WordPress. Mainly, I say that because of WordPress because my love for WordPress led me to Automatic, which led me to a job – a full time career – that helps me help people every single day and then my team, all the teams that I’ve worked on are just so smart and they get to teach me and then I get to share those tidbits of things with you all as well.

So, those are just some things I’m rolling around in my head when it comes to Episode 400. I didn’t know what to do like, “Should I do this as a big, monumental event?” And then I thought, “Hey, let’s be low key – kind of like WordPress.” You know WordPress – except for 5.0 – is gonna be kind of a big release. But you know WordPress 4.0, WordPress 3.0, it wasn’t a really big deal. It was just the next point release and we just kept moving on.

So, we’re gonna continue to keep moving on with Episode No. 401 next week and we are gonna go out with the actual – let’s see, which music should I use? I’ll use the actual outro that I had professionally created by the music radio creative folks and that will end Episode No. 400. Until next week, take care, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye, bye.

Well, this was a great outro when I used to have to talk over it and try to time it so I was just perfectly ended right when the music ended. I’m glad I don’t do that anymore and just have a short outro. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care and – Oh, it’s still going. There’s still more. So, thanks for listening. Thanks for being a subscriber and head on over to Patreon. I guess that’s what people say at the end of shows. I’m not all about it, but if you want to donate to the show, you can at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/Patreon. Take Care. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye, bye.

Ah, I forgot about this. This is another piece of music that I have to talk over. It was the outro and I had to time it when it was gonna start talking itself and so just thank you so much for listening and joining me on this 400th episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. I’m so thankful that you’ve come along on this journey. You want to level up your WordPress journey and you want to learn more about WordPress and just continue to build a high quality site. That’s what I’m here for and that’s what I’m gonna try to do each and every week. Until next week, take care, and we’ll talk again soon.

Speaker 2: You have been listening to Your Website Engineer podcast.

Speaker 3: Are you ready to take action and start working on your website now?

Speaker 2: Don’t search through countless resources.

Speaker 3: Dustin has a free eBook on the most useful plugins for your WordPress website available for you to download now.

Speaker 2: YourWebsiteEngineer.com.

Speaker 3: That’s YourWebsiteEngineer.com.

Adam Silver: Hello? You still there? Okay. Don’t tell Dustin, but I’m sneaking this clip in. This is Adam Silver, the host of Kitchen Sink WP podcast and the Get Options podcast. And on behalf of all the WordPress podcasts and the hosts of those podcasts that are currently active – and those that are long gone – we all want to say congratulations on Episode 400. You, my friend, are an inspiration and we all really appreciate the work that you’ve done week in and week out to keep this show – your show – going. It’s awesome.

And as a personal note, those who may not know – without your encouragement and support – I would not be where I’m at right now with my WordPress career, nor my own podcast. So, really a heartfelt thank you for everything. I really do appreciate your friendship and I look forward to another 100, 200, 300 to 400 more episodes from you. Alright. Thanks again. Congratulations. Happy, happy 400 episodes. I think that’s the right way to say that. Okay. See you. Bye.