The children’s author on his writing process and habits.

This is a fantastic interview with the famous children’s author Roald Dahl, in which he talks about his life, his work, and his process. The video is from 1982 but it’s remarkable how similar it is to other master writers and creatives: Dahl will write from the quiet of his shed for four or five hours a day, and he’ll focus totally with no distractions in that time. The shed is both messy and precisely how he liked it: the only time it has been cleaned in the last five years, he said, was when a goat got in.

After Dahl is done with his five hours maximum of writing, there’s plenty of time for other activities and pursuits. This is creative mastery and “Deep Work” exactly how we’d refer to it today: find the thing you’re amazing at, and focus on doing that thing as much as you can. The video is a real treat, and well worth watching.

If you want more similar-ish videos, I really love Kirsten Dirksen’s YouTube channel.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

This was a great little read about server performance matters from Ashley Rich over at Delicious Brains. While I think most WordPress users (and even most WordPress developers) don’t really need to be expert server administrators, at least delving into the topics from time-to-time is super valuable if you’re going to be the most skilled developer you can be, and understand how parts outside of your “core stack” interact.

For those totally new to the concept of WordPress servers, check out our “WordPress LAMP” article. For those who are a little more experienced, head over to Ashley’s article. He does a good job bringing you up to speed on the core concepts involved in using Nginx instead of Apache, and how it’s different caching choices work. It’s a lot to learn, but not more than I’m confident that you can manage.

The highlight for me is just that he thought to, and did, try to combine a Nginx trick with a simple WordPress caching plugin. That had never occurred to me. Here are his conclusions about that:

I have to admit, I’m surprised by the results. I expected Simple Cache + Nginx Try Files to perform much better, but I never expected it to outperform Nginx’s native FastCGI Caching. I can only conclude that there must be additional overhead due to Nginx determining if a cache entry is still valid. Whereas try_files simply checks for the existence of a file.

In reality, the difference between Nginx FastCGI Caching and Simple Cache + Nginx Try Files is negligible and both caching solutions are excellent options (depending on which users Nginx and PHP run under). However, going forward I think I’ll be using Simple Cache + Nginx Try Files because it provides much more flexibility when it comes to purging the cache.

Fantastic NPR-style podcast from WPMU DEV.

I can highly recommend this podcast, which does something totally different to all the WordPress podcasts you’ve heard before. The show follows co-host’s Micah’s journey as a new user of WordPress through a series of stories and interviews.

There are five episodes live now, and it’s really good. It’s so well produced, and so easy to listen to. The stories keep the podcast really fresh, and there are a ton of fascinating people interviewed. You should really listen to this.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

I’m not a WordPress core contributor. I don’t write the code, and I don’t make it a priority in my life to be contributing to the Marketting, Accessibility, WP-CLI, Support, Themes, or any other of the volunteer teams that keep WordPress a healthy ecosystem. And I don’t know enough of the people who do that work to claim to have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on for them.

But, from observing from the outside, I’ve been really impressed and how Josepha Hayden has been operating since taking over as WordPress’s Executive Director. Obviously changes take time, and the real proof of her success will be in a few years time with quieter stats like fewer of the people who are seen as “core contributors” being burnt out, and more people choosing to join the effort. Things that will be hard to track, even if we try.

But with her “Our Strength and Weaknesses” post from a few weeks ago, and a timely and publicly posted follow up, I feel like Josepha’s clearly on the right track. Real good leadership is rare in the world. But I believe it is rooted in openness, honesty, vulnerability, and a willingness to try new things. So far, Josepha is demonstrating all of those things and more in the what I’m seeing. And that she’s doing it publicly is really crucial for a project with the scale and open-nature of WordPress.

It’s still early days, but so far I’m feeling impressed and excited by Matt Mullenweg’s choice to name deputies. Josepha looks to be off to a good start.

(BTW, yes I intentionally subverted Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.)

You should probably take more responsibility.

I found this from Tom Greenwood at Wholegrain Digital really interesting: it explores the application of “extreme ownership” to the agency space. This comes from Jocko Willink’s book of the same name; Jocko is a former Navy SEAL whose world is a fair way from WordPress agencies.

Tom talks in detail about how extreme ownership works and how they’ve applied it as a web agency. A lot of the focus is on having an open environment for strengths and weaknesses; understanding the full context for any errors, and working collaboratively with clients to ensure a project is a success.

Putting this into practice is hard, but Tom gives a lot of practical detail on how they’ve applied this at Wholegrain. The focus is on agencies, but teams of any size and description would benefit from this.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Our friend Josh Pollock recently published a guide which I wish I’d written (and which I may yet, because it’s a good idea, and I’m sure going to be growingly-common question). It’s about how to go from a shortcode, which is that [square-bracketed] things of the past, to the Gutenberg-y thing of the future: blocks!

The process isn’t so hard, but I’d flail a lot if I set out to do it right away. That’s why guides like this one from Josh is so helpful: you can quickly read it over, and get a sense of the outlines of the Gutenberg-block from shortcode journey. It’ll help you if you ever make a WordPress block editor segment from scratch, or if you just want to do the conversion this guide covers.

One of the most pleasant surprises of our time at WordCamp US 2018 was that we got to meet Dan Maby. Dan is the founder of WP&UP, a registered charity that exists to support and promote mental health in the WordPress community

Dan explained to us in depth what he’s trying to do, and we really liked what we heard. At WCUS, Dan identified loneliness, isolation, and lack of social contact as among the root causes of mental health issues for many WordPress professionals, and having seen both the highs and lows of WordPress freelancing, we fully endorse that understanding.

We found WP&UP’s approach to addressing these issues to be layered, practical, and very well thought-through. In particular, its four interlocking concerns of “Business Health,” “Skills Health,” “Physical Health,” and “Mental Health” capture well how various kinds of business concerns interact with a WordPress developer’s (especially a freelancer’s) personal life and health.

We intend to offer a longer interview with Dan sometime in the next few months. In the meantime, check out WP&UP, and start to think what best supporting their work would look like for you and your community.

A huge year in review for Pippin Williamson.

There are transparency reports and annual reviews, and then there’s Pippin Williamson’s annual review. Pippin has been writing these since 2012, and in that time Pippin’s plugins have gone from being worked on wholly by him and sold through his own site and CodeCanyon, to Sandhills Development, a multi-million dollar company with 19 employees.

Pippin’s annual reports are fascinating because he’s incredibly candid about what did and didn’t go well, the real numbers and problems in the business, and the personal challenges that come with all of this. This isn’t “showing off”; it’s a thoughtful reflection on both the business and the personal impact this has.

I’d thoroughly recommend taking the fifteen minutes needed to read this 6,000 word post, but here’s a couple of business points which stuck out:

• The overall business picture at Sandhills is excellent, with $2.7 million in product sales and AffiliateWP and Easy Digital Downloads bringing in the vast majority of that. Profit was up nearly 100% this year.
• Easy Digital Downloads has been through a lot of pricing changes over the years. This year it saw a decline in sales, and made a loss. Pippin doesn’t have a firm answer on why this is, but cites “unintentionally out-priced our average customer” and “tougher competition than ever before”. Fixing this was a big part of 2018.
• Content marketing is working for them! We see this with our clients too at Ellipsis – drop me an email if you want in on this, alex@getellipsis.com 😉
• AffiliateWP is doing really well. It gets less of a mention because of this, but this shows the value of a fantastic product/market fit, strong demand, and having the best solution available.
• WP Simple Pay was acquired in October, and it looks like it’s working out very well for everyone. I bought this around then, and look forward to seeing how the product is improved.

The post then moves on to the personal, and you should read the post rather than my commentary on it: Pippin talks about a fire nearly destroying his childhood home, and about struggling with burnout this year.

On top of these, a string of acquisition offers combined with the departure of a long-standing team member lead Pippin to question if he was seeing “the initial signs of the demise of my company”. He says he barely slept and was deeply worried about the future of the business. I’ll leave you to read the rest of this; I’ll just add I have a huge amount of respect for Pippin for writing this, and I’ve no doubt others will take solace from the story. I can also recommend Matt Medeiros’ video where he picks up on some of these themes.

There’s been an outpouring of admiration and support since Pippin posted this on Monday, and that’s heartening. For a third time, I’ll recommend you read this.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Over on Thoughtful Code I recently covered the topic of “rubber duck debugging.” It’s a pretty simple procedure but one I love because it works surprisingly well. Here are the basic steps:

1. Explain your (broken) code and its goals, generally. Don’t worry about details, just set the context for your duck.
2. Line-by-line, explain what the flow of the whole function or method that’s not working is. Don’t skip details, ducks love details!
3. If your duck friend hasn’t spotted it yet, be sure to explain all the intermediate states and transitions in detail.
4. Find your (stupid, obvious) solution! The reason we so love “rubber duck debugging” is that (typically) in the process of doing this, you’ll find your problem. You made a small typo. You were operating on the wrong variable. Your if condition was checking the opposite of what you thought. Something is likely to be revealed.

You can read all of that, and my Malcolm Gladwelling about how it works in “Rubber Duck Debugging: The Psychology of How it Works.” I’m thought-leadering so hard right now! 😂

One of the reasons I love WordPress is because there’s always something to learn. I’ve recently had two clients who, for different reasons, really need to sort their post content by custom field values within the posts themselves.

CodePress’s Admin Columns plugin is a great free solution for this, although the free version doesn’t allow complex sorting and filtering or a few other options. I tried out the cheapest premium version and it’s precisely what my client needed. The plugin itself is cleanly designed and developed and easy-to-use. Highly recommended.

WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google.

WordPress.com is launching a new Newspack platform, which will “develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations”. When Matt Mullenweg was on Kara Swisher’s podcast last year, he talked about solving this problem a fair bit, and it’s interesting to see what’s coming next from this.

The platform is trying to solve the technology problem for news organisations, letting them get on with their reporting. It comes with funding from, amongst others, Google. It will be free whilst “in development”, until 2020, and then $1k-2k/month after that. Interesting to see where this one goes.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

On his personal blog, Studio Press lead developer Nathan Rice makes an interesting point about the block-derived performance issues that may come from having lots of Gutenberg blocks and lots of CSS rules to style them in WordPress after 5.0. I don’t know how serious the performance degradation will be over time — I don’t know if anyone does. But I do know that it’s worth some consideration that as you load more styles it does indeed impact the waterfall of the site, as Nathan highlights.

I didn’t really consider the opportunity to print CSS styles exactly where you need them that Nathan is highlighting, but I think it’s an intriguing and promising method that at a minimum I want to call your attention to. Here’s the briefest summary of the content I think Nathan is driving at:

When you enqueue styles this way, every stylesheet link gets output to the <head>. Each stylesheet is registered with a unique handle, so the same stylesheet link doesn’t get linked more than once.

I’m not suggesting that we start linking our own stylesheets outside the WordPress way. But something does have to change.

What if you could register stylesheets the same way, but instead of enqueueing them to be output in the <head>, you could call a function manually that would output the stylesheet link (with any dependencies) immediately before a block. Once a link is rendered, the WordPress stylesheet manager could make sure it doesn’t get rendered again.

As it turns out, you can!

Derek Sivers will get back to you tomorrow.

“When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next morning, I have an answer.” I like this from Derek Sivers, and have been thinking – slowly – about this over the holiday period.

Derek’s arguing our that first reactions are based on outdated knowledge and biases and are thus unhelpful. If, however, we take a step back and think more deliberately, we’ll have a better answer. I don’t agree that an intuitive reaction is always unhelpful, but have been taking the point to heart so far this year: think harder.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

This post about how WordPress works with URL from Ryan McCue has almost everything I love in such things:

1. A certified expert.
2. A thorough examination of both history and details.
3. Disambiguations of things that can trip people up.
4. A little more detail that I need to learn.

In short, it’s new best place to go if you’re interested in or working on the way that WordPress handles processing URLs for your website. Here’s the part that most stuck with me:

Extra permastructs are typically generated by core helpers like register_post_type() or register_taxonomy(). Plugins don’t typically add permastructs manually, as the generation makes a lot of assumptions about things you want.

Once all of this is done, WordPress saves the rules into the rewrite_rule option to avoid having to regenerate them on the next request. However, if a plugin has flushed the write rules before wp_loaded, this saving is deferred to wp_loaded to ensure plugins don’t break the whole system.

Now that we know we have rewrite rules (whether loaded from the option or generated fresh), we can finally get around to routing our requests.