The weirdest piece of email I’ve gotten all month was courtesy of Brian Krogsgard and the Post Status newsletter: Automattic (owner of WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce…) has just bought blogging giant Tumblr.

Reviewing the SEO of small business websites.

A very good guide to the work philosophy I swear by.

This week I’m running a (my first ever) fundraiser for a non-profit where I do a lot of volunteer work, Code for Fort Collins. And I figured it make sense to share it pretty widely. And that may as well include right here on WPShout.

Akin to Fred’s thorough answer on “the best page builder for WordPress”, Ryan Sullivan recently published over on WP Site Care a thorough analysis of six of the biggest form plugins for WordPress. He goes in depth, and doesn’t leave out much I could think to have wanted compared. So if you’ve already got a favorite form plugin, and or want to know how your personal favorite compared, give it a look.

Alex on his little notebook.

This is one of those articles that I’m linking 50% for its substance (which I regard as good but too brief) and 50% for covering and important topic. Specifically, how to manage and think about self-education. A lot, probably most, web developers I know and readers of WPShout I’ve talked to are self-educated in the web development field. Maybe you got college degrees, but few of those were “computer science.” Even if you did, Computer Science Degree often covers very little about web development. So most of us are just learning as we go.

Back in November I set aside this article from my friend Jeremy Ward about how to learn web development. I finally got to reading it and quite liked it. So I thought I’d share it with you. I liked that Jeremy started off with something I think about to little. The “circles of knowledge.” Here’s what he says:

“The occasional convenience [of your phone] comes at the cost of developing a compulsive urge to monitor your messages constantly.”

Google just introduced a major update to its search algorithm. This one’s called E-A-T, which stands for the things Google really likes now: “Expertise,” “Authoritativeness,” and “Trustworthiness.”