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Lessons in Customer Support in WordPress

December 22, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

This past weekend, I had a couple of less-than-stellar exchanges as it relates to customer service, customer support, or whatever you’d like to call it.

Specifically, they were things that transpired with other unrelated businesses both of which got me thinking about the state of customer support in WordPress.

Customers

And since many of us are involved in WordPress-related businesses or are running shops in the industry, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the whole thing.

None of this is novel and it’s probably not particularly insightful. Just some things I observed and thought about while driving home (because, you know, who doesn’t think about WordPress when they aren’t WordPressing? :).

The purpose of this, though, isn’t to disparage anyone.

This post is about self-edification. It’s about sharing ideas for how we currently run our businesses and how we might be able to improve – both as customers and as businesses – moving forward.

Recommended Tools For Bloggers

December 21, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Blogging is one of those things a lot of people enjoy – some do it daily, some weekly, and some whenever they want. There isn’t a single right way to go about it either.

It’s all about what your goals are.

With that said, I’m occasionally asked about tools for bloggers. More specifically, I’m asked something like:

If I wanted to blog regularly, what tools should I use?

And though I generally write about development on this blog, I thought it might be worth writing a short post for the tools I recommend for all bloggers.

Get Better at WordPress Development

December 18, 2015 / Tom

For the last few months, I’ve been quietly running a small pop-up on this site used to help build a mailing list for those who are interested in wanting to get better at WordPress development.

Get Better at WordPress I know, I know: This kind of stuff seriously annoys a certain breed of people, doesn’t it? Myself included!

But at the recommendation of a friend, I tried it. And it’s been working.

The mailing list has been successfully growing over the last few months, and I’m getting ready to start something new at the beginning of 2016. To that end, I wanted to share a little more about what’s in store for the first quarter of next year.

On The Idea of Simplifying Our Tools

December 17, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Perhaps one of the most tiring things of working in development in staying up to date with all of the various tools and processes available to us for helping us get our work done.

As soon as one comes out we even come close to mastering (and I use that term loosely), there’s a new dependency manager, process, server configuration, whatever, to learn and to see if it fits into our workflow.

All the while, many of us want to find the most streamlined process available for us to efficiently do our work and build our projects with as much optimization as possible.

So it’s like we’re faced with this dilemma:

Stay up to date with all of the new tools that are available or stick with what we know and hope that we don’t become irrelevant?

It sounds a bit like hyperbole, but you know the feeling I’m talking about, right?

Retrieve Flickr Photos in WordPress

December 16, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re working on a plugin or theme that’s tightly integrated with a user’s social profile then you may find yourself wanting to pull in photos from their Flickr account.

Flickr API

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, then you know most of the stuff I share like this comes from either working on something for myself or working on something for someone else.

So, in a recent project, here’s how I used the Flickr API to bring Flickr photos into a WordPress plugin to display on the front-end.

Tom McFarlin

Lessons in Customer Support in WordPress

Recommended Tools For Bloggers

Get Better at WordPress Development

On The Idea of Simplifying Our Tools

Retrieve Flickr Photos in WordPress