If you’re like me, and you may be since you’re reading this post,  you get ideas for apps , websites and services all the time. I know I do. What I am bad at is actually executing these ideas. Sometimes I write a little code, other times I buy a domain name that would fit my idea and then life happens and before you know it I have a bunch of folders, some code and domain names but no real sites to speak of.  I’m trying to break that cycle. I worked in higher ed from 1998 to 2016. It was both the best and hardest career choice I could have made and it was awesome. I met so many awesom ..read more

This year has been much different than we all expected. Obviously. Sorry for the hyperbole, but it’s true, especially when it comes to hosting events in higher ed. We all saw our large planned events like admitted student open houses, commencement, alumni reunions, lectures and more postponed, done on Zoom, or cancelled. I have sat through many Zoom events this spring and summer as the parent of an incoming freshman college student. Some were great. Some were OK. Some were bad. There are just so many variables when it comes on online events, especially when it comes to having multiple people p ..read more

It’s time for the third and final post in our series on website backups. If you’re just jumping in now, take a few minutes to review part one here and part two here. So far, we’ve talked why you need to be backing up your website, and not relying on your web host or server provider. Second, we’ve talked about how often you should be backing up your site. Now, it’s time to explore where the best place is to store your backups. This is a critical decision and the good news is you have lots of options, including free and paid options. Let’s talk about them from worst to best, in my opinion. Not T ..read more

Welcome back. In part one of this series, we talked about why you should backup your WordPress site, and explored a few of the plugins that are available to make backing up your site easy and painless. In this post, we’ll explore how to find a backup schedule that works for your site, content, and posting schedule. It’s important to come up with a schedule for your backups. Start with thinking about how often you’re updating content on your site.If you aren’t generating content daily, it doesn’t make sense to use resources (such as storage, which can cost money) to keep backing up the same dat ..read more

In the past, I’ve written extensively about improving the performance of your WordPress site. That’s very important work you can do, as speed matters. But what happens if something happens to your site? What if you’re hacked, or the hard drive on your server dies? These are all common events that could leave you high and dry with all your website content gone. Backups will be your best friend should any of these tragedies occur. In this three-part series, we’ll explore how and why to backup your website. Why should you backup your WordPress website? A key part of any web strategy should be how ..read more

WordPress version 5.3 released last week. In this release, there are changes in the way WordPress handles very large image uploads. Previous to 5.3, the software would allow you or your users to upload images of any size into the media library. This in and of itself is not a problem, but many sites and themes did not have automatic image and/or thumbnail image sizing setup. These sites often just embed that full size image into a page, template or post and scale it down with CSS or hard-code it in the image tag. In version 5.3, WordPress will size down images over 2560 pixels high and wide dow ..read more

I’ve been seeing a lot of Twitter accounts, both regular user accounts as well as brand accounts, using fancy, math and other symbol fonts in their tweets. These characters are all legal, and part of the Unicode standard. Akin to using a screenshot from a notes app in your tweet, we should take a closer look at these characters. On one hand, I get it. These characters can make your tweet stand out and breathe some life into your message copy. This comes with a catch though. Those special characters can break accessibility. This includes being able to be read by screen readers and other speech ..read more

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com and many other services like JetPack, WooCommerce and more has received $300 million USD in funding from Salesforce. From TechCrunch: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and soon Tumblr, has closed a $300 million funding round at a $3 billion post-money valuation. The Series D round has a single investor, Salesforce Ventures. First off, congrats at Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team on this round. That’s a large investment and Salesforce is an interesting, and sole partner in this investment. This will improve ser ..read more

Last year, I wrote about my experience of getting to 500,000 public story views on Snapchat. While fully acknowledging that I am not Snap’s target demographic, it’s been interesting to watch the rise, dip and potential rise again of this company. This is a critical time for the social media platform, as new networks like TikTok are gaining a lot of steam globally, especially in higher ed. Today, I write to let you know that earlier this summer, I crossed the million public story views milestone. On my Snapchat. I know, it’s nutty. It’s strange to think people around the world have watched 40 d ..read more

Yeah, that’s a slightly clickbait-y title, but these are scary times. Schools are cutting programs, scaling way back and in some extreme instances, closing altogether. It’s hard to go a full week without seeing an article in the news about the impending death of higher education. Is higher ed dying? No, I don’t think so. Is it sick? Yes, I believe so. I recently read this news story about big companies like Google, Apple and Netflix no longer requiring college degrees for its employees. This quote jumped out at me: Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that about half of Apple’s US employment ..read more