 And welcome to my talk titled learn and contribute to open source by writing blog posts now just before we jump into things just a bit about myself, my name is Ivan Zuzek and I've been a freelance Drupal developer for around 12 years. I think a couple of years I was full-time, but most of the time I've been a Drupal developer and I always love to look at my user profile on Drupal.org because I actually realized that my account has been on Drupal.org for 13 years and one week. It's probably now 13 years and four weeks Which is kind of scary because my my account's a teenager technically and especially because I've got two small kids It's it's it's it's scary to know that my account is older than all my kids and existed way before them But in the last 13 years and one week I've always tried to find ways to contribute to the Drupal community because the community has given me a lot Now without Drupal, I wouldn't be standing up here of course because this is a Drupal conference And I wouldn't have a career and I wouldn't have all of made made made all of the friends that I have Here at Drupal South so I Always try to find ways to contribute Now when it comes to contributing to Drupal or any type of open source project You may be thinking the only way to contribute is by writing content, correct? Oh, sorry writing code correct. Well One thing I've realized is that with open source projects The code is just one little small part for a project to be successful You need to promote it. Okay You need good documentation Now who here has searched for something in Drupal and then found the documentation page And there's a little thing saying our documentation needs to be written. Okay, we've all gone through it in Drupal and Any type of open source content or or open source project if it's not promoted and if it's lacking Documentation then no one's going to use it. You're gonna have the best code in the world But if but if you don't have those things you have nothing, okay? So let me talk about a few ways you can contribute in non technical ways Now the first way as I just mentioned promotion now to bring this back to Drupal I remember I remember just recently discovering a module called rabbit hole. Okay Now, I don't know if you if any of you have used that module, but essentially what that module does is That it stops people from getting access to the entity canonical URL So you can actually set it up to stop people from going to node slash one two three now The name is terrible Okay, in my in my in my opinion in my opinion because rabbit hole doesn't mean anything You cannot find it in a simple Google search by saying how do I stop access to a canonical page? the only way I figured it out or I found out about the module is is is that somebody wrote a blog post about it so so if you want to contribute in a non technical or Code away you can you can promote the project another way of contributing is to Organize meet-ups now you don't have to organize a whole meet-up from from from start to end You can actually join the organizing committee and and help them order pizzas When I used to live in Sydney because I've moved out of Sydney I was part of the organizing committee for the Sydney Drupal meet-up and it was my job to find speakers Of course, but there was about three or four of us, but but every meet-up I would order pizza so that was kind of my thing So I would jump on the dominoes side I knew exactly where to get the cheaper pizza because it's right down at the bottom because the expensive ones are up the top and I would organize pizzas or and they'll get delivered. I'll go downstairs and pick them up and organize all of that So that was my way of Helping out another way is volunteer at camps now I am volunteering here. I'm helping out and when you volunteer at a camp, it's a great way to meet people especially if You have joined a new open-source community. So about a year ago. I went to my first word camp in Australia and I didn't know anyone there Okay, I've been doing Drupal for 12 years. So I decided to volunteer and so I was thrown up the front on the registration desk I met a lot of people and that was great way just to break the ice Because if I didn't volunteer, I'd be in the corner on my phone during the you know the Afternoon tea doing nothing and not socializing but by volunteering it got me out of my shell and I was just and I could talk to anyone and Another way and another way you can contribute and this is Specific for Drupal is offer support in the issue queue Now I'm sure all of us have installed a module realized It doesn't do something or we found a bug and we jumped in the issue queue to ask for help now a lot of now a lot of the times this can be just a simple or can this module do X and The answer is yes or no. So you so you don't have to write code so if you want to help out just jump into the issue queue and Answer a few support requests so that the maintainers can just sit down and write code and Another way you can contribute and it's the whole point of this session is You can contribute by writing content and this is my way of contributing to Drupal or any type of open source Project and that is to write Content about it now just a bit of history about myself So I've been writing for the last six years about Drupal and I've been producing blog posts recording videos Producing free courses over at web wash net now this may sound like a free plug Which it kind of is but I just want to show you and talk about my experiences in running this site So over the last six or so years. I have written over Just under 180 blog posts, which isn't that much because if I was to actually stick to my Schedule of writing one a week. It would have been way more I have Replied to over 900 comments and on the site in total. There's two thousand two over two thousand two hundred comments and that is people asking for help and the site also has free courses and there's over 500 enrolled students and I've also got a free Udemy course on Udemy comm which is a courses platform and there's over 10,000 enrolled students now Yes, that sounds like a lot 10,000 But you would realize quick with courses a lot of people in role very few actually spend more like go past the third or fourth Video they're like they're like gym memberships. It's you know, it feels great to get it, but then you never really finish it But it is a good number I was actually surprised because because I created this course and forgot about it and then hey, you know I've got 10,000 active students crazy and then I've also got a huge A YouTube channel with over I think it's over a hundred videos So as you can see this is my way of contributing to Drupal by by producing great content that That will help people learn how to use Drupal So in this session, I want to share with you how I write blog posts and How you can start as well and I do hope that you were convinced to get out there Spin up a blog and start writing yourselves So Before we get into the technical details. Well, there's actually not much technical details in this in this session But let's talk about why you want to write. So why go through all the efforts of Writing a blog posts. Now when I say blog posts, this can be text or video. Okay, so think of it like this Like why produce content? Okay, so let's talk about the benefits that you get as an actual writer That you get by documenting and publishing content Well, the first one is you'll get a better understanding of the topic if you teach it Okay, I'm sure you've heard of the saying that if you want to learn about something, you know, teach somebody about it And I know that when I want to write about a module. I Have to look at it from multiple angles because I know people are going to ask questions about oh Does this module work with this theme doesn't work with that and also if I want to learn about a topic in Drupal I force myself to write about it because that is a great way to learn something and also get something out of it by producing content Now another benefit is you'll become a better communicator Because if you are used to putting your thoughts out in text or in video When you are working on a project, you'll you'll be able to explain things better to others Now I've been building Drupal sites for a very long time and on every single project I need to explain to the client what a block is because their definition of a block is very different to mine Their definition of a module is very different to mine So communication is key and I and I would even say and I'm and I'll put in this extra note just yesterday, but How many times have you started a project you finished it you hand it to the client and they go oh I Assumed it was going to work like this and that's because they didn't quite understand what you were talking about so communication is key and by getting into the habit of writing you will be able to you will be able to to conceptualize these concepts in your head better and Another benefit of writing is that you will get all of these secondary skills Now these are just some of the second the secondary skills that I've got now I'm not an expert in any of these but these are just some random skills that I got by producing content the first one Of course is content marketing. That's pretty basic if you write any type of content It's content marketing another one is is SEO and here and a couple of years ago here I thought all SEO people were sleazy but now I do actually take a note of certain keywords that I want to rank for in Google so then I kind of adjust my title in a clean way not in a black hat type of way, but a nice clean way now another thing I've started to do is social media and email marketing now I Would recommend you focus on email marketing not social media marketing because you get better bang for your buck I mean the click the click-through rate for social media posts is absolutely terrible, but email marketing is a way to go and And and if you're going to produce video well, you'll learn how to produce video and also I've done live streams and webinars and I've also learned how to set up what is it OBS and Do streaming on multiple platforms using a third-party service? Now if all you want to do is write content and not worry about all this stuff. That's fine. Okay, because if What you write is popular enough and users need it you should automatically appear at the top of Google honestly Like I've probably spent a lot of time trying to rank better for pages For certain keywords and then I see other blog posts that just have better content and rank way better So at the end of the day if you just write great content, you're going to rank pretty well now One thing that I've enjoyed doing lately or the last couple of years is producing videos and So I've learned all these all these skills about recording video Fixing up audio how to how to use the parametric equalizer, which I've got no idea about I just Google it You know, I've learned how to remove background noises add a bit of bass to my voice and also edit intros and outros and things like that Now the final benefit I'll mention is you will become an authority now Now this may sound a bit marketing-esque, which it kind of is but if you write enough content and People read it. You will eventually be seen as an authority and This is great if you're a freelancer and you want to promote a personal brand or if you're a company and also you want to promote your company and and For me, I do like meeting new people at camps like here or conferences and they come up to me and say you know, thanks for producing the videos and the blog posts because it's good for me to know that my content's been appreciated because Writing content can sometimes be a lonely experience and you don't get that feedback to know Well, are people actually enjoying it or is it actually useful and it's good to know when people can't come up and say Oh, you know your content helped me out so So that's some of the benefits you get as a writer now Let's quickly talk about the benefits you get as a reader or the end user Okay, so what are the benefits for the reader now? This is probably obvious But what happens when you hit a roadblock? When you're building a site Well, you'll Google it or you would being it's or duck duck go it whichever search engine you use But essentially you will try and find a problem to your solution I'll find our solution to your problem. Sorry By simply googling it and then hopefully and then, you know, you search for something you have a look at some of the results and You look for a solution to fix your problem And this is where you can contribute to an open-source project just by writing blog posts because you are helping somebody Get over or get past a roadblock and this is huge. Okay, because I know myself. I Have had problems, you know, I still Google random things about Drupal 8 and I've been using Drupal 8 since it was released and Often I would find a blog post with just a few sentences that help me out and straight away I can move on to the to the next thing and I do think that you can tell if an open-source project is Healthy if people are willing to write content about it because it shows people are willing to spend tens of hours Writing content So how do you start? Okay, so we've talked about the benefits as a reader as a writer So how do you start? Well, it's actually pretty straightforward How you start the first thing you want to do is pick a is pick a platform. Okay, you want to create a Website if you don't have a website already go ahead and create a website Now there are a lot of platforms out there that you can choose now Try and use a self-hosted platform. Don't use medium.com. Okay, because You're not in control of your data and that's important. Okay, we always talk about, you know, Drupal's Drupal is an open-source platform. You have access to the code You also want to have full control over the content that you will spend hours and hours and hours writing So avoid using platforms like medium.com because they they can just change and all of a sudden They force a paywall in front and so now you have all this great content, which is stopped by a paywall and so So here I've got a list of just a few platforms. You can use to host your website Okay, the first one obviously is Drupal The second one is WordPress that that I've heard is great for blogging another one which is which has become popular is Gatsby, which is a JavaScript static site generator and If you want to host for free, you can use github or GitLab pages. That is all for free Okay Now I do have to make a I do have to make a bit of a confession web-wash.net is a WordPress site okay, it's not a Drupal site and Even though I write about Drupal well pretty much every blog post is about Drupal now I decided to move over to WordPress purely because Maintaining a Drupal site takes a lot of time and effort and I decided this when it was still when the site was on Drupal 7 and I didn't want to migrate it to Drupal 8 and the reason for that is I just wanted to focus on writing content not managing a Drupal site I manage 10 Drupal sites, you know I've I've had to wake up at 4 in the morning because there was a security release and quickly update all of these sites with a team of people Remotely it's not fun. Okay Now of course, you know WordPress has its has its security rather releases Of course, but I didn't want to spend time maintaining a Drupal site and also with WordPress Do you have access to an ecosystem of plugins where you can just buy a theme and you've got a nice theme? You can buy a coursing are you can you you can buy a course platform? And you have a nice course platform on your site with Drupal you have to do all that yourself And I just didn't have the time to do that But one thing I want to stress, okay Write whatever you are comfortable in okay now when When I decided to move to WordPress I thought oh, you know our people want to send me snarky comments saying why have you moved the site over to WordPress? You know why aren't you using Drupal? but honestly no one cared and if you want to write in markdown and you hate editors Well then writing markdown and use github or get lab pages even if you're going to write about WordPress Who cares just write what you're comfortable in because You don't have to force yourself to use a platform that you don't like because then you won't write anything and the whole point Is just to produce content so just write whatever you're comfortable in it and don't worry about the rest okay, so Once you've decided on a platform and you want to start writing you first need to figure out the topics you're going to write about Okay So how do you come up with ideas? Well, I've got a few I I've got a few tips right here the first way to come up with the IDs You should just write it out on paper. Okay simple If you're on a train or you're commuting somewhere, you have a pen and paper just write down some ideas on a piece of paper Another place we can get some great ideas and this is where I get a lot of my ideas is While I'm building a Drupal site for a client often I would estimate somewhere something will take half a day But then I end up taking a day or two because you have to use a particular version of this module You need to patch this you need to configure this in views You need to configure that somewhere else and then I realize all this took took much longer than I thought so So if it confused me Then chances are it's going to confuse someone else So that's a great way to just write down all those little issues that you've had in the past and then just make a blog post about that So once you have your list you want to compile it somewhere Okay, this is pretty straightforward stuff, you know, you have a you have a bunch of ideas You want to put it somewhere then you can use a note as any type of note-taking tool I started using notion which is a new note-taking tool and you can see that's probably a screenshot of A stuff that I want to write about. I've also got stuff in Google sheets as well But I will stress one thing try and consolidate all your ideas into a single place I've got three or four Google sheets. I've got stuff in evernotes. I've got stuff in Todoist I've got stuff in Google keep. I've got probably stuff in Microsoft one notes. I've got it everywhere. So you want to try and keep things consolidated in a single place And so once you have all your ideas So once you have an idea for a blog post It's time to sit down and write and this is the hardest part mind you in my opinion now For some people writing may not be a pleasant experience. I know for me I I can bear you know, I don't sit down and you know get into the zone straight away for writing sometimes It's kind of you know, I need to smash my head against the keyboard just to get ideas out So here is something that I recommend when you start writing come up with a nice Blog post structure. Okay, and stick with it because this will help you write blog posts very quickly So here is my structure. Okay, I've got an introduction body and summary It's pretty straightforward. You know nothing groundbreaking at this point Well, there's nothing really groundbreaking at all, but it's just simple you have an introduction You have a body and you have a summary Now in the summary I first sorry in the introduction I first explained the problem. Okay now that can be 200 words. It can be 100 words. It can be 50 words. Okay I use as many words as necessary Sometimes I try and force myself to write 100 words when something can be explained in a sentence Then I just write it in a sentence. You know, don't use too many words. Okay, so you first You first explain the problem then you office then I would offer a solution Okay, I would recommend the best way of doing it and then at the end before we jump into things I will let the reader know what they will learn This way the reader can quickly just skim the introduction See if they want to read the rest and if they don't want to learn if they don't want to read the rest They can just jump off and go to something else. Okay, and and this introduction works well for me And then in the summary Okay, the summary is broken up into three parts I would summarize the tutorial so so, you know, just kind of put in a few final remarks I will I would add in extra resources if necessary though. Okay, these extra resources don't get in often But one thing that I've been doing the last couple of years is I've been adding in FAQs right down at the bottom And the FAQs and I use the FAQs to answer common questions that I get in the comments because some because some of my blog posts have like 30 or 40 comments and Not everyone reads the comments. They will just read half the blog post and be like, oh, this this this rubbish doesn't work And so what I'll do is if I get the same comment over and over again, I would add it into the FAQs Hopefully people will notice the FAQs down at the bottom and not and not spend the time putting in a comment but I also use the FAQs to to predict questions that I will get especially While I write blog posts. So in this example, I think the question down here is I can't see Allow each content item to have its layout customized on the default view mode I actually had this problem when I was writing the blog post and that kind of confused me And the reason why you can't see that checkbox is because you need to be on the full content view mode So if I had that problem chances are someone else would have that problem So I just chuck stuff in there and I often use the FAQs to just tell people to to, you know, run drush CR or cache rebuild because that seems to be 90% of Drupal's problems, you know, they install a module They can't see something did you run cache rebuild? Oh, yeah. Thanks. It's working now. All right. There you go Move on to the next thing So this is the structure that I use On web wash. It's not perfect And I do tweak it from time to time But by sticking to the same structure All I need to do is make sure that yep. I've got an intro I've got the body Now the body of the tutorial is pretty straightforward because all I'm doing is taking screenshots and explaining, you know Click here click there select this select that screenshot here, you know screenshot there done done done done like it's fairly straightforward It's the introductions and the summary is where I is where I spend a lot of time because I'm trying to sell Especially in the in the introduction in the first few sentences You are trying to sell the to the actual blog post to the reader and hope that they read The next line then they read the next line and then they read the next line So once you know what you're going to write about and you have a rough structure it's time to get writing okay, and You need to sit down and write and keep writing Until the draft is done. That's kind of like my rule I like to sit down and write until the draft is done because I often write After hours and so I will probably have about an hour or two to start right to to write at at night, you know after nine o'clock or something and When it comes to writing you can't just switch on and start writing okay You slowly get into the hat, you know, you so slowly get into the zone and you get you know You start writing start writing start writing and then you're productive for about half an hour Where you're just you know getting words are getting words out and then you and then you need to go to bed And so I was trying to do my drafts as quickly as possible because if I don't then it's going to take a couple more nights And then before you know it I've spent a whole week And you know, I've just got a draft done So try and get your drafts done as quickly as possible Now if you're like me and kind of struggle to focus especially in this connected world and especially if you write on a computer You know you have slack you have all these type of notifications One thing that I've done is I've actually started to write a lot of my introductions, especially if I'm struggling now I don't do now I don't do this all the time But if I'm struggling to just get ideas out I would write the draw the introduction to the draft the draft of the introduction on a piece of paper first and this actually helps me a lot because when you're writing on a computer because it's easy to backspace and delete words and Change sentences and all that You spend more time you're kind of editing and writing you're like writing a few words and you're editing You're writing a few words and you're editing and you're writing a few words and editing when when in actual fact You should You should just write as much as you can and then go back the next day preferably And then go and edit because it's two different frame of minds the writing and the editing So what I often do is I would find a quiet corner. I won't take any devices I'll just take a pen and paper and I'll just smash out, you know, a couple pages and probably half of it. I won't use But when I type it into the computer, then I'll go in there and clean things up And I'll have to kind of figure out what I wrote because I can't even read my own handwriting half the time But it just gives me a chance to kind of clean things up Where as I write it and I have been looking for an actual phone Like if somebody knows of an app they can just take a photo of and he does like ocr optical recognition And he just gets the text out of it in a nice clean way. Let me know because I'd love to I'd love to know if there's an actual app for that. I'm sure there is. I just haven't really searched for it So yeah If you get stuck Try writing on a pen and paper first So once you've um written the draft you've checked the links you've proof read it now We are skipping a bunch of stuff, but if you've uh written your draft check the links proof read it It's time to publish, okay Now a few tips here do not wait too long To publish it so so don't finish your draft You know Three weeks ago and then decide to publish it because because I have been in situations where I have written a blog post And I've left it in a draft state ready to go And the module that I was writing about released a new version Which pretty much made my blog post obsolete and that kind of gets annoying because you're just about to Publish something and then you realize that they've Pushed out a release which changes everything and so all your screenshots are wrong You know everything's changed and then you're pretty much publishing an obsolete Um blog post so always try and you know publish like write it and then release it And then also congratulate yourself, you know you've You've you've spent the time to write some content and you have published it And then now you need to promote it now. This is going to sound a bit bit sowsy I know that a bit a bit marketing, but you want to try and promote your blog post But this is where I struggle. Okay. I hate promoting my blog posts. I prefer to just Publish it and then move on to them to the next tutorial because I want to learn about something new I don't want to sit in social media and promote it and you know do all that type of stuff, but He but here are a few things you can do to promote your blog post you can promote it on social media That's one way as I said on I don't really like sitting on twitter that much these days it's a bit depressing But what you can do is you can automate most of this stuff and that's what I do So there are a lot of tools out there where you can automate Your social media statuses and and honestly just do that. But as I've mentioned before Like from personal experience you'll click through rate For people reading your tweets and going to your site is very low Honestly, so it's up to you if you want to even be on social if you want to promote on social media at all But if you have to have to choose now, I actually forgot to put a slide about email marketing, but If you have to choose between social media and email marketing Go with email marketing. Yes there's a bit more effort, but You get way more engagement from your email list Because if you actually ask for feedback in your email list people will reply If you ask for feedback on your facebook page like you put in a poll saying what type of content Do you want? I think I had one person reply back and it's kind of like more that's useless But on my email list, I had about 20 like 20 people send like reply reply back to me saying Oh, yeah, I'd love to learn more about you know Drupal and JavaScript or Drupal commas and all that so work on your email list Now another way you can promote your blog your blog post and this is specific to Drupal Is try and get your site listed On planet Drupal Now if you go to planet Drupal.org On this page, you will see a bunch of aggregated blog posts From from about I think 400 ish I think the count is about 450 the last time I checked of Of 400 websites that write about Drupal and and this and this page actually aggregates all those blog posts into a single feed And then of course you can you can connect to an rss feed for planet Drupal Now to get your website On to planet Drupal. It needs to be approved. There are a few requirements Like I think you need about four blog posts about Drupal and also your feed needs to be A feed which will only display a particular tag so that you're not posting all of your blog posts to the planet because Because you should only post blog posts about Drupal to the planet Drupal even though I've seen a lot of blog posts that don't even mention the word Drupal in In the actual body But this is a good way to promote your site Especially if you're writing Drupal and you will see a bump in traffic You will see a bump a bump in traffic may not it may not be as much as it used to be I remember I remember back in the day you would see a see You know at least 100 100 visits on the day Now that may not sound like much But if you're getting you know a thousand visitors a day an extra hundred is a nice little bump Now the final thing I want to mention is content repurposing Because one thing you realize quickly is that writing blog posts takes time Okay, if you want to push out a 300 word blog post with no screenshots and Just the basic or how you know how how you build this and that Then yeah, that may take you an hour if you want to build a if you want to write a 2000 word blog post on How to create a react widget and embed that into Drupal It's going to take You know five to ten hours So what I so what I recommend you do is look at ways of repurposing your content because You've already done the hardest part and that is Researching the topic which is often can sometimes take longer than actually writing it And also writing the blog post so Here are a few ideas, okay You can convert a blog post into an email course and that's pretty easy All you need to do is Create emails from your section So if you have a blog post with 10 different sections well, then you then you can convert that into a 10 email a 10 email course Email course, okay another thing is an e-book, okay Um, you can easily and I actually did this recently. Um, google docs is is great for this If your site is producing nice and nice and clean html All you have to do is copy all of your text and the images and paste that into google docs And the images automatically get uploaded and you have a google doc of your article And you have to do just tiny little bit of formatting But then you can export it out as pdf. I think epub and mobi. So there you go There's a whole e-book without spending hours reformatting things because yes Content repurposing is simple but you but But if you have to reformat a 2000 or 3000 word blog post you're going to probably spend a couple hours doing that Now another thing you can do with content repurposing Is you can convert your blog post into a slide share so you can post it onto well a Like a powerpoint slide so you can then post it up to slide share and then you can get traffic from that from from that and another thing you can do is Is actually create a video Using the blog post text and the structure as a basic script Of course recording the video will probably take A fair bit of time and then fixing up the audio and doing all that type of stuff But the blog post can be The pretty much a basic structure and that's what I often do. I would write the blog post and then I will create a video using the blog post And another way you can repurpose your content And this is something that I did and coming back to the udemy course Is I uploaded about 50 or 60 videos onto youtube and then I realized well Why don't I just put that on udemy and make it free? and that's what I ended up doing and Luckily the videos were In a kind of a course fashion where it was it was videos about display suite videos about views about fields and blocks and this and that And then I was able to create a free course On udemy about it and it's as I've mentioned it's helped over 10 000 people So there you have it. I mean Go out there create create blog posts And by creating great blog posts you can help others And you can also contribute to open source Thank you So any questions? Kind of must be one question. Thank you Don't want to be standing up here Are you going to publish these slides on your site or want to get a hub or anything like that? They'd be quite good to reference back. I think. Yeah, absolutely. Um Yes, I will be writing writing a post about this. It'll be terrible if I don't actually write a post about this and put on the site Yeah, I'll be writing about that probably out next week or something But I will I think I've I think I can actually add it to the Drupal dot org Drupal south site, I think I've got edit access to the To the actual Drupal south slide page that I'll put it there. Yeah any Any others? Yep How long does it take for you to write a 500 word post? Yeah, so if I know what I'm going to write about Which a lot of the times I don't and and he doesn't and he doesn't mean that I don't know Drupal. It's just that If I'm using a new module that I've never used then Or then I have to actually look at the code and figure out and look at look and look at all the back end Screens and all that so it will take me about two to three hours Um two to three hours to write it Now in the past when I would publish it I would spend probably an hour and a half Going through a whole publishing process because what I'll do is I would publish the blog post then I would post it on Twitter facebook I've got an instagram and I'll do all that manually Our linked in as well, and then I will write a basic email and send it to my email list And that will take about an hour and a half which was very annoying because it will be late at night And I would have to do all this type of stuff, but I do use a service Um that I do recommend called called co-schedule and that can kind of automate a lot of the publishing stuff So I actually have a template and and automatically when a blog post gets published I've actually set up a template to To send a status to my personal twitter page to web wash twitter page To the web wash facebook page linkeding page and then I've also set it up so that a month from now It will also do another status update as well and kind of automates all that but I've I've I've probably spent Just recently I wrote a blog post on using react in Drupal and that required me actually writing code and and actually Actually building two basic react applications As a Drupal module and that took probably five or six hours Just just to write the code and then I'll put all the code on github as well And then if I have that then he can take You know 12 12 to 15 hours when I when I actually look at the time that I spend because I do track at all Because I am a freelancer. So I track my time I do sometimes think about oh, it's like It's took a lot of time. I took a lot of time, but You know, it's uh, I do I do enjoy it most of the time. Sometimes it does get a bit tedious, but Yeah, just he really depends how much effort you want to put in really Yeah See any any other questions? Oh another one. Oh No, go for it three questions. I think it's better than my last Drupal south session I suppose the react in Drupal is a good example But have you had many blog posts where you had really minimal knowledge of the actual Topic you were going to be writing about and how did that really influence the blog post? What did it help you learn more? I suppose. Yeah, um I can't really think of it at this point. I've mostly been writing about Drupal and I've got experience in that the only time I guess There's been instances where I I don't have that much experience with a module and then I would write something On how to use a module and then the first comment will be oh, but you can use this other module Which does the exact same thing? And it's kind of like well Yeah, you can but you know the whole thing about Drupal is that you have a lot of options Or another one is I would explain how to do something and then somebody will tell me Oh, there's another back end screen that allows you to do it this way And that caught me on that. I actually got caught actually got caught by that a few times early on But I've actually learned now To always open up the module and have a look At the routing dot yaml and have a look at all the back end screens get your head across all the back end screens And see what can actually be done Because of course the module doesn't have very rarely doesn't have any documentation And one thing that Drupal kind of struggles with and this is a bit of a rant about Drupal's back end Is that it's actually very hard to discover back end screens in Drupal? I don't know how I don't know how non technical or non coding people do it because I've talked to many people And I do get a lot of comments asking me. Oh, I'm a non developer. How do I use Drupal? And I think to myself, huh, I don't know how to explain how to use Drupal without writing code, but I know for myself I would I would always open up the module and for Drupal 8 I'll look at the routing dot yaml and Drupal 7 I'd look at the hook menu and and try and find out all the back end screens And then get my head around them and then just start playing around with them And and I try and make sure I try and anticipate all the questions I will get Because after you've done it for a while, you know what type of questions you're going to get So I try and anticipate it all but but this will know next year I want to start writing about other things a lot more of non Drupal stuff specifically like javascript and React and view and more cater towards that. So maybe I'll be able to answer that question in a year Where I'm not a full blown expert Any other questions? No more? Oh, yeah. Well, wait for the mic. So it picks up How do you go about maintaining blog posts, especially things with like React is one I get burnt with a lot Is where you go looking for a blog post and how to do something with React and it's three months old and completely pointless Yes, um, yeah, I think with react Yeah, I was learning it back in the day when I just decided to move everything over to ES6 So you had half blog posts written in like ES5 then you have half blog posts written in ES6 and I was like, what the hell is this? Yes The way I handle it is you have to spend the time. Well, okay First of all, you can just leave it and be like, I forget about it. You know, this content's free People should all should stop complaining. It's free. It's free content and don't worry about it But I can't do that. Okay so Drupal as I'm sure you're all aware Drupal 8 has a Six month release cycle back in the Drupal seven days. It was easy You know, there wasn't a new version of Drupal for years But now with Drupal 8 there's a release cycle every six months And so I have written I have rewritten a blog post on media management in Drupal 8 about three times Because it keeps changing which is great. Like I love the fact that Drupal's getting better and we don't have to wait, you know years and years and years and Next week when Drupal 8.8 gets released There's going to be um, you can embed media assets directly into the editor again I'm going to have to totally change the the the article that I've got about media management But with Drupal 8 content, I do keep track. There is an there is an actual page on Drupal.org that that tracks um What is it called the change request or change? I forgot the name the change Change records. That's one. That's one to change records. So I have a look in that Every month or so, I just quickly go in there and see you can You can you can you can kind of see if there's major changes like, you know Oh, there's a whole new module in core. Then I go in there. I have a read. It's okay. Okay. That's good Um, one of the ones that I got got kind of burned because I just randomly slipped it in was the bootstrap theme just randomly in a In a normal release Removed three starter kit There starter kit sub themes that you would use to create a sub theme So for the bootstrap theme, which is only bootstrap three at this point. There was a cdn a less Believe it or not because it's still bootstrap three which was written in less and a sass starter kit and then Luckily somebody in the issue queue contacted me directly Somebody like that that read it in the issue queue saying oh the latest dev version of bootstrap only has one starter kit called Just starter kit and that kind of changed all like all the content that I had out there And this is where content repurposing can become a bit of a pain because then all of a sudden you're like, oh crap Where did I put that blog post? Oh, I put it up here. I need to change it here Need to change it there But luckily for me it was a simple few lines going there and change it but occasionally get the irate person saying Oh, I followed your blog post. It's crap. It doesn't work. Drupal sucks. They move on You know, there's only so much you can do with that. I mean, yeah I'm not going to bother helping that type of person or you get the great ones I was going to put a few slides in here with examples of of comments that I get People get very angry about panels. I've noticed there was one person on on in youtube That got really angry why panels doesn't work and he's like 10 panels is crap And that's one thing I've noticed that people are the love or hate panels But they but but they get very upset about using panels and page manager And I should have probably put a few comments that I get because yeah, I've got some funny ones Like, you know basic like oh I I installed a module and I get a php error and that's the comment and it's kind of like come on It's like you need to actually help me and I actually want to write a blog post about About asking help in the comments, you know what I need to help you out Exactly. It's it's like you it's like you need to tell me like exactly what you're doing. You can't just say it doesn't work so That answers your question along a long-winded rant. Yeah Yeah Yes Yeah, absolutely and and one one thing that I actually did put in here But I forgot to mention is that I've actually googled Issues that I've had and I've totally forgotten that I've actually written about it. It's like, oh, that's right I wrote about this module. It's like, oh, that's how you use it. And so I really use this to kind of just document what I've learned because Sometimes I feel especially with Drupal 8 and this is again another rant that I kind of have is like I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what what service in Drupal 8 is required to do something Where in Drupal 7 everything kind of had a like a procedural function And that's all been taken out and for Drupal 9 it's all being deprecated And so I spent a lot of time just figuring out how stuff work And very little time actually gluing it together once I know which bit of which service to use So so yeah, that's another reason to write blog posts. It's a great way to document what you've learned And then you'll just google it and find it yourself. Any other questions? Oh co-scheduled Co-scheduled. Yeah, it's just co-scheduled So yeah, have a look at it. I don't want this to be like a marketing thing about it I can show it to you after if you want It's not it's not cheap. It's about 400 bucks a year But the way I see it saves me an hour every time I post So I can kind of justify it from a business spend like from a business standpoint. I can justify it Um, but that's getting into the whole marketing and content marketing Which you know developers normally look look down upon. It's like, oh, that's a marketing department, whatever Yeah, but it's a good tool. I like it Any others? Anyway, you can catch me wherever I'll be here today tomorrow. And yeah, that's it. Thank you