 All right guys We're gonna have lunch real soon, so we're gonna speed through this a pretty high pace and I hope everybody can hear me and try my best to project. It's something. I'm working on There's anybody who is struggling a little bit at this kind of volume. This is kind of my volume We awkward to go louder or quieter, but let's get started I want to emphasize first and foremost that this is the condensed version of my WordPress life hack I have a longer version of this. I really had to cut it down trim the fat This is just the good stuff and this is all April 2018 edition if you asked me a year ago It would be a different list of things if you ask me next year It'll be different again, but these are the things that are helping me make my life better right now And what's also making my life better is that uh, yeah, we're getting through this extra long winter that we had anybody get this joke It's gonna be Mike. I love it. I can't resist Um, we made it through a hard winter, but now it's word camp season everybody Let's uh Let's talk about how you are sitting here. You are thinking you probably want to be Like that guy who's up there. I like him. I want to be as productive as kyle Uh, I'm gonna do all these great things. I want to be as cool As the the guy who won best actor for his portrayal of gandalf at the 2010 mower movie awards Yeah, you want to be as cool as this guy or as productive as this guy. These are the life hacks you need to follow So without further ado, let's just start hitting them in no particular order. Let's start with diffchecker.com This is a handy tool super simple website that I use all the time It is used just for pasting two different pieces of text and comparing the differences between them Probably some people in here who have used this I use this just to see What's different about uh two Pieces of text or snippets of code Sometimes maybe somebody's proofreading something for me and they said I made some changes here it is And I want to know what changes did you make or I've even had cases where sites were compromised and files were modified according to the Logs and I wanted to see what modifications were made to files What code was changed and something someone sent me is diffchecker all the time just to see what was changed Git is Something that is Inessential for every developer. If you're a developer you have to be using git. This is a rule This is critical. There's no excuse for not using it. Learn it. It's not that hard. It is for version controlling Your code. It's not just strictly code But that's where it's most commonly employed and git is just it's just essential It will make your life better. It will make you a better person if you use git This is that important. I can't emphasize the importance of using git enough It changed my life when I started using it PHP storm Is a great application. I love it. How many other people use php storm in here a few a few It's so powerful. It has made me a better developer writing code in php storm Is just a great experience. It's an extremely powerful program with a lot of features built in including a built-in terminal And it integrates with git so you can pull down Your repository straight from php storm. You can do a lot that you would otherwise have to do in several applications You can do it all in php storm But it's great for just Conceptualizing all of your files as as a project and indexing everything together So when you see a function or a variable php storm is great about like hinting What you should be doing and maybe indicating when you're doing something wrong Like maybe you're you're returning this function as a boolean, but it's expecting a string Maybe you should check that out Catches a lot of errors before I deploy them and that's really helpful I'm not going to be the kind of person who's going to tell you anything crazy like you can live without social media Just cut it from your life social media is entrenched In all of our lives. It's something that is just here to stay And we just need to be responsible and learn how to incorporate it responsibly into our lives And for me the trick has been Taking deliberate steps to make it inconvenient to use social media And good examples of this are removing the apps from any device that I have So I have to use the browser It's still possible for me to use social media because as I said it's a part of our life The social media is here to stay we can't really escape it But we can do a lot to make it a little more inconvenient to use so it doesn't become that dangerous time suck that it often is If you are building WordPress websites Local development is the way to go Local development is essential that is a responsible way to build websites This is where you use a free like desktop server or local by flywheel to install A WordPress site that exists only on your machine not on the web It's accessible only by you you can just create these they're at a domain in your browser that is only Accessible on your computer. This is your perfect sandbox for experimenting You can install plugins you can configure them the way you want you can build out a website You can hack the code do whatever you want and then nuke this site when you're done just for fun This is the responsible thing to do just spin up a site on your computer It'll be faster than anything on the internet experiment before you ever take anything online That's the way to go try these free programs and incorporate that into your workflow Just a life hack here one of the When we're developing our careers There's so many different things that we can invest in an investment just being you know something that we can Put our time and energy into now that we'll pay off later and one of the One of the best things that I found that Is fruitful to invest in early is reputation This has been this has been really helpful in opening doors that I didn't even know I wanted to walk through You can invest in education you can invest in relationships You can invest in acquiring assets and so many other things but investing in one's reputation Is just take my word for it extremely powerful. It'll take you places. You didn't even know you wanted to go I've been able to Take advantage of opportunities just because I spent a lot of time investing in my reputation And one of the ways that we can do this will start there how you can invest in your reputation Is a little bit of a mindset shift It's thinking about others first is the simplest step when you're at an event like this And you approach conversations with other people you look at all these other wonderful people who are with you And instead of thinking like maybe this person could be my next customer This person could help me solve my problems Turn that on its head think in a different context think about how maybe I could help that person Maybe I could solve their problems that I've already figured out Maybe I could help them work through a struggle that they're having and thinking about it in this sense is the first step To ingraining yourself in the community and building a reputation And then you can take that a step further you can volunteer You can engage the community even more and the next thing you know You're important someone you're someone that people know and speak highly of and this is paid in dividends for me In recent years ways that I never really expected coming. I was able to get a job that I wanted Just by asking for it. There was no opening I just said I want to work at this company and because I wasn't a stranger and had a reputation. They said great Let's go. I can speak when I want to at great events like this because I'm not a stranger And I've even had clients in the past who said don't worry kyle We're not looking at other people We feel like we're lucky to get to work with you because we see the other people who are going to you for advice And looking up to you reputation pays out big time in the future and it's worthwhile investing in early on It's typing out passwords is stupid get the knock-to-lock app on your iphone and just tap your iphone every time you have to log into your mac It's super handy. It saves you time I want you guys to put your hands up in the air. We're all going to stay this together. All right. We're all going to commit this I do solidly swear That the next website I build Will not have a home page carousel in it Okay, are we all in agreement on this? We are all going to work together to let this dumb trend stay in the past and die And become this thing that we laugh about like remember back in 2011 to 2015 when it was cool to have those sliders on your side I'm so glad those days are gone I'm tired of even the discussion about sliders. They're a trend. They're in the past. Goodbye. We all have agreed I heard you we're on the same page here. Goodbye sliders And uh, we won't miss you There's a lot of times where I want to Show some kind of a prototype. I want to show what something might look like that's in my head And it would be incredibly tedious for me to use like a graphical design program to Slice and dice up images. I just a lot for when I'm building presentations and and showing people What an interface might look like in the WordPress admin or what a web page could look like And it would be super painful to try and do this in photoshop or whatnot Uh, did you know you can just like right click in your browser inspect and just modify the web page you're viewing With a few simple clicks It's very simple In whatever browser you're using there's a tool like this chrome is fantastic You can just right click on an element And this uh, this panel on the right will appear and you can just click on html and delete it If you don't want it there and it'll disappear from the page you can Modify the text as I did in this example, which I'm doing all the time Sometimes I'll be taking a screen grab of like a user's list in the WordPress dashboard And I want to use this in like our product documentation or whatever But all those are real users emails. So instead of like editing those users or making fake users I just modify the page and just type out a fake email so that the screenshot looks legitimate But it's a not a fake email address. It's just a simple example But prototyping in the browser with dev tools and then just taking a screen capture of it is my life hack getting things done much quicker I like to be the kind of person that reaches out to people randomly and a fun hack that I've found is just Following up with people the kind of people that you meet at events like this and just touching base with them with no agenda I like the conversation so much better. This is something that I found consistently The conversations are really great. If you open them up without an agenda, they always go much better No, uh, no no points to this conversation. No objective Just reaching out to say, hey, how are you? What's new in your life? What are you struggling with these days? What are you stoked about? What's your future looking like? What are you hoping for? This kind of conversations is touching base with people randomly. Whoever you've met at this kind of event in the future You'll be surprised where those things go I can't live without my sit stand desk If for some reason it disappeared I would have to take the day off and immediately go get one because it's that important to me I have a nice little one with a motor on that little button that I can go up and down I do it several times a day. We're just more productive standing. That's just a fact And uh, I love this thing. I really seriously love it and I recommend it to everybody I also love my portrait oriented monitor. I don't know about you guys, but a big part of my job Is viewing things called webpages And uh, a lot of those are actually oriented vertically and not wide I don't know what the thing is with the big widescreen monitors But I find that I have a lot of wasted space on the horizontal monitors and oriented Orienting my monitor portrait style just means that much more to see in one go And uh, I love it. I love it Easy win Uh, another great tip that has proven successful. I got years and years ago. I acted on it and it's been very very constructive has been Actively interviewing peers in the industry a few benefits to come from this one is just like taking their knowledge People who know more than you been there done that learning from them Uh, but also building great relationships with the people who really matter in the industry People you have an interest with that are where you're trying to go. Those relationships are very very valuable They can also be beneficial from a business standpoint because if you're collaborating in any sense with Peers in the industry you can often leverage their audiences If you're interviewing them on your blog get text quoting them and so forth That can be very useful for your content marketing Interviewing them on a video series or on your podcast All of these things are pretty low barrier easy to do for your business And like just one of the quickest shortcuts to a new audience is to bring peers people with a big audience into yours And uh, most everyone is pretty receptive to that. It's not hard to do the benefit is pretty high so If there's a this shortcut And speaking of shortcuts keyboard shortcuts are the way to go. I mean who uses a mouse anymore Anybody who's pointing and clicking can never keep up with the person who knows the keyboard shortcuts So save yourself some time invest just a little bit of time and energy Into mastering all the keyboard shortcuts on your computer and you'll be a whiz You'll never be as accurate with the mouse How many times have you clicked on something you didn't mean to One of those stupid ads or closed a window that you meant to minimize or something just use keyboard shortcuts. It's so much better I'm a huge proponent of podcasts. I love them for so many reasons There's a lot a lot of great audio content out there that we can enjoy and learn from Uh, but one of the coolest things about them You can learn and take in information in a variety of formats. You can attend live lectures like this You can watch video. You can read stuff That's all really cool, but podcasts are superior in one way and that's that they can be consumed passively We can listen to podcasts while doing other stuff While you're washing the dishes and doing your chores and driving and whatever You can be taking in information and learning. That's phenomenal every other channel every other uh medium for information you need to be focused on it And that kind of sucks in comparison So I listen to podcasts like all the time every time I turn away from the screen In goes the phones that I'm learning while I'm sweeping and so forth I like to be the kind of person I try hard to be the kind of person who gives more regular Uh gestures of appreciation How many times a day are we taking advantage of something that some other creative person created? And just not acknowledging it all Using a plugin an app reading an article whatever it is Just taking advantage of the work that someone else did and then just moving on with our life I like promoting a culture where people Give shout outs more often and show gestures of appreciation We get a lot of free stuff that we're so just like desensitized to it We don't even know how good we have it. We don't appreciate how much free stuff. We're getting all the time, but I really want to be more like the person who Takes the time to leave a rating Review for the podcast or the plugin that I use or just share a public tweet to say You know what I just used this app or just read this great article on wp tavern or something That was good and thank you guys for writing it Because I know more based on the free thing that you made Free or not people creating great things that make our lives better. Maybe Deserve some love that's just uh being a good person online And when it comes to email those are part of all our lives We have powerful email applications. I use mac mail And it's got all kinds of powerful rules built and I try to take advantage of these I'm one of those weird people who maintains inbox zero at all times and how I do that is largely by fiercely Guarding my inbox protecting against anything that doesn't require my attention and immediate action So I have simple rules like this one in place where In this case an email any email that comes into my Inbox that even contains the text unsubscribed in its body gets dumped into a low priority folder Which I'll later sift through and probably click on all of those unsubscribed links because I don't need any of that stuff in my life It's a pretty low priority. I have a lot of other similar rules helps to that helps to filter out Anything that isn't really important Get it out of my inbox shuffle it into low priority folders, which I will check on a routine basis clean through Uh, so this is really important and in a similar vein Turning off email notifications is super important. Like we don't need this junk You don't want this crap every stupid app out there that we use Whether it's wordpress or facebook or your social media or github or whatever this is They all want to email you whenever some dumb thing happens on their platform But you know what if I want to know what's going on on your platform go to your stupid platform I don't want it in my inbox. This is an important rule. We can turn off this crap Uh, if you want to grow as a developer smart thing to do Is to open up your code with your friends with other people And show it now. This is hard some of you if you're not developers in this room I'll explain why and the developers will I think this will resonate with you. We learned this On our own we were self-taught. We were not classically trained whatever that even means as a developer Uh, and we hacked our way to figuring stuff out You know problems to solve somehow we figured a little bit of code out next thing, you know, we're a developer And now we're in this third place where we're a little bit self-conscious about what we create with code Uh, because we we know this is probably not the right way. It's just a hack Uh, I think but I don't really know the right way. I just know this this works And so I'm a little self-conscious about it I don't really want anybody to look at it I feel like I'm just standing here in my underwear when it looks at my code. It's like, oh, please. No, go easy I mean, you know, I I just got it from Stack Overflow. Come on. Go easy But This is how most of us developers feel is there any developer here who kind of like Like relates Okay, a few kind of relate. All right That's how we feel But we need to get over this and it's not just developers It's anybody building websites or doing something creative On your own especially those of us who operate independently not as a part of a team We need to learn to swallow our pride And events like this are a great opportunity to open up our machines and log into our dashboard and say, hey You're not just like taking a look. This is how I decided to solve my problem I decided to use this page builder or this theme or write my code this way What do you think about that? Do this That is hard There's a lot of us who squirm at the thought of doing that Because we feel like we hacked and figured out a random way to do this But we need to swallow our pride. We need to share it with others. That's how we grow Wpcli is another great shortcut just kind of like the how No one who points and clicks their way. Uh, we'll ever keep up with somebody writing Using keyboard shortcuts Wpcli is a command line interface that's built into wordpress where you can type out and execute your commands against your wordpress site So if you want to like for example in this screenshot, I install a plugin by just typing wp install Plugin install jetpack activate and so in like Less than two seconds. I have this again installed and activated where if I was just You know point and clicking through the admin go into plugins add new and search for it and install and activate That's 10 15 seconds. I don't know This is and this is just a very simple example of the kinds of commands you can run against your site by command line Using wpcli can really speed things up for you User switching is an awesome plugin that I use on almost every site. It's a troubleshooting God send it allows you to Uh, it experience the wordpress site as another user with just a click Switch to that user and you're seeing it like they see it awesome It's free on the on the repo My wife and I are in the process of like trying to move by a new house So we're going through the attic in the basement finding all this stuff that we have and asking the question like What is this even can we let it go? We haven't used it in years and that's the same way I feel when I domain registrar and look at the domains that like maybe I Registered after a few drinks at an after party at a word camp a few years ago And I still haven't done anything with that dumb domain So this is this is me saying like let's all try and be stronger and just let those stupid domains go When they come up for renewal just make that be your goal If you haven't used the domain in your first year, just let it go. All right Don't do not renew that domain that you haven't used yet It's weird to even describe this as a problem, but a lot of us I know have it This is a fact actually developers who write inline documentation go straight to heaven when they die That's what this gray text is at the top The comment it just precedes a function and it describes does and It's amazing It's so helpful as another developer to approach code that has Helpful and descriptive and accurate inline documentation. It's a beautiful wonderful thing And if you're a developer, I strongly encourage I beg you to write inline documentation Please every class and function should have inline docs Just for the reading of other developers many applications actually references inline documentation PHP storm is a good example The reason it's so smart about knowing how variables and classes and methods and functions should operate Needs the inline docs and it says, you know, you're actually trying to access a protected method You're trying to return something Boolean. That's an integer and so on The inline docs inform that and allow us to extend code more easily So please write inline documentation. It'll save you And it'll make you a better person If you're doing anything with e-commerce abandoning carts are a thing It will surprise you to learn how what percentage of your users are abandoning your cart And not completing purchase The good news is there are really powerful tools available to help you with this problem tools like jilt which I recently installed turned on in my site And for one was thrilled with how easy it was I procrastinated a little and found out oh my gosh, this was a piece of cake and less than two minutes I'm done and now customers who start the checkout process But don't finish it later on get a couple of follow-up emails to say, hey, did you Did you forget something or maybe you can get an automatically generated discount code like come back and finish your purchase So what so these are lost customers that are coming back This is money that I I'm getting that I would have lost otherwise With a tool like jilt that automates those email follow-ups. There are others, but I just love jilt integrates with ucommerce and easy digital downloads Color box is another great plugin that I love It's really simple to implement For creating like those little banners and faux chat things and the pop-ups on your site that prompt people to Subscribe to your newsletter or check out your latest sale This name can be a little intrusive to use in moderation, but they do work They really do howler box is a great one that has a free version That we've gotten a lot of conversions from Speaking of wordcamps is I think a life hack that put me on the fast track to learning a lot of things and getting a lot of great connections in this industry When you speak at a word camp You get to rub elbows with other speakers go to special dinners and meet the people that you admire and been learning from for years That also gives you an opportunity to give back to other people There's a lot of you who are learning things right now You now have enough knowledge to turn around and help somebody else out. And so I say it's your turn Coming up here soon. You can speak at local meetups Wordcamps don't have the same exact problem, but meetups always are Practically desperate for speakers begging all the time anybody want to step up big just just show us anything you're trying to do Even if it's terrible, let's just anybody speak please So speak at a local meetup and just share your knowledge with other people. That's always a positive Really does kind of put you on the fast track Helping other people Exposing you in the right way when I went to my first word camp by I knew I wanted to talk to a lot more people But that's a little bit hard a little bit intimidating When you feel like you're not anybody and don't have anything much to share But I did notice that like I've got a few things I could share So I could choose to be one of the people in line standing to speak with a speaker after they're done Or I could be people lining up to talk to me that sounded a lot easier That definitely is easier than randomly approaching strangers Volunteering at wordcams is also really helpful just a simple easy way to integrate yourself in a community The bar is low. Yeah help people out It's all volunteers here. These these events are put together entirely by volunteers Just donating their time for fun. Keep that in mind when you leave a review after this event, please Clearly monitor is another plugin that is essential for troubleshooting. This is immensely powerful It will tell you everything that you need to know more about every page that's being loaded It's a free plugin on wordpress.org. I run it on every site every site And my last chip as we are departing for lunch You didn't have to come out here to get this knowledge I'm not sharing anything that you can't find elsewhere From smarter people you could go online, you know, like we have things called online conferences We have the technology we can do that But there are really compelling reasons why we get together irl Events like this and that's because this is how we can meet each other going through similar things You're sitting next to people who have solved problems that you're trying to solve You're also sitting next to people who are trying to solve problems You already have solved And you are sitting next to other people who are looking to sell something you're looking to buy And looking to partner with somebody that's a perfect fit for you This is your opportunity to meet the other people going through the same things and who care about what you care about So take advantage of this go sit with some strangers. Don't don't be Me into gravitate towards your friends. I try hard to do this but Try hard to seek out strangers people they know and sit with them at lunch This is the best opportunity of the day and and meet more people here because that's the one thing that you can't get From all the valuable online learning that we have Let's do a quick recap Because debba has it flagged me down here are the four tools that I really appreciate and decided to include in here diff checker php storm the knock to unlock app and using chrome dev tools My productivity hacks just a few of them in particular I can't look on my sit stand desk get all that new crap out of your inbox turn it all off And uh Look at our plugins. I only picked out four plugins I can't believe that and none of them were self promotional at all. I have nothing to do with these four user switching query monitor jilt and holler box fantastic tools Uh development tips there's no excuse for not using local development No excuse for not using get and no excuse For leaving out your online documentation developers. So please please get on and be a better person and and do those things And I also think it's really important to invest in your Reputation as I said get involved in these word camp things. They're pretty cool A lot of a lot of first timers here. I'm encouraging you to Opportunity meet the right people get involved And listen to more podcasts all agreed. We're all on the same page here Uh, no more sliders. No more sliders. It doesn't matter what your clients say. No more sliders We're done with them. That's a dated trend that we're laughing about And be friends and let's have some lunch. How's that sound? And Debra has something to say I have two and a time No, I don't it's 12 32 All right