 Let's talk about WordPress and the Internet of Things. I've got a lot of stuff to get through here. Basically, I just want to give you guys a bunch of ideas about why you would want to do this, how you would want to do it, some ideas of cool things you might be able to come up with and hopefully, you know, get your own creative ideas going. My name is Arsi Lations. I'm from a company called WetPaint. We're the creators of the SEO Control Center plugin. And you can find me on Twitter. It's just at my name if you want to talk about Internet of Things or anything later on. So when we think about the Internet of Things, what do we think about? We've got cameras, we've got locks, we've got thermostats, lights we can control with our phone. You can control your entire TV now with the Internet using a Roku or anything else. And of course, who doesn't need the weather forecast while you're getting some nice cold ice water from the fridge? So why would you want to get WordPress messed up in all of this? The answer is to innovate. Innovation is really the core fabric of our culture. It's what we've always done. It's what we're always doing. And for me, I think it's one of the coolest things about our community. We're the community that took this, which is B2 Cafe Lug, and turned it into this, which is an earlier version of WordPress. And then we looked at this and we're like, you know what? We can do a little better. And then we made it into this. And this is sweet. It has such a great focus on writing. We're the culture of community that created the plugin directory with all this nice, beautiful card system so people can see really easily what functionality is out there to extend their site and how they can do it. We're the culture that created the REST API for WordPress, which is fantastic and huge, opens up all these possibilities for doing stuff with Backbone and anything else. And last but not least, we're the culture that created the Customizer to make it super easy for people with non-technical knowledge to be able to go into their site, customize things, and make their site really personal to their needs and their audience. So if we want to innovate and we want to try working on this, how would we do this? By this point, at least some of you in this room, if you're here, might have heard that WordPress is an open source project. The really cool thing is that open sources had such a big trend lately. There's so many other projects that are becoming open source and especially with Internet of Things projects becoming so new. There's a ton of open source projects that you can connect to. There's a lot of ones that are really easy. There's some intermediate ones pretty much where whatever your level is of expertise and interest and any type of project you want to build. There's pretty much an open source way to do it and you can connect that with WordPress. So let's look at a couple of those. This is a company called Little Bits. They make Snap Together electronics. So if you think about, you know, like an Arduino, you would be soldering stuff together. If that's not quite your level, which is definitely not mine, this company makes everything that instead of soldering, you just have magnets and you just clip them together. So you might have on the left, the blue one is a power little module. So you plug that with a USB cable into the wall and that just powers your little device. And then in the middle, you could put an input, which is a little button. And then to the right of that, you could put an output, which is, you know, like this little LED light that they have on here. And so this is really complicated, but you plug it in the wall and you hit the button and the light will light up. So this company came out with a module called a cloud, a cloud bit. So basically it allows you to use the internet as your input device. So you can trigger anything based. They have their own little AP rest API that runs through their servers, but you can connect it to anything. So I threw together this little proof of concept that's on the WordPress plugin directory. And you can download this and basically it just works off WordPress action hooks, which I'm sure you all are pretty familiar WordPress action hooks are if then type of scenario. This type of electronic stuff is an if then scenario. So it's all very simple, easy to understand, easy to put together and prototype ideas. A lot of the little bit stuff, they make it for kids, which doesn't make me feel great about myself. But they also make it for people to prototype ideas really quickly, even if you're going to go solder it and make it some really fancy thing later, you could just snap it together in 10 minutes and test out your idea and see if it's cool. So you can hook this up really easily in about five minutes to every time you get a comment on your WordPress site on any post, it'll light up the light. Or any time you get a WooCommerce order placed, it'll light up the light or any other action hook that might be in WordPress you could connect it to. If this than that, here's my next example. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because everyone's heard of it. They have a website that's pretty easy to use. They have a WordPress dedicated channel, so you can send data into WordPress, you can send data out of WordPress, and they have millions of things that you can connect, maybe not millions, but a ton of different services out there. There's home automation, there's all sorts of stuff. You can pretty much connect your WordPress site to do anything with that. And if you're looking to get started and you haven't really jumped into Internet of Things or building stuff, this is probably the easiest five-minute way. You can just stop listening to me right now, log on this website and probably have something built by the time I'm finished talking. Arduino, so a lot of people know about Arduino, basically just a micro computer and you can program it to do anything you want. And you can build sensors, you can build displays, you can kind of build anything with it. This is a more intermediate or advanced, but if you're looking to do something super cool and you need something a little more robust to power it, this is a really great option. So with those kind of ideas for how you might be able to get involved with this in mind, the whole reason why we might want to do this, innovation is great, but if we're innovating, we want to try to innovate to make something meaningful. We don't just want to innovate for the sake of doing something, we want to try and build something that would actually be useful to people. So what would actually be useful to people? I've got a couple ideas for you guys here, dashboards. So this is an example of a little bit's project, which they have like a instructable on. And you could take this and you could repurpose it to run off your WordPress site and do whatever you want. Instead of having the temperature gauge, you could have it say, how many comments do I have on my post? Or instead of the sun and then the rain clouds, you could have it be, are all my plugins up to date or do I need to go look at that? This is a product called a Nimbus, made by a company called Quirky. And this is actually a dashboard that it does nothing. You plug it in and you hook it up and it has four dashboards and you set whatever data you want to go in there. So you could just pretty much hook that up yourself and put whatever data you want from your site into it. This is not a WordPress or Internet of Things dashboard, but when I think about building dashboards, this is what I would love to do. You know, if you're like an agency that has a bunch of clients, you could list all your clients on the train board and some of their stats and have it actively be ticking what's going on with them. Or say, you know, you're a company like WooCommerce and you have all these extension plugins. You can have a list of your extension plugins and see how our sales, how many people are using them and downloading them and all these kind of real, cool, interactive stats. And plus you get that sweet sound of all the things ticking as they're changing. Alerts, another super useful one. I went to work at Minneapolis in the springtime which was a ton of fun and I gave a little talk related to this but I basically hooked up Jetpack Monitor which if you're not familiar with it will let you know if your site gun's down and I hooked that into if this and that. So I triggered a light basically that said bad things are happening if my site crashed and I tested it and it worked. Ask Alexa, this is my favorite idea which I haven't had time to work on so I hope that one of you do and makes this. If anyone's heard of the Amazon Echo, Alexa is the open source voice software that powers that inside of it. So Google is open source this. They're giving out grants to people to try and work on it and they want, it's basically like an open source version of Siri that they want people to work on. So you can build your own devices, again if then statements pretty basic, familiar concepts here. They'll let you build your own service if you have your own device, you could run it or you could build an Alexa skill. So theoretically you could say, Echo, ask WordPress how my site's doing and then you could have your Alexa skill look into your WordPress site and then have it respond to you and just say your WordPress site's doing great. You have 27 comments on your last post. You have 12 orders that have been placed this week and all your plugins are up to date. Keep up the good work. That would be something amazing and I think it'd be super cool. Data tracking, so I have an example for that in a sec and I'm short on time so I'll get to it. How about putting things the reverse way? Two last kind of out there examples that might get you an idea for something cool. This is a picture of beautiful Sunday River ski resort in Maine. What if you had a ski resort and you have a website and you set a temperature gauge at the top of the mountain or you put a snowfall gauge at the top of the mountain and every day you just said track this, send it into a custom post type in my site and it would display real time for people. Hey, the temperature at the top of the mountain is this which for skiers and snowboarders people would be super into that. That's a cool use case. Or what I would love to do or see someone else do is make a choose your own adventure interactive real life story. So you could make all of your possible stories in WordPress as posts, connect them using the post to post plugin and then build a physical display that says here's where you're at. Do you wanna go down road A or B? And then you click it and then WordPress through the rest API would load up the next stuff and say all right, now you're in the cave. Do you wanna go left or right? That would be something I think would be maybe not the pinnacle of achievement of what we can do but at least something that would be pretty fun. So that's all I have. I hope this has been useful and informative and hopefully gave you guys some ideas of what stuff you might be able to do. Thanks.