It's December 31st, the last day of December, and also the last day of the Blogging for Benjamin contest. This is the final post I'll be making for this contest. I'm really pleased that I participated in this contest because I learned quite a few things, I've communicated a few things that I'd been meaning to share, and I've created a bunch of snippets and tutorials for WordPressers.
One of the things I knew I wanted to do when I started this Blogging for Benjamin competition was to easily link users on one of those posts to the original post about the competition. That way users know why there's so many posts in December and about one a month in every other month. So I created a plugin to automatically add a message at the top of each of those posts.
One of the most important parts of creating a new habit – whether it be running more, eating healthy, or forming better writing skills – is to reward yourself when you accomplish the task. That's why we often set milestones for our selves like running a race. There's actually a lot of value in creating these meaningful milestones / goals for your self. They help motivate you push yourself just a little harder and once it's accomplished you'll feel proud of your achievement and you can share the experience with others to relive some of that joy which is very rewarding.
I have some pretty exciting news that I've been waiting to share for a while now. Back in June I released the User Analytics extension for Ninja Forms. That was definitely the start of my entrepreneurship but there is another aspect of being an entrepreneur that I've been looking forward to. Back in November I used the commissions from my extensions to purchase the rights to another developer's plugins so I can resell them as my own. And now I really feel like an entrepreneur!
One of the questions we hear all of the time doing support for WooCommerce is “what payment gateway do you recommend?” There's a lot of payment gateways out there – currently there's 111 available for WooCommerce – so picking one can be intimidating. I've used several payment gateways both for myself and doing work for clients and have had to jump over a few hurdles. Now that I've had to painfully learn the flaws of other gateways I'm a huge fan of Stripe. At this point I doubt I would use anything else.
I'm a big advocate of lean plugins and I think we've done a stellar job removing unnecessary bloat from WooCommerce 2.1. The brilliance of having multiple plugins to add only the functionality you need reduces the number of bugs, keeps everything separated for easy updates, and perhaps most importantly creates a clean & intuitive admin interface.
There is of course a huge demand for customizing the behavior of WooCommerce (or any plugin). So where do you put that functionality? Do you put them in settings pages, extra plugins, snippets, tutorials, or something else? There's a few options to choose from and while none of them are perfect there are a couple of clear winners.
It's Christmas here in the United States and just about everyone will be giving and receiving gifts today. When you're a kid Christmas is all about the presents but as you get older it becomes less important to receive gifts and more important to give gifts. Likewise the number and size of the gifts don't matter it's all about giving joy.
A little joy & appreciation can go a long way. Knowing that you're appreciated for your work can be really motivating. This is especially true with projects that might lack a financial incentive (fixing a neighbor's car, watching a friends cat, or managing an open source project). That's why in the WordPress community it's so important to give back to projects. And just like Christmas the number or size of the gifts don't matter just give to show your appreciation.
I'm spending some time with family for the holidays this week and it's amazing how little we get done. I'm not even talking about work. I'm talking about regular every day things like finishing a card game. Everyone's playing on their smartphones, tablets, laptops, or otherwise multitasking. It doesn't seem like a single person is paying attention to what they're doing.
I love my family and I'm not saying this to rip on them. I think this is one of the big issues my generation will face. There's information coming in at us in every direction and it's hard to not want to try to consume it. One of the issues my generation has to face is trying to squeeze every drop of productivity out of each moment. I'm all for being productive but when you multitask you don't multiply your focus you fracture it. This is why I'm in favor of monotasking and completely finishing one task before moving onto the next one.
I just built a plugin for Contact Form 7. Yup you read that right Contact Form 7. After releasing the MailPoet extension for Ninja Forms I bumped into Kim from MailPoet at WordCamp Europe and we struck up a conversation for some more MailPoet plugins.
All of us have met one of those people that complains about everything. They're no fun to be around. Even if I'm chipper and excited about the day I'll be drained after talking with them for just a few minutes. I don't know about you but I have no desire to spend time with people who bring me down. I want to be around people that inspire me and encourage me to more! I get energized by meeting people who are passionate, people who do instead talk, and people who are unapologetically themselves.