Today was a life changing day. In January of 2019 my mother passed away. Today my father suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, just two short years after my mom. I have never liked January, it’s the let down after Christmas. It’s the Monday of the year. The feeling right now, aside from the loss and sadness, is a profound disconnect from who I am. A very large part of my identity was...
Practice makes perfect. I have heard that so many times! As a kid it’s what I was told about getting better at guitar and piano. Whenever I wanted to do something new, it always came down to practice. Practice and practice some more. It’s a basic concept, one that makes sense, but is easier said than done. I prefer to just be good at stuff. Have you heard of Masterclass? Basically...
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”Winston Churchill Customer Success My favorite definition of Customer Success is very simple. Delivering value with a wonderful experience. If I were to imagine that I myself was in a Customer Success Manager role, I would see my function as making sure that post sale, our new customer stays our customer. I...
After 5 years I have earned a sabbatical! I have planned it for the summer of 2021. Here are the things I want to do. Travel: 14 days in New Zealand (Bonus: Hobbiton!)Complete this rally school, get licensed and participate in a rally. While there drive and explore New England in a rally car, possibly WRX or BMW. (14 days)Camping trip in Tahoe or Sierras with family, including...
Updated often. And growing, because … life. Travel Travel to GermanyTravel to IrelandAlaskan Cruise and a side trek to the Yukon to visit Lisa (Scheduled for summer of 2021)Travel to NetherlandsTravel to New Zealand and see Hobbiton (Scheduled for summer 2021)Travel to MexicoHike Half DomeTravel to CanadaTravel to Scotland3 month hike on the pacific trailTravel to IcelandTravel to...
Today I needed to loop through the output of a command on the WP CLI. The most simple way I could think to do that was to save the output of the command into an array and loop through it. What I did was use wp site list to get the subsites on a WordPress Multisite. I needed to pass each of those sites as an argument to a command and give it some time in between each execution since it was going...
In October WordPress VIP headed to the Rotterdam in the Netherlands for the VIP Grand Meetup! This was my first VIP GM and the first year not attending the main Automattic GM. I had a blast getting to know the amazing folks in VIP. You can view some photos of the trip here.
I had a great time with my wife and my team (Tatooine) in Hawaii. We were there 12 days total. The only thing I would change is the location in Hawaii. Honolulu is very crowded. It’s a big city that felt like Los Angeles, only the driving was 100 times worse. It was hot and humid as well. If I was to go back to Hawaii I would choose a different island. We rented a car for 7 days and left...
My team is having a MeetUp in Hawaii and it should be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to spending some time with my team, Tatooine in WooCommerce, as well as a team from .com that is having their MeetUp in the same location. We have some cross team stuff planned that should be really great learning experiences. When I have been on team and company wide meet ups, I have really enjoyed fitness...
Just a few finishing touches needed, like the completed doors, and we will be done. We added 1800 square feet on to the house to add this kitchen which took almost 14 months to complete. We are really happy with the results, though we would not use the same contractor again. The cabinet company was a delight to deal with. We love the cabinets so much we had them do the same treatment on several...
Last night was the closing party which officially ends the Grand Meetup.
The party was held at Epcot Center not too far from our hotel. It was a blast! The food, the band (our own Automatticians), the fireworks, just an amazing experience as always! View the album here!
This week during the Grand Meetup I was in a class called "Contributing to Core". It was such a great class in that I got an inside view to all things WordPress Core. By the end of class I had my very first commit to WordPress Core. The commit was a fix for #45028 that my co-worker filed during the class.
Tonight we took over Universal Studios and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Just us! The entire park to ourselves. No lines for rides, unlimited food and drinks, including my favorite beer and Butter Beer! I had 4 cups of the frozen Butter Beer! I can't even begin to describe how amazing the experience was. My team, my co-workers, we are like a huge family and we got have a blast hanging out...
During the GM we have a few speakers come and give a talk. This morning was Cheryl Strayed. Until today I had not heard of her, but it seems like I may have been hiding under a rock. 🙂 Her talk was great and very inspiring. I enjoyed it quite a bit and had several moments where I felt like she was talking directly to me. I was able to grab her book “Wild” and have it signed. I am...
Today I updated the plugin I wrote almost a year ago, bringing to to version 1.1.
I finally got around to adding a simple icon to my plugin on WordPress.org. It was very easy! Here is how to can do it in just 5 simple steps. Before you start In your plugin folder you should have an assets folder. This is where you can add files for things like the Plugin’s icon, the header, screenshots, etc. The folder should be a top level directory, so it’s not going to be in...
One of the more frequent issues that we hear about day to day is that WooCommerce is not sending emails for new orders (or any emails at all). There are several reasons that this may be happening. The most common reason is that the status of order is such that an email is not going to be sent. Some times the email may not even be enabled, or the server is not sending the emails. While we do have...
Every day that I get a CrossFit workout in, I like to record that on my site, Level Up CrossFit. But that is a time consuming task that I have less and less time for. I don’t want to stop doing that, so I decided to add some custom fields so that entry is easier and formatting is all done. Enter Advanced Custom Fields. This plugin makes it very simple. Just add the custom fields in the...
In WooCommerce you can use WooCommerce Services to make tax calculations easier. This uses the TaxJar API to do that for you. Sometimes though, you will have everything configured correctly, but taxes still show as $0 or not at all on the front end of your site. This is often because there is no Nexus available. To confirm this, make sure you have Automated Taxes enabled. Now let’s check...
WooCommerce: Send a coupon! Send a coupon to a customer as a reward for subscribing to a list and/or creating an account during checkout. With Follow Up Emails you can create a list for your customers to subscribe to, create a sign up form to subscribe to that list, and send them a coupon for doing so! This is what you do. Create a new coupon in Follow-Up Emails Create a new Signup Email in...