What Happens in Vegas, Gets Talked About Here

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to you you, you and you welcome to each and everyone of you to officehoursfm. This is episode number 54 and today I’ve got KrashKartMedia a.k.a. Russell Aaron with me. Hey Russell! How you doing?

Russell: I am doing great! How are you doing?

Carrie: I pretty much couldn’t be more fabulous unless I had a bowl of ice cream sitting in front of me.

Russell: You can have a tiara. That would make you more fabulous.

Carrie: You know I can probably find a tiara in the course of this podcast. At least one of the Google effects one.

Russell: I think you should do that. That would be awesome.

Carrie: This is episode number 54 . Welcome to everyone who’s listening out there in the World Wide Webs. A couple of housekeeping notes. If you would like to ask questions of myself or Russell today you can tweet them to @officehoursfm or use the #officefm. We just made that one up last week. Whoo Hoo! Or if you are watching this directly over on Google+ you can do the live Q&A there and we will get to your questions. Today’s episode is brought to you by the lovely manage ManageWP who makes managing a whole wad of WordPress sites super simple. Check them out on ManageWP.
Russell: Super simple….
Carrie: What’s that?

Russell: Super simple….I can’t stress how simple enough it makes it.

Carrie: If Russell can do it by golly anybody can do it. Check them out; ManageWP.com. And then we’ve got DesktopServer. Russell are you a user?

Russell: So let me tell you about DesktopServer. There’s been many times at meet ups where I’ve had to load a demo site to show what I am talking about. I start up DesktopServer, whip up an instance of WP and it’s there. I’m a fan. If I had a t-shirt I would have it on. But I have my San Diego shirt on.

Carrie: (laughing) Well we love DesktopServer around here too. So check them out at serverpress.com. They just got a shiny new coat of paint on their website. It’s much simpler to navigate. Everything’s easier to find there. DesktopServer is actually free. They do have a pro version but the free version is pretty darn awesome in and of itself. I’ve gotten a word from Ben. Today I tweeted out the Google+ link instead of the web site link for people who like to watch the show. I’ve heard it streams a little more smoothly there. If you are having trouble accessing that, do go over to officehours.fm/podcast/54 and you can watch it live there.
Russell: /org.
Carrie: Backslash, hashslash bring me some ice cream right now. Dang it. Ok. So Russell, where did we first meet?

Russell: Wordcamp Chicago.

Carrie: I was apparently in some sort of a coma and don’t remember attending Wordcamp Chicago. Ok. Wordcamp Vegas.
Russell: Wordcamp Vegas. Technically it’s last year but I still consider it this year coz it just recently happened. I was completely nervous to meet you. I tried to fabricate this great story. I got caught. End of story. (laughs)

Carrie: So what have we learned?
Russell: We learned that we should not do that. And we learned that you should just be honest with Carrie Dils. She will call you out every time.

Carrie: Carrie Dils knows. I don’t know how. I got eyes in the back of my head or something. Yeah. So I met you in Vegas. You were one of the organizers for WordCamp Vegas. How many years have you been doing that?

Russell: I have done two now. I am one of many. I am one of like four. There’s like many people that put Vegas on. I kind of run the developer session. I kinda help pick that. I MC that kind of room. I decided to that because I like speaking. I like setting up the meetups and I wanted to take on something a little bigger. To see if :

A: I could do it and

B: Just to help out

Carrie: Awesome. So you run some meetups locally too?

Russell: So John Hawkins, a mutual friend. Shout out to John Hawkins.

Carrie: Hawkins.
Russell: He puts the Vegas meetup on. And there’s another guy, Steve Ripka, who helps kinda co-organize that. I kind of fit in where I can to help put things together.
Carrie: Sweet. All right. So let’s go back . Wow somebody’s rear end just entered the picture over there. Hey dude! How you doing?

Russell: That’s how we roll.

Carrie: Hey you know what? I like surprise guests on the show. OK so back up to the beginning. Not like the moment you popped out your mother’s womb beginning but career beginning…sort of where you come from, how you got your start and what your journey’s been. So that we know how to frame Russell Aaron.

Russell: That’s funny. OK I started out doing MySpace band layouts. Yeah that’s right. I am taking you way back.
Carrie: Wow.

Russell: So I started doing that. A buddy gave me copy of Dreamweaver. It was actually Macromedia Dreamweaver. It wasn’t even Adobe yet. And so I had a copy of that and I started to just you know, like fumble my way around. It was a lot of images. Let’s be honest. It was tables and images. And then a buddy of mine said you should get a blog you should start you know like talking about all your successes or failures doing these MySpace layouts. I started using a blog called WordPress. And then he said look dude you can start manipulating WordPress. I was a fan ever since.

Carrie: That was the end of the story. So clearly not end the story just the beginning of a different story.

Russell: True

Carrie: Ok this is a little bit of a derailer. But since you are talking about MySpace, they tried to make a noble comeback. Did you…or was that the MySpace you were involved with? Are you one of these genYers or Millennials that…
Russell: No..Ok. I was part of the

Carrie: Involved in first Scooby Doo?

Russell: I was part of the first

Carrie: Your Scooby Doo was the first? Sorry…go ahead.

Russell: I was part of the MySpace generation where we thought it was so cool to use CSS to hide comments. I was that. It was just the style tag and comments display hidden. (laughing). I think MySpace was trying to do something great with music. But the thing with MySpace for me personally was if your band didn’t start with the letter A or an underscore…like no one’s gonna find you. They’re not gonna go 300,000 pages deep to find your band. I think that really kind of derailed them but I think it was a great platform. I miss MySpace. I have this great photo of me holding MySpace for Dummies. I really miss it.

Carrie: Wow. RIP. Ok so… So moving on to WordPress what are your..like what do you specialize in?

Russell: I kinda dabble, I am kind of one of the guys that can do a little of a lot. So I started out doing like kinda theme design and I started out just supporting people. Helping people. Oh Hey I know how to do that. I know how to do this. Then I really got into developing. You know what I see John Hawkins once a month. Every so often he’s like hey, you should learn this. And then I started like following Pippin Williamson and that kid is just like hey let’s write this code. He’ll just like go crazy. So I really started getting into  like developing. I work at a mortgage company. I get to develop things that aren’t in the industry because it doesn’t exist. So I really get to spend most of my day trying to build an industry where nothing already is and I can kind of set a tone. I’m really excited about that. That’s most of my day doing. Is just developing.

Carrie: So are you the only WordPress developer at this company?

Russell: I’m the only WordPress developer in the mortgage industry in Las Vegas I feel like. I don’t meet too many people. I met a few, but I the only one here at the company. Yes.

Carrie: And that’s where you are presently?

Russell: Currently. Currently yes. You can’t see it right now but I am actually like pushing a loan through and getting one funded at the same time.

Carrie: Now that’s amazing multitasking. I hope none of your clients are watching and wondering about your attention and dedication to their mortgage application.

Russell: I hope they’re watching so they see how low our rates are. I think it would be great.

Carrie: (laughing) All right. Well you recently created a plug-in called Gravity Styles and I wanted to spend some time talking today about that and then also just your process of developing and some lessons learned there. You want to give us the quick rundown of what Gravity Styles is?

Russell: Well I will tell you what it’s not. So Gravity Styles… I wanted to have this plug-in. I’ve had this idea for quite a long time. But it used to have to be that you had to copy and paste some stuff into the header and then like FTP a stylesheet…that kind of stuff. When WP enqueue came around, it kind of opened the door for this plug-in. The plug-in simply is all you do is add a class name to a Gravity Form and it styles it. You don’t have to learn CSS you don’t have to use like jquery pickers to choose your colors and your own font sizes. It just does it for you. And it’s something that I feel is kind of needed. You know I think there’s a lot of people that wish they could just style a form call it done without having to spend another 40 minutes trying to stylize it. If that makes sense.

Carrie: It does. OK so you gave me the what it’s not and what it is all in the same answer.

Russell: Right.
Carrie: Ok. So are there preset themes (not themes as in WordPress themes) but styles themes; themes as in styles that people can use or is there any creating your own? How does that work?

Russell: OK so currently now they’re all pre set they have all been defined you just add a class name to Gravity Forms. In the back end. So you would add like GF style 2015 and it will style just like the 2015 theme or the 2013, the 2014 and then I had a great friend Suzette Frank I think another mutual friend of ours she sent me her Gravity Form stylesheet and so if you want to have a pink form just like her you can add her class name it’s already stylized just like her.

Carrie: All right. What’s the URL if people want to check that out more were talking.
Russell: It’s Google.com/ no… its gravitystyles.com.

Carrie: Ok cool. So did you… like as said you thought people needed this, but were your scratchin your own itch or were people actually say hey I sure wish I could  do this or what even started to building or choosing this for plug-in?

Russell: Ok. There was a tweet/facebook post that I said I wish there is a plug-in where I could add a class name and Gravity Forms would  re style. Megan Gray posts on my Facebook thing shut up and take my money. (laughing) I was like all right. All right. Somebody would clearly would like this plugin. So I started toying around with the idea. I built version 1 beta version 1 and I as show up to prestige conf here in Las Vegas and I met this wonderful guy named Ben Fox. You know Ben Fox? You know Ben Fox. Did I just say his name too many times? I feel like I did.

Carrie: I feel like we have summoned him and he might rise out of the ether here in a moment.

Russell: He is gonna be the third person that walks by. Anyways, I show Ben Fox. I say check out my plug in. And he goes dude you need to make this a paid plug in. If you don’t I will. So he really kind of got the ball rolling on saying this is a great idea. I think you could really snowball this down the road and you should get it going. So that’s kind of the idea. At the same time, I’ve been styling Gravity Forms forever. I do it for people just for free. And in the events and the WordPress group on Facebook so I was like maybe I could take two worlds and mesh them. You know kind of make my day easier.

Carrie: All right. So you made the transition from free to paid and so a lot of folks that listen to this show I know are curious…are either wanting to or in the process of building and selling products, themes or plug-ins some sort of a productized service even for WordPress. How have you found your entry into that space? Have you found some success there or has it been sort of pushing a rock up a hill?

Russell: Yes. (laughing) I sent out this tweet and I was like hey check this out and it got like crazy traction. It got retweeted like a massive amount of times. I check my analytics and the site hits weren’t there… Ok well twitter’s clearly not my best friend right now, even though I love twitter. Hi all the twitter people. I started going around and meeting people and posting it in different groups and trying to see what I could do and then this lady comes along and says hey I would really like to try your plug-in. If it works great. I’ll sell it for you. And I used it, she used it. She goes I love it and now I have somebody selling it for me.

Carrie: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. She’s actively selling it. So describe that. How is she marketing it?

Russell: She said I will just do anything I can. I’m gonna ask you for something. Build it into the plug in later on. But she just tweets it. She just shares it. No affiliate link- nothing. She’s just a fan. And so there’s this lady out there kind of pushing it. She has x-amount of followers and it’s kind of been growing since. It’s one of those things where I just kind of lucked out.
Carrie: We should all be so lucky. To have a friend who wants to do some free marketing for us. So give me some of the dirty details. Like what’s your set up? What are you using for processing payments. Give me the technical end of it.

Russell: OK. So I chose easy digital downloads. That’s how I am gonna sell everything. I don’t want to say I am biased but Pippin Williamson was at Prestige Conf and said you need to use this. You know I don’t feel like I should cross him. So I use EDD. That’s how we sell everything. EDD hooks up to PayPal so we use PayPal currently. We’ll build in stripe and I’m gonna build in on-site payments. But I don’t want to do that yet until I have all the small little bugs worked out.  So I use EDD and then we use their software licensor. That’s how we actually license the plug-in to say you can use it on this many sites or this many sites. That’s kind of the down and dirty of it. It’s Our site, to PayPal, to download, to Install.

Carrie: Ok. So your set up sounds very similar to mine. I’m using easy digital downloads (EDD). I am using it with stripe. Then I’m also using their software licensing tool which was kind of a little bit of buggar to figure out how to integrate that in a theme. But with some help, got that going on. And delivery right there via an account on the web site. EDD if you are listening to this. Here is some free love for EDD. It’s a fantastic product. It’s actually a free product.  It’s the add ons that you pay for as you go for whichever add ons fit your specific needs.
Russell: You’re actually going to be really jealous. I bought the software licensing plug in. I downloaded it. I read the whitepaper on how to install it. I prefixed all my functions and stuff like that. The activator wasn’t working right. Like it worked but it wasn’t giving me the little green check box. I turn around and I go hey Pippin! Can I? He says I got it. Don’t worry. He goes (typing sounds) and it was done. I had Pippin Williamson help me with my plugin. I did (dancing in chair) a lot.

Carrie: (laughing) That really calls for dancing baby gif.

Russell: Yeah. He’s just like totally this normal guy. Everybody holds him like on this high pedestal thing. He’s like like dude. I already know what the problem is. I’ll fix it. We plan on fixing it but let me get you started now. Totally cool dude.

Carrie: Pippin is fantastic. Ok. Well I’ve got some more questions for you a couple to take from the audience here. By the way if you are just joining us you can shoot your questions to @officehoursfm on Twitter or tag your tweet with #officefm or if you watching over on Google+ you can submit it via Q & A. We have a question from Leonica. She’s asking how did you make your first steps in the world building plug-ins? Were you reading books, tutorials?

Russell: Yes. So one of the first books I read was WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin Wilson. I met her at Wordcamp Vegas. I got her to sign my copy of WordPress for Dummies. I read that cover to cover multiple times. Then I started reading like the smashing book on WordPress. I started reading like WP Candy. Stuff like that and then I found other connections like Post Status. I found….I can’t think of the other one…WP MU..I think is what it is. I read all those tutorials. It like Hey! If you’re going to a plug-in you should check this out! You know? It always defaults back to the Codex. So I would say if your gonna get started you should use the Codex first. Learn how they do it. Then go read tutorials. That’s what  I did it. I read. I read all the time. I don’t watch much TV other than NASCAR. But I mean I just started reading and that’s the best way to learn. And then I go meet people at Wordcamps. You are like hey how would you do this? And John Hawkins fires up his computer shows you how to do it and know how to enqueue scripts.

Carrie: That was actually how I learned about DesktopServer. I was out at Wordcamp Vegas in 2013. I was throwing away a slice of awful pizza when I bumped shoulders with Greg Franklin. I had heard of DesktopServer but I never used them. So he just pulled me aside like your talking with John Hawkins and he gave me a demo, showed me how to use it. You know my life is never been the same since.

 

Russell: Were you such a fan that you tried to say that you met him at a previous Wordcamp?
Carrie: (laughing) I did. I got a little flustered. Surely we met it at Wordcamp (blugh…) sometime last year.
Russell: That’s funny.
Carrie: Yes. I am always giving plugs for Wordcamps on the show. They are a great way to meet people and just kind of peek over shoulders and see just how people do things.

 

Russell: I was just at WordCamp San Diego. I spoke there. I will be speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis coming at the end of the month. I have another WordCamp but I’m not allowed to say anything about it until later on down the road but stay tuned for that.
Carrie: That you are speaking at?

Russell: Yes. The actual email said that you can’t say anything until like May 9^th But you’re accepted. I said cool.

 

Carrie: Well if we put our detective caps on. Ok we won’t do that. Congratulations on that future upcoming one. It sounds like you get around so to speak as far as Wordcamps are concerned.

Russell: I’m trying to ugh…John Hawkins has been to like 80 or 90 WordCamps something like that. I don’t even know how many. I’m trying to catch up. I have a long way to go.

Carrie: Well. All right. You’ve got the t-shirts to prove it. So getting back to this… you make some good points about how you’re learning. You’re are basically reading a whole lot, referencing the codex and then just sort of seeing where things take you? Finding the next article… that every time something comes upfinding an article that helps you solve the problem or what?

Russell: I’m kind of that person that when I discover something, that’s all want to do for like the next two hours. So like I found how to en queue scripts. I was like let’s enqueue all the scripts. And I found out wp enqueue styles…like…uh oh ok scripts and styles? It’s getting out of control. At the bottom of the codex pages it says hey..you should check this out. I just start following links you know and by the time I look up its 6 am. I’ve been up all night reading how to do this but I have a really good understanding of how WordPress likes do things.

Carrie: Do you use…Are you still using the old version of the codex or have you switched to the new documentation?
Russell: I will check both because I like to build things that are backwards compatibility. You know, so I like to see how it was done here and then I’ll check how they’re doing it now and see which one like really suits me. Coz there some functions that I’ll just use from over here to call but if I see something new I am like let’s try that. Maybe that will help out. You know?
Carrie: Ugh I did not notice much in the way of the functions actually being different more of just styled a little bit more beautifully. But I still found myself using the old one mostly. Except I feel like the examples are little bit better.
Russell: I feel like they’re a little more documented. Like here’s the usage heres like all the strings and stuff. Here’s some examples of like what to do and what not to do. I think that’s great you know. But I think the new version will get there as well.
Carrie: Cool. Well here’s a shout out if you’re feeling like volunteering in the WordPress ecosystem. You can go be on the docs team. They are always looking for help. OK. We’re gonna ask. We want some numbers. Can you share about your average number of sales and I’m curious too if you saw a little burst at the beginning and then a drop-off? Or it’s been a pretty steady or even climbing number? Will you give us some hints there?

Russell: So it’s about half a day that you know I get half a download a day and it’s steadily growing up.

Carrie: (laughing) Half a download?

Russell: Yeah. So when I first put my plug-in…it was…yeah…I don’t know how that works. It’s just javascript files are downloading. I put my plug-in on Github. I had no way to update it other than re-downloading it, uninstalling, reinstalling. Somebody said hey check out this Github updater plug-in. I embedded it into my plug-in. I tweeted it and I saw a download number start rising. It went from like 10. I came the next day and there was like 150. I came the next day, there’s like 200. So that there are spurts and there are kind of like trickles in and then there’s another spurt. That’s kind of what we’re doing now. I can see somewhere there’s like 6 or 7 a day. And then I can see somewhere they went and told two friends, and they went and told two friends and then we have now 25 today. But we’ve never done more like 30 in day.

Carrie: Ok.

Russell: That is kind of where I am maxing out. It’s somewhere in between like 3 or 4 to like 30 in there. I know it’s a big window but looking at all our stats that we have its roughly in there. It’s not like consistently 15. It varies.

Carrie: Yeah. I’ve noticed the same thing with theme sales. There will be days that go by. And it’s just crickets. Not a single sale. Another day there will be 3 or 4 sales so it’s kind of interesting how they group up like that.

Russell: Do a happy dance when you get a sale? Coz I do a happy dance when I get a sale.

Carrie: Yes… I am sitting there eating a meal and a sale comes across. EDD even has a little app that will ping you on your phone every time you get a sale. I am not that bad, but I do get the e-mails. I’m sitting there eating my dinner and a sale came through and I am like there’s my dinner. But of course you can’t take that quite literally. I’m a long ways to go before I pay myself back for development time. I think I need to mentally let development time go.

Russell: That’s actually interesting because that’s what LoopConf is all about. You get to hear about like the business side of WordPress. You know, we had Andrew Norcross from Design Palette Pro. He showed us how…he’s just now starting to see some recoup from it…he’s just now trying to balance things out. It was really interesting to see how that works you know? Seeing Pippin’s numbers are insane but even his numbers are like he’ll have 10,000 downloads. None. 4000 downloads. None. You know? It was interesting to see that. It is interesting to see you know like how he gets excited about making sales. I never knew that that part of WordPress existed until I ventured down this path.

Carrie: Now for some reason I was thinking LoopConf was more technically oriented or developer focused than the business end of things.

Russell: I meant Prestige Conf.

Carrie: Ugh Ok.
Russell: All these Confs. I’m so confused

Carrie: Conf, Conf, Conf it was meant to be the Marsha Marsha Marsha boys. I don’t know if that was quite clear not.

Russell: It’s really weird. They spell it ph and not an f.

Carrie: Oh my, Oh my, Oh my. The follow-up question to the number of average sales as you see more and more downloads, does that inspire you to build more plug-ins? Are you like ugh, I wouldn’t do this again.

Russell: No. I want everybody to go build a plug-in. I want to keep building plug-ins. I have ideas for plug-ins all the time. And then there’s sometimes where I’m like that would never work in this environment. But when I start seeing downloads and I start seeing people like paying money to use something it inspires me to go make 30 new styles. It inspires me to like okay…let’s enbed like animate CSS and now start having forms do crazy stuff. It really does inspire me, the more downloads I see. I am not like download driven. But even if I get one new download today I am like hey let’s go build 5 new styles.

Carrie: So how many styles do you currently have available?

Russell: So we’re still in version 1 of the plugin. So there’s 10 styles…9 styles, No…there’s 10. You can to gravitystyles.com and it says pre view forms and you can see all the styles available. You can play with them. You can use them. We are going to release version 2 in about a week. And we built 45 new styles.

Carrie: Nice.
Russell. Yeah you know? So we’ve been scraping the internet looking for ideas and saying hey that really works this doesn’t work. Some forms I really like. Like your form with Utility Pro. And I asked you hey can we build a version to use in our plug-in. You said yes. I think so. I need have to go check my e-mails.

Carrie: (laughing) The answer was Yes. As long as it doesn’t mess with accessibility.

Russell: Exactly, and we reached out to other people. So clearly you guys are doing a good job. Can we take your form and kind of mimic it. They are like dude do it. Even the guys over at dreadcast are like do it. Yes. Here’s our form. Go and do it!

Carrie: Sweet. Well Paul had a…he’s joining us a little bit late…just a recap of the plug-in…who is it intended for? You know the client or the developer? If I’m….you can correct me if I’m misinterpreting…but it’s really for somebody that wants to custom style a Gravity Form but does not want to mess with any CSS. It might be the developer who doesn’t want to fart with CSS or it might be a client. I think it could be either one.

Russell: I think you’re absolutely correct. I think it also can be you know what like were a small little design shop and were using Gravity Forms and you know you don’t want to pay us the extra hours to style it. Here. Here’s this plug-in. Go and do it. You know? I think it’s something that they could really be accessible to set up in three seconds. It’s a copy, paste and then save. And now your form is stylized.

Carrie: I’m kind of back around to that. You mentioned that you used the EDD licensing add on. That add on also includes updates so when you’re the ability to push updates and someone’s WordPress admin. So when you come out from version 2 will current customers be able to update from their dashboard? Or…are you going to make them download again?

Russell: No. No. It’s all about updating from the dashboard. I’ve done it a few times where I had to go to the developer site re-download it for whatever reason. Uninstall. It’s a pain. When Pippin jumped over and said hey let me fix your software licensing…He actually like moved some things around to where when it’s activated it will trigger an update. Or it will go call back to see if there’s an update you know. So he built that in for me. But I really want it to be in the dashboard. I don’t want you to have to leave. I think be great to just click. Update. Done. You know?

 

Carrie: Yeah. So I’m not using that for Utility Pro because with a theme it’s almost guaranteed that someone’s going to customize it. So you don’t to provide the ability to auto update and accidently…you know someone accidently write over their customizations. So I make them come back to the site and download. If they want to.

Russell: So how does that work then? Because on my end with my plug-in I define a variable that says version is 3.0…3.1 whatever. And then I roll into easy digital downloads and say here’s the new version. Supply the download. How to you do that? Do you send out an email blast saying hey a new copy is out. Go download it. When they go to your account can they see all the old versions? Like how does that work?

Carrie: They would only see the most current version. To date I think I’ve only pushed one update. It was just a couple minor fixes that if someone were to come through support and even have that issue. Sort of some edge cases. But if they were to have that issue then we would walk them through a manual fix. We would help do that for them. The main..I have a developer version of the theme and that’s the one really where I will be pushing out any updates that would..I don’t want to say that would matter… the original theme as is will stay as is. The only real changes to that that be you know if there’s any bug fixes or style fixes or things like that. The changes I intend to make are on the developer side; so adding additional grunt tools. My next version will be a SAS version of the theme. So little things like that really don’t matter to the end client. It’s more for the developer.

Russell: I thought about this for a long time you know. Am I going to do a tier 1 version a tier 2 version, tier 3…. Ben Fox is like listen. Here’s what we do. It’s basically licensing. Give away the plug-in. It doesn’t matter what version they’re using. But make it you know by licensing x amount of sites. I mean that’s what Gravity Forms already does. Since my plug-in is based around the involvement of Gravity Forms, I kind of keep it the same to that you know. If that makes sense.

Carrie: It does, it does. Well pause the thoughts for just a second. Since we’re at the…little bit at the halfway mark here. Welcome anyone who’s joined us. Somewhere in between the beginning and now. Appreciate you tuning in and listening. I’ve got Russell Aaron of Krash Kart Media and Gravity Styles on the show. You can ask him questions by tweeting to @officehoursfm or just tag in your tweet with #officefm. (sneeze) Excuse em moi. If you would like to receive email updates just reminding you the day of the show go to officehours.fm/subscribe and I will lovingly hand-deliver a little email reminder on Thursday mornings to your inbox. No spam. I promise. Ok. So let’s dive back in. I’ve got some good questions. This is the one that’s always on my mind or people’s minds when they’re thinking about putting out products. How much time you spend on support? Does the plug-in really even require support?

Russell: So I started doing support. I had this great support website and I launched the same week that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. And if you don’t know Maintainn, stop what you’re doing, go look at Maintainn and comeback. I’ll wait.

Carrie: Way to drive off all the listeners. Just kidding. So that’s Maintainn with two n’s.

Russell: You can go to webdevstudios/maintainn I think it is. And check them out. Fabulous support. I met the guys from wpsitecare. They do phenomenal support and I started realizing that the more technical a product is, you really have to provide some support. Which is…the irony is.Pippin Williamson has all these downloads. And he has like one or two people for support. For like 30,000 users and he has one person for support. My plug-in doesn’t really require support. I have the white paper. It’s a copy and paste. Let’s be honest. You copy a class name, paste it in and hit save. I don’t think that’s too difficult and if it’s too difficult you can hit us up on twitter. We have when you log into the site, we have the support Gravity Form. Ask us all your questions. I really don’t think a forum or anything is kind of needed just yet. But with the new versions we want to release, eventually we are going to have to handle support. We’re going have to handle all the developer tools for hooks and filters and stuff. We’re gonna have to do that at some point. I think it plays a big role in what you’re doing. I think that’s how you not only keep people. I think it’s how you promote yourself as well. They have fabulous support. Go use Gravity Forms. They have great support. Go use you knows Utility Pro. I think that kind of sells your product even more than you just marketing on Google ad words or whatever.

Carrie: Oh I would agree wholeheartedly. Pippin for example is renowned for the excellence in their support. And yeah it’s kind of crazy that their support team is so small with such a huge product base. Maybe that speaks to their documentation.

Russell: You would never know it! Like you…before I met him I thought it was a great big shop. I thought it was a team of about 40 developers. It’s like no. It’s me and 5 people. (laughing) I was like…really? It blew me away.

Carrie: Crazy, crazy. I had question on deck and then it left my brain. Now that I am over the hill that happens sometimes. So I will just move onto another question.

Russell: Over the hill. Wow. Ok.

Carrie: Shifting gears a little bit…curious about the tools that you use just sort of in your daily life. Your time management, social media, productivity… Give us the rundown. Whatcha got installed?

Russell: What do I have installed? I think I’m gonna write a blog post about that. That could be my weekly post challenge. I’m excited. I have three screens. I have a 27 inch iMac running 32 gigs i7. It’s maxed out to the core. That’s what I develop and design on everyday. For everything code I’m using Aptana Studio 3. Are you familiar? Aptana?

Carrie: Negative.

Russell: It’s a remote manager. I can just remote in and change things without having to FTP, without having to make a local copy, that kind of stuff. But my daily kind of workflow is everything I do on DesktopServer I design locally. It’s good, I’ll push it up to stage. I’ll test it on stage. If that’s great, I’ll push it to live. But it’s basically from DesktopServer and Aptana. I’ll push it up using…I don’t know filezilla or something like that. And then testing it over on wpengine. Hey, hey wpengine. Making sure it works. Checking to make sure cache and objects and all that are great. Then I push it live. But that’s really all I use, is Aptana, DesktopServer, filezilla maybe Chrome. Firefox if I feel daring.
Carrie: Ok. So when your saying push it up you are transferring files. You not using some sort of a deployment tool?

Russell: No. Everything I use is svn. It’s all svn. It’s all ssh. I’ll use filezilla if I need to push it up for some for a crazy reason. But for the most part it’s all ssh. And wpengine gives you the tools to do that. I’m just plugging everybody today.

Carrie: Yeah. I mean we are just all about the free product place. I feel like you need a can…you should take a drink of Coca-Cola right now and shift the label right towards us. Oh my gosh! Who just has a bottle of Coke hanging around?

Russell: I do! My family has been buying stock in Coca-Cola since like the 20s, so I have a Coca-Cola by me at all times. Like if I was a ninja turtle that would be my weapon. I would have a Coke bottle right there. I would be good to go.

Carrie: That’s awesome.

Russell: You didn’t know that was going to happen? Did you?

Carrie: I didn’t. I was not anticipating that one. That was very well played. It was like that show, Let’s Make a Deal?

Russell: Yeah.

Carrie: You win prizes if you have really bizarre implements in your purse or your backpack. Like who’s got a set of tweezers? Who’s got precisely 3 toenail clippings? Or an egg? Yeah …weird stuff. Ok.

Russell: It’s really shocking to see like 20 people have nail files; like clippers. That kind of surprises me. Shifting gears.

Carrie: Yeah getting back to things. We have a fantastic question from Jan. Gravity Styles works with Gravity Forms which is a paid premium product. So like in your case where your building an add-on that is…you know wouldn’t work without Gravity Forms did you have to go through any sort of clearance with those guys? Was there any copyright concerns?

Russell: No. I spend most of my time in copyright stuff doing all the mortgage stuff. Um..you know what? I wrote the guys at Gravity Forms and said this is what I trying to do. Do you care if I use the name Gravity. Do you care? They just wrote back and said dude do what you want to do. Like we really can’t stop you. Don’t fork our plug-in and give it away for free and we’re cool. They’re very cool like that. I am very respectful to say here’s what I will do. I am not going to cross that boundary. You know like the have the navlib style that you can embed and do that. I won’t put that in my plug-in even though they kind of just give that away. I’ll create my own navlib styles. I will do that. But you know what I want the credit to go where it deserves you know? I don’t want to be like ripping anyone’s style. Did you see what I did there?

Carrie: Yeah. I really needed a little rimshot on here. I tried to get Naomi Bush on the show today. I thought she would be a great paring with you since she also does some add-on plug-ins for Gravity Forms. But, alas. I think she’s moving or traveling or something today. So you get the place all to yourself.

Russell: Yeah.

Carrie: Well except for those people behind you pushing a….

Russell: It’s a typical workday. I was like everybody get out. I’m on this podcast and then they were….that’s how it’s gonna role.

Carrie: They ignored you.

Russell : Basically, basically.

Carrie: We see where you stand I the pecking order. If you had it to do all over again; you’re just now to start creating gravity styles, what would you do differently?

Russell: Nothing really. You know the biggest thing I had to overcome was pushing out updates because I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t know how updates rolled. So when I started using the Github updater to update my stuff. It said all you have to do is inside of a readme file put you know put the version number and it will push update. I was like okay and I changed that number like 10,000 times. I never got an update. And then somebody goes there’s thing called tags that you have to release a new tag. You have to put like a required version. That’s the only thing I would do differently. I would read more about what I need to do. Instead of just like diving it in and hoping it works.

Carrie: That would make an excellent blog post.

Russell: I already have the one earlier so maybe that can be next week.

Carrie: Ah. All right. So no major mistakes or pitfalls?

Russell: Yeah. No mistakes. I’ve made a few where like I pushed too many updates. I was like version 1. Version 1.1.1 – 1.1.2. I did that kind of stuff but that was all before it was a paid plug-in. Now that it’s a paid plug in and there’s people downloading it and people using it. I kind of feel like I have to be responsible for their downloads and their updates so I have to do a really good job here before I push it to like a staging or something you know. I really have to pay attention now.

Carrie: You mean you don’t want to be like Yoast and push an update to people’s admins every day? What?

Russell: I don’t want to be that guy like Pippin Williamson. Oh. I said his name.

Oh. I was gonna say his hair color… anyways . Who like hacked the admin just let everybody log in to the admin with no password.

Carrie: What?

Russell: Yeah. He has this great WordPress.tv thing on like how to build a plug-ins. He was like I released 4 versions of a plug-in because we hacked the login. We didn’t even know about it.

Carrie: Wow. Wow.

Russell: It’s a great cop. You should head over to WordPress.pd later and go check it out.

Carrie: By the way…when are those videos from Wordcamp Vegas 2014 going to go up on WordPress.tv?

Russell: Here’s what’s funny. I don’t know. It was at the innovation center. I love the innovation center. It’s a phenomenal place. It’s a great place to have WordCamp. We uploaded everything through their ridiculously fast wi-fi there. And it’s just sitting somewhere waiting to be approved. It’s not on us anymore. It’s on them.

Carrie: Ha! Interesting.
Russell: I feel like I’m passing the buck here but it’s really on them. Not on us.

Carrie: All right. You heard it here guys. It’s the blame game according to Russell. Ok. If you have more questions about creating a plug-in, marketing a plug-in, selling a plug-in, supporting a plug-in, those sort of things; hit up this guy before we end the show. So other than the plug-in, you mentioned that you getting to do some stuff the mortgage industry using WordPress…you’re the only one locally to be doing that. So can you…is this proprietary or can share what solutions your working on there?

Russell: I can. But everybody watching your show has to sign a nondisclosure.

Carrie: (giggles) Raise your hand if you’re listening..ok everybody agreed. Carry on.

Russell: So one of the things in the mortgage world is displaying your rates for loans on your website. Most people use a third-party tool and they give you this stupid little i-frame and you really can’t do much with the i-frame other than put a background on it. So I started helping other people who use the same tools we do, scrape that and display their rate on their website with like an H1 tag. You know like huge numbers, big rates. But that’s something that doesn’t really exist. If you go to a lot of websites, they don’t show you rates. They don’t show you fees, stuff like that so I get to do that with the things that I do.

Carrie: Cool. So you’re still yourself pulling their data but you’re able to get it out of that ridiculous i-frame and manipulate it yourself. Excellent. So how are you doing that? Can you give us the skinny?

Russell: A good buddy of mine up in Reno. I asked him. He was like yeah give we 30 seconds. He like wrote this crazy script. It’s a great fit. It stores in the variable. You just echo the variable on your template. It’s done. And so…I was like I would like to turn this into a plug-in and you know like it’s on the repo it’s not one of those things where we just say come here and download it. There’s some small variables that you need to have…like you need to have an account over here…you need have all that… I don’t want give that their secret blend of spices away. But you know its something where we reach out to other people and say would you like to do this? Check this out and as long you’re in the mortgage industry. Does that make sense?

Carrie: It does. That’s pretty cool.

Russell: So I’m a big fan of Josh Strebel. Do know Josh Strebel?

Carrie: I have not had the pleasure meeting him.

Russell: OK. Well you should.

Carrie: You know I might have met him at WordCamp Chicago and forgotten.

Russell: That’s very possible. He runs this great small little hosting company called Pagely and you should check him out.

Carrie: Oh that guy. Yeah,Yeah,Yeah. I don’t know people’s last names.

Russell: That’s funny. OK. So Joshua Strebel did this great thing at WordCamp Vegas about the many faces of WordPress. You know like some guy built a whole online videogame using custom post types for trees and stuff like that. It was phenomenal. It really inspired me to like build something cool. One of our loan processors here said we need an internal system that’s like a dmv. It’s like now calling file number and then that’s what he works on and so we took WordPress and built that. You know it’s basically Gravity Forms mapping it to a custom post type and then changing taxonomies around. You know, simple stuff. I started showing this to other people and they are like you know we want this and so we kind of packagee that up and sell it to them. Again it’s not really a repo a product kind of thing. It’s kind of per instance basis but it’s you know another thing that didn’t exist in the mortgage industry. And because WordPress exists. I can do that.

Carrie: I love it. Creative uses for WordPress. If WordPress.tv gets those videos on line I am gonna have to go watch that presentation.

Russell: You can actually see the thing I am talking about. The dmv. You can actually go to WPVegas.com. That are WordPress Las Vegas meet up. There’s videos over there from all of our meet ups and it’s on there.

Carrie: Ah. Excellent. OK.

Russell: I might just tweet a link out.

Carrie: Tweet it. And you know throw a little #officefm on there so that folks can find that later. All right. We got time for a couple of last questions. If you send those in. In the meantime let me tell you about our loving sponsors today we got Managewp who tremendous supporters of people in the WordPress community. Those guys are great. Check them out at managewp.com. If you manage more than one WordPress site. Seriously if it’s more than one, check them out. They will make your life easier. Also DesktopServer. Those crazy guys, Mark and Greg, have a fantastic product for local WordPress development and you can learn more about them @serverpress.com. Did you tweet that link out?

Russell: I think you should use Managewp even if you have just one WordPress site. Why do you have to limit it, Carrie? Why does it have to be 2 or plus?

Carrie: Well you know…so you know here’s the deal. When you make a product, you shouldn’t make a product for everybody, It then it’s not a good product. It should be for somebody specific. So that’s why I left out the one siters, just to make it feel a little more niche.

Russell: That’s awesome.

Carrie; I came up that on the spot. I thought it was pretty good.

Russell: Right? I think that’s pretty good.

Carrie: So I will share with our listeners are a couple more things. So I launched the new website officehours.fm last week.

Russell: Which is phenomenal by the way.

Carrie: Well thank you. I was just about to say it’s still got a quite a few issues so in time that will improve. Like just one of the tiny issues right now is there’s no pagination. It’s built on Rainmaker and Rainmaker is still on WordPress 4.0. The pagination customizations that I built in aren’t supported until WordPress 4.1. So you know, they had to pull those out. So anyways that sounded like a blame game. It totally wasn’t. It totally was. So head over there you can check out the archives and also the #officehoursfm. I’ll try to tweet out helpful information throughout the day as well as reminders about the show and then of course if you want to subscribe you can go to officehours.fm/subscribe and lastly not leastly (if you are tired of hearing me talk) I would love, love, love if you went over to itunes and gave a little five-star review for this plug-in (laughs) go to WordPress.org and also give five star reviews for you favorite plug-in. And also go over to itunes to give a five star review for your favorite podcast. That helps other people just like you find us. Ok. I see Russell that you tweeted out that link Wpvegas.com.

Russell: I have one more link for you, I am going to tweet. I’ll do it after the show. I want to hook somebody up with a free instance of my plug-in. And I want to hook somebody up with a free unlimited developer version and also I would like to offer people if they want to beta test for us we can hook them up as well. I will tweet out a link . There’s a contact, there’s an opt in, there is another opt in…there could be 20 opt ins. I’m gonna be honest. I want to hook people up and I want them to use the plug-in, give us creative feedback,whether it’s good or bad. I want that to hook that up.

Carrie: Awesome. Thanks are generously offering that up. Can you share the link or is that only for folks on twitter?

Russell: I’m going to share the link with you and you can do with it as you’d like. It actually gravitystyles.com/officehoursfm. That’s all it is and it will take you there. I’ll tweet it out here in a minute.

Carrie: Ok.
Russell: The best advice I ever got and I will offer it to anybody is to test your plug-in and give it away not for free but give it away for a little bit and let people tell you here’s how I use WordPress. Here’s what’s happening and then you can kind of alter the way you develop. Maybe improve..maybe it can hurt you. At least you’re learning how people use WordPress. You might be able to solve a problem because of that.

Carrie: Oh yes. Beta testing for the win. Test, Test, Test, Test, Test. I use software in a very specific way. I do things over and over and over and they are commonplace And somebody else can pick up the same piece of software and immediately push a button that I would never have even thought to push…you know whatever. That’s why, just to your point…
Russell: It’s Crazy Right? It’s like somebody goes like hey what’t this little blue button over here? Like I didn’t even know that existed. They’re like yeah check it out. I can click it and it’s like…why would you do that? Oh it’s an option. Ok well now we gotta fix that.
Carrie: (giggle) Well we are wrapping up another episode of officehoursfm and Russell, I would like thank you for you’re time and for coming on the show today.

Russell: No..I would like to thank you for your time.
Carrie: No…no..no..Thank you!

Russell: No no. It’s all on you. It’s like you hang up. No, you hang up. No really seriously thank you. When I sent out an email to be on your show, I was like she’s gonna say no. Why would you say yes? Like who am I? And you were like I love it. Let’s do it. So seriously, thank you for your time and thank you everybody who listened. I am going to tweet out a link here in two minutes. You can win chance and listen to the show every week because I do.

Carrie: Thanks man. That was a great little commercial. I appreciate that.
Russell: I am just saying…I plugged everybody else. So I am like…listen Carrie we met in Chicago, Ok?

 

Carrie: Ah shucks. Thanks guys for everybody that tuned in today. We love the listeners and until next week. We’ll see then. Bye!