Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
I've written a few times about people saying, "This code sucks." Most of the time the sucky code in question was written by somebody else — another employee or a different vendor.
On occasion, it was written by the very person who is talking to me about it, usually 6 months or more in the past. That is always a fascinating conversation, but that is not what this blog is about. This blog is about the other situation: "This bad code was written by somebody else and it is bad, bad code."
Object-oriented programming is a paradigm that allows you to write a program by modeling real-world things in terms of class and object. It not only effectively represents real-world applications but also allows you to manage the complexity of your program.
Even though there are several programming paradigms, e.g. procedural and functional, most of the code we write today is object-oriented, and some of the most of popular programming languages out there are object-oriented, e.g. Java, Python, PHP, and JavaScript.
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive and Director of WPCampus and Brian DeConinck, a front-end designer and developer with the OIT Design and Web Services team, part of the Office of Information Technology at NC State University.
We learn how Tenon was chosen as the vendor to perform the audit and what conditions needed to be met. We then dissected the results of the Gutenberg Accessibility Audit conducted by Tenon. We discuss the state of Gutenberg’s accessibility, recommendations for those in Higher Education environments, and where Gutenberg development might go from here.
Next Episode: Wednesday, May 15th 3:00 P.M. Eastern
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Today at the annual Google I/O developer conference, Surma (Web Advocate at Google) hosted the session "WebAssembly for Web Developers". Surma recommended using AssemblyScript in order to convert code written in TypeScript into the portable binary format, WebAssembly. WebAssembly makes it so that code written in C/C++ and Rust is able to run on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge Web browsers.
Android app writers are about bathe in newfound powers within the Google Play Store. A handful of features will improve star ratings, ease the process of dealing with user feedback, customize their landing page, and force app updates even when the app is in active use. Here's the skinny.
The latest developer preview of Android Q adds an incredible array of user- and developer-facing features. The company focused on innovation, security, privacy, and digital wellbeing in Android Q. These core tenets should help developers build for the cutting edge tech that's just around the corner.
Nevena Tomovic, a Business Developer at Human Made, is researching the most important skills for pursuing a career in WordPress. She is conducting a survey for professionals that is open to anyone working in a WordPress-related capacity, including writers, developers, marketers, UI & UX designers, illustrators, community drivers, evangelists, project managers, and creatives.
The survey takes less than five minutes to complete and the results will be shared at WordCamp Europe in Berlin and on nevena.blog. Tomovoic will be giving a presentation titled “Renaissance jobs in WordPress: Skills you need to survive the 21st-century career,” where she will elaborate on global trends related to the job landscape. She will also be speaking about how employers and managers can attract new talent through WordPress education.
In a recent post on her blog, Tomovic elaborated on the concept of “Renaissance jobs,” positions that use titles merging multiple skills into one role:
Renaissance jobs, also otherwise known as hybrid roles are a mishmash of more than one skill, a combination of expertise in more than one domain. You might have come across roles such as experience architect, user experience consultant, or even customer wrangler, all of these typically involve technical knowledge, excellent communication and management skills. All of these roles are a completely foreign concept for most of our parents. The 21st century has brought with it remote work, chief growth officers, and a globalized workforce among other things.
Tomovic’s survey data will identify what skills are most important in the WordPress job market right now. The survey does not collect any personal data and the raw data will be deleted after the results are published.
If you want to check out Tomovic’s talk in person, make sure to purchase a ticket to WordCamp Europe. The final batch of tickets has gone on sale and there are only 133 general admission tickets remaining.
WordPress is evolving, and so are we, even though it’s hard to see the kids leave home.
It’s almost 12 years since Andrew and I launched WPMU DEV Premium as ‘a subscription-based service that offers advanced plugins for WordPress Multi-User’ and I reckon it’s fair to say that, well, it’s been quite the ride.
And as of today, we’re taking another corner, guided by you, our members, and bringing all of our focus and efforts to the core services and functionality you care most about when it comes to running a great WordPress site, or two, or a few thousand.
But first a little history.
Over the years we’ve released well over 100 premium plugins, have a bbPress installation that’s hitting something like 1.5 million posts, had over 750,000 users sign up and smushed more than 33,300,000,000 (yes, that’s billion) images with over 267,000 different sites currently hooked up to The Hub.
And that’s just the stuff that worked, lol. We’ve tried our hand at auto install and config of MU, becoming the WP Plugin App Store, achieving peak Gutenberg 5 years too early and no end of other gambles.
But today marks perhaps the most significant change we’ve made as a company, because as of today, we’re embracing and focusing on what the vast vast majority of our members care about and saying farewell and good luck to the over 90% of our plugin catalogue, which you can now find freely available on our GitHub.
These include:
Pro Sites – The original WordPress MU supporter level plugin, it’s still awesome btw but you should probably check out WP Ultimo 
@Arindo, write an importer and we’ll promote it for ya!
MarketPress – We gave ecommerce, especially with an MU bent, a red hot go but winner takes all in this space, go Woo people
CoursePress – The first thing I ever wanted to do online was to build a great LMS, but by the time I got round to it my focus was elsewhere and there are lots of amazing 3rd party platforms online that do this so much better. Like a native live chat plugin, these also don’t work.
Membership 2 Pro – The original UltimateMember ;) Which you should probably go and use instead: UltimateMember (or one of the bazillion others out there)
Appointments + & Events + – They were really cool at the time and pretty useful but have been superseded by third-party platforms.
Jobs & Experts, Reader, Support System – Same story… you can’t compete with dedicated high-quality platforms offering increasingly wonderful tools in this area. It’s a real shame, in many ways, that WP hasn’t evolved to such an extent to make this a really feasible business model (although in not doing so, there are lots of side benefits)
PopUp Pro – Is now all in Hustle, and much better
Dozens and dozens of Multisite specific plugins – some teeny, some bigger, all will be missed.
Pretty simple really, at the end of the day if you are unable to successfully meet and exceed your customer’s needs, then, speaking personally, I’d rather not pretend we are doing that and then deliver something average.
And at WPMU DEV our capacity to meet those needs is effectively determined by the number of members we have using a specific plugin, the level of difficulty entailed in ongoing development & support of that plugin and how it compares to the competition (and is likely to do so in future).
For example, our ‘Ad sharing’ plugin that rotates ad code based on a % set by a network admin so that the subsite owner and they can share in ad revenue has, since we started tracking stats properly in April 2009, been downloaded 26,315 times and yet is active on only 56 members sites and has generated 234 support forum threads and seen 23 releases 
.
It’s not particularly hard to support but it’s also hardly the future of WordPress and hey, you can take it from GitHub and run with it if you like, it should be solid for years!
And then there’s the pro version of MarketPress that has been downloaded 189,732 times but is now only active on 1,179 members sites (by only 729 members) and has been responsible for 13,712 forum support tickets and many more times that in live chats. Oucha.
The complexity levels involved here are enormous, the competition ‘won’ years and years ago and is supported by Automattic… it’s also really good. Woocommerce is a much better call for our members and we would be doing them a disservice if we told them otherwise.
Which is why, by shifting our focus, we can be better for you.
Moving on from these projects will allow us to do what moving on from Upfront allowed us to do last year – namely focus on bringing you, dear member, products, services and an experience that will be nothing short of magical.
Our developers will have swathes more time to focus on the plugins you really want, the Hub experience you deserve and, coming shortly out of beta, the best hosting product in WordPress (of which you’ll get 3 free instances with your existing membership at no extra cost!!!)
And our expert support team can focus on the solutions that you are actually using and are likely to use in the future. We can give you better support for the WordPress tools and services that *you* actually use.
Well, you are welcome to continue using them! In fact, you can take them for your own use, fork them on GitHub or wherever and even go and sell them if you like… just maintain the license so somebody else can do the same 
. That’s the magic of open source!
If you need help transitioning to alternatives, or have any other questions or concerns, we’re here to help 24/7/365, just head over to live chat support to talk to someone.
We won’t leave you in the lurch, we will do everything in our power and spend as much time as is necessary to make sure you have a good experience here.
In the same way, as we don’t want to provide ‘lesser’ plugins and experiences on WPMU DEV, we don’t think that WordPress.org deserves that either.
So you’ll also find that we’ve removed everything apart from the absolutely core plugins we are dedicated to there as well. And, to be honest, we’d encourage others to do the same.
WordPress thrives as a result of the time and effort that people are able to put into it, whether as a straightforward volunteer, as a member of a company that is dedicated to encouraging its staff to contribute in the community as developers and support or as the owner of an individual freemium plugin.
If you are unable to put the time into a plugin or theme on wp.org, then it’s probably best to sunset it to provide users with the best possible chance of finding what they need. It’s the responsible thing to do. IMO.
I know, I did, and it was (and has been) my intent to keep and develop and build these plugins for the longest time possible.
I’ve toyed with the idea, been assailed by members of the company to do it and always fallen back to these core parts of what we are.
But, but, but the thing is that it’s no longer just about me. How our company evolves now means supporting over 100 of my colleagues who rely on me to make hard decisions (even ones that I may not like) and admit where I was wrong.
And this is one of those occasions. I was wrong to say we wouldn’t ever do something like this, I should have instead said that I didn’t want to do anything like this, but that it could change depending on circumstances. I’m sorry.
If you are an active member and feel super stressed or worried about this decision please don’t hesitate to contact us on contact@wpmudev.org or via our 24/7 live support and we will do everything in our power to assist.
Also please remember too that while we will be no longer actively developing these plugins, we *will* be supporting them in the same way that we support *any* WP plugin, theme or service, 24/7/365.
Well, maybe it’s time to start my own Killed by Google James gallery?
But in all seriousness, in addition to making The Hub the absolute best place to manage every aspect of every site you manage, and the small matter of hosting, you can expect us to continue to focus on optimization with Hummingbird and Smush, on your security by Defender, creating successful marketing machines with SmartCrawl and Hustle, white labelling with Branda and Reports… and a few more specials that I can’t quite tell you about yet (but’ll be on the roadmap soon).
Check out our new navigation for a tour.
And, after that, please do come along on the ride with us as we slip the core products and services at the heart of WPMU DEV into the superhighway to providing you with the very best WordPress services we can.
So, let us know your thoughts, questions and, well, anything you like really in the comments… I’ll endeavour to get back to everyone, and, as I mentioned above, I’m really sorry if this impacts you in any negative way, just ping us at contact@wpmudev.org or use our 24/7 live chat service if you’d like to discuss any specific concerns.
Otherwise, have at it! Good or bad call? Whaddya reckon?
Update: Ooops, I forgot, there are a whole bunch of Multisite plugins (almost all of them in fact, including Pro Sites) that we are still using on Edublogs, so they will continue to be updated in GitHub and – as we support everything to do with WordPress – supported here too!
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a unicorn wrangler, followed closely by princess. Because of course I did. I was five years old.
It seems, though, that had I done a little more digging when I was first starting out my career, I could have been both.
Google continues to update ML Kit, the company’s flagship technology to enable developers to create applications for mobile devices that utilize the power of machine learning. The company reported on Tuesday at the Google I/O developer conference that improvements in ML Kit now make it possible for mobile devices to perform machine learning functions even when disconnected from the internet.
Today in a session at Google I/O, Kobi Glick (project manager for Google Play) gave attendees an overview of some of the key updates to the Android App Bundle. These updates include new metrics added to Android vitals, upgraded security features, and options for conditional delivery of application features.
Enterprises are always looking for ways to extract business value from their data. They have shifted their focus on analytics as the primary source of getting this value.
This is where Hadoop benefits the businesses as it is not only efficient in handling large data volumes but also very affordable. With its help, even the small scale organizations can scale their existing IT systems.
In the first part of this series, you saw some of the most used array functions that the PHP language makes available.
Fortunately, after years and years of evolution and the publication of new versions of the language this list of array functions is still long, it almost seems that it never ends.
We've added a new sharing button to our pens on CodePen to Dev.to and Marie and Chris are here chatting about why and how CodePen decides to include social networks to share to from a Pen.
Discover.bot – a digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks.
The post #220: Social Sharing appeared first on CodePen Blog.
Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she teaches and studies what the above TED Talk is all about – how we can all overcome our innately human fear of vulnerability so that we can truly lead our best lives.
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what this has to do with DZone, since it’s obviously not overtly tech related. But it just so happens that tech companies from all over the world pay Dr. Brown a whole lot of money to advise them on building cultures where innovation can thrive.
Jetpack 7.3 was released yesterday with changes that improve the “out of the box” experience. The plugin now enables fewer features on setup so users can have more control over what they activate on their sites.
The new version also integrates with WordPress 5.2’s new Site Health checks. It includes a status check and moves Jetpack’s legacy debug data to a section in the new “Site Health Info” tab. The initial status check isn’t very descriptive regarding critical errors, but these error messages can be improved in future iterations so users know how to get to a page with more information.
Jetpack is getting ready to introduce a new Membership block that will essentially function like a recurring donation button using Stripe as the payment gateway.
Users will be able to set the currency, price, product name, and renewal interval directly within the block.
This release adds the new block behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant for users who are beta testing new blocks. Feedback from testers will be addressed in future pull requests. The PR merged into Jetpack 7.3 includes the following technical additions for the new Membership block:
In its current form, the use of the term “Membership” for the block might be a bit misleading for some users, depending on their expectations. Site owners usually expect more granular management of members, multiple membership tiers, customizable emails, various renewal options, content access, and more for managing memberships.
Unless Jetpack intends to make this the gateway to more robust membership capabilities, then “Recurring donation/payment button” might be a more accurate name for the block. However, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a more full-featured Membership module turn up as a SaaS product from WordPress.com, as opposed to everything getting packed into the plugin.
No release date has been announced for the membership block as it is still under active development and in the very early stages of beta testing.
Check out the full changelog to see all the enhancements and bug fixes in Jetpack 7.3.
Link building can become a time-consuming process. Sometimes you spend hours exhausting all of your strategies and still fall short of your benchmark target.
This can be extremely frustrating.
Yet other times, certain pieces of content seem to effortlessly attract links. Before you know it, you might have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of backlinks for one post without even putting in too much effort.
Wouldn’t it be great if that was the case for all of your content? Fortunately, the possibility is more realistic than you might realize. That’s why you need to learn how to create link bait posts.
What is link bait?
Some of you might have created link bait in the past by accident, without fully understanding what you were doing. Don’t worry; this is a good thing.
In short, link bait is content that’s specifically designed to build links. The idea here is that any blogger, journalist, or influencer in your industry would feel obligated to share your link because the information is so valuable.
Creating link bait content will do wonders for your website.
First of all, this will benefit your website visitors by providing them with high-quality content. But once you start building links at scale with link bait, your site traffic will continue to rise and your search ranking will skyrocket as well.
Here’s something else to keep in mind. If you spend more time creating link bait content, you can spend less time trying to build links. All of your links will start to come organically.
This is much better than producing mediocre or sub-par content and then wasting your efforts trying to build links that nobody wants. I’ll show you everything you need to know about creating predictably popular link bait posts in this guide.
In my experience, all link bait content typically has certain characteristics in common.
With that said, you don’t necessarily need to apply all of these best practices to each post. But you can use these elements as a reference to help you come up with ideas and decide which direction you’re going to take whenever you produce new content.
Why should someone view or read your post?
If it’s nothing but fluff and long blocks of text that’s stuffed with keywords and designed strictly for SEO purposes, it’s not actually providing value to anyone. This type of content won’t go viral or become link bait.
Instead, you need to ask yourself two questions before you create anything.
If you’re unable to answer these questions, then it’s probably not worth continuing in that direction. But when you’re able to use these questions to guide you throughout the process, it adds great value to the audience.
Value means going the extra mile. Don’t just tell someone why a certain idea works. Show them by using a case study with statistics and examples.
Then other websites will be able to use those figures a reference. Here’s an example to show you what I’m talking about.
Here’s a backlink for Quick Sprout.
The article above talks about the best times to post on Facebook. So the author used a study from one of my old posts to validate their point.
My original content was valuable because it included statistics and research. If I just said, “I think you should post to Facebook on Wednesdays,” it doesn’t provide any value.
But since I took the time to create a link bait post, other sites used it as a reference without me having to go out and ask for the link.
This is common with the majority of the posts here at Quick Sprout. Just look at what happens when you search the web for “according to Quick Sprout.”
I get links like this all of the time.
For those of you who are still unconvinced, just take a look at these metrics from the backlink checker tool at Ahrefs.
Quick Sprout has more than 2.2 million backlinks from over 24,000 referring domains.
Trust me, I didn’t go out there and ask webmasters for backlinks 2 million times. The majority of this happened organically with link bait because all of the content on our blog provides so much value.
Even if you’re a blogger and a master with words, you still need to use visuals to spice up your content.
Here’s the thing. Large blocks of text in paragraph form just won’t get read. In fact, 73% of readers skim through articles as opposed to thoroughly reading them.
So if your posts aren’t reader-friendly, nobody has a reason to link to them.
But adding visuals breaks up the content and makes it easier for people to skim. Plus, visuals grab attention and add value.
Take a look at this research about blog posts from Orbit Media.
Images ranked highest as the most common element found in blog posts for the past five years in a row.
That’s because people are more drawn to visuals.
According to HubSpot, 32% of marketing professionals say that visuals are the most important type of content for their brands, which was the number one response in the survey.
Furthermore, content with visuals gets up to 94% more views compared to posts with just text.
This is definitely a recipe for increasing your chances of creating content that will ultimately turn into link bait. There are plenty of ways to add visuals to your posts.
These are a handful of ideas to get you started in the right direction. You can check out my full guide on how to use visual elements to enhance your blogs for more information on this.
Create content that will make people feel a certain type of way.
Write a “feel good” post that will make readers jump for joy. Or go the other way and tell a sad story of pain and agony.
Create content funny. Share something sexy. Be inspirational. Make a claim that raises some eyebrows.
Don’t be afraid to bring up topics that are controversial. Just make sure that you’re not offending anyone or doing something that will damage your brand image.
I usually recommend staying away from topics that involve politics, religion, race, and things of that nature.
But with that said, controversial content tends to go viral. Just look at this research from Backlinko.
These are some analytics from a post about racial tolerance in America. The article has been linked to more than 6,000 times.
This is a great example because the post itself doesn’t make any racist claims or anything like that.
Instead, it analyzes data, which refers back to one of our previous points about adding value. The study examined derogatory language from state to state based on Twitter locations. All of the data is shown in graphs, which adds visuals to the piece.
Based on everything we’ve discussed so far, this is a recipe for a predictably popular post.
If you want to learn more about the right emotions to invoke when you’re creating content, I recommend this post on how to guide people’s emotions to drive sales. The same concepts can be applied to link bait content.
Link bait needs to be relevant in two ways.
First and foremost, every piece of content that you produce needs to related to your niche. If you’re a fashion blogger, you shouldn’t be posting video tutorials about how to surf.
The timing of your posts needs to be relevant as well. Nobody is interested in hearing the same news story that broke six months ago. If you’re too late to the party, then sites won’t have a reason to use your link as a reference unless you find some type of new and valuable information.
On the flip side, if you’re the first to report something, then you essentially become the source. This is one of the best ways to create link bait.
Here’s an example from Forbes Magazine.
On March 5, 2019, Forbes announced that Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
The content is relevant to their site, but more importantly, the timing was everything.
They were the first major publication to report this story. Since Kylie Jenner is such a well-known public figure, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the topic.
Bloggers and journalists needed to weigh in. But it would be an injustice to readers if they didn’t cite their sources.
So what did they do? Everyone used Forbes as a reference.
That’s why this link has more than 34,000 backlinks in just two months. This is a great example of how to create timely content that’s highly relevant.
Now that you know what your link bait posts should include, it’s time to show you some examples of the types of posts you can create using this formula.
We’ll go through each one of these to give you a better grasp on how these posts can attract links.
One of the reasons why list posts can be great for link bait is because they provide value.
Lists give you the opportunity to outperform everyone else on the web who has covered a certain topic.
Plus, headlines with numbers are preferred over other types of posts.
Check out my guide on tips for getting more conversions with headlines.
To get the most value out of your list posts, you can curate content from other sources. Let’s say you want to create a list of the best software for something in your industry.
Google that term and see how long other lists are. You might see lists of five, eight, ten, or twelve. This is your chance to create something that’s better than all of them.
Your list post can be the top 25 or 30 software systems. This can become the ultimate reference for people, which will quickly turn into link bait.
Comprehensive guides are popular link bait sources because they are so thorough.
Take this post you’re reading right now as an example. I could have just defined link bait and then used bullet points for best practices and wrapped up the whole thing in less than 500 words.
But that doesn’t add any value, and nobody is going to read it. Instead, I go into lots of detail in each section, using plenty of visuals and statistics to back up my claims.
So teach people how to do something.
Here’s another example of the beginner’s guide to online marketing that was previously published on Quick Sprout.
As you can see, this post is approaching 4,000 backlinks.
Comprehensive guides will always perform well because it’s easier for you to include all of the common features in a link bait post.
In addition to the value and visuals, you can also find ways to stimulate certain emotions while prioritizing relevance and timing.
We briefly talked about infographics earlier when we covered visual content. But it’s definitely worth mentioning again on its own.
As we previously discussed, images are the most popular element included in blog posts.
This means that bloggers and journalists need to find images on the web. Most of them aren’t going to take the time to create original content. It’s much easier to just find an infographic online and cite the source with a backlink.
So if you can create infographics that people will use to enhance their own content, you’ll be able to build tons of backlinks at scale.
Just make sure that your information is always accurate and up to date, which is when the relevancy factor comes into play.
If you’re using a study from 2011 to create an infographic in 2019, it’s not going to become link bait. But if you update your study and infographics each year, you’ll become an authoritative source for information.
Again, these are more examples of visual content.
Depending on the type of website you have, some of these formats will be more beneficial to you than others.
For example, if you’re a photographer, you’ll definitely want to share your original photos. Then other sites can use them as a reference (similar to infographics) which will build backlinks.
Some of you could use humor to your advantage and create viral GIFs.
But that’s not necessarily a winning strategy for everyone.
Let’s say your website is more serious and professional, you’d be better off creating video tutorials of how to do something that’s related to your niche.
This isn’t necessarily the most common type of link bait, and it won’t be something that’s relevant for all of you.
But with that said, you can build tons of backlinks with interactive posts like a quiz or calculator.
For example, let’s say your website is in the real estate industry. You could create a home mortgage calculator tool. Now other websites can use your tool as a reference since it’s much easier than building their own.
Here’s another example of an emotional intelligence test.
Any post discussing emotional intelligence can link to the test for people to take. That’s why this particular test has over 1,800 backlinks.
Creating link bait content is arguably the best way to build backlinks. As discussed earlier, we’ve built more than 2.2 million backlinks here at Quick Sprout using this strategy.
While link bait usually sells itself, it doesn’t mean you should sit back and do absolutely nothing once your content has been published.
You still need to take steps to increase its exposure and boost the chances of it going viral.
Email the post to your email subscribers. Share it on social media. Incorporate it with your other link building strategies.
If you follow the best practices that I’ve outlined above, it will much easier for you to create link bait posts.