The Royal Geek

Statistics says that online shopping is growing day by day. But what is the secret component of each popular online store? Is it the variety of goods or its quantity? I think these days they are not key elements anymore. In fact, we should be looking at design attractiveness and ... Continue reading »

We have 5 tickets to give away for our newest Tuts+ Live Workshop, all you have to do is subscribe to our newsletter. Be quick though, this giveaway ends on Monday!

We have a superb new Workshop, Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development, starting in a week. This is your chance to win a free ticket!

Simply subscribe to the Tuts+ Live Workshops newsletter and we’ll pick the winners on Monday 27th. Read on to find out more about the Workshop and for more details about the giveaway!

Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development

Our newest Tuts+ Live Workshop, Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development, teaches you everything that you need to know to start developing WordPress plugins; from setting up a local development environment, all the way through to building a WordPress plugin that’s ready for release into the WordPress Plugin Repository.

It’s led by Instructor Tom McFarlin, a self-employed WordPress developer who divides his time between running his own WordPress development shop, building plugins for WordPress, blogging every day about software development in the context of WordPress, and working for 8BIT (the team responsible for Standard Theme and WP Daily).

Each weekly workshop will last one hour, running over a five week period. You’ll have the opportunity to follow along with Tom, ask questions live during the workshop, and complete a weekly homework assignment. Not able to make it to the live recording? No problem! All of the workshop recordings will be made available online the day after the live workshop.

Learn more about Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development

Subscribe and Win a Ticket!

We have 5 tickets to give away and will be choosing the winners from everyone who has subscribed to the Tuts+ Live Workshops newsletter, so no worries if you’ve already signed up. We’ll also reimburse any winners who have already paid for their ticket.

To enter simply subscribe to the Tuts+ Live Workshops newsletter and stay informed on upcoming workshops!

In our previous post, we started a discussion on how to create and insert new elements with the jQuery (and JavaScript) Append method. We’ve learned how to create and insert new elements to the body document. In its basic form, the Append method inserts the new element as the last ... Continue reading »

In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to select topics for speaking engagements. Your topic can make or break you, if your goal is to sell a product or a service to your audience. Choosing the right topic to cover is crucial in engaging your audience and building a reputation as a great speaker.

Learn how to narrowly define your audience, choose a topic that is a great fit for that audience, test your ideas, and pitch your topic to event organizers. With practice you can build on your expertise with the topic you present on and refine your presentation each time you reach out to a larger audience.

1. Identify Your Audience

Step 1

Create a list of the characteristics common to your audience. If your goal is to sell a product or a service to your audience as a result of your talk, who would want to buy what you’re selling? Ask yourself the following questions:

• What industries do members of your audience work in?
• Do any of your audience members share demographic characteristics, like age or gender?
• What problems do members of your audience face on a regular basis?
• What sites or other media do members of your audience follow?
• What trends are driving decisions for your audience?

Step 2

The more clearly you can describe your ideal audience, the better equipped you will be to decide if that audience will like a given topic.

Write a specific description of the type of person you want to reach with your talk, relying on the list of characteristics you created above. The more clearly you can describe your ideal audience, the better equipped you will be to decide if that audience will like a given topic.

Step 3

If you aren’t sure about how close you’re getting to your target audience, spend more time on getting to know them. Go to the events they do, read the blogs they do and look for what ideas and what problems they regularly discuss.

2. Brainstorm as Many Ideas as Possible

Step 1

Choose a method to record your ideas. While some people prefer mind-mapping out ideas, others are comfortable just writing out a list using an app like Evernote. Decide which option is the best for you first, and how you’re going to digitize your ideas.

Step 2

Start with the ideas you can come up with off the top of your head. You’re an expert in your field and there are likely issues that you’ve seen in the field that you can easily speak about.

Step 3

Use the prompts below to generate more ideas:

• What are the biggest problems facing your audience today? In the near future? In the long-term?
• What are the big opportunities in front of your audience?
• How can your audience improve on the work they’re already doing?
• What information from other fields would be useful to your audience, if only they had it?
• Are there any core concepts that are particularly hard for your audience to grasp?
• What articles or blog posts have caught the attention of the industry?
• Have you done any interesting work that is particularly relevant to the audience?
• Are there any case studies that the audience could learn from?
• What ideas in your audience’s industry do you personally find captivating?

Step 4

Save the ideas that you come up with, even if you don’t expect to use them, somewhere that you can refer back to them. You’re going to pick a handful of ideas, at best, to work on right now, but this isn’t likely to be the only time you need speaking topics during your professional career. Put those extra ideas away so that you can refer back to them when needed.

3. Narrow Down the Field

Step 1

Clear out those ideas that clearly aren’t going to work: whether you’re just not going to have the time to do the necessary research or you’ve come up with something out in left field as you’ve been brainstorming, narrow down the list in a first pass. Don’t delete them, though. You may find a use for those ideas, either as is or with some improvement.

Step 2

Pick a few ideas (no more than five) that you believe will resonate particularly well with your audience. Focus on the most likely candidates. You’re going to test your ideas before you bring them in front of an audience, but you want to make sure that you have a solid starting point. They don’t have to be the five best ideas you’ve ever heard of, since you’ll be coming back to this list for more ideas, but they do have to be topics that you think you can work with.

4. Test Your Ideas

Step 1

Run it by people who fit into your core audience. After the work you did in the first step of this tutorial, you likely know where you can find a few people who would fit into the target audience you’re trying reach. Ask their opinions on your topic ideas: are you talking about something they want to hear about? You don’t have to give them an entire presentation, but you do need to make sure that they get a clear picture of what you’re offering.

While you don’t want to publish every last detail of the idea you’re considering speaking about, you want to get some feedback that doesn’t come from people who might have a reason to be nice to you.

Step 2

Write about the concept for your blog, provided you have a blog. While you don’t want to publish every last detail of the idea you’re considering speaking about, you want to get some feedback that doesn’t come from people who might have a reason to be nice to you. You don’t have to worry about that online, so publishing a post or two about some of the concepts you might want to speak about is a fast way to get feedback.

You may need to promote your post a bit to get a wider range of feedback than that offered by your usual readers.

Step 3

Put your idea in front of other people. The more feedback you can get, the better — provided it’s from people who would likely attend the sort of event where you want to speak at. By finding out what the response is in advance, you can reduce the number of talks you give that aren’t quite spot on.

5. Pitch Your Topic to Conference Organizers

Step 1

Reach out to event organizers. Many organizers make themselves available on social media, especially if they’ve recently issued a request for speakers’ proposals. That’s because they’re willing to answer questions if doing so will get them proposals that more closely match what they’re looking for. That means you can run your idea past them early enough in the process to make it fit the event in question a little better.

Step 2

Propose your topic for a conference or another event. Submitting proposals to conferences is a fast way to make sure that you’ve got an idea that the conference organizer will like. However, since the conference organizer isn’t actually the person who decides to act on the information you share during your talk, she’s the last person you want to test your topic idea for, without establishing a way to get feedback first.

Step 3

If there aren’t any relevant calls for speakers that you can pitch your idea to, consider what other events may be a good fit. You can pitch your idea directly to event organizers, who can set you up to speak to groups they manage or at other events. The more chances you get to give talks about your idea, the more opportunity you have to hone your concept and build on the basic idea. You may even be able to give the same talk multiple times, improving it along the way.

Step 4

Walk away from any idea that doesn’t work. If, after you get some feedback, you can’t make a particular topic work, don’t stress. There are more on your list. Shelve the problem topic, at least temporarily. It may be a good fit later on, but if you’re just not getting good feedback, it’s not worth pursuing at this time. For those ideas that you feel strongly about, you can always try pitching them again later on. In the meanwhile, start testing another idea from your list.

Building on Your Topic

In this tutorial, we walked through how to brainstorm and vet topics for your speaking engagements. We’ve also discussed how to test your ideas out to make sure that they’re relevant to the audiences you’re hoping to reach. Using these methods, you’ll be able to come up with ideas for every speaking opportunity you’re offered.

Once you’ve seen how a topic performs on stage, you can experiment with offering different versions of the same topic for different audiences. You may be able to find ways to build on your topic and connect it to your speaking, by writing about it and otherwise promoting the underlying concept.

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Throughout this series, we’ve been taking a look at a few design patterns and how they are applicable to software development – specifically WordPress development.

The thing about design patterns is that there is a wide variety of them and it would be near impossible to do justice to each of the patterns in a series here on the blog. Nonetheless, hopefully taking a look at these three have helped kickstart your interest in using design patterns in your work.

To wrap up this series, I wanted to provide a list of other patterns, resources, and guides that you may find useful if you’ve found this particular series useful in your development endeavors.

A List of Design Patterns

Here’s the thing: The list of design patterns isn’t fixed. There are some that have been established for quite some time.

The truth is, the patterns even have various permutations based on the environment in which they’re implemented – this is why I think it’s so important to understand the core pattern so that you can adapt it to your needs, or so you can recognize it in the wild so that – should the need arise – you can continue to implement your work in a way that plays nicely with the existing implementation.

With that said, I can’t possibly list out all of the design patterns here. I can list out many of the popular patterns along with some links to their corresponding Wikipedia articles so you have a few to review.

• The Abstract Pattern
• The Singleton Pattern
• The Adapter Pattern
• The Composite Pattern
• The Decorator Pattern
• The Flyweight Pattern
• The Chain-of-Responsibility Pattern
• The Null Object Pattern
• The Visitor Pattern
• The Scheduler Pattern
• For a more comprehensive list, check out this page.

For those that are listed above, I recommend at least reading through each of the articles. Many of the them will likely be applicable to your day-to-day work especially if you’re working on larger applications. Even if you’re working on a smaller project, they’re still applicable and beneficial.

After that, we’ll take a look at two books that I highly recommend for developers to have on their desk at any given time.

Resources

Whenever others ask me for resources on design patterns, there are really only two books that I recommend. Both of them are listed below along with links, a short description of each, why I recommend them, and the target audience for each of them.

Head First Design Patterns

Head First Design Patterns is a relatively new book in comparison to a lot of the material that’s available today. It uses a different teaching style than many classical books or text books in that it uses a lot of humor, lots of pictures, diagrams, humor, and so on.

Personally, I’m a fan of its style but I know that some may reject it.

Nonetheless, the book covers the following patterns:

• The Strategy Pattern
• The Observer Pattern
• The Decorator Pattern
• The Simple Factory Pattern
• The Factory Pattern
• The Singleton Pattern
• The Command Pattern
• The Adapter Pattern
• The Facade Pattern
• The Template Method Pattern
• The Iterator Pattern
• The Composite Pattern
• The State Pattern
• The Proxy Pattern
• The Compound Pattern
• And a list of other common patterns that we’ve listed in the first part of this article.

If you’re looking for a book to get started in design patterns, then this is the book with which I’d start.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

This book is also known as The Gang of Four Book because it was written by four accomplished software engineers. It’s a more technical read than Head First Design Patterns, but I still recommend it as the description of the patterns and the provided diagrams and implementations are easy to follow.

I will say that if you’re just now venturing into the world of design patterns, I’d start with Head First and then read this book; otherwise, this one may seem a bit more dry or less interesting.

Nonetheless, here’s the list of patterns the Gang of Four provide in their book:

• The Abstract Pattern
• The Builder Pattern
• The Factory Pattern
• The Prototype Pattern
• The Singleton Pattern
• The Chain of Responsibility
• The Command Pattern
• The Interpreter Pattern
• The Iterator Pattern
• The Mediator Pattern
• The Memento Pattern
• The Observer Pattern
• The State Pattern
• The Strategy Pattern
• The Template Method Pattern
• The Adapter Pattern
• The Bridge Pattern
• The Composite Pattern
• The Decorator Pattern
• The Facade Pattern
• The Flyweight Pattern
• The Proxy Pattern

In addition to covering the patterns, the book also uses case studies to show actual implementations of the pattern in real world examples which I think can be incredibly useful when referring to them in your work.

Conclusion

One of the dangers for people who first discover design patterns is the propensity to try to apply them everywhere, but don’t do that: design patterns offer a lot of advantages in software development, but they have their place and things should not be forced into a pattern.

They should fit naturally.

In short, don’t try to use patterns for the sake of using a pattern, use them when their design fits the problem that you’re trying to solve.

With that said, we’ve wrapped up the Design Patterns in WordPress series.

To summarize:

• We’ve covered the Observer Pattern and how we can setup our code to fire events and to publish them to other objects that are interested.
• We’ve reviewed how to setup our plugins so that a single instance of the plugin is always accessible throughout the lifetime of the plugin, theme, or application
• We also took a detailed look at the Simple Factory pattern that included a demo application, diagram, and sample code

All in all, it feels as if we’ve covered a lot of ground. The truth is, there’s still much to review. If you’ve found this particular series interesting, or want to take a deeper dive into the topics at hand, be sure to review the design patterns listed earlier in this article, or read the two books that are linked above.

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Blogging is a great way for freelancers and small business owners to market their services.

Blogs are a lead magnet to pull in clients. The more blog posts, videos and images you have on your blog, the better your chances of potential clients coming across you when they’re searching Google or browsing social media.

Not every visitor to your blog will become a client – only a tiny percentage will. But the more visitors your blog gets, the more people will get in touch to ask about your services.

In this article, I’ll show you how to get started creating a blog for free, using the website WordPress.com. But first, it’s time to go back to basics. What is a blog?

What is a Blog?

As a professional blogger, it’s easy for me to assume that everyone knows what a blog is. Yet recently, I’ve met business owner after business owner whose first question to me is “What’s a blog?”

Blogging is simple. Blogs are made up of blog posts. A blog post is a short article, usually 250-750 words. Blogs are updated regularly, typically at least once per week.

The article you’re reading right now is a blog post.

Freelancers usually write a blog about the service they provide. Their blog posts address common questions or problems faced by their clients. Small business owners usually write on a topic related to the product they sell. Potential clients visiting the blog will see the business owner knows what they’re talking about.

Writing a blog post is as simple as writing an email. This is true both in terms of the writing skills you need to blog, and the technical skills you need to use blogging software.

If you’d like to try out blogging, there’s a simple, free way to start.

Why WordPress.com?

WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging tool. You can use it on a self-hosted website. This is a good option for those with intermediate computer skills, but for those just starting out, setting up a self-hosted site can be intimidating.

Alternatively, you can use WordPress on WordPress.com. A basic account is free to set-up and use. It’s an easy way to dip your toes into the blogging waters and see if blogging is right for you. What’s more, if you enjoy it, you can stick with it, there’s no need to transfer over to a self-hosted blog, unless you want advanced functions. Even if you decide to go self-hosted, you’ll have the advantage of already being familiar with how WordPress works.

Advantages of WordPress.com:

• It’s easy to set up.
• A basic account is free.
• Your blog has a high level of security against hackers.
• All technical maintenance is done for you.
• Even if your blog goes viral, it won’t crash under the weight of the traffic, because WordPress.com has the servers needed to do the heavy lifting under heavy traffic conditions.
• You’re part of the WordPress.com community, and this will help you find readers. This is especially helpful when you’re starting out.

Disadvantages of WordPress.com:

• WordPress places adverts on your blog. You have no control over what these ads say.
• Your website is a WordPress.com subdomain, i.e. yoursite.wordpress.com, which looks less professional than having your own domain, i.e. www.yoursite.com.
• You have limited options for visual customization.
• You don’t have full control of your content. If WordPress.com ever folded, you could lose what you’ve published. (This, however, is extremely unlikely as things stand.)
• You can’t use plugins or ecommerce features.

While these disadvantages are significant, they shouldn’t stop you from dabbling in WordPress.com as a way of getting familiar with blogging. What’s more, if you want to stick with WordPress.com, many of these disadvantages can be overcome with paid solutions. These work out at around the same or a slightly higher cost than a self-hosted site, but it’s well worth it if you’re willing to spend a little more to save yourself on the hassle of self-hosting, particularly if you’re not technically minded.

Tutorial Assets

To complete this tutorial, you will need:

• An Internet Connection
• An Email Account

1. Sign Up for WordPress.com

Step 1: Visit WordPress.com

To sign up for your WordPress account, visit WordPress.com, then scroll down and click Create your WordPress.com blog now!

Alternatively, you can visit the WordPress.com signup page.

Step 2: Choose Your Blog Address

You’ll be asked for your email address, a username, password, and blog address, so enter these.

Your blog address is what people will type into their web browser to visit your blog. Make it memorable and relevant to your business. For example, if you’re a copywriter, consider including the word “writer” in your blog address. Avoid numbers, because these are confusing in website addresses (is it blogone.com or blog1.com?).

The name you choose will be appended by .wordpress.com, so your site name will be yoursitename.wordpress.com.

Alternatively, at this stage, you can sign up for your own domain name by clicking the blue arrow in the blog address form. Options are .me, .com, .net, and .org. Only do this if you’re confident you’ll stick with WordPress.com over a self-hosted site. If you’re unsure now, you can buy your own domain name from WordPress.com at anytime in the future.

Once you’re done, scroll down and click “Create Blog” at the bottom of the page.

You’ll be asked if you want to update to a paid option, and you’ll be offered a significant discount. Don’t feel pressured to upgrade, as the discounts are available at any time.

Step 3: Confirm Your Email Address

WordPress.com will send you an email confirming your registration. To activate your blog, check your email, then click the “Activate Blog” button in the WordPress email.

2. Set Up Your Blog

Step 1: Choose a Title and Tagline

When you click the link to Activate your blog, you’ll be taken to WordPress.com and guided through setting up your blog.

First, you must choose a blog title and tagline. As with your blog address, make them memorable and relevant to your business. In particular, you’ll want to include what you do somewhere in the title or tagline, so visitors to your blog immediately know that you’re a writer, consultant or designer. This also helps people who are looking for your services find you on Google.

Don’t worry too much about making it perfect, as you can change your blog title and tagline at any time.

You also set your language at this stage.

Step 2: Choose Your Theme

In WordPress, how your blog looks is determined by your theme. Themes are a simple way to change the appearance of a website without having to know any code.

Initially, you’ll be shown nine themes, some free, some paid. You can browse more themes by scrolling down and clicking “Show More Themes” at the bottom of the theme list. As with your title and tagline, there’s no need to agonize over this decision, as you can change your theme at any time.

To find out more about a theme, click on the theme name. You’ll be given an overview of the theme’s features, and a bigger same view of the theme.

If you want to take a look at a different theme, click “Back to previous step”.

Once you’re happy with your theme, it’s onto the next step.

3. Create Your First Blog Post

Step 1: Select Post Type

Once you’ve selected your theme, WordPress guides you through creating your first blog post. You can choose to share a text post, a photo, a video a quote or a link.

Note: Blog posts are typically multimedia, and can include any combination of these media types.

For this tutorial, we’ll create a text post, as this is the most common type of blog post.

Step 2: Try Out The Editor

You’ll be taken to the WordPress editor. If you used a web-based email client such as GMail or Yahoo, this will look familiar you. Essentially, it’s a basic word processor.

Using the toolbar at the top of the editor, you can make your text bold or italic, create a bulleted or numbered list, selecte text alignment, insert links and quotes, and conduct a spellcheck.

Type one or two sentences into the editor and play around with the different options.

Step 3: Pick a Title

The title or headline is the most important part of any blog post, as from the title readers will decide whether or not to read on. In the title bar of the editor, type your title.

Step 4: Write Your Blog Post

Next, type out your blog post. As you’re learning how WordPress works, it doesn’t matter what you write. Like everything on WordPress, you can change the blog post later, or delete it if you want to.

Step 5: Add an Image

Images grab the eyeballs of your readers and encourage them to read your blog post.

To add an image, start by placing the cursor in the editor where you’d like the image to appear. At the start of your blog post is a good place.

Next click “Insert Photo” next to the title bar. Browse your computer to find a suitable image.

To edit how the image appears, click on it, then click the small button (it looks like a mountain) that appears at the top right of your image.

You can choose how the image is aligned, and give it a title.

Step 6: Add Tags

Beneath the editor, you can insert tags for your blog post, separated by commas. Tags allow you to organize your blog post into different categories. Don’t worry too much about tagging your first blog post. You’ve guessed it, you can edit tags later!

Step 7: Publish Your Post

Finally, click “Publish Your Post.” The post you’ve created will now be live on the Internet.

Type the web address of your blog into your web browser, yourblogname.wordpress.com. Admire your beautiful creation!

Step 8: Rinse and Repeat

To add more blog posts in the future, visit WordPress.com, log in with your username and password, and click “New Post” in the top right.

Blogging really is that simple. So go on, now you’ve read the tutorial, follow the steps and get started today!

Note: Android rooting is required. Android users who want to root their phone are advised time and time again to perform regular backups. It is not uncommon to find a rooted Android device messed up so having a backup to revert to is always a good idea. Don’t want to ... Continue reading »