Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a broadly accomplished web designer and educator. He is very active in the WordPress open-source project and is known there for his strong opinions on topics like the Gutenberg project. I also learned in this interview that he was originally trained as a philosopher and is currently working on an ethical framework for web content creators.

Morten and I talked about the content strategy behind his Lynda.com content-strategy course, about the implications of Gutenberg for content strategists in the WordPress world, and about his work on web-industry ethics.

Morten's Bio

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design and UX, and future technologies. He also teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.

When he’s not working you’ll find Morten playing with his son, reading philosophy and science fiction, talking to people about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor.

Video

Here's the video version of our conversation.

https://youtu.be/T5yuAr_YE5s

Show Notes/"Transcript"

[Not an actual transcript - just my quick notes on first listen-through]

0:30 - Morten history and background - built first website in 1998 -

2:50 - impact of hyperlinking on how we access, publish, access again, etc. content - huge changes - and we'll see an perceive, understand and share content - and we'll see another dramatic

4:15 - origins of his content strategy course at Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning (which are the same thing) - get those who don't identify as content strategists to think like one - goal was to show wider scope of content strategy and help everyone understand how they fit into it - it shows up in all aspects of web development - e.g., why would back-end engineer care? - even at database level, decisions about how/where to store content have strategy implications - thinking about how end user might want to access the content can/should dictate aspects of underlying data

8:35 - sorting out data chunks from blobs - make it efficient to display - e.g. go to Google now and search for a product and Google will return shopping options (along with other info) - importance of markup so that Google can understand and index properly

10:00 - and that's a glimpse to the future - contextual information served up because devices can understand your content and its structure - future technologies (AR glasses, etc.) require same way of thinking - data needs to be split up and connected together - only output data that is necessary, in individual pieces of data, which is stored properly, and properly connected - and THAT is content strategy - "truly contextualizing your data and explaining what it is, and then figuring out which parts of that matter to which users and giving them only what matters when they need it, in a format they can use"

12:00 - process at Lynda culminated with approval of the course

12:40 - Gutenberg initiative at WordPress open-source project - "WordPress Block Editor" - used to be just "posts" and "pages" in WordPress - what Gutenberg currently says is that all of the stuff that happens in a content block - different content types - each paragraph, image, list, etc. has its own context and characteristics - but that's just tip of iceberg - can get more specific - doing content modeling exercise - figuring out pieces fit in - for each piece of content - currently done in WordPress editor

16:20 - Gutenberg Step 2 - extend block way of thinking outside of the editor - e.g. can define shareable blocks to use elsewhere - e.g. for book reviews "about author" block - can use same block in m...