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We Interview Lee Jackson founder of Agency Trail Blazer Community podcast and membership website is on a mission to help design & web agencies fall in love with their business again.

This show is dedicated to exploring ways we can improve agency life, grow our businesses, achieve our goals and get back time with our loved ones.

https://agencytrailblazer.com/

Ben Arellano is the joint founder of Fly Plugins: We at Fly Plugins offer 3 premium plugin products. WP Courseware which is a learning management system, S3 Media Maestro which is a media protection plugin with Amazon S3 integration, and Churnly our latest product that helps to reduce churn. Our flagship product is WP Courseware and is by far our most popular plugin.

https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/260-wp-tonic-friday-round-table-show-19th-jan-2018/

This week on Episode 262 of the WP-Tonic Podcast, the roundtable discussed Virtual Reality in WordPress and WordPress use in higher education.

Sallie Goetsch, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, Chris Badgett, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined co-host Kim Shivler in a lively discussion of the future of virtual reality with one member believing it has no future.

We launched with WPTavern’s covering of Tuesday’s Higher Ed Conference.
https://wptavern.com/free-conference-dedicated-to-wordpress-in-higher-ed-takes-place-january-30th-at-9am-cst

On Tuesday, January 30, WPCampus will be holding a free, all-day conference about WordPress in higher education. The conference begins at 9AM CST and you can register at https://online.wpcampus.org/.

Much of this discussion included reminiscing on our own computer experiences at the university level with some of us attending before there was a World Wide Web.

The team discussed how universities are embracing WordPress though adoption is sometimes siloed by department and there isn’t always a campus-wide governance or strategy. This is something we touched on in our WP-Tonic interview with WPCampus Founder Rachel Cherry. https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/259-wp-tonic-show-special-guest-rachel-cherry-wpcampus/

Watch on YouTube - https://youtu.be/7FX2BD_Cwjo

Our second story was, Virtual Reality in WordPress: Are You Ready to Give This a Shot?
https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/virtual-reality-in-wordpress-are-you-ready-to-give-this-a-shot/

This one brought debate about the future of virtual reality with Morten laying out a world of virtual and augmented reality that completely removes computers as we know them today and includes overlay information provided in contact lenses, and Adam debunking virtual reality as anything other than a gaming platform.

The roundtable did point out that much of what was called virtual reality in the article, like Google Maps Streetview or a 360 view of a real estate listing isn’t a true VR experience.

This week, Adam Fout, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 260. This week, the roundtable covered three news stories relevant to the WordPress and online community.

Story 1 WordPress 4.9.2 was released and patches an XSS Vulnerability
https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-2-patches-xss-vulnerability

This was an important update and brought up the overall importance of keeping your sites updated to keep them as secure as possible.

The topic also moved into recent security news about people buying plugins and themes and using them to spread malware. Those managing the WordPress repository remove plugins that aren’t updated.

Adam Preiser addressed Tide, a tool to run automated tests against plugins in the WordPress directory. This was announced at the recent State of the Word address. He wondered if this will also be expanded to provide some security scans possibly using machine learning.

https://xwp.co/tide-a-path-to-better-code-across-the-wordpress-ecosystem/

https://make.wordpress.org/tide/

The second story covered was The Best Tech Newsletters compiled by codeinwp.com.

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-tech-newsletters/

This discussion mainly covered are newsletters still important and relevant?

Jonathan asked the team what newsletters they receive that they still read.

Adam Fout reads:
Search Engine Journal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
Copyhackers - https://copyhackers.com/

He thinks email marketing and newsletters is still important and doesn’t think you can get enough information from what you see in click rates. People may only read the subject line all year and then click on a special and buy. It still keeps you in front of your customers.

John Locke reads several including:
Whitespark Roundup - https://whitespark.ca/
Phil Rozek’s Local Visibility System - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

He says key is making sure you have great content that your target audience will be interested in.

Is there a preference to have one main story or a spread of little stories?

He tends to prefer a deeper dive. He likes focus and quality content.

Adam Preiser

He finds he has the news before a newsletter arrives because he still uses an RSS Reader. He doesn’t actually read any newsletters.

He pointed out that it depends on your audience.

He doesn’t send regular newsletters to his lists, but does send updates sometimes and particularly includes personal information about himself. His point is to build a relationship with his followers, not just consider them a number.

The sponsor for this episode is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) - a plugin that helps you make sense of your Google Analytics data.

For the third story, the group covered - Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate huge revenue for WordPress products by freemius.com
https://freemius.com/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-wordpress/

People know this is a time of year to spend money. The plugin and theme space is no different. People expect sales at this time of year and buy during this time of year.

Adam Preiser is the roundtable member who is most involved in affiliate marketing. During the Black Friday period of time he put a live chat on his website. People go there and ask him to decide between plugins, themes and what to buy.

He had at least 300 live chats and when he saw how much people purchased, he was surprised.

The challenge is will people just wait until the discount days? Are you training people to wait for the sale?

This week, Adam Fout, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 260. This week, the roundtable covered three news stories relevant to the WordPress and online community.

Story 1 WordPress 4.9.2 was released and patches an XSS Vulnerability
https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-2-patches-xss-vulnerability

This was an important update and brought up the overall importance of keeping your sites updated to keep them as secure as possible.

The topic also moved into recent security news about people buying plugins and themes and using them to spread malware. Those managing the WordPress repository remove plugins that aren’t updated.

Adam Preiser addressed Tide, a tool to run automated tests against plugins in the WordPress directory. This was announced at the recent State of the Word address. He wondered if this will also be expanded to provide some security scans possibly using machine learning.

https://xwp.co/tide-a-path-to-better-code-across-the-wordpress-ecosystem/

https://make.wordpress.org/tide/

The second story covered was The Best Tech Newsletters compiled by codeinwp.com.

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-tech-newsletters/

This discussion mainly covered are newsletters still important and relevant?

Jonathan asked the team what newsletters they receive that they still read.

Adam Fout reads:
Search Engine Journal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
Copyhackers - https://copyhackers.com/

He thinks email marketing and newsletters is still important and doesn’t think you can get enough information from what you see in click rates. People may only read the subject line all year and then click on a special and buy. It still keeps you in front of your customers.

John Locke reads several including:
Whitespark Roundup - https://whitespark.ca/
Phil Rozek’s Local Visibility System - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

He says key is making sure you have great content that your target audience will be interested in.

Is there a preference to have one main story or a spread of little stories?

He tends to prefer a deeper dive. He likes focus and quality content.

Adam Preiser

He finds he has the news before a newsletter arrives because he still uses an RSS Reader. He doesn’t actually read any newsletters.

He pointed out that it depends on your audience.

He doesn’t send regular newsletters to his lists, but does send updates sometimes and particularly includes personal information about himself. His point is to build a relationship with his followers, not just consider them a number.

The sponsor for this episode is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) - a plugin that helps you make sense of your Google Analytics data.

For the third story, the group covered - Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate huge revenue for WordPress products by freemius.com
https://freemius.com/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-wordpress/

People know this is a time of year to spend money. The plugin and theme space is no different. People expect sales at this time of year and buy during this time of year.

Adam Preiser is the roundtable member who is most involved in affiliate marketing. During the Black Friday period of time he put a live chat on his website. People go there and ask him to decide between plugins, themes and what to buy.

He had at least 300 live chats and when he saw how much people purchased, he was surprised.

The challenge is will people just wait until the discount days? Are you training people to wait for the sale?

On Episode 259 of WP-Tonic, host Jonathan Denwood and co-host Kim Shivler interview Rachel Cherry of WP-Campus (https://wpcampus.org/). Rachel is a Senior Software Engineer at the Walt Disney Company in California. In the WordPress community, she is more well known as the founder and director of WP-Campus, a community for people in higher education interested in WordPress.

This episode is brought to you by Kinsta Hosting (https://kinsta.com). This Premium WordPress Hosting Platform is the power behind WP-Tonic. Check them out today for your hosting needs.