In addition to the elections, next week is #WooConf – the first ever conference dedicated to WordPress + Ecommerce. We’ll be attending Monday and Tuesday along with many others from Amazon, PayPal, Elto.com, and .
To celebrate, we’ll be hosting a Happy Hour with WP Engine (our awesome web hosting partners), one block away from WooConf.
This year at WordCamp SF, Matt Mullenweg (the founder of the WordPress project), delivered the State of the Word – a compilation of 33,000 survey responses. We live tweeted part of it here.
Some highlights of The State of the Word :
over 23% of the web is powered by WordPress
nearly 25% of respondents to the survey (7,500+ people) make their living off of WordPress
Making WordPress generates over $1 billion in full-time jobs
2014 was the first year where more people used WordPress in languages other than English
Throughout his presentation, Matt emphasized #mobile. From making the WordPress admin area responsive, to the fact that there are more mobile phones than there are people in the world, it’s clear that mobile is not only the future – mobile has arrived.
Excited about the internationalization and mobile-first focus for WordPress 2015. #wcsf14 State of the Word. Nice job Matt!
Overall, these updates will make Making WordPress easier. And hopefully, it will make the mission of WordPress – to democratize publishing – even easier.
This weekend, Arrow Root Media (that’s us) sponsored Reallocate’s Hacktivation – a hackathon for the homeless population in San Francisco. For more info on that, check out our last blog post. What follows below is a summary of what our working group of 6 volunteer hackers did.
THE NEED
Market Street for the Masses Coalition (MSFTMC) is a collective voice and resource for community organizations and companies to strengthen the social, physical and economic well-being of those living in the Mid-Market, Tenderloin, and South of Market neighborhoods.
The coalition needed a website that could :
showcase its members
get the larger community involved
offer tech companies an opportunity to connect with community organizations
Previous to the Hacktivation, MSFTMC organized its community through its Facebook Page and Facebook Group. Now, they have a fully featured WordPress website, hosted and managed by us. Here’s one of our team members talking about the process :
MSFTMC also now has a way to manage their site ongoingly, offer their member organizations a hub to connect, and feature all the ongoing community work. Our 6 person team worked to organize the content, produce the website, and develop an ongoing strategy for engaging the community.
Total Volunteer Time to Produce this site in 1 day : 40 hours
For all the WordPress geeks out there – here are the Tech Specs :
This weekend, Arrow Root Media’s very own Kyle Stewart will be holding this year’s HACKtivation hackathon in San Francisco, where several non-profit and other socially aware groups will get together to collaborate on projects for their causes, focusing on homelessness this year. The event serves as a time for the community to get together and work together, not only to develop the projects, but also educate others and create new ideas.
The event’s past success has drawn a diverse and great array of partners, including GoodWill, Spotify, and Code for America, and, of course, Arrow Root. With over twenty partners this year, the event seeks to create a lasting impact on the community. A large goal of these collaborative efforts is to fulfill the tech needs of a community as fast and economically as possible by drawing an effort from a group, rather than just individuals.
In a Shareable interview, Kyle said that while “hackathons do not create change themselves, it’s the sustained efforts of people working together for long-term solutions that will have an impact.”
The project was also recently featured on Torque Magazine, WP Engine’s source for WordPress Community News.
Despite the city spending $200 million per year on problems related to homelessness, the problem persists. “We want to help bring in new energy and ideas. Creative solutions come with creative people and it’s those people getting involved that can have impact in new ways,” said Kyle in response to whether homelessness needs to be treated in a different manner. “Homelessness and poverty are not technology problems, they are people problems.”
The event will start today, Friday, at 6 p.m. local time at Glide Memorial Church, with tomorrow’s hackathon session going from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., and ending with a Sunday session 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
There will be a closing ceremony at 4 p.m. that day, as well, at the Code for America office.
Costs for participation will be $20 for students, $40 for others.
We’re excited to announce that in less than one week, we’ll be leading a WordPress Workshop in Berkeley.
Here’s a little bit about the course, which is geared towards folks getting started :
We’ll go over the basics, talk about hosting, review a few popular WordPress features, and get started on creating content. We’ll also discuss how WordPress differs from other systems, and what advantages there are to working with WordPress.
If you can’t make it or don’t live in the area, you can still spread the word about our WordPress classes, and let others know!
Here’s some past praise from students –
Not only is Jaki an innovative, collaborative, informed, inspired instructor, but the students are fascinating as well. They have great projects that they’re working on. I’m always delighted to hear about them. Their questions are often ones I will need answered along the way too. I’m so glad that Jaki weaves the students’ questions and comments into our class time. It’s been a blast! These remarks are high praise from a relatively non-techie person like me. This course has surpassed my expectations in every way.
Jaki is the shining star in this course. He’s generous, wise, experienced. He has an amazing ability to address lots of random roadblocks that the students throw at him and still, for the most part, stick to his agenda. He’s even keeled and clear. The material is complex, but not for him, and even that aspect of the class is so valuable. Rubbing shoulders with someone who’s clear, logical, informed, creative and successful in this area makes the goal of constructing a WP website seem doable, even for us non-techies. This has been an awesome experience. I am very inspired to keep going with this.
WordPress Class Details
Location: Impact Hub Berkeley
2150 Allston Way, #400
(Inside the David Brower Center)
Berkeley, CA 94704
Time: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (AKST)
SEO is no longer a solution in and of itself. SEO must be paired with content marketing and social media to establish relevance in the new semantic web.
As the weekend is about to commence, so is Dance Films Association’s yearly festival Dance on Camera. It’s a cultural deep dive into movement, experimental collaborations and as noted on DFA’s website a “recognition that dance thrives best in the bosom of a creative community”. The perk of interdisciplinary nature of our clients often is exposure to unique experiences. Take a look for yourself!
A relevant piece of Dance Film Association’s story is their legacy in their genre. In their 42 year history they’ve been able keep current and innovative. That’s no small feat. We have a lot to learn about how they’ve done this. I have a hunch that it might boil down to understanding their niche, being a member centric organization, and meeting the needs of their community of dancemakers and filmmakers.
That’s where Dance Film’s Association has aligned with our expertise in WordPress web development. During our partnership, we have streamlined the process of accepting applications from filmmakers and created archives all the past festivals.
This year we are launching a new phase of their membership system, using BuddyPress. This new system will allow members to connect more easily and share immediate information about their projects and expertise as dance filmmakers through groups. Groups will be small hubs oF connectivity to bring their global community of members closer. We’re excited to present the system to DFA members directly and get first hand feedback and thoughts on its use going forward.
If you’re in New York come join us at Dance on Camera 2014! We guarantee you’ll leave inspired and ready to build something great for your community.
We’re big fans of the arts (which is why we work with so many clients in the arts). This year, we’re supporting Dance Films Association by hosting and maintaining their WordPress site year round.
Make sure to check out their 2014 Dance Films Festival lineup and catch the trailer for the festival below.
We’ve been hard at work here at Arrow Root Media, the last few months hiring new staff and producing awesome experiences for our clients. I’m really excited by the direction we’ve been going, and people are noticing.
Personally, I’m particularly excited about the reviews we’ve been getting on Yelp. We’ve received so much positive feedback on our Yelp, I decided to do a video that would live on our Yelp page – you can watch it below. Though you’ll need to make sure to watch on a desktop. We’re working on a mobile friendly video, and will update that post as soon as that happens.
A little over a year ago, we launched a New Responsive Website for Coppersea Distilling (http://coppersea.com), a craft distillery based in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Today, they announced their partnership with Wilson Daniels, a premium wine importer & marketing agency based in Napa Valley.
From the press release :
Coppersea Distilling is a Heritage-Methods farm distillery located in the burgeoning distilling hub of New York’s Hudson Valley. Coppersea, recently named one of “America’s Coolest Distilleries” by Travel and Leisure magazine, creates spirits of distinction and character from hyper-locally sourced ingredients and employs Heritage-Methods distillation techniques, this means using on-site well water, mashing in open wood fermentation tanks, and distilling in direct-fired alembic copper pot stills. The resulting Coppersea New York Raw Rye is an unaged whisky of unusual creaminess, with notes of black pepper and honey.
To learn more about Coppersea, check out this awesome video by Surrender Pictures.
This past June, we participated at the TV of Tomorrow Conference by showing a few of our interactive sculptures. Eleas Kostis, the sculptor and lead artist, worked on the form while I handled the interactive bits.
The pieces were previously shown at Maker Faire and Freespace. We’re honored to have participated with all the other artists – including the great folks at Cool Neon – check out some of their work (and ours) below.
TV of Tomorrow also put together a wrap up video for the conference – to see what the conference was all about, check out their recap here.
This past June, I gave a presentation at the San Francisco WordPress Meetup on the topic of WordPress Security. When I started, I posted a question to the room.
1. Who has had their WordPress site hacked?
2. Who has “unhacked” someone else’s WordPress site?
Everyone in the room raised their hand.
This is why Arrow Root Media started offering ongoing, proactive security and maintenance services last year. We prevent hacks before they happen. Since we started offering this service, our clients haven’t had a single issue.
My point of the presentation was simply this : even though many WordPress sites have been hacked, WordPress is actually very secure. I listed out some things you can do to keep your site and server secure.
You can watch the video below for some key tips.
If you’d like a copy of the actual presentation we used, simply leave a comment below. And if you’re looking for help to keep your sites online, secure, and running quickly, get in touch! We can help.
We recently had a client come to us and say “Our WordPress site is slow. Can you help?” The answer, of course was “Yes!”
In fact, we improved the site’s performance by a factor of 7.5.
In other words, the sites is 7.5 times faster than it was before we started working on it.
The Client : Solaire Generation
After digging around, we noticed a few things :
It was running on cheap, shared hosting
It was running an old version of WordPress, and had outdated plugins.
This situation is actually pretty typical, and we see it quite a bit. Running an old version of WordPress is bad. Really bad. But that’s a whole different topic. Let’s just focus on the speed for this post.
I’m assuming you already know why it’s important for your site to be fast and secure. But – if you need convincing, here are a few links :
The above tools were very helpful in diagnosing, monitoring, and improving the site’s performance. Migrating the site to a better host (WP Engine) also made a HUGE difference. Without a doubt. But it was just one part of the bigger puzzle. Caching, CDN’s, plugins, and other optimizations are all key. The real secret, though, includes tweaking, ongoing maintenance, and general persistence.
Want to see how we can make your site faster, more secure, and generally more stable? Get in touch and we’ll give you a free, personalized analysis of your site. We love doing this stuff and would be happy to take a look at your site!
Questions? Tips? Leave a comment below!
PS – a big mighty thanks to the folks over at WP Engine for helping us out so much!
We typically write about WordPress and all things web. But the past few weeks, we’ve been working on a very special week.
And this coming weekend, I’ll be showing this project with my collaborator, Eleas Kostis – artist extraordinaire – and owner of Praxis Design at Maker Faire! Woohoo!
Once I had the latest versions running on my computer, I was able to get hacking and coding. I pulled down some test code just to try getting code from my computer to by Arduino board. For the Arduino side of things, I’m using the Arduino Duemilanove.
Initially, I had some issues getting the very basic step of getting code onto my Arduino going. I typed in the error message I got when I compiled code into Google and came across many resources. This particular resource was the best : http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Troubleshooting#upload
It turns out that I had an old version of Processing and Arduino already running. So I had to make some changes.
From the page :
Make sure you have the right item selected in the Tools > Board menu. If you have an Arduino Uno, you’ll need to choose it. Also, newer Arduino Duemilanove boards come with an ATmega328, while older ones have an ATmega168. To check, read the text on the microcontroller (the larger chip) on your Arduino board.
Once I updated my software, and made the changes above, I was able to get coding.
This past March, I taught a WordPress Intensive at The Hub in San Francisco, as part of their ongoing educational series, Hub Workbench.
The intensive was geared towards people getting started with WordPress Resources. At the end of the course, most of the students were left with more questions than they had come in with.
Personally, I see this as a testament to the learning process – the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.
Regardless, it’s helpful to have some resources to help along the way. So – I’ve gathered some resources resources that I often turn to when I need help or am looking for what’s new in WordPress land. Enjoy!
WP Mail – simply put, if you work with WordPress at all, subscribe to this email list and get smarter. Not convinced by my endorsement? Check out their archive.
From their site: “A free WordPress Newsletter, once a week, with a round-up of WordPress news and articles.” Simply put – this is a one-stop shop for great resources all around. For the curious types, I’ve linked to a nice article about “the making of” WP Mail.me, featured on WP Candy, another resource featured below.
WP Beginner is a great resource for beginners and pros alike. They’ve featured everything from “how to ask for help” (beginner) to setting up the W3 Total Cache Plugin (pros). Not only does WP Beginner have great resources, but they’re supporters of the WordPress community as demonstrated by their sponsorships of WordCamps.
WP Candypublishes all kinds of articles about WordPress. In my eyes, the site is geared towards WordPress designers and developers but often includes theme and plugin roundups. It was founded by Michael Castilla in 2007. In 2010, Ryan Imel acquired and re-launched the blog.
From their about page : “At WPCandy, we wrangle all the important stuff together so you can enjoy it with a cup of coffee. Let us do the work, you keep blogging, creating, and developing awesome things. Oh, but let us know when you’re done so we can tell everyone.”
Sucuri Blog – If your site has been hacked, Sucuri can help. They help remove malware, and get your site secure. Given they’re an internet security company, they’ve also got a nice blog on how to keep the internet a safe place. It doesn’t hurt that the founders, Dre Armeda and Tony Perez, are also great chaps.
Learn WordPress – geared towards beginners, this online handbook was launched by Automattic (the folks who make WordPress.com) to help folks get going and publishing. They’ve even made the online guide printable!
WPMU Dev – WPMU.org will often have fantastic posts on great plugins to use. They make their own set of plugins and fully support them. A great go-to resource. For an example of their usefulness – check out their recently featured WordPres.com v WordPress.org.
WP Daily– provides great articles about the world of WordPress – from their manifesto page : “We are a group of connected and passionate individuals called to create economies of creativity, innovation, and value. We are designers, developers, online publishers, bloggers, small business owners, corporate employees, leaders, followers, and everything in between.”
Smashing Magazine was one of the first blogs I would constantly visit when I first started WordPress development – and I still do. They feature extensive interviews, great theme roundups, and lots of tutorials. In my eyes, they’ve set the bar for all of the sites I’ve mentioned above. Check out Smashing Magazine’s WordPress articles <- here.
Chris Lema – Chris is the only individual in this list, so he doesn’t get a logo. After I attend WordCamp Miami (April 7th), I’ll create a new post of individual bloggers I’d recommend checking out. So this is a “preview” of that post.
Chris writes articles for people making things with WordPress (developers, designers, consultants, and business-types). Not only does he have some useful code, but he goes over the business of WordPress as well. And he recently organized a “business track” for a WordCamp (WordPress conference) in San Diego.
There are many people who make WordPress great. In addition to the developers who build WordPress, and the designers who make WordPress beautiful and usable, there are the many folks who are sharing resources.
Big thanks to all the bloggers, writers, publishers, designers, strategists, developers, and other people that make WordPress great!
Finally – if you’ve found a great WordPress resource that I haven’t included (or would like to add your own) – leave a comment!
We’re proud supporters of the Dance on Camera Festival happening February 1st. We’ll be at the Festival the whole way through – come visit us and say hello!
Last year, we helped Dance Films Association (DFA) revamp their whole site. DFA has been putting together their annual Dance on Camera film festival for over 40 years (since 1971) and is “the mother” of all Dance Film Fests. During the initial build, we worked on the information architecture first, which resulted in cleaning up the navigation. We also added a calendar, and redid the whole design. When we noticed they were getting a healthy amount of traffic, we moved them to our managed hosting system.
This year, we wanted to improve upon the work we did. So we helped Dance Films Association (DFA) launch several new features. One of the primary goals of their site is to help promote their Film Festivals, past and present. DFA also provides many services to their members, so we worked to setup a new online membership system.
Below is a little documentation on what we did, and how did it.
A little over a year ago, we launched a New Responsive Website for Coppersea Distilling (
We typically write about WordPress and all things web. But the past few weeks, we’ve been working on a very special week.
