Category Archives for "Money Making Programs"

August 6, 2023

Automattic Gets $300M Investment, Now What?

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com and many other services like JetPack, WooCommerce and more has received $300 million USD in funding from Salesforce. What does this mean WordPress going forward? The post Automattic Gets $300M Investment, Now What? appeared first on HighEdWebTech. Last year, I wrote about my experience of getting to 500,000 public story views on Snapchat. While fully acknowledging that I am not Snap’s target demographic, it’s been interesting to watch the rise, dip and potential rise again of this company. This is a critical time for the social media platform, as new networks like TikTok are gaining a lot of steam globally, especially in higher ed. Today, I write to let you know that earlier this summer, I crossed the million public story views milestone. On my Snapchat. I know, it’s nutty. It’s strange to think people around the world have watched 40 days worth of my content. My content? It’s not terribly interesting. It’s a lot of food shots taken while I’m travelling and vinyl I’ve been listening to lately. Observations on a million Snapchat views First, Snapchat isn’t dead. While it’s certainly not aimed at me and people my age, it’s still used heavily by its younger users. My oldest is nearly 18 years old, and most of the time his phone is open to Snapchat or Instagram. It’s a big communication tool for one to one and group chats. Second, the analytics available to power users haven’t changed all the much. I wrote about Snap’s analytics tools when they first launched last year and the tool hasn’t evolved. The stats are still top level, and while they’re interesting (location, interest), they aren’t much more than superficial. There isn’t much in the way of actionable intel here to work with or make decisions with. Snap tells me I’m popular in Greater London as well as my public Snaps are 7x more popular than average amongst people who are fans of cricket. I dig cricket, but I’ve never posted a Snap or story about cricket. There’s a lot of room for improvement here. Third, consistency is key when it comes to views. When I was posting regularly, often daily, I would get more views, often to the tune of 7-10k views per story.  I haven’t posted much this year, and that number hovers between one and two thousand views per post. If you want to grow your public views, post a lot and regularly. Finally, Snap will still not give you a total number of views. Maybe if you’re a big brand that has a high ad spent, you can see those types of analytic data, but I can’t. I’d love to know how many people follow me, instead Snap just tells me who recent followers are. That’s disappointing. I hope Snap rebounds and keeps adding new and interesting features. They certainly are doing great work around their lens and filters and just this week they announced a new version of their Spectacles wearable. The post What I’ve Learned from a Million Public Story Views on SnapChat appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

What I’ve Learned from a Million Public Story Views on SnapChat

Last year, I wrote about my experience of getting to 500,000 public story views on Snapchat. While fully acknowledging that I am not Snap’s target demographic, it’s been interesting to watch the rise, dip and potential rise again of this company. This is a critical time for the social media platform, as new networks like … What I’ve Learned from a Million Public Story Views on SnapChat Read More » The post What I’ve Learned from a Million Public Story Views on SnapChat appeared first on HighEdWebTech. Yeah, that’s a slightly clickbait-y title, but these are scary times. Schools are cutting programs, scaling way back and in some extreme instances, closing altogether. It’s hard to go a full week without seeing an article in the news about the impending death of higher education. Is higher ed dying? No, I don’t think so. Is it sick? Yes, I believe so. I recently read this news story about big companies like Google, Apple and Netflix no longer requiring college degrees for its employees. This quote jumped out at me: Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that about half of Apple’s US employment last year included people who did not have four-year degrees. Cook reasoned that many colleges do not teach the skills business leaders need most in their workforce, such as coding. That’s worrying, but not surprising. It’s challenging to quickly pivot at enterprises as large as a university. Apple can decide tomorrow to stop making X and instead make Y. That’s a much harder thing to do for us. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as we go through the college search process with our oldest child. I’ve been focusing like never before on outcomes and cost, and what kind of experience my son will have. I wonder what the experience will be like 5 years after that for my younger son. Expect a large number of posts in the coming months about my experiences of this search process. I know how the sausage is made, so I’ve been both surprised and downright shocked at what some schools are doing to reach potential students. That’s a (series of) post(s) for another day. I watched this video last week, and while I disagree with some of what Patrick Bet-David is saying in it, some of makes a lot of sense, especially the parts about speed, memory and technology changing so fast that some programs are out of date before they even start. Have a watch and let me know what, if anything, jumps out at you and what parts you think are applicable. The post Is it time to panic about the future of higher ed? appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

The Future of Live Events in Higher Ed

This year has been much different than we all expected. Obviously. Sorry for the hyperbole, but it’s true, especially when it comes to hosting events in higher ed. We all saw our large planned events like admitted student open houses, commencement, alumni reunions, lectures and more postponed, done on Zoom, or cancelled. I have sat … The Future of Live Events in Higher Ed Read More » The post The Future of Live Events in Higher Ed appeared first on HighEdWebTech. This year has been much different than we all expected. Obviously. Sorry for the hyperbole, but it’s true, especially when it comes to hosting events in higher ed. We all saw our large planned events like admitted student open houses, commencement, alumni reunions, lectures and more postponed, done on Zoom, or cancelled. I have sat through many Zoom events this spring and summer as the parent of an incoming freshman college student. Some were great. Some were OK. Some were bad. There are just so many variables when it comes on online events, especially when it comes to having multiple people participating from multiple locations. There are so many variables when it comes to people’s webcams, lighting, microphones, echos, backgrounds and more. These variables means that our events don’t have a consistent look and feel. Perhaps we need to rethink how we’re doing live events in higher ed, and not just during a pandemic. Let’s be honest, this won’t change once this pandemic ends or a vaccine is available. People are going to be apprehensive of large gatherings for the foreseeable future. I watched a live event this past weekend that really opened my eyes to new ways to do live events, and it came from a Scottish rock band called Biffy Clyro. Before I go much further, I’m a big Biffy fan. I’ve seen them four times, I’ve got all their albums (many on vinyl.) Last week, they released their eighth full length album, A Celebration of Endings. Traditionally, a band would release an album and do promotion around the world, including live shows. Since just about every live, in-person event is cancelled, it’s forced artists to find alternate ways to connect with fans and promote their work. Biffy Clyro are no different. In addition to an acoustic series earlier this summer, the band promoted a live worldwide event where they would be playing their entire new album live. Prices started at $20 and went up from there. Costs were slightly higher if you ordered a CD or vinyl along with your purchase. I will admit I was skeptical at first about the event, despite being a super fan. I was apprehensive about the quality of the stream, given the cost, for an event that would be less than 90 minutes. Thank goodness I had a change of heart and bought a ticket. The show was absolutely awesome. The Live Show There was a 30 minute pre-show before the album playthrough started, consisting of the band playing some older tunes in soundcheck as well as a few acoustic numbers., During those acoustic songs, the band used one of those binaural head microphones so the sound was all around you. The band took full advantage, walking around the mic singing and playing. Finally, some behind the scenes footage from the studio was shown, and then it was showtime. The band kicked off the album playthrough in the famous Barrowlands ballroom in Glasgow, Scotland. They started on stage playing a few songs, but as the set went on, they spread out all over the event space, including the floor where the audience usually is. A string quartet joined them there, along with additional instruments. A third set filled the corner, but the highlight for me was when the band moved to large glass cube to play, not unlike their performance for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend earlier this year. Yes, they were dressed in pajamas. Here’s the thing about this event. It wasn’t technically live, happening at the exact moment I was watching it. It was pre-taped, despite being promoted as being live. It’s nitpicking, but I guess technically the band was indeed playing live. Even though the show was 1 long live event, it was recorded a few days before for the reasons I mentioned before. For as high a profile event as this, you couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong and keep your paying customers from getting what they paid for. Recording it in advance also let the band stream it at different prime time slots around the world. The UK and Europe got the stream at 9pm their time, and we got it a hours later here in the U.S.A. Given the high level of production that went into this show, I don’t mind it was pre-recorded. The ticketing process was also interesting. About an hour before the show, customers were sent their ticket. The ticket consisted of a link to an unlisted YouTube live stream of the event. You may have noticed the fact it was YouTube in my screenshots. In a way, hosting the stream on YouTube is genius. Why not use the infrastructure of maybe the world’s largest technology company (Google) to deliver your product. After all, YouTube is setup to do live streaming, will stop people from downloading the stream (best they can) and turn the video off at a certain time. This greatly reduces the barrier of entry for colleges, universities and small businesses. That has to be easier than maintaining a video streaming infrastructure. Does that mean that I could have shared my link with everyone I know? Sure. That’s definitely something to think of you are going to use YouTube as your technology back-end. What does this mean for higher ed? I can see this becoming an interesting option for some campus events going forward.  Having the ability to pre-record, edit, caption and more before a promoted event would be a lifesaver for over-stretched marketing teams. This type of setup would be great for a “live” admission event, for example. You could pre-tape introductions from your president, admission leader, students, even do things like a campus or dorm room tour. There would be no live Zoom challenges or lighting or bad sound, sketchy backgrounds and more. You could set the video to premiere at a certain time and promote that as a big event. It’d be up to you if you want the chat to be there, but if you do, have a moderator there. If your school has award ceremonies, such as an alumni awards event or academic awards, a pre-taped “live” event might make sense. This model would work for free events but I can see a market for paid events. There’s an opportunity here for an alumni office to offer a 30 minute presentation by a beloved faculty member (though it would mean not take live questions.) Perhaps its a musical performance by students or faculty. A poetry reading would be a great experience. And what’s nice about this method is that you aren’t limited by location. Sure, you can tape a faculty member reading poetry in a lecture hall or auditorium, but why not have them read from the top of the bell tower? Your virtuoso guitar student? Have them play in the middle of the quad while they circle around you and your immersive microphone. There’s so much opportunity there to do something really special and break out of very boring Zoom calls and streams we’ve been doing for the last few months. I’ve blogged about tips to improve your videos in the past, it’s worth revisiting if you’re taking on more video in the year ahead. A great example of this type of event was Apple’s WWDC keynote this past June. They pre-recorded bits from around their amazing new campus and it really helped drive the story. Instead of watching slides on a screen behind someone on the stage, you were watching that person in Apple’s silicon development lab. It really helps sell the message. When it comes time to promote your “live” event, you can drive interest by using scarcity. Even though using video and a platform like YouTube means your video can be online forever, you can limit access, much like the Biffy show. Once the show was over, I couldn’t go back and re-watch it. It was live, and one show only. And I’m okay with that, it made the experience feel special and made me pay more attention and be more engaged. I wasn’t checking my phone, or had the video playing in another window. My son and I sat around my nice big monitor and good speakers and shared the experience together. I want to say I am still a fan of the live event. My family attended many such events this past spring and summer and they were very informative. They were a great way to connect with schools on our son’s list and narrow down where he would end up going. But this… this could be something really special for this next academic and going forward.       The post The Future of Live Events in Higher Ed appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

Backup Series: Where Should I Store My Backups?

In the last post of our series on backups, we’ll explore where the best place to store your backups is, and whether that’s in the cloud or on your server. The post Backup Series: Where Should I Store My Backups? appeared first on HighEdWebTech. It’s time for the third and final post in our series on website backups. If you’re just jumping in now, take a few minutes to review part one here and part two here. So far, we’ve talked why you need to be backing up your website, and not relying on your web host or server provider. Second, we’ve talked about how often you should be backing up your site. Now, it’s time to explore where the best place is to store your backups. This is a critical decision and the good news is you have lots of options, including free and paid options. Let’s talk about them from worst to best, in my opinion. Not The Best When using your backup plugin or script, you may see email as an option for your automatic backups. You shouldn’t send your website backups to your email address.  First, email can be insecure. You could leave your data exposed as it travels the internet. Also, some email providers may block the reception of large backup files. Only use this as a last resort. Slightly Better Storing your backups locally on your server is also an option. This is fine for quick backups before you test or upgrade a plugin, for example, but it’s not a good long-term location to store your backups. If something happens to your web hosting server, your files may also be affected. It doesn’t take much to break a server, especially on a shared hosting provider, where resources are oversold and security is lax. If a drive fails, or a site is hacked, your backups could be, at best, lost and and at worst, compromised. Don’t store them on your hosting server. You may also run into issues if you are trying to migrate or copy your site. I was recently working with a client and we needed to make a copy of their site. I was surprised to find a dump I made of their site was over 25GB, even with excluding the media folder of WordPress. It turns out, they were storing their backups locally, so the plugin I was using to migrate the site was including those local backups. Getting Better Setting up the files to automatically send to another server or service such as Dropbox is a good first place to get your backup plan going. Several plugins like Updraft will allow you to store your backups in a service such as Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, or Google Drive. These are good places to store your files as you start on your backup journey. However, services like Dropbox may offer only a certain amount of free space, so keep an eye on your quotas. You should also be aware that if you use something like Dropbox, you are giving your site access to all of your Dropbox files. If your key or login is compromised, the attacker will have full access to your Dropbox or Google Drive. The Best Option To best protect your data and yourself, I would recommend storing your backups in a cloud-based storage provider. These providers would include Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3), DigitalOcean’s Spaces, BackBlaze’s B2 product, or Rackspace Cloud Files. These systems are built to store files and offer finely tuned permissions and controls. This gives you full control over how, where and who the files are accessed. The Process Here’s an example of how I set up Amazon S3 for our client’s sites backups: First, I create a new Amazon S3 bucket for each client’s site. This helps our team not only keep track of where the backups live, but also allows us to make sure we don’t cross the streams in terms of login keys. I then set these new buckets to not be publically viewable. This is different than if you were hosting web content for use by the world by the site’s editors. For our backup needs, we want a secure home where no one can even see our files. Next, I create a new Amazon IAM user for each site. That’s a lot of acronyms, but it’s a username and password (in the form of two long keys) for each new site we’re backing up. Here’s a good IAM tutorial post. I then tell Amazon that the only person that can access our new bucket is this new user. That’s it — our backup files are protected and need a username and password to view and download. No one can stumble upon them or download them. This is often how large chunks of data is compromised – permissions aren’t set correctly and world-read access is granted  by default. Here’s a story on this practice. A similar setup and process will work for Backblaze, Rackspace, Azure and DigitalOcean as well. The big difference will be how to set up the accounts and secure the storage containers. In the end, backing up your WordPress website needs to be a critical part of your web strategy. If you’re unsure on how to get backups set up and configured correctly, let us know and we’d be glad to help you. Map photo by Capturing the human heart. on Unsplash The post Backup Series: Where Should I Store My Backups? appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

Backup Series: How Often Should You Backup Your Website?

It’s great you are backing up your website. The next challenge is to determine what’s the right backup schedule, which can vary depending on many factors. The post Backup Series: How Often Should You Backup Your Website? appeared first on HighEdWebTech. In the past, I’ve written extensively about improving the performance of your WordPress site. That’s very important work you can do, as speed matters. But what happens if something happens to your site? What if you’re hacked, or the hard drive on your server dies? These are all common events that could leave you high and dry with all your website content gone. Backups will be your best friend should any of these tragedies occur. In this three-part series, we’ll explore how and why to backup your website. Why should you backup your WordPress website? A key part of any web strategy should be how to protect your site, and a big part of that is backups. If you’re using WordPress to manage your website (and you should, it’s a great tool), you have to worry about many pieces and parts — from pages to posts, media to plugins, there’s a lot to keep updated. Backups are key to this. You should be backing up your WordPress site. Period, full stop. If you are relying on your hosting provider to do it, you may be disappointed. They may not be backing up all your data often enough. Site backups are something that you can easily do yourself, and setting them up will bring you peace of mind. As you’ll see below, there are many choices when it comes to storing your backups. Plugins Can Help There are several backup plugins available, many of which are free or have a free tier. I am a user and fan of UpdraftPlus, one of the more popular WordPress backup plugins. It’s a set it and forget it tool that will backup your site files, media, plugins, themes, and more on a schedule you determine. The only negative about Updraft is that it likes to nag you to upgrade to their paid plan. I have no problem with a plugin developer asking folks to update, but Updraft does it a lot. Credit to Updraft though — they share details here on how to hide their nag messages. In addition to Updraft, there are many backup plugins, both free and paid, available to download. These include plugins such as BackWPup, which behaves similarly to Updraft in that you can control where you would like your backups stored and how often your backups run. BackupBuddy, available since 2010, also allows you to schedule backups and store them where you’d like. If you don’t want to manage where your backups are stored, there are plugins that do the heavy lifting for you. These include plugins like VaultPress, which is created by Auttomatic and is part of the JetPack suite. There’s also Snapshot Pro from WPMU Dev, which includes 10GB of cloud backup storage. Snapshot Pro is a paid plugin. This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of important backup information. Next week, in part two of this series, we’ll explore setting the right backup schedule for your site. The post Backup Series: Why, How, and Where to Store Your WordPress Backups appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

Backup Series: Why, How, and Where to Store Your WordPress Backups

If backing up your website isn’t a key part of your strategy, it should be. You can’t afford for your site to be down if something happens. With regular backups, you can mitigate those issues. The post Backup Series: Why, How, and Where to Store Your WordPress Backups appeared first on HighEdWebTech. WordPress version 5.3 released last week. In this release, there are changes in the way WordPress handles very large image uploads. Previous to 5.3, the software would allow you or your users to upload images of any size into the media library. This in and of itself is not a problem, but many sites and themes did not have automatic image and/or thumbnail image sizing setup. These sites often just embed that full size image into a page, template or post and scale it down with CSS or hard-code it in the image tag. In version 5.3, WordPress will size down images over 2560 pixels high and wide down to a max of 2560 pixels (in either direction.) That means your 4000 pixel wide image would be sized down to 2560 pixels wide and scaled tomy”>horizontally proportionally. Here’s a snipped from the WordPress.org blog talking about the change: When a new image is uploaded, WordPress will detect if it is a “big” image by checking if its height or its width is above a big_image threshold. The default threshold value is 2560px, filterable with the new big_image_size_threshold filter. What’s important to note is that the original uploaded image is not discarded. It will still be stored in the system, and you can access it using the original_image meta value. It can also be accessed by calling  this new function: wp_get_original_image_path(). This is important to remember if you have limited storage available. For most users, they won’t notice this change. It will help file size  and improve download speeds. However, there are use cases where you need to be able to get at the big image. Yes, you have those new functions, but that will mean having to back into your theme or plugin. To that end, you can disable the resizing by adding this filter to your functions.php file: add_filter( ‘big_image_size_threshold’, ‘__return_false’ ); Even with this change in image handling,  you should be optimizing your images regardless. This new change will not affect existing optimization setups The post WordPress 5.3 and Large Image Uploads appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

WordPress 5.3 and Large Image Uploads

WordPress version 5.3 released last week. In this release, there are changes in the way WordPress handles very large image uploads. The post WordPress 5.3 and Large Image Uploads appeared first on HighEdWebTech. I’ve been seeing a lot of Twitter accounts, both regular user accounts as well as brand accounts, using fancy, math and other symbol fonts in their tweets. These characters are all legal, and part of the Unicode standard. Akin to using a screenshot from a notes app in your tweet, we should take a closer look at these characters. On one hand, I get it. These characters can make your tweet stand out and breathe some life into your message copy. This comes with a catch though. Those special characters can break accessibility. This includes being able to be read by screen readers and other speech tools. Here’s an example I’ve seen recently. I want to be clear that I’m not attacking them, just using them as reference. Go Cavs! Celebrating ???????????????????? seasons!#Cavs50 x #WelcomeHome pic.twitter.com/GwBN729lwk — Cleveland Cavaliers (@cavs) September 28, 2019 Why is this bad? In that tweet from the Cleveland Cavaliers, you can see the word “fifty” is actually small caps unicode characters. It’s a cool effect, but it can wreak havoc in screen readers. Why are these characters bad? First, they were designed as mathematical and other symbols, so screen readers either skip them (which happens when I use my Mac’s speech feature) or read out to the user the symbol equivalent. You can see a great example in this video: You ???????????????????? it's ????????????ℯ to ???????????????????? your tweets and usernames ???????????????? ????????????. But have you ???????????????????????????????? to what it ???????????????????????? ???????????????? with assistive technologies like ????????????????????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm — Kent C. Dodds ???? (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019 What about using Emojis in your tweets? They are fine to use as they have descriptions and when used in a tweet and read by a screenreader, can be described correctly so the user knows what they are. I don’t have an alternative to suggest. Some people have talked about Twitter supporting Markdown,  which would be nice for formatting but doesn’t address the special Unicode character issue. I also don’t think Twitter will remove Unicode support, as there are legitimate use cases for the characters. I write all that to say this: think about your audience and if you do in fact need to use these special characters in your tweet. Can you get  by with an image (using Twitter image alt descriptions), emoji or other method? All of those options are better for accessibility than straight up Unicode characters in some cases. The post Are special characters in your tweets breaking accessibility? appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

Are special characters in your tweets breaking accessibility?

I’ve been seeing a lot of Twitter accounts, both regular user accounts as well as brand accounts, using fancy, math and other symbol fonts in their tweets. These characters are all legal, and part of the Unicode standard. Akin to using a screenshot from a notes app in your tweet, we should take a closer … Are special characters in your tweets breaking accessibility? Read More » The post Are special characters in your tweets breaking accessibility? appeared first on HighEdWebTech. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com and many other services like JetPack, WooCommerce and tomy”>more has received $300 million USD in funding from Salesforce. From TechCrunch: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and soon Tumblr, has closed a $300 million funding round at a $3 billion post-money valuation. The Series D round has a single investor, Salesforce Ventures. First off, congrats at Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team on this round. That’s a large investment and Salesforce is an interesting, and sole partner in this investment. This will improve services, integrate new acquisitions like Tumblr, and create tomy”>more jobs. All good things. I’d love someone to invest anything let alone several hundred million dollars in my company. VentureBeat says this about the deal: Reading between the lines, it’s not hard to see why Salesforce would invest such a gargantuan sum in a company best known for blogging. WordPress currently powers one-third of the web, which includes everything from small-time bloggers to publishers and online retailers. And several products in Automattic’s arsenal hint at the reasons Salesforce has elected to invest in the company. What does this mean for you? The question I’ve been thinking about all morning is this: what does this fundraising mean for those of us who use, develop for, and are deep in the trenches with WordPress. I think the answers are good and bad. To start, it means tomy”>more ads. I don’t mean display or text ads are going to start populating WordPress. Instead,  you are going to see an increase in the promotion of Automattic’s services and offerings in products like WooCommerce, product directories and tomy”>more, putting their products in front of tens of millions of WordPress users, admins and developers. You may have already seen this in action. This Spring, WooCommerce started pushing their plugins and add-ons as “recommended extensions,” and surprise, they’re all Automattic/WooCommerce owned ones. About this new type of “ad,” Erik Bernskiold said this: “I get that WooCommerce want to benefit from their commercial side, too, and there are many ways to do this. But in this case, it feels like this is at a great disregard for the users. Hijacking a product list, order list or a user interface element in this way is a major interruption of the user experience. It’s not the place for an ad.” I understand that Automattic bought WooCommerce, and it’s their platform, but for many people, they feel the manipulation of a set of results goes against the open nature of WordPress. The rise of plugin nags, upsells and banners This happens in the Add Plugin area of WordPress as well. Look at the “Featured” tab — 2 of the 5 plugins there are paid services from Automattic (Akismet and JetPack.) Switch to the “Recommended” tab and you see WooCommerce in the first position. In addition, there’s been a very rapid increase in the use of upsell alerts, banners and other annoyances by WordPress plugin makers lately. What’s keeping a widely used tool like WooCommerce to start advertising other Automattic services, like the recently acquired ZBS CRM? I like the Updraft Backup plugin, but they constantly nag users to upgrade. They’re not alone in doing this. Lookin’ at you, Yoast.   They wouldn’t do this, people will say. No? The over $500 million that they’ve raised for their company isn’t a gift — investors expect a several-multiple return on that investment. So, Automattic has to make money. They do that by selling services like WordPress VIP, WooCommerce add-ons and so on. Governance is Key It’s these kind of possibilities that makes the push for improved governance over the WordPress project tomy”>more important than ever. There are some key issues that need to be communicated, debated and solutions offered to the community. There are many, but I’d include topics such as the expansion of nags like the ones I mentioned earlier. There’s the issue of auto-updating old WordPress installations, and the pros and cons of doing that. And finally, there’s accessibility. I don’t think the accessibility issues around Gutenberg at the launch of version 5 of WordPress were handled particularly well. There have been a million blog post and tweets both for and against the launch in general as well as about the accessibility issues. Thankfully, organizations like WPCampus raised money to fund an accessibility study to identify issues with the hope they would be fixed. (Note: I donated to that campaign.) WordPress (.org) is open source, and needs formal and stable governance. It powers so much of the web it needs oversight to keep it free, open and not under the control of one company.   The post Automattic Gets $300M Investment, Now What? appeared first on HighEdWebTech.
August 6, 2023

I decided to build a job search site

If you’re like me, and you may be since you’re reading this post,  you get ideas for apps , websites and services all the time. I know I do. What I am bad at is actually executing these ideas. Sometimes I write a little code, other times I buy a domain name that would fit … I decided to build a job search site Read More » The post I decided to build a job search site appeared first on HighEdWebTech. If you’re like me, and you may be since you’re reading this post,  you get ideas for apps , websites and services all the time. I know I do. What I am bad at is actually executing these ideas. Sometimes I write a little code, other times I buy a domain name that would fit my idea and then life happens and before you know it I have a bunch of folders, some code and domain names but no real sites to speak of.  I’m trying to break that cycle. I worked in higher ed from 1998 to 2016. It was both the best and hardest career choice I could have made and it was awesome. I met so many awesome colleagues, team members, friends and more across that time. I left and went to the private sector for two years, but it wasn’t a great fit. At that point, I went full-time on my own at my digital agency, Gas Mark 8.  I kept looking for higher ed roles, interviewed for several (including a few full-day on campus interviews) but nothing went my way. What can you do — it happens. Over the last 6 years since I left higher ed, I’ve seen so many amazing people leave the industry. It started pre-pandemic, the last 3 years have really been hard on higher education and there’s been a large exodus of talent. There are a lot of reasons for that, and we know many of them (pay, remote work, career advancement, difficult environments, the big sea change in education, and so on.) There has been a very large brain drain, and that’s a bummer. I’m bummed because I love higher ed and it’s important. I don’t know what the future holds for it, but I believe in what its about. I have one child a year away from finishing college and one a year away from starting. They’re working with amazing faculty and staff and taking advantage of all the opportunities they can. It’s so critical as they get ready to go out into the world. Back in 2013 or 2014, I created a very quick and dirty job search website that provided links to the HR listing pages of colleges and universities around me in Cleveland, where I live. I was curious about what was out there, and made a simple tool. I shared it with some folks on my team, and added more cities like Erie and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was just for me mostly, and had very little in terms of design or usability. I did, however, notice that a few schools featured  RSS feeds, and I added a note in my code to someday build out a feature that would grab those job posts and show them on the page without needing another click. The idea nagged at me. I took me 7 or 8 years, but I finally built it. Before Christmas, I was going through some folders of code and old sites and found the old job site I made. “Finally,” I thought, “there has to be an easy way to build this.” In about 15 minutes, I spun up a WordPress dev site, installed some of the tools we use at Gas Mark 8 and got to work. I started with the last school I worked at (miss you, JCU) — it’s also where my son attends. I threw in their RSS feed and to my surprise, it worked. There were 15 jobs in a custom post type I created. Interesting… I continued to iterate on features and data structures. The goal in my mind was to build something I didn’t have to babysit. I wanted to add schools to it, import their posts and make sure the data goes to the right place. It started out well. I found more and more schools whose applicant tracking system (ATS) offered RSS or Atom feeds. A decent amount do but the vast majority of them to do not. TMany are closed systems, which is fine, but it stinks to not share that data. One thing that the plugins we have and the code I’ve written so far doesn’t do (except for a few tests) is scrape pages to get job postings. The ones I’ve tried to scape use the same system so I can re-use my code but many obfuscate their code and don’t let you make requests to data like JSON feeds (looking at you, Workday.) If anyone has written a scraper for any of these ATS sites, let me know. Once the jobs were coming in, the actual web site  needed a layout, design, UI and most importantly a name. Let me introduce you to CollegeAndUniversity.careers. Have you tried to find a good domain name lately? It’s difficult. After a few weeks of work and getting some help (thanks, Dylan!), it’s ready for use. I’ve polling about 90 schools and the site now has over 7,700 jobs. It polls schools daily, gets new jobs, edits existing job and deletes jobs that are no longer posted. We’ve created some cool searching ability (by keyword, state or both.) I think it would be cool to allow people to create job search alerts, but that’s down the road. I’ve got a nice feature list going. We also have a logo. I had one made awhile ago for another app (it’s on the list to build) and we all love it so it’s got a graduation cap now. Why an octopus? It’s got eight legs. Our agency also has an 8 in it. Made sense at the time. I’m thinking of calling it Tako. The site is built in WordPress and uses Elementor. I did the design in XD and we built it from there. It uses WP All Import Pro to poll all the schools and import the jobs. I wrote some PHP to scrape a few sites that didn’t have feeds. It’s OK but not the best. The site is hosted at Cloudways, where we are a Gold Agency Partner and are big fans. They’ve made our lives much easier. I’m sharing it here because there are still some folks who subscribe to this blog via email so I hope you’ll open it and visit it. You may still work in higher ed, so I’d love your feedback and ideas on how to make this the best job search tool possible. If you have a second, would you mind checking it out? Better yet, if you know of someone who is searching for the next stop in their career, please share it with them. We’re adding new schools every day and if just one person finds an amazing opportunity from the site, then all the work and time will have been worth it. Me? I’m glad to get one of these ideas out of my head and out there into the world. Thanks and Happy New Year Career! The post I decided to build a job search site appeared first on HighEdWebTech.