WordPress

After using Ansible as a personal DevOps tool for a couple of months, here are some impressions.

Context

• Outside of work (web development) I look after six Drupal 7 and WordPress sites on shared hosting
• My local development is done on a MacBook using apache (with some dabbling in Lando/Docker). I've done some wildcarding with dnsmasq and vhosts to streamline local dev site configuration. CMS code is in git repos.
• My Ansible work is a personal project and I'm the only stakeholder
• I learned Ansible doing this work

Next to Drupal, my favourite content management system is WordPress. The local WordPress gang is holding a WordCamp up in Whistler on Saturday, January 24, 2009.

Photo: ggee @ flickr

Title:	Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com
Author:	John Chow (pictured above)
Available:	Free download at www.johnchow.com
Length:	59 pages

The core thesis of Make Money Online is you (the reader) can follow John Chow's example and get non-trivial ad revenue from a blog website with lots and lots of traffic. Like me, you might find it both suspect and ironically recursive that John Chow gets lots of traffic and makes money because he's telling people how to get lots of traffic and make money. Fortunately, his advice for generating blog traffic isn't to pay him a fee, emulate his site content, or even buy his e-book (it's free), it's general best practice for blogging.

Even if you aren't interesting in making money off your blog, the content specific advice is one of the more concise presentations I've seen. It's worth reading just those chapters, if nothing else. If you do want to make money from your blog I believe this book will help you, though I'm not sure how many people can copy John Chow's success.

I had two issues with Make Money Online. The biggest issue is the self-identified "evil" practices. A smaller issue is the mildly condescending attitude found in some chapters, especially the introduction. Both of these somewhat taint what is otherwise good information.

A detailed review of the book follows.

Known as a Drupal (fan) boy, an evening of WordPress might be the last place you'd expect to find me. But I know a lot of people running Wordpress, and have even recommended it on a number of occasions. And I'm a bit of a conference whore. So there I was at WordCamp Fraser Valley, which had nothing to do with Microsoft Word and everything to do with the WordPress blogging platform.

The first pleasant surprise of the evening was open wireless. A big thank you to Think Referrals for sponsoring this.

I'm certainly not the first person to observe this, and it wasn't a surprise, but it was still really interesting seeing how different the WordPress audience was versus a typical Drupal audience. Many, many end users versus a tiny number of developers. It really brought home how successful Automattic is evangelizing their product with WordPress.com and making it accessible to non-technical types.

The evening consisted of lots of interesting short talks. For the best coverage of the evening, see Miss 604's blog post: WordCamp Fraser Valley Liveblog.