Month: May 2019

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
On top of working for Automattic on WordPress.com and our other products, I spend a lot of time volunteering in the open-source WordPress community, sometimes referred to as WordPress.org.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with the differences with WordPress.com and WordPress.org, it goes like this: Once upon a time there was this fellow named Matt Mullenweg. He and Mike Little released the open-source WordPress software in 2003. WordPress initially started out as blogging software but eventually evolved into a rich and the most widely used content management system (CMS) in the world.

So what is WordPress.org?

So, we know WordPress is the software itself. WordPress.org refers to the open source community that supports, develops, and maintains the WordPress software. No single person or entity is in charge and anyone can contribute.

Now, anyone can download this free software, and install it on a web host or local server. You can hack it, break it, bundle it up and redistribute it (within the parameters of the licensing) and essentially do whatever you want with it.

Here’s the tricky part

You still have to find a web host (unless you’re going to run the web server out of your house, which isn’t advisable.) There are lots of hosts out there, with all sorts of different features. WordPress.org has a few recommended hosts here. This is the part where I think people get most confused.

So, you’ve purchased hosting somewhere, installed WordPress, registered a domain, and connected it to the site. Now you’re setting up the site and you have a question. Who do you ask? WordPress.com right? Wrong!

WordPress is open-source software. It’s developed, maintained, and supported by the WordPress.org community. You can ask for help on the WordPress.org forums (and there are lots of helpful volunteers!) or the developer of a specific plugin or theme, but that’s it!

What about my host? They might be able to help. However, most hosts are there to help you with the actual configuration of the web server, and not a whole lot beyond that. There are exceptions to this rule, and hosts like Bluehost have support for the WordPress software, but for the most part, you’re on your own.

This has its benefits. You’re virtually unlimited in what you can do with your site, the sky (and your hosting restrictions) are the limit.

Here’s what most people don’t know, though:

Sure, you can host a site for dirt cheap but it’s probably shared hosting and the bandwidth is likely not great either. How much web storage do you have? If something breaks, what’s the support like? If they’re charging you for SSL, get out. An SSL certificate costs no one anything and it’s a bogus charge, in my opinion.

In terms of bandwidth: you may not think this is important but if you ever have more than one person connecting to your site, it’s a concern. Take a look, for example, of 50 simulated requests to this site:

50 requests served in about 5 seconds. I could run that script all day without any issues.

Let’s compare this to what some other hosts might look like:

How much do you know about software, web development, security? These are legitimate concerns that any reasonable site owner should have. Remember how I said you’re virtually unlimited in what you can do? You’re also responsible for the security of your site and keeping things up to date. It takes work. Because WordPress is open-source software, hackers find vulnerabilities all the time. These are often patched in WordPress core before they have any real effect on people, but folks install plugins made by third party developers and/or fail to update core and get exploited. Happens every day.

If you’re a web developer who absolutely knows what they’re doing, this may not be a concern for you. But for the average user, this is a really big deal.

Enter WordPress.com

Remember Matt Mullenweg? Shortly after founding WordPress he started his own company, called Automattic, which makes a product called WordPress.com among many others. Automattic is passionate about making the web a better place. The vast majority of its work is available to the public under the GPL, and they heavily contribute to the WordPress.org community and open-source WordPress software.

So what is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com at its core is a hosting service like some we’ve discussed above, but it’s really much more than that. It’s a fully managed, site building service, it’s a domain registrar, it’s an all-in-one platform for you to publish your message to the world. It’s much, much more.

So right out of the gate: You can start on WordPress.com for free. Granted of course, you’ll be using a subdomain on a free site, and some other restrictions, but you can still start writing content, uploading pictures and customizing a theme and site for free. I’m not really aware of another hosting service that will give you a space to host a site for free, especially not a WordPress installation, and especially not with unlimited bandwidth. So that’s nice.

You can upgrade to a paid plan anytime, or start out with one, and the benefits are massive. On top of all of the features listed at https://wordpress.com/plans you get:
- Access to run ads with one click (monetization)
- Unlimited Bandwidth (seriously, it’s blazing fast too)
- Updates and security all managed for you (this is huge)
- Real-time backups
- Free domain for the first year
- 24/7 support
Speaking of support: The support at WordPress.com is no joke. These aren’t folks reading off a script, these are bloggers, developers, designers, marketers… in fact, every single person that works at Automattic does a support rotation at least once a year (including Matt himself!)
Well, we tried.

There’s also a dedicated team of folks 300+ strong who guide, troubleshoot, live and breathe WordPress all day long. These folks, called Happiness Engineers (👋) do just that by providing world class guidance and troubleshooting day in and day out for our 156 Million+ users across our products. We’ll show you how to set up a WordPress site, we’ll walk you through theme setup, we’ll write CSS for you, we’ll provide advice and best practices for SEO, and we’ll do it all in real time – all for as little as $5, or $8 a month on a Personal or Premium plan.

We’re also a well-established entity. We’ve been around for 14 years now and we aren’t going anywhere. If you aren’t satisfied with your purchase we have a 30 day no-questions-asked refund policy at WordPress.com on all WordPress.com Products and 5 days for domains.

We keep things secure. All updates to WordPress core (the open source software) are automatically applied to your WordPress.com site in addition to our proprietary software and most if not all features of the Jetpack plugin (another product we make) see: social media sharing, static file hosting, lazy loading images, video players, advanced SEO, eCommerce tools, premium themes, the list goes on…

So why doesn’t everyone use WordPress.com?

Because it has its pros and cons. I’d honestly say (and I look at thousands of sites a month) that for 90% of folks, it’s exactly what you need. You can’t out-scale us. If you get really big, we even have a VIP platform where we have clients like Time, CNN, Variety, People, New York Post, Capital One, even Facebook. Is your site getting more clicks than Time Magazine? Probably not.

However, that remaining 10% of folks do need the extensibility that is simply much easier on a self-hosted solution. Especially for developers. They may have a client with specific needs. WordPress is powerful, but requires an advanced knowledge of web development to really get in there and work requirements out around a client. If you need to heavily modify or extend the software’s functionality – a self-hosted solution is probably the way to go.

Lastly, there are a lot of myths floating around.

Common Myths:

“You don’t own your site at WordPress.com”

This simply isn’t true. I don’t know how this rumor got started but I see it everywhere. Some hosts/platform might hold your site and/or content hostage, but we don’t. At My Sites > Settings > Export we provide the option to Export all (or specific) text content (pages, posts, feedback) from your site and also the option to Download all the media library files (images, videos, audio and documents) from your site.

We also explicitly say this in our Terms of Service:

Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your website as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely. You own all content you post to your website.
https://en.wordpress.com/tos/ Section 7: Service Specific Terms

“You can’t use plugins”

This actually used to be true, and still is for non-Business or eCommerce plans but this is because of the way the site architecture is set up on lower-than-business plans. With a WordPress.com Business plan you can install plugins, upload custom themes, have unlimited storage and bandwidth and literal 24/7 real time support among a plethora of other ridiculous features at $25 a month.

“I need a website, not a blog”

While WordPress itself started out as blogging software, it’s now a very robust CMS and this is true on .com and .org. At WordPress.com, we use “website” and “blog” as interchangeable terms. All of our themes can be used for either a website or a blog. Our default layout is a blog-style format. Take a look at this video tutorial for a walkthrough on how to change your theme’s layout to a website-style format.

At the end of the day:

WordPress.com and WordPress.org both have their pros and cons. WordPress.com is sort like having an apartment. You can’t put in a swimming pool, but if something breaks or you need something you’ll get expert help at no additional cost to you. If you aren’t sure how to paint the walls of your apartment, we’ll buy the paint and show you how. WordPress.org is sort of like owning a house. Sure you can knock down that wall to join two rooms but it’s on you if the house falls, as well.

That’s a pretty base comparison, but hopefully you get the point. Ultimately, it’s your choice. I hope this post was able to clear a few misconceptions surrounding these two platforms for you.

Do you have any other questions? Let me know!
May 10, 2019
Setting an Alias in Windows Powershell.
It’s no secret that the UNIX terminal is a far superior and preferred method for command-line computing. Windows, it seems, is well-aware of this and determined to improve the command line tools on its Operating Systems.

VScode has already come such a long way. In my opinion, their open-source editor is the best on the market. It seems there’s been a change in direction at Windows as of late, as they ease towards a more open-source and user-centric approach. This is exemplified in Microsoft’s new Windows Terminal, a UNIX-style terminal under development for Windows. There’s already Linux subsystem tools available on some distributions, but it’s finicky at best in its current state.

While I’m hopeful for the future, I’ve come to enjoy how much closer Windows Powershell is to a UNIX system in terms of syntax and functionality. It isn’t perfect, but I’m determined to make it as close and comfortable as possible.

Setting an Alias in Powershell

There’s a lot of conflicting information about there, and the Microsoft docs are kind of vague. After doing some research, here’s what I’ve gathered:
- It’s not a good idea to add this directly to your $env:WINDIR (sort of like a UNIX root)
- The recommended way is to add it via a user profile
Steps from here vary, but I’ve tested this method across a few systems and it seems to be effective.
- You’ll want a profile1.psl file. This isn’t created by default. To create the profile1.psl file, open up Powershell and type in the following command:
- new-item $PROFILE.CurrentUserAllHosts -ItemType file -Force
- to access the file, type in the next command:
- ise $PROFILE.CurrentUserAllHosts
- (Conditional) This should be enough, but if you have an issue with this that means you need to change your execution policy: run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser then RemoteSigned then run the ise command again.
Otherwise, the first two commands should be enough to create the profile then pull it up in Windows Powershell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) – it looks like this:

From here, we can set alias’ that call functions. You can see in my example that I’ve written a function that:
- Changes directory
- Opens Google in a web browser
- Removes a file in the current directory named fileName.txt
All we have to do now is set up an alias that calls that function. Anywhere below the closing bracket of the function we can write:

Set-Alias google goSomewhereThenOpenGoogleThenDeleteSomething

Now save, exit the ISE and Powershell and restart. You should be able to type google as a command with nothing else to run the function you just created. It might throw an error saying: rm : Cannot find path 'C:\Users\fileName.txt' because it does not exist. which is expected but if it opens Google in a browser, that means it was successful.

Handy to do

I’ve set Alias’ for a lot of things but most handy are to set alias’ to check your profile’s location and open it in case you want to add more, you won’t have to remember the steps.

I use profile which displays:

and as you can see above, profile_open which runs the command to open my profile in the ISE, ise $PROFILE.CurrentUserAllHosts

In addition to that, I set commonly used scripts and programs on Alias for convenience so I don’t have to navigate to a directory and execute with the program prefix. E.g. my most recent ratelimit script I wrote for work, I just type ratelimit from anywhere to start the program:
May 9, 2019
Reading list: First Half 2019

I read a lot during my 100 days of running, pretty much every day and mostly via Audiobook. One of the great things about committing to run was I was able to easily get into and finish books on Audio. I read some the old fashioned way as well… pretty much the technical manuals… but for the most part, I listened. This was meant to be a first quarter reading list but I’ve been very busy since it ended, so we’ll call it “first half of 2019.”

Anyway, without further ado: here was my reading list, in the order I read them, along with a short summary of my take on the book and a link to purchase. Full disclosure, these are affiliate links. I don’t run ads on this site 🤷. Comments, suggestions, feedback? Feel free to comment below 👇 or reach out to me here.

Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins

This was really the book that inspired me to challenge myself to run in the first place. I talked a lot about this book in my initial “New Year, Improved Me” post. But my words really don’t pay this book its proper tribute. Dive in as David grows up abused and the only, ending up 300lbs and spraying for cockroaches when he decides to change his life forever and become one of the baddest men on planet earth. Amazon Link.

Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler

This was a re-read. I read this book back in 2015 when it wasn’t well known who the SEAL in the book that trained Jesse was, but after learning it was none other than our man Goggins I had to go back through. This book is an easy read, and hilarious the whole way through. Imagine an uber-rich CEO guy who hires a Navy SEAL to live with him for 30 days. That’s this book. Full of laughs and lessons, I highly recommend this book in it’s audio form. Amazon Link.

Living with the Monks by Jesse Itzler

After finishing my re-read of Jesse’s last book, I found out that he had come out with another one. Admittedly not nearly as good as Living with a SEAL, I still enjoyed the read and Jesse’s narration is always funny. Read as Jesse decides he needs to shake things up again, heading to upstate New York to spend a few weeks with the world famous dog-training monks of New Skete. Amazon Link.

Finding Ultra by Rich Roll

Suprising gem find by browsing Kindle Audiobooks. I loved this read. Rich Roll was a serious alcoholic, at risk of losing it all and almost his life many times. Read as he transforms to an accomplished ultra endurance athlete, doing it all on an exclusively plant-based diet. Amazon Link.

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

This was another re-read, but I couldn’t resist. Red Rising is a three-book trilogy series by Pierce brown and probably my favorite series of all time (start book one here). It’s a mix of Star Wars, Ender’s Game, Starcraft, and Greek Mythology and it’s amazing. I recommend these books to everyone and I’ve never heard negative feedback. If you’re going to read anything on this list – read this series. Amazon Link (This is Book 2/3).

The Plant Powered Diet by Sharon Palmer, RD

After reading “Finding Ultra” I became interested in Rich’s plant-powered diet as an endurance athlete. This was research on a diet with more plants from the perspective of a Registered Dietician. It’s a great read, and I will say we signed up for a weekly produce delivery after I finished this book. Amazon Link.

The Obesity Code by Jason Fung, MD

Going deeper down the rabbit hole of diet, health, and wellness I picked up this read by Dr. Fung. An extremely interesting read, Dr. Fung debunks common myths about health, wellness, and weight loss to include calories in, calories out and macro-nutrient intake. Dr. Fung primarily treated kidney disease before becoming curious about why patients who were given insulin gained weight when it was “common knowledge” that reducing calories and increasing exercise curbed weight gain. Amazon Link.

Meditation by Camelia Gherib

As it’s probably obvious at this point, I was deep deep into a quest to improve myself mentally, physically, and spiritually. I listened to this on Audiobook where the format was 21 days of 10 minute meditation sessions, and I have to say it was excellent. I still use some of the breathing techniques in an attempt to still my mind and push out unwanted thoughts or feelings. Amazon Link.

The Dresden Files – Books 1, 2, and 3 by Jim Butcher

My friend Travis recommended this series to me. Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only openly practicing wizard in a modern day society. These books are sort of like your old detective/private investigator murder mystery books except the protagonist is a wizard and he’s trying to run his own investigation alongside the police. The stories are interesting enough but the Narration by James Marsters is superb. I read the first three books but I won’t spam you with a review of each. Book 1 | Book 2 | Book 3 Amazon Links.

iOS Programming – The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

I switched over at work from WordPress.com to our Mobile Applications and decided to try and refresh on some iOS knowledge. I hadn’t even looked at Swift since 2016. This was my first Nerd Ranch experience and I can’t recommend it enough. If I’m ever breaking into another programming language, framework, or technology I’m going to look for Nerd Ranch first! Amazon Link.

Ascend Online by Luke Chmilenko

This book was alright. LITRPG is usually my favorite guilty-pleasure reading. As far as they go, I thought Ascend Online left a lot to be desired. If you’re interested in the story-is-told-from-the-perspective-of-a-game-player-in-a-VR-world Sword Art Online style, this might be for you… but I recommend a series like Awaken Online first. Amazon Link.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

A surprisingly intimate look into the life of Michelle Robinson and later, the Obama Family as a whole. I really enjoyed this read. It’s extremely long but Michelle is an excellent and engaging Narrator, and the book is split into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More. Read as Michelle grows up as a Black Female on the South Side of Chicago later attending Princeton, Harvard Law, and eventually landing a position as a corporate attorney at Sidley Austin where she met Barack before working with non-profits. Eventually, Barack runs for the Illinois Senate, the U.S. Senate and well, you know how the rest of the story goes. This book is a strong case for the idea that privilege has almost nothing to do with race but almost everything to do with environment. Michelle’s parents are attentive and engaged throughout her life, and they sacrifice everything to help Michelle find her voice and instill values in her that last throughout her lifetime. Amazon Link.

May 8, 2019