Slides and links from my php[world] talk

Yesterday I gave a talk at php[world] 2019 about "Tips and Tools for Gluing Together the Open Web." Below are the slides, text and links from my talk. Where applicable, the slide images link to relevant websites and code.

A few months ago, I was helping a local non-profit organization with their new website. We were almost set to launch, but they had one more request: can we get the next five upcoming events we've put up on our organization's Facebook page to show up in a list in the website's footer? I initially thought that surely there would be a simple way to do this, but as I looked in to it, the short answer was no, no you can't.

There's an embeddable Facebook widget that can display events, but you don't get a lot of control over appearance and it's far from a helpful list that can be scanned quickly. This seemed like such a basic request - connecting Facebook page events to a website - and yet as I poured through Google and Stack Overflow search results all I could find were frustrated users and abandoned tools that had tried and failed to do this one thing.

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Speaking at SupConf NYC

I'll be speaking at the SupConf New York City 2016 conference behind held at the Digital Ocean HQ in Soho on November 15th and 16th.  My talk is on a topic I've enjoyed thinking about and working on over the years, moving customer support interactions from transactions to partnerships. I'm also excited to meet and hear from some other great speakers.

If you're interested and can make it, tickets are available now. I'll also be sure to share the content of my talk here after the event.

Update December 3, 2016: My slides from the talk are below. Continue reading "Speaking at SupConf NYC"

Slides: Growing a Distributed Team

Last night I gave a talk at a local meetup of tech folks about tools, processes and culture involved in growing a distributed/remote team, and how those might help organizations regardless of their structure.

Regular readers of this site would have recognized my remarks as derived from various posts here. It was neat that at least half of the folks in the room were also working remotely for their employers, so we had some good discussion and exchanging of best practices.

The slides from my talk are below. Thanks to everyone who joined in!

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Speaking at WordCamp Dayton

WordCamp-Dayton-2016-LogoI'll be speaking at the upcoming WordCamp Dayton 2016, happening March 4-5, 2016 at Wright State University. I'll be talking about "WordPress as your digital home," a topic I've thought about for a long time and blogged about recently:

There are tons of places to put your content, but not all of them give you the control and ownership you should have. Your WordPress site is still probably the best place to call home for your online creations. In this session I’ll show you why that is, walk through tools and techniques for using WordPress as your digital home while pushing content out to other places, and answer your questions about how to build an online presence that is fully yours.

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Why Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst was good for you

Republican Congressman Joe Wilson has already apologized for his lack of civility in last night's joint session of Congress, after shouting "you lie!" at President Barack Obama during Obama's speech about health care reform. Wilson is unsurprisingly being raked over the coals by fellow politicians, the media, and indignant bloggers and Twitter users, but I'm not sure we don't also owe him a word of thanks.

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