Of WordPress Training and Learning

Over at Interconnect IT, where I work, we’ve found that demand for our WordPress Training Courses has shot up over the past year or so.  And it’s certainly interesting to see where the work comes from.

Curiously, it’s very polarised – we either work with smaller one man band companies like Jason Nevin who runs a house removals company site who are looking to switch technologies, or big corporates and government agencies such as Shop Direct, The US Mission to the UN and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

I’ve been thinking about why there’s such a big dip in the middle of our client base – 90% of our business is groups with over 500 staff or with fewer than three.

The Gap

Small, one man companies tend to involve highly motivated individuals.  They understand the important of their skills, and they know that in the tech sector they have to always stay up to date.  Large corporates tend to understand this too, and have allocated training budgets to make sure they keep up to date.  Government departments are often a little slower with new technology, but they too need to keep efficient or tax payers will kick up a stink.

And WordPress is a very efficient platform for running many informational websites.

But why are medium sized companies not coming to us in nearly such large numbers as micro enterprises and large corporates?  Let’s see…

Budgets

I’ve noticed that medium companies often have people who are extremely good at what they do, but I do find that there are often significant skills gaps.  I’ve dealt with someone from a school (medium) who didn’t realise that you don’t have to close an application in Windows in order to see another application.  Each time she cut and paste she’d open one document, select the text, close the document, then open the receiving application and paste the text there.  Productivity, as you can imagine, was pretty poor.

I think a lot comes from budgets – many firms around the 50 people size aren’t always able to make good money.  They have to be careful where they spend it – they’re not big enough to have training departments who make sure everyone is up to date, and they’re usually busy.

Culture

Another thing with smaller firms, I believe, is that they’re often started by individuals with a lot of skills – these are flexible folk who can teach themselves and learn quickly from books and the internet.  As they grow they try and hire similar people, but eventually there comes a point where a lot of staff are there for the job.  They need training because they aren’t going to go to the trouble of autodidactism.  They have a job to do, and they’re going to do that and no more or less.

At best, they’ll get on-the-job training.

Our Marketing

We don’t do a lot of it, to be quite frank.  But perhaps our website, approach and costs simply don’t ring true with people in medium sized companies looking for WordPress training?  Do we need to get advertising in business magazines, such as those sent out by the FSB?

Summary

I suspect that the truth is that a company always needs to look at the skills of staff, but as they reach a certain size they have too much going on to give it much thought.  Once they break through that difficult 50 man barrier things seem to start to change again.

But how do we change this?  I’m not sure we can, easily.  Governments often give generous grants, and around here we have Skillworks which helps a little, and we do get local approaches – however, the person paying still has to pay a significant contribution and specialist training is never all that cheap.

Do you have any ideas of how skills can be improved in small to medium sized enterprises?  Should we be marketing our courses more proactively?  What about scheduled classroom courses that keep things at a lower cost, albeit needing more time from the attendees?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – especially in the field of WordPress.

Is WordPress Slowing My Site Down?

I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!

I don’t really look at server response times too much, because generally it’s a bit dull, really.  If our server is really sick then the automatic alerts and text messages from Pingdom tell me to get fixing.

Anyway, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs.  And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is getting slower.  Here’s the graph:

 

Now, what you’ll notice is that generally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deterioration in performance.  Then it plodded along just fine until December 2009 when it got worse again.

Is It WordPress Bloat?

I wondered what had happened to cause this – I’m especially shocked that a page load is now so slow.  I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plugins are generally ones I use elsewhere.  So I did a bit of thinking, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:

The dates correlate exactly with the worsening performance of this site.

Now, correlation absolutely does not relate to causality.  At upgrade time I usually take a moment to review plugins, upgrade the theme, etc.  It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plugins in use here that has caused the slowdown.  I know it’s not traffic to my site – that’s been flat for ages, with only the occasional blip.  The server is a dedicated machine running about fourty sites that we manage, but the load is generally quite consistent and impact on different websites is fairly well managed.

But I’m a speed freak.  I like it when a website zings into view.  I love fast cars.  I love computers that don’t dither.  I love telephones that respond instantly.  So I hate that response times are now below 1s.  That’s not on!

So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slowdown – I’ll be running some experiments on this site, profiling queries, checking the database over and so on.  And I’ll document it all as a way of showing you how we at Interconnect IT do our performance tuning.  Whether I document it here or there I haven’t decided yet – I think it would make a good case study for the site.  We’ll see!  Watch both sites…

note 1 – deactivated Twitme on 03/02/2010

Sean’s 40th Birthday Party

Sean’s 40. But he’ll always be two months younger than me. Dammit. Well, here’s some photos from his party. Enjoy…

OK, it’s taken me four months to actually pull these images from the memory card, get them on my computer, select them, resize them for the web, and upload them.

And mainly because tomorrow I go to see Sean & Em to celebrate the 1st birthday of their young son Matthew.

I’ll try and be quicker next time, but in the meantime, enjoy the pics:

Argh! Spiders!

To my great shame, I’ve allowed the cobwebs to build up somewhat during renovation work.

That’s going to have to stop, because today I just saw something scary.  An entire spider family, with big mummy spider sitting in the middle.  O_0

Cleaning time is about to start.  Sorry little fellas, but you're moving out!
Cleaning time is about to start. Sorry little fellas, but you're moving out! Your mum too. The lot of you, in fact.

Photoblog is No More!

Sometimes… you just have to tidy up, and finally I got around to dumping the old photoblog section of the site and integrating it in here.

I’ve removed the old photoblog now that I’ve gone over to a wider format for this theme – I previously set up the photoblog because I wanted to be able to have large images easily viewable by visitors.  However, I wasn’t really keep the site up to date this year due to time commitments.

How I looked a few years back... and yes, I'd found the hair dye.
How I looked a few years back… and yes, I’d found the hair dye.

In other words, it was just an extra ‘thing’ that was floating around.  I have enough of those, and it’s become time to have a tidy up.

The content’s still here, and I may even create a new category/section called photoblog which will be used for the same purpose.  Or then again, I may not :-)

What it’s Like to Present and Attend at WordCamp UK

Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff.  I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with.  In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators.  People who will make things happen.  And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.

Presenting at WordCamps

Presentation
Presentation

I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life.  I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer.  I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.

But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers.  So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media.  I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers.  I have no history or background in public speaking.

Both got accepted.

Damn!

But it had some great potential too.  I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results.  So what did I learn?  Read on:

1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky

The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V.  At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.

I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject.  But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience.  In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions.  It’s almost impossible.

2. Consider an Assistant for Demos

One can work the computer, the other can talk.  Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.

3. Get in Early

I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event.  I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic.  By the end of the conference people were flagging.  Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage.  You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!

4. Start Funny

In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote.  The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood.  It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.

5. It’s a Great Audience

I was dealing with fellow geeks.  People in the same situation as me.  It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine.  The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet.  This was a whole lot more relaxed.  Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.

6. Get Engagement

I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t.  It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.

7. Be Prepared

At conferences opportunities come up.  Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.

8. Freebies

You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts.  Good gifts though.  I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days.  What geek in the world needs a calculator?  So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.

9. Matt

I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend.  I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL.  So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat.  He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.

Funny hat tho’ ;-)

Summary

An ace time, basically.  I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.

Here’s to WordCamp UK 2010!

Saab 9-5 Aero (HOT) Estate For Sale – SOLD!

Given that I’m selling my motorbike at the moment as well, you may well wonder if I’ve had some kind of financial crisis of my own.

But thankfully, no.  I just don’t need such a large and fast car any more.  When I was doing a lot of sprinting I needed something capable of towing a car trailer comfortably and reliably.  But I also wanted something I could enjoy driving as my daily transport.

City Commuting Doesn’t Suit Big Cars

And that’s what happened, basically – for the past 18mths or so I’ve driven 12 miles to Liverpool city centre, and 12 miles back – congested roads, with a lot of stop-start action.  In the end I bought a Golf TDI which makes much more sense for that kind of driving.  Although I’m tempted to keep the Saab, which I will if I can’t get the right price, I know that in reality it’ll get far too little use in the coming year or two.  The sensible decision, then, is to sell it.

So, here goes…

Specification

This is a 2004  (04 plate) 9-5 Aero HOT Estate with 250bhp.  The full specification items worth listing are as follows:

Bi-Xenon headlights, headlight washers, factory alloy wheels, factory CD/Radio, Nokia Bluetooth Hands-Free (works with most phones), electric windows all round, electric mirrors, heated mirrors, split climate control, dual-colour leather seats, leather steering wheel, lots of airbags (5* NCAP Rating), ABS, Electronic Stability Program, new Vredestein Giugiaro front tyres and lots of life on the identical rears, detachable tow bar, FSH (main dealer or specialist only), two owners (first owner the dealership as it’s an ex-demo car), 58,000 miles, 10 months MOT, Tax until 10/09.

The car is in a gorgeous Capuccino Black.  In other words, most of the time the car looks black or very dark grey, but when the sun shines on it you realise that there’s a pearlescent bronze finish.  The photos below really capture this, which took some effort as it’s not easy to show in pictures – normally it just looks black.

Damage Worth Noting

I’m nothing if not thorough and feel it’s worth noting everything even if it’s minor so that you’re not disappointed if you travel – the car has a couple of tiny dings from the careless door opening of others.  It has a small ding that’s almost but not quite invisible under the nearside rearmost window with a matching scrape on the bumper – that was a van in Paris that did it, and no, he didn’t leave details.  But I’d say very few people can spot these marks – I’ve taken close-ups, however, to try and show marks.  Also, one of the alloys has a barely visible kerb scrape on it.  Picture shown.  There’s a few minor and normal stone chips that could do with being dealt with by chipsaway or similar, but one left a tiny ding on the bonnet.  Another tiny ding was caused by the biggest hailstorm I’ve ever seen, over in Italy.  I expected worse….

Get in Touch – Price to be around £6200

If you’re interested, you can contact me through the contact form on this site, or simply call me, during office hours or in the evening on 0151 709 7977.

If you’re wondering whether someone with the word ‘mental’ in his website address and a history of motorsport will have taken care of his car… well, in racing if you don’t take care of your car you often end up with an accident at some point.  Or losing.  I apply the same philosophy to my road cars – look after them and they look after you.

Enjoy the gallery – simply click on a thumbnail to get the big version, and you can then move between images by clicking on the arrows that come up.

 

And a Deep Zoom Seadragon view of the under-bonnet area

 

 

And now, PhotoSynth

Yes, I may have been playing – I’d be interested to know what you think of this use of technology…

1999 ZZR600 (ZX600-E7) For Sale

Sadly, after ten years, I’ve decided that I’ve really failed to make good use of the ZZR600 I treated myself to back in 1999.  It’s the only new motorbike I’ve ever bought… and I’ll hate getting rid of it.

But practically speaking, I don’t have much use for it, most of my friends stopped riding years ago, and I’ve put criminally few miles on the back since around 2003.

So, it’s time to go, get my garage re-organised, and space made for my car based toy.

It will have a 12 month MOT on it within a few days, though I’ll only tax the bike again if it runs out before sale.  I’m also not going to give the bike away just because it’s old.

The bike is in near perfect condition – as you’d expect for something with just over 4500 miles on it. It’s still very shiny and, frankly, when I polished it up I decided that there was no way I was going to give the bike away for a silly price. In other words, I expect a fair value that reflects its ultra low mileage, the care its received, the way its been stored, and the condition it’s in. I’m open to offers, however, because I know that valuing a bike like this can be quite tricky. For the right person it’ll be a bargain. For someone who just wants something to go to work on it’ll be too expensive. Simple as that.

Mileage appx. 4700
Year Registered 1999
Tax July 2009
MoT July 2010
Service History Some, but not annually due to lay-ups.  DIY checks too.  Will service it before sale.
Condition Almost as new.
Scratches A couple of minor chips on the left (pictured), and small dinks on the left-hand engine cover (pictured) caused by a very slow speed incident involving my disk lock, a gravel car park, and inadvertently doing the splits.

Five Things Bing Does Better than Google

MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a competent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.

Microsoft (MS), quite frankly, gets a lot of grief in the internet world.  Sometimes it’s fair (I never like MSN, for example, from way back in the mid nineties) and often a little unfair.

But Live Search simply wasn’t up to the job.  It didn’t work well.  And I know that people that found IE defaulting to it would either work out how to change it, or simply type Google.com into the address bar.  In other words, many tried it, but it didn’t find the answers they wanted.  The algorithm has been slowly improved with time, but the damage was done.  MS knew they had to relaunch.

Bing, they felt, was the answer.  And in some ways, it’s a better and more productive tool than Google:

Bing - pretty pictures to cheer you up
Bing - pretty pictures to cheer you up

1. It’s Prettier

While I’ve heard many question the function of the landing page photo, I personally really like it.  It’s attractive, well designed, and brings a little bit of beauty into the day.  You can’t sit and surf pretty images at work, so if they’re there as part of the ‘wallpaper’ of a daily tool then that’s a lift we all need.

2. Infinite Image Search

The infinite scroll facility of the image search makes it a quicker tool to use.  Chunking of text related searches makes sense, because we can scan a page relatively slowly, but with images the human eye can scan a huge amount of visual information incredibly quickly which means that Bing’s constantly scrolling visual tool is way ahead of Google’s image search.

3. Video Previewing on Video Search

bingvideo
Bing Video - content owner's nightmare or benefit?

Searching for video content can often be a slow and painful process.  In Bing, when you get a series of videos up on screen you can simply hover your mouse pointer over a video to preview the first 30s and get a feel for the video, rather than visiting the site and waiting for a slow load.  The previews are poor quality, in order to get quick loading, but they’re good enough.  I feel this is one of Bing’s most effective innovations.

One thing where they may struggle is that if you click the video and that video has an embed option, you get it on the Bing site, rather than going through to the source site.  So a YouTube video search result doesn’t send you off to YouTube.  Content owners may not like this.

4. Site Preview

When you hover over a search result, you’ll see a small orange marker appear over to the right.  Hover over that and up pops a preview of the content you’re looking for.  Again, saves a wasted visit as it lets you scan a little bit of content for relevance – something that’s quicker this way than clicking on yet another unnecessary site.

5. It’s Not Google

Bing is, purportedly, a recursive acronym that means Bing Is Not Google.  But there’s something important in that – Microsoft is a highly profitable, focussed company that has the resources to provide an alternative to Google.  This is important – without solid competition Google will cease to innovate appropriately.  MS suffered a similar fate on the desktop – they were too dominant and rivals couldn’t compete.  Apple’s OS9 was dreadfully dated when sat next to a Windows machine of the same era, yet Windows had significant flaws.  It’s only lately with Windows 7 that MS have really started to get their act together properly – because OSX finally gave it some decent competition in certain sectors.

When you start seeing articles on how to change from Google to Bing on Firefox, you know something’s happened.

It Can Get Better

Microsoft Seadragon, with it’s deep zoom and mobile capabilities, and Photosynth technologies could be tied into the image search, for example.  As cheap processing power expands and more and more images are geotagged, this could form an astonishing visual search capability.  A shame it won’t be coupled with Google Street View – imagine what that could be like?

Search is going to become more relevant and more powerful with time.  Developers (our own Interconnect IT included) are busy creating a lot of powerful geocoded databases which will allow for some amazing mashups.  If Google and MS start fighting for dominance in this space the opportunities for users and information suppliers are vast.  Are you looking into it?

Crazy European Sports To Try This Summer

Europeans are considered to be the best educated, most sophisticated people on the planet. They also like diving into bogs, throwing tomatoes at one another, and chasing cheese.

I sometimes think that the British are an unusual breed when it comes to sport, but when you look around Europe you start to realise that quite possibly we don’t have the monopoly we thought we did.

If you’re thinking of a trip to Europe where you can get involved with some local sports, consider these.

Here’s a selection of videos showing some of the things Europeans do for fun:

Cheese Rolling (England)

Take cheese, a round one.  Go to a steep hill.  Find a group of like minded maniacs.  And then chase the cheese down the hill only to be greeted by a group of similarly crazy catchers waiting to ‘rescue’ you at the bottom.  That’s England’s annual cheese rolling contest.  Many people will be hurt and this is proof that the insurance companies and inept Health & Safety consultants haven’t yet managed to stop people risking their own lives for no sound reason whatsoever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM

Wife Carrying (Finland)

The Scandinavians are about the most equitable people you can imagine, yet it’s the men that have to do the carrying in this sport.  Wife Carrying is a sport that involves running a 253.5m course, with your wife on your back.  I personally find the Estonian wife-lift the easiest, but there are a number of styles.

If you’ve been to Finland, you’ll know that they’re not the most svelte of peoples.  If you want to take part and have a typically skinny French wife you stand a good chance…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIB9UcA5iQU

La Tomatina (Spain)

La Tomatina - Public domain image from Wikipedia, by Aaron Corey
La Tomatina – Public domain image from Wikipedia, by Aaron Corey

The Spanish grow an awful lot of tomatoes.  This needs celebrating.  What better way than to throw them at each other?  Every year, in Buñol, Valencia, the Spanish enjoy nothing more than to throw tomatoes at La Tomatina And why not?  Beats throwing donkeys off churches.  My family happens to live in the Valencia region, and I fully intend to attend though it’s worth noting – I’ve been to a few Spanish festivals and I know that alcohol and chaos feature strongly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPQCH1b_LgE

Bog Snorkelling (Wales)

You might think of snorkelling as something to do at a Caribbean beach.  Not the Welsh.  They like nothing better than to get into fancy dress, head to a bog and get swimming in the annual Bog Snorkelling competition.  There are prizes for speed, but many people enter the contest to raise money for charity and, consequently, the efforts that get the most attention are likely to raise the most money – hence the fancy dress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAh7e9d45_Y