Part One My goal is to free the audience from their fear of failure so they can either start posting content or so they can increase the amount and quality of content they are posting. I will do this by sharing past experiences that outline the value of taking the risk, facing your fears, and putting yourself out in the world. I will teach them to focus on what they can change and ignore the things they can’t change or that they can’t change right now. I will use the example of my first website at the midway marketplace, my first post as the blind blogger, and my successful Amtrak Writers In Residence Application. In the end I wil challenge them and remind them that if a guy like me can do it with all he has going against him, then what is their excuse.

Since the introduction of the WordPress REST API, the potential for using it to power React applications has generated much excitement among developers. But what is an actual use-case for these technologies, and how can it improve the user experience? In this presentation we’ll show how WordPress was used as a foundation for building an in-gallery video kiosk for the Clyfford Still Museum. We’ll begin by looking at the design process for a museum experience: How digital design can reflect the physical space in which it is installed, and how graphic and movement choices affect visitors’ sense of intimacy. We’ll show how the video kiosk platform was built to scale with the museum’s growing video library, how we made the videos accessible to people with hearing impairments, and how we designed the system to be content-managed from afar. From there, we’ll demonstrate how content-management via WordPress combined with the REST API and a React front-end provide an intuitive experience for administrators and users, save development time, and provide a smooth native-app-like experience. We’ll finish by detailing the hardware used to prese

Continue the discussion Published January 28, 2019 There are many tools that help us understand and improve the state of web performance on our WordPress sites. But it’s not always obvious which tool is right for the job and how to use it. When would I use “field” data from real users? What is my “lab” testing tool trying to tell me? In this workshop, we will examine the landscape of tools at our disposal: WebPageTest, HTTP Archive, Google Analytics, and the Chrome User Experience Report. We will use these tools and real world examples to better understand how slow a website is, what is causing it, and how to fix it.