The personal blog of Rhys Wynne, a WordPress freelancer based in Newton-le-Willows, England.
I’ve come back from WordCamp Lancaster and am still recovering, so whilst I write up that event, I’ve got a small bit of news.
This Saturday is my bbPress Book Launch Party (which is looking less and less likely I’ll actually have a book out by then, damn delays), and right now free tickets are available.
It would be great to see you there! Tickets are available until they’re gone.
So another month begins! It has been a mental 6 months for me, and already 2013 is shaping up to be a huge year. If you would’ve said to me that in 6 months ago I’d have started a business and written a book, I’d probably called you a nutcase, but after half of 2013, it’s been incredible ride.
Unfortunately, this has reflected on something which putting right will be my focus for my July Challenge.
So yes, I just about managed to put a fifth of my wage into my savings account, which was an achievement in itself, however I did go into my overdraft the last week of June – for no other reason that my last week was just a wee bit mental. Ay well, but managed to put away the amount I wanted to. No more mental weeks for me, certainly not in July…..
….as July’s challenge is quite simply to get fitter. These last two or 3 months have been so busy, that they culiminated spectacularly on Wednesday night – where after booking The Nook for the bbPress Complete Launch Party I took it upon myself to sample the range of beverages that they have to offer, and also went out again on Thursday. And Friday.
It’s beginning to take it’s toll, and feel myself getting bigger and feeling a bit bleh when I look at myself in the mirror. This culminated on Saturday where I ran downstairs and back up again to get to the postman and found myself out of breath.
Yikes.
So inspired in part by Richard Shove’s gym and diet session, I’m going to try and increase the amount of exercise I am doing. I started on Sunday with a gym session and although I was quite sore on Sunday night, I was surprised how fit I actually was (managed a good hour or so with about 35 minutes cardio, 25 minutes weights). I do actually walk a fair bit (I walk 3 miles to work most mornings), and general dicking about with the wrestling means I’m not completely stationary.
It’s not a diet per-se, as I actually eat pretty good (not perfect, like I don’t shovel Kale down my gullet like it’s going out of fashion), plus probably my biggest weakness for calories (alcohol) will probably be knocked on the head if I’m spending more time in the gym.
So yes, those last two paragraphs explain my biggest problem – I make excuses for my fitness far too easy, as I generally say I’m not that bad. So for the next 30 days, no excuses. This month I’ll do the following:-
I’m not setting any goals, but my reward is if I do this I’ll probably lose weight, and if I don’t I’ll probably still be a fat unhealthy bastard. That’s my reward & punishment. Wish me luck!
Otherwise known as “my big news from April as my April Challenge“.
I have written a book.
A genuine, published, “buy it in Waterstones if you ask for it but can buy it off Amazon no problem” book.
I was approached a few months ago by a publishing firm asking if I wanted pitch for the possible writing of a book. After a bit of research, and a pitch, I was accepted and for the last two months I’ve been scribbling away at a book.
It’s been hard, it’s been tough (writers block is so much worse when you have deadlines), but on or around the 19th of July, bbPress Complete (a provisional title) is expected to launch, all being well.
I haven’t done it alone, so a huge thank you to various people: Cass Brookes, Shane Jones, Alex Moss, John Wilson, Jem Turner, Joost de Valk, Nile Flores, Emily Clark & Adam Croft who have helped me or offered to help me in the process.
During one of those periods of writers block, I went out for a drink with Shane, and we decided that the best way to celebrate the release of the book would be a launch party on or around the launch date. As tonight I finally confirmed the venue for the book launch, I feel it’s a good point to share it with people.
The event will be held in The Nook in Chorlton, and is invite only. There will be free tickets available the week before the event, but for now, to gauge interest, there are only paid tickets, which includes a signed copy of the book (either at the event or as soon as I get the copies), and a free drink. To know how much I love buying drinks for people, that’s worth the price of admission itself.
To buy tickets, or to read more about the event, please visit Eventbrite.
So yeah, it’s been a secret for ages, I’m just delighted to share it. Feel free to ask questions/congratulate/mock me now. All I can say is yes I had a proof reader and no it’s not written in Welsh.
If you remember back to my Goals of 2013, one of my goals is to save a bit of cash. This manifested this month with my monthly challenge of giving myself a cash amount for what I will save. One way I’m doing this is by avoiding fruit machines (yeah it’s a habit I’ve kinda dabbled in since my University days), and instead, when bored, playing on quiz machines instead.
In truth, I’ve always liked a dabble on quizzers in my time, a small guilty pleasure with my pint. In fact I’ve probably played most games on quizzers during my time spent in pubs, so I’d like to think I’m pretty good at them, and know what makes a good game. As such, here’s my three favourite quiz machine games ever.
You’ll notice a theme with all games on this list, in that they have a fairly defined end game. Games such as Cluedo you can play for hours because the machine will eventually screw you over, rolling numbers on your dice that will miss all the good squares. Monopoly is another game, with early versions not even telling you the points you have to reach before the cash prize.
Monopoly: Streets Ahead though is one game that takes the classic Monopoly and provides you with an end game. For one, they get rid of the dice entirely. Instead you have to pick properties you would like to win. Answer all the questions on a variety of subjects in the round to bank the points. Get over the number of points and you enter the end game, which you’re nigh on guaranteed to win a prize.
You can also enter a “shop”, which gives you the chance to exchange points accumulated up to that point for properties, tokens (which give you perks) and extra passes and try agains, and there’s a couple of skill games.
In short, it’s quite a fun quiz game, and probably my favourite quiz based quiz machine game. It is fairly easy to win something, though does have a habit of throwing up “Hotel & House” repairs towards the end, which is a bit screwy, but not irrecoverable from. The fact that this screwy feature exists knocks it down from second to third.
This game is quite fast, but quite easy to win a pound or two on. The game features a 16 square grid, with 8 right answers to a question, and 8 wrong answers. You need to find all 8 correct answers. This game does have a habit of throwing up some nasty rounds early on (one in particular is “Find 8 Cigarette Brands”, as somebody who has smoked a grand total of one cigarette and one cigar in his life, it’s tough!), but overall they are pretty fair.
What’s nice about this game is that the random, but welcome, feature that after the end of rounds, your lives and assists (“Eliminator” which eliminates 2-3 wrong answers, and “Find 1” which finds one correct answer) are refilled, which is always handy when the random difficult question shows up.
The only thing that lets this game down is the speed of it. For 50p, you are probably getting a minute or two of game time. It’s frantic, particularly with the timer which speeds up at later levels, it could do with being a bit slower I think, but overall my usual #2 choice if #1 isn’t on the list.
And lo, the best quiz machine game, in the world, ever is Pints Win Prizes. This game has a £10 jackpot, and is your basic hangman game. To win the game, each puzzle gets you a pre-determined amount of beer into a pint glass (or, if you have a “Happy Hour”, a small amount in each pint glass). Collect 10 pints to win the jackpot, but various prizes are available for complete pints (starting from 4 pints). Bonuses are the usual bonuses you get with hangman games (Pass, Extra Letters, Complete Phrase, Extra Vowels and Eliminator), and you get 6 lives. You can also “Pull The Barmaid”, which will get you 3 pints straight off.
In short, it’s fairly straightforward to get decent wins, and also really good fun. The diverse range of categories means most rounds have at least one category that you’ll like.
If you can find the second version of the game (green bar, rather than blue), then play that. It has far fewer categories than the third one, and doesn’t have as quite a difficult bonus round when it wants you off the machine.
So a blog post that has been doing the rounds in the WordPress Community has been “Do not buy WordPress themes that bundle premium plugins” by Coen Jacobs from WooThemes. In it it is a exasperation of the arms race experienced by many plugin developers when dealing with some theme developers, who are happy to include premium plugins in their theme.
As introduced in the post, one of the issues of including plugin functionality in themes is that you increase the load time and – in the desperate attempt to be all things to all men – you actually end up bloating your site with features you cannot replicate or don’t need. For example, you may notice this blog running slightly faster over the last few days. This is largely due to removing one plugin that was a legacy from the previous design, who’s functionality is no longer needed. Imagine if that was buried deep within a theme? It would take me as an experienced coder a while to remove the code, and a less experienced individual would probably just be stuck with the functionality.
It has gotten so bad now that at 3 Door Digital we now try to avoid buying themes, as wrestling with them to get them working takes longer than say using Underscores or Peadig to design from scratch.
The Premium issue is a problem, and is something that it took me a while to figure out a solution with WP Email Capture as with WordPress, all derivative code needs to be GPL compatible (which, in my case, it is). It’s something I’ve dealt with a couple of times as theme developers bundled the premium versions of my plugins with their theme, promising extra functionality. When you buy a premium plugin, you don’t just buy the plugin code, you also usually buy access to support and updates, which people can remove should they desire (Gravity Forms – for example – is a GPL plugin but has a solid TOS. I’m speaking with somebody now to get a similar for WP Email Capture). Whilst GPL developers generally are quite a helpful bunch, if you stop them feeding their kids (or in my case, my Pie & Pringle addiction) then – if you knowingly buy a theme with premium plugins attached – you should be able to understand that they may not be so willing to help if things go wrong.
Unfortunately, customers are often caught in the middle of this, and suffer the headache when they are stuck between a plugin developer who has no record of the premium customer, and a theme developer who doesn’t have a clue what they’ve packaged with their theme. The worst case scenario has been for me when a customer used a cracked version of a premium theme (that injected footer links) that was bundled with a cracked version of my premium plugin (that emailed every signup that ever signed up to a dodgy email address). This hack broke when the plugin owner tried to remove the footer links. Of course, both the theme developer and myself were unable to support it, and in the end we gave a copy of our plugin and theme, unhacked, for free.
I should add that I do have great working relationships with some top notch theme designers. Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs has been absolutely crucial in making my plugins more friendly to designers (you should check out his themes by the way), and my top affiliate has just topped three figures in commission last month alone (on top of his theme sales), so it can be rewarding working when plugin and theme designers work together.
So please do it! It’s been a negative rant, but if it means that more theme designers and plugin developers working on ways of complementing their products, rather than stepping on each others toes, then the community and customers will all benefit.
