"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to improve my productivity. My latest discovery, which is really working for me, is a treadmill desk (shown above). Here’s why.
I’ve noticed that as I get older, regular exercise is becoming an increasingly important necessity for me to stay sharp and focused. (Here’s a New York Times article on the positive benefits of exercise on the functioning of the brain.) Walking along some of the 60 miles of dirt road in my Vermont town is my preferred exercise activity (as well as stacking wood in the spring) but bad weather can make this onerous, so five years ago I purchased a Sole F80 treadmill and used it when I couldn’t stand the thought of going outside. I didn’t use it much—about 150 miles per year.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a growing number of articles about standing and treadmill desks. Standing desks do not appeal to me; if I’m thinking on my feet I like to be moving (I often pace around the room while on a phone call). However, the concept of exercising while working intrigued me. I’m writing a book, which involves cranking out 600+ words a day until it’s done and I’d been having trouble staying focused on my writing while meeting my daily word count target. I didn’t want to exercise all day, but I thought even an hour of walking while writing daily wouldn’t hurt.
Quite simply, this has been one of the best productivity investments I’ve ever made.
Writing while walking has turned out to be a fantastic way for me to maintain focus & creativity. I’m still using the 20+5 work sprint method that works so well for me, but the time on the treadmill flashes by and I’m eager to get back on the treadmill to write more. I have the Sole set at 1.7 miles/hour and an incline of 4%, creating a 2/3-mile walk and 100 calorie burn every twenty minutes according to the who-knows-how-accurate Sole readouts.
Walking to work
Currently, I use the treadmill for 3+ 20-minute sessions a day, equivalent to walking a couple of miles and burning 300 calories each day. Over a week, if I don’t eat more, that translates to a weight loss of about a pound, though that’s not my main objective. It will be interesting to see if I increase the number of sessions over time; I suspect I will.
The SurfShelf fits just about every treadmill, stationary exercise bike, elliptical trainer, and stair master out there. I didn’t have much problem installing it on my Sole, though I hung it lower than recommended so my keyboard wouldn’t be too high and added a second horizontal strap from an old messenger bag around the vertical straps to cinch it in tight to the F80 faceplate.
Calling the SurfShelf a “desk” could be a little hyperbole as my 17″ laptop completely covers its work surface, leaving no room for anything else. That works for me since I just want to write. But my large laptop does fit and is held securely in place by a single Velcro strap that can be installed and removed in seconds. As you can see from the photo, on the Sole I’ve set the keyboard sloping forward; not ideal for typing all day, but perfectly comfortable for a few twenty-minute periods with breaks.
Conclusions? As the Gizmodo SurfShelf review and the Amazon reviews indicate, I am not alone in admiring this inexpensive gadget. If you have an underutilized treadmill—or can buy an inexpensive used unit—this could be a great way to increase your work productivity through increased focus and exercise. Who knows—maybe you’ll even lose a few pounds too?
I’ve worked out of my home office for the last thirty years, and have learned a few things about working productively. During that time I:
Consulted on information technology for hundreds of companies.
Wrote and maintained almost a million lines of code.
Ran a couple of small non-profits (still do) and served on my local United Way Board.
Wrote Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, and am now hard at work on my second book.
Along the way, I spent a fair amount of time experimenting with different environments and work processes, always with the goal of improving my productivity. As you might expect of a proponent of the philosophy of risky learning, some things worked and some didn’t. I’ll reserve the things that didn’t for another post.
You may not have as much control over your work environment and process as I do. Nevertheless, perhaps you will find helpful some of what follows.
Work environment: Office furniture, ergonomics, and beauty
Twenty-five years ago I purchased two astronomically expensive high-quality office chairs. Until then I had sat on a sagging ancient chair rather like the one pictured. Hours spent in this chair had taken their toll. A kneeling chair replacement, while an improvement, was not comfortable for long periods. The marvelously adjustable Steelcases that made me gulp when I signed the check paid for themselves many times in adjustability, comfort, and eliminated physical therapy appointments.
A few years ago I replaced both chairs, and this time I was happy to sign the check.
In the same spirit, I learned the importance of correct ergonomics for computer keyboards and mice (later, touchpads). Long hours toiling over these machines translate to pain and discomfort if keyboard heights aren’t right and you don’t position pointing devices correctly. Don’t skimp on firm work surfaces, keyboard drawers, and touch devices that are easy to use; your body will be the victim if you do.
Finally, when I had the opportunity and funds to add a custom home office to my home I spent serious time and money creating a space that I would find beautiful. Built at the northwest corner of my home, the office receives natural light from two sides and looks out onto a flourishing garden and beautiful Vermont stone walls and woods.
Knowing my appetite for workspace, I also took the opportunity to build about three times more beautiful custom desktop space than I thought I’d ever need. (A good thing I did—these days it’s pretty full most of the time.) Having a beautiful space for my work feeds my energy and spirit and helps me get through those times when I’m feeling creatively blocked and work isn’t going so well.
Getting Things Done
No question—until the day I die I’m going to have tasks on my to-do list. Being at peace with this reality in the here and now is hard. I am perpetually interested in exploring more than I can practically accomplish. As I age, my ability to keep track of and continually re-prioritize what’s important lessens. Embracing Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done has been a lifesaver. I may always be trying to bite off more than I can chew, but GTD allows me to avoid being overwhelmed by the consequences of my curiosity. What many don’t understand about GTD, and what makes it so powerful, is that it doesn’t impose a specific implementation on you; it’s a framework that helps you build processes customized for your needs. Here’s more information on why and how GTD works.
Highly flexible, continuously-on backup of digital stuff
I have one word for those of you young enough to miss the decades when personal computers were expensive, hard to use, and frequently broke. Lucky! I’ve spent too much time configuring and running expensive and all-too-fallible equipment designed to back up valuable digital data. Today, there’s no excuse for losing any of the ever-increasing quantities of information we entrust to our electronic gizmos. My four computers continually back up to each other (local backups—great for fast restoration of a lost file or two) and to the internet cloud (remote backups—where I’d go if a catastrophe took out all my computers).
You can easily back up to other computers or hard drives in the same location or across the internet (perhaps your friend’s business across town) or to hosted servers sitting elsewhere on the internet. The name of this magic is CrashPlan. (No, I do not get a penny for recommending their service.) If you’re not using a service like this with every computer you own these days you’re nuts.
For working productively, run sprints, not marathons
It took me years to learn that working on a problem or task for hours on end without a break is not an optimum way to work. Please don’t make this mistake (no matter how young you are). Currently, I decide on the task I want to work on, set a timer for twenty minutes, and work uninterruptedly until the timer sounds. Then I’ll take a break for five minutes and repeat two or three more times before taking a longer break. I came up with this approach myself; an almost identical version is called Pomodoro. The frequent breaks give my brain relaxed downtime to mull over a problem and, often, propose creative solutions. And I find it easier to ignore the lure of the modern environment of constant email and internet distractions by telling myself I’ll just work for twenty minutes first.
That’s my summary of what I’ve learned about working productively. Do you have lessons to add?
Many in the event industry exhort us to “make conferences memorable” but are short on specifics. Well, disasters are good. Meeting your life partner at the party guarantees memorability but is hard to engineer. And a massive spectacle sometimes works (though it costs a bundle).
Here’s another way.
Start with a truism
“We are the stories we tell ourselves.”
It’s enough of a truism to be turned into a TED Talk. I prefer a slightly different formulation:
“We are the stories we tell about ourselves.”
The stories we tell, our stories, are central to who we are and who we become. Our stories, large or small, don’t really fully exist until we tell them to others. In the telling, we learn who we are.
In my experience, while telling ourselves stories has a certain power, telling them to others is the core process by which we become who we are.
The experience of becoming who we are. That’s worth remembering. That’s memorable!
Make your conference memorable Give your attendees time and a supportive conference environment to tell their stories to each other. No, providing an end-of-day mixer with loud music won’t work. Instead, use conference process like roundtables to draw out and share attendee stories, provide plenty of time for peer-led follow-up discussions, and don’t scrimp on the conference white space.
Once you give your attendees an opening to tell their stories to others, they will run with it, and wonderful things will happen. They won’t be wonderful in the way that big spectacles can sometimes be wonderful; they will be wonderful because they will be personally meaning-building and consequently memorable.
Disasters and over-the-top production can make conferences memorable, but they usually score poorly on ROI. Try my way.
While talking to Judy Kucharuk on the weekly #eventprofs happy hour hangout, she mentioned that she was watching the Olympic opening ceremonies live in her home in British Columbia. Our U.S. chatters were having no such luck. NBC made it hard to watch the Olympics online in the U.S. You have to subscribe to cable-huh?-and have MSNBC and CNBC. NBC refused to show the opening ceremonies live, deciding to delay broadcast until “prime time” (whatever that means these days).
Doing stuff like this annoys lots of people. Indeed, many technologically savvy US citizens simply found live Olympic web streams in other countries. Or they watched other country’s live coverage on their Roku boxes. Net result – loss of eyeballs on NBC.
Why NBC is doing this
Of course, we know why NBC is doing this. The company’s business model is to wrap what it decides are highlights of the Olympic Games in lucrative advertisements. The same old TV model we’ve had for years: serve up canned content, carefully packaged to maximize revenue. (Though, come to think of it, cutting out the tribute to the London terrorism victims during the opening ceremonies isn’t my idea of careful packaging.)
NBC isn’t doing what its viewers want. It’s doing what it wants, to satisfy its legacy business model. A model that is becoming more and more out of touch with what consumers—who supply the eyeballs for advertisers—want.
When NBC broadcast the 2000 Olympic games, online internet streaming didn’t exist. The company had a U.S. monopoly on placing its expensive cameras around the Olympic venues. Today, every spectator can bring an inexpensive decent quality videocam, stream what they can see, and tweet commentary. (A special law was passed to make this a criminal offense. Yeah, with hundreds of thousands of spectators, that’s gonna work really well.) Twelve years ago, NBC could decide how to package its coverage and get away with it because there was no alternative. Today, using the same model leads to widespread complaints and increasing defection from their content.
When spectators at an Olympic event can provide better live coverage than a $30 billion company, that company had better watch out.
Are you serving up canned or live content at your Olympics?
Today, the old model of providing canned content at a conference has become archaic. People no longer want to be passive spectators. They want live opportunities to connect with and be part of what’s going on. There are plenty of alternatives for broadcast content now; they don’t need to attend a face-to-face event anymore to access this style of content whenever and wherever they want it.
When your conference competition can provide a real-time, interactive, and relevant conference experience to attendees, a large majority will choose them over a traditional, broadcast-heavy event, no matter how slick the production values. If you’re still serving up the latter, you’d better watch out.
How does one move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad?
[I wrote this post so that others in my situation won’t have to go through what I did. Feel free to skip the introduction and concentrate on the nitty gritty instructions.]
Possibly boring background and introduction
The original Apple iPad shipped on April 30, 2010, and, that very afternoon one arrived at my rural home. It included an unlimited AT&T cellular data access plan for the sum of $29.99/month. I chose this plan because AT&T advertised that I could turn it off for the months I didn’t need it. Within 30 days, AT&T reneged on this promise and discontinued all unlimited data plans.
Perhaps to avoid a class action suit, the company said that people like me could keep their unlimited plans. So far AT&T has done this, despite announcing in June 2012 that they would throttle all remaining “unlimited” plans after 3GB (3G/4G) or 5GB (4G LTE) or more of data in a billing cycle.
I have been happy with my original iPad, and was not planning to upgrade to a “New” (3rd generation) iPad. But in June the good folks at the annual edACCESS business meeting insisted that the organization buy me a new one. I tried to decline, but they were most insistent. Thank you edACCESSians!
Technical support trials and tribulations
I had heard that I could move my unlimited data plan to a new iPad and called Apple to confirm. Apple said I would need to talk to AT&T and patched me through. The first AT&T tech was unable to answer my questions and I asked to talk to a second. The second AT&T tech told me it was a simple matter and gave me directions that subsequently I found were not accurate.
When I received my new iPad I discovered that what AT&T told me (that I could switch the plan on the new iPad itself) did not work. I called them again and was led through an incorrect procedure that wiped out all my work customizing the new iPad. I still could not transfer the plan!
After wasting far too much time, I finally discovered that you need to go to a special AT&T website (which is not documented on AT&T’s website as far as I can see) to transfer an unlimited plan to a new iPad. To avoid my trials and tribulations, follow these steps, which should take about ten minutes:
The nitty gritty: How to move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad
Turn on your new iPad and go through the setup. Don’t bother to restore from a backup of your old iPad at this point.
Go into Settings->General->About so you can see the IMEI and ICCID fields for your new iPad.
Click on Update Device Information, enter the new iPad’s IMEI and ICCID numbers and click Next. Then click Submit at the bottom of the user & payment information screen. Click Continue and you’ll be logged out and told to login again in a few minutes.
Login again and your Data Plan should now show as “Unlimited MB for 30 days – LTE”. You’ve switched your plan to the new iPad, but you’re not done yet. If you check your email at this point, you’ll see a worrying message from AT&T saying that the automatic renewal of your plan has been canceled! Don’t let this happen!
On the new iPad go to Settings->Cellular Data->View Account and login. Choose Edit User & Payment Information and re-activate automatic plan renewal. You will receive another email from AT&T confirming that your data plan will renew automatically every 30 days. Phew!
Your old iPad will now have no data plan associated with it. If you want to add a new (limited data) plan to your old iPad do not login with your old email and password (the ones now associated with your new iPad). Instead, on the old iPad go to Settings->Cellular Data->View Account and enter User and Login Information for a new account (one that must use a different email address to login than the one now in use on your new iPad). You’ll then have a range of current data plans from which to choose.
Conclusion
I don’t know how many iPads are floating around with an unlimited AT&T data plan, though Apple sold at least a million iPads of all kinds during the time the plan was available. But I would guess that there are still probably a hundred thousand unlimited data plan iPads around. A quick Google search shows that many people in my situation have been looking in vain for clear directions to transfer their plan to a new device.
AT&T, do your customer service reputation and your tech staff a favor by posting clear instructions on how to do this transfer in a prominent place on your website. I suspect many will thank you. I certainly would have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27SZ8NhJUos
Here’s a one hour video of a Hangout On Air that Jenise Fryatt & I held July 24, 2012 on How to moderate a Twitter Chat.
To decide whether this is a valuable use of your time I’ve listed below the topics and tips we covered from our summary notes.
Introduction – 5 minutes
Jenise & me intros
– poll of participants; brief answers; tweet if watching
– Q1) who wants to start a new chat? moderate an existing chat; chat name?
– Q2) what’s the most important thing you’d like to get out of this hangout?
Set up – 12 minutes Presence on the web – 2 minutes
helpful to have permanent place for chat on web: wiki, WordPress site
– include schedule, format, rules, chat archives (use Storify)
Chat formats – 3 minutes
fixed or rotating moderators
1+ moderators on busy chats
topic based
guest(s)
pre-announced questions
moderator asks pre-determined questions
to all
to guests first, and then opens up discussion
Choosing a topic – 2 minutes
something that can be usefully covered in an hour
appealing
“how to do something”
“tips for doing something”
controversial current topic
Tools – 3 minutes
Tweetchat
TweetDeck/HootSuite columns
chat hashtag; mentions; DMs columns
use when you don’t want hashtag at end of tweet
keep as a backup in case Tweetchat goes down/is slow (rare)
Preparation – 2 minutes
gather up topic links in advance
crowdsourced topics http://www.allourideas.org/epchat
write out Qs in advance so you can paste them into your Twitter client
Running the chat – 23 minutes Protocol – 2 minutes
welcome as many participants as you can
encourage first-timers, lurkers to tweet
Welcome everyone – 4 minutes
moderator intro (write out in advance include welcome, your name, who your with, topic for today and welcome guest if any)
participant intros, including ice-breakers
possibilities: names, company, location
ice-breaker question: favorite candy, unusual experience etc.
Heart of the chat -12 minutes
asking questions
concentrate on making them clear (in advance?)
make tweets stand-alone
participants often RT questions
number them Q1), Q2) and ask participants to answer w/ A1) A2)
keep track of time; have a plan for time available to get through Qs you’ve prepared
but be flexible if circumstances dictate
don’t be rushed by anything; don’t feel bad if you miss a tweet or two, we are human; can always go back after the chat & respond then
consider ignoring trollish/annoying behaviour
end of chat – 5 minutes
ask for takeaways
thank moderators, guests
mention next topic/guest(s)/time
describe where/when archive will be posted
Questions?
Post-chat – 8 minutes
use Storify for archives (login first, click on save regularly, laggy!)
Jenise: can add rich media (videos) to Storify; create threads (subheads, move Tweets around)
Questions on how to moderate a Twitter chat? Ask them below!
Here are my favorite WordPress plugins for a small business website.
These days when considering a web presence for your small business, it’s hard to not be impressed with the flexibility and power available from a self-hosted WordPress site. Although WordPress’ roots are in the blog creation world, it’s pretty easy to build a WordPress site where the blog is just another tab in the menu hierarchy. (Example? This site!) And with over 17,000 plugins available that can extend the functionality of your website, you’ll almost certainly be able to add just the special features you want. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are so many plugins that you could use, and, for performance reasons, you don’t want to have more of them activated than you need.
I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last person to write a post like this. But I hope you’ll find some gems in the following list. Here, in alphabetical order, are my favorite 14 WordPress plugins.
Akismet (free for personal use, $5/month for small business sites)
“Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam” sang the merry men of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (As a schoolboy, I watched the original episode with this song.) I knew that my blog posts were finally gaining traction when the volume of spam comments started to soar. Akismet uses the combined submissions of its users to automatically flag comment and trackback spam. On my site, it has successfully rejected hundreds of thousands of spam messages and only missed a few hundred.
You can see the comments that Akismet flags as spam on an informative screen and quickly delete them, or—rarely needed—reclassify them.
If your blog is getting any kind of decent amount of traffic (this site has had a million page views in the last seven months) you need Akismet. It will save you significant time dealing with the spam comments and backlinks that will otherwise plague your posts.
BackupBuddy ($75 for two licenses + 1 year of updates. Discounts are often available.)
You back up your computer files regularly, right? (If you haven’t yet learned that computers die and data disappears, you will, and it won’t be pleasant.) Imagine your pain if your painstakingly created website became corrupted or vanished one day, a victim of a glitch, a crashed host server, or an evil hacker.
I used to use my hosting company’s free backup service to make complete backups of my website, but they only let me do this once every 30 days! Not frequent enough, and I needed to run through multiple steps to get everything. Although I am still using the same hosting company if I ever decided to move I would have no idea how to transfer my backed-up files onto a new service.
Enter BackupBuddy. This is an expensive plugin but for my peace of mind it’s worth it. Backups are one-click operations from your WordPress Dashboard, or you can schedule them to occur automatically. You can back up just your WordPress database or the entire site (including that massive media library you’ve uploaded). The plugin has the capability to painlessly recreate your site on another host, aka site migration, and comes with two licenses to let you do this.
Bad things happen to good websites and backup is essential. Whether you use BackupBuddy or another solution, back up your website regularly!
As I write this I have 1,501 outbound links scattered around the posts and pages of this website, and 2 of them are broken. How do I know this? Why, thanks to the invaluable Broken Link Checker, of course! Links are always going dark on the web, and some of them could be on your website. This fantastic plugin periodically checks that every link on your website still points to a valid page. Those that break can be easily reviewed and updated, or if they have disappeared for good, unlinked. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to install this plugin to keep a site reliable and broken-link-free.
Let me start by emphasizing that you need to keep your WordPress installation up to date. I learned this the hard way last year when I started seeing ads for cheap drugs that appeared to be linked to pages on my website appearing in Google searches. I was still running an older vulnerable version of WordPress, and the subsequent cleaning of my site took a large amount of time. Trust me, you do not want this to happen to you. Despite being an IT consultant for 25 years, I am so glad these days I do not have to understand and protect against all the nefarious ways that hackers can subvert WordPress websites. That’s BulletProof Security’s job. The plugin guards your crucial WordPress configuration files against attack.
A warning is in order though; I don’t find this plugin particularly easy to set up. It conflicted with my webhost’s statistics reports and figuring out how to make them available again required some configuration changes that I had to get from the author of the program (who responded quickly and accurately I might add). There are many other security conflicts like this that you might run into, and they are documented at exhaustive length in the associated support forums. In addition, plugin updates can lose these custom changes unless you install them just so.
Nevertheless, this plugin supplies peace of mind, albeit in a complex package. This is one plugin you may want someone with technical expertise to install and maintain for you.
This neat little plugin piggybacks onto Akismet to further reduce comment spam. If Akismet identifies a comment as spam, Conditional CAPTCHA will ask the commenter to complete a simple CAPTCHA. If they fail, then the comment will be automatically discarded or trashed, while if they pass, it will be allowed into the spam queue (or approved, if you so choose).
Comments not flagged as spam by Akismet will appear on your site as usual.
I have seen a dramatic decrease in spam displayed in Akismet since adding this plugin. Recommended!
Everyone needs a few user-fillable forms on their website for one thing or another. There are several plugins that supply this functionality; Contact Form 7 is the one I use. Although it’s optional I strongly recommend you turn on the CAPTCHA option supplied by the free Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin to prevent bots from submitting spammy forms. This plugin has been 100% reliable and is easy to set up.
I used the default WordPress comment system for a long time but switched to Disqus about a year ago. (In case you were wondering, it has the capability to import all your existing WordPress comments.) Disqus has more features than the WordPress comment system and I have found it to be reliable. It’s also prettier. One great feature of Disqus is that it is available on many blogging platforms, allowing you to see your own comments across multiple sites.
I maintain an event list on my website that contains information about upcoming peer conferences I’ve been told about and conferences I’m facilitating or at which I’m presenting. The Events plugin allows you to display this list in a sidebar and/or on a page and includes the capability to display separate lists of historic or future events. The plugin has fields for all the usual information you’d want to share about an event and is highly customizable. This plugin does exactly what I want.
You’d probably like to display a collection of testimonials from happy customers about your wonderful products and services, wouldn’t you? The Quotes Collection plugin does just that via a simple interface. You can choose whether the quotes include an author and/or a source, how and when they get refreshed, etc. I display a random testimonial in my sidebar; I now have quite a collection! Don’t miss this easy way to add a little interest and customer-supplied positive sales message to an appropriate place on your website.
Currently, I have 180+ blog posts on my website. Some of them, cough cough, are quite good and still relevant, even if they were written a couple of years ago. How can I expose these old-but-good posts to an internet world that thrives on the new?
Using Tweet Old Post, that’s how.
Although I’m not a fan of excessive automated tweeting, I use Tweet Old Post to tweet two to three randomly chosen old posts every day. As the author explains: “This plugin helps you to keep your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from Twitter. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set the time and no of tweets to post to drive more traffic.” I’ll add that you can exclude posts individually (e.g. if they refer to out-of-date information or one-time events) and/or by WordPress Category, and you can supply the hashtags to be added to each tweet. The plugin only supports a single Twitter account, so if you have more than one you’ll need to decide which account to use.
Since I started using Tweet Old Post, I’ve seen a measurable increase in visitors to my blog. Use it once you’ve built up a respectable volume of posts—but don’t overdo it!
After my frustrating experience with my website being hacked (see the BulletProof plugin above) I decided to implement a belt-and-suspenders strategy for site security. So, besides BulletProof, I also run this plugin, which simply supplies a warning message when any files in my WordPress directories are added, deleted, or changed. This means that I get warnings when I upload media for posts or install new versions of plugins, which is a little distracting, but I like the knowledge that if something slips past Bulletproof this plugin should catch the attempt to install new stuff on my server. File Monitor can be set to skip user-chosen directories so that backups, captchas, caching, site maps, and other routine processes won’t constantly trigger it.
I sleep a little better each night with this plugin installed.
As you might expect from the name, Popular Posts is a sidebar widget that displays your most popular blog posts. A wide range of options allows you to customize how the posts appear, and the plugin adds a Dashboard panel that shows blog post statistics. Nice! This is a great way to showcase what visitors like on your blog and lure them into exploring your content further.
Every blog post you write and every revision you save while writing is stored in WordPress’s SQL database. Over time this database gets bloated with old post revisions, deleted drafts, spam comments—all kinds of what technical folks call cruft. WP-Optimize allows you to easily slim down your WordPress database back to the core content. This can improve the responsiveness of your website and make it a little quicker to back up. A few clicks to a svelter site, and a satisfying display of the space freed up. What’s not to like?
OK, I admit it, I’m a bit of a cheapskate. The Conferences That Work website uses inexpensive shared hosting, which crams multiple websites onto a single server. As a result, my site used to often take over a second to return a webpage from a click (use a free service like gtmetrix.com to monitor the responsiveness of your site—the results may surprise you). Earlier this year, hosting provider issues that I won’t go into here led me to investigate caching my website using the WP Super Cache plugin. The results were drastic—my average response time is now 1/5 of a second, a very significant and welcome improvement.
Setting up WP Super Cache appears a first sight to be a bit overwhelming, though the process is easier than the installation instructions imply as the plugin includes a number of checks that everything is configured correctly and will tell you what to do if it isn’t. Enough people (over three million downloads!) use this plugin to reassure me that it’s solid, and I can’t argue with the 5x speedup in site performance. Recommended!
Final thoughts
Most of these plugins are donationware. Send the author some money if they make your life easier.
Check that any plugin you install is compatible with the version of WordPress you’re running. Check compatibility before you upgrade WordPress too!
I don’t claim that this list is definitive. In fact, I won’t be surprised to learn of better choices for the functions these plugins supply. That’s one of the best reasons for writing posts like these; I’ll learn new stuff! But I hope this list of my 14 favorite WordPress plugins is useful to you too. Let me know in the comments!
“Our basic ideas about design have been based on Newton, says Tim [Brown of Ideo]. Design assumes the ability to predict the future based on the present. We need to think more like Darwin: design as an evolutionary process. Design is more about emergence, never finished…” —From a blog postby David Weinberger about a talk given by Tim Brown of Ideo
The marketing pioneer John Wanamaker reportedly said that half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is we don’t know which half.
Similarly, there are probably fundamental principles underlying good design of human meeting process. The trouble is, we don’t know what they are. (Beware anyone who claims they have a comprehensive list).
I believe we need to experiment like scientists and artists to discover over time what works and what doesn’t. So that’s why my attempt to share what I learned about running participant-driven events between 1992 and 2009 in my book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love is a frozen-in-time snapshot of the “best” process I knew up to the moment the ninth manuscript draft went to the printer.
Thirty months later, the supplement I started writing within a few months of publication remains an ever-changing work as I continue to experiment and learn at every event. [See the comment below for supplement information.] As a result, printed books are poor vehicles for this kind of information, so I expect to publish the supplement as a continually updated ebook of some kind—but that’s another story.
As a recovering ex-physicist, I love Tim Brown’s description of the old paradigm of design as a Newtonian knowable. Thinking of design, in my case meeting and conference design, as something that is emergent, responsive, and continually evolving is a humbling and yet wonderfully freeing lens to view my work.
Here’s a letter to every event technology company trying to sell me stuff.
Dear event technology vendor,
I’m sure I’m not the only event professional who is bombarded with emails from event technology companies. I receive solicitations from multiple companies each week, asking me to check out/review their latest mobile app/conference management software/social networking tool, etc.
Guys, I don’t want to be crass here, but could you give me some idea upfront how much your products/services cost?
If cost was no object I would be a customer for much of the stuff you are pitching.
But the cost is not no object. For me to evaluate the value proposition you’re offering I have to know the value of what you provide and what it costs me. The former is my job. The latter is yours.
I read your patter about your product or service, decide to find out more, and click on your embedded link. So far so good. I jump to your elaborate website where it’s obvious you have spared no expense in creating great material designed to turn me into a customer. Overviews, feature lists, videos—it’s all there.
Except for any kind of price information.
You don’t share your pricing model! Is this a $299-for-unlimited-use, a $5/seat, or a $10,000/event deal? Are there packages of services available at clear price points? If customization is an option, what ballpark costs are we talking about?
About the only thing I’m sure of, once I’ve wasted my time searching for this information on your oh-so-pretty website, is that you don’t use a freemium model. You would have told me about that.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time to enter into your next sales step—the “contact us to discuss your requirements” dance—on the off chance that your actual pricing model represents real value for me.
So next time—if there is a next time—please consider giving me all the basic information I need so I’ll be compelled to check out your possibly awesome creation further. I can handle talking about money upfront. And so can you.
“There was a frankness you’re not going to get anywhere else.”
“What a unique opportunity!”
“That was eye-opening.”
“We got a one-time look behind the curtain.”
“That was an incredible session.”
“I’m so grateful that session was available.”
Those were some of the comments I heard while waiting outside the door of Room 102 as attendees streamed out after the first peer session at the 21st edACCESS annual conference held at the Peddie School, Hightstown, New Jersey. Sadly, I’ll never know what I missed—and neither will you unless you were there.
The only Olympics tweets I’ve seen all day are from people pissed that NBC is not broadcasting the opening ceremony live. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27SZ8NhJUos
