Maintaining WordPress with Russell Aaron

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Hey, everybody. In this episode, Russell Aaron and I talked about a plugin that helps him do support for Maintainn. So we talk a lot about what it takes to be a good support person but we also talk about the important information necessary to offer that good support. All in all it’s a great conversation. I had a lot of fun. I think you will too. And so without further ado on the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Russell Aaron of WebDevStudios. Russell, how are you?

Russell Aaron: I am amazing, how are you?

Joe Casabona: I am fantastic. I’m a little envious that you are outside. So we don’t have video on this podcast but I have video chat open so I see Russell is outside with his awesome setup in like a dual monitor setup. Very, a little bit envious of that. But,

Russell Aaron: I don’t know if you can see past like the 50th balcony inside this auditorium but it is great right now. And I live in Las Vegas. I work outside. I’m sitting on my patio. The weather is amazing and this is how I like to build things.

Joe Casabona: That’s excellent, really glad to hear that. I do have a balcony off of the master bedroom in our new place that overlooks a golf course so I just needed to stop raining here on the East Coast and I’ll be golden. I will smoke cigars while building things. So…

Russell Aaron: That’s how you’re supposed to do it man.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. So Speaking of building things, we are going to talk today about Maintainn tools. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you or I believe WebDev maybe came up with this idea?

Russell Aaron: So my name is Russell Aaron, and I am a developer at WebDevStudios and I also do support for Maintainn. And so essentially this is a tool, it’s called Maintainn tools, it’s free on the WordPress repo. This is something that we have been using internally for years and it’s a tool that we started to decide that maybe we’re not the only people who need to know this information. It could benefit everybody in the WordPress community as you know, so we kind of started slowly building some stuff out to say maybe they need this, maybe they need that, and then we had an idea to kind of roll all these ideas in the one. And that’s where we get the name Maintainn tools from.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice. So just looking at the page on the repo here, it shows site info, site scanner, you can manage plugins. Why don’t you break that out a little bit for us, give us like a high level overview of the feature set.

Russell Aaron: Yeah, sure. So the feature set and Maintainn tools is fairly simple. So every plugin on the repo has a home page right now, right? Like you activate the plugin, it takes you right to the home page. So on the home page it kind of gives you that overview but so there are some tools that every developer should know such as what are the permalinks setup like? Does this server offer curl? What kind of version of PHP are you using? How many post types? So we have, it’s called site info is the very first screen that you’ll see and it tells you everything you need to know about your site, how many plugins are activated, how many plugins are installed. If you’re on multisite, just things like this that you need to know, right? When it gets time to debug, these are helpful tools.

And also the first thing that we built was one of the ways to where anybody using the plugin can actually email that setting to somebody else. So this way even though you might not be using Maintainn or using WebDevStudios, you can still email this information to your developer and they can take a look and maybe it helps them figure something out, right? That’s kind of the idea.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome.

Russell Aaron: Yeah, so then the second feature that we have is called Checksums. So what it’s really doing is essentially we’re going out to wordpress.org and we are checking your WordPress core files on your server against the WordPress core files that you would get from wordpress.org itself. Our checking is to see if anything has changed, if there’s a mismatch ’cause WordPress gives you this check some number and so we’re checking your number versus their number and if everything’s cool, you get a great success message and if something goes wrong there’s an alert and what to do next.

Joe Casabona: Nice, so that feature specifically would that be like if your website was compromised or just out of date like it both or none other things?

Russell Aaron: So part of doing support and security for clients is when somebody comes to us and says “Hey, we think we’ve been hacked.” It’s one of the first things we check, right? Let’s go and check core, nothing in core, nothing in config was changed. All right then maybe it was a plugin. Nothing in the plugin then the theme. It’s one of the first places we start when we do debugging, right? And that’s something that I was even aware of until I started working at a company like WebDev and now it’s my go to.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. So instead of going to wordpress.org, downloading the latest version of core and just replacing it, you can just do the Checksum on this plugin and save yourself a bunch of time.

Russell Aaron: Right. Instead of trying to connect to your FTP and randomly download, you know, something from WP admin, this is so much easier, is way easier.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome.

Russell Aaron: So then we are slowly building out tools. So one of the ideas that we had was what if you could leave a note on a plugin for other people to see. So we built the thing that’s called ’Admin Notes’. So essentially what you do is you check it and when you go to the list of plugins inside your dashboard you’ll see the plugin name and the version and then you’ll see the description. And then to the very far right hand side though there’s actually a way to where you can leave a note for the plugin. So the idea here is that let’s say something, there’s a setting in WooCommerce that breaks your site and I have to go and deactivate it. I can leave a note to somebody that says “Hey, please do not touch the setting until we verify the latest version of this plugin that gets updated has been checked.” right? So it’s an idea to just communicate inside of the WordPress dashboard instead of sending an email or instead of doing other things like that. It’s kind of easier to just do everything on the WordPress site, right? And on top of that you can auto update so you can say this plugin I always want to auto update so whenever there’s a new release it will just update regardless or you can lock that and say no matter what we can never update this. So it’s kind of one of those things where if I leave a note that says “Hey, please don’t go and touch the setting. I’m going to lock it as well.” That way I know that even if I’m not awake or if I’m not by my computer I know that my client site isn’t gonna break because I locked it down .

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. So this plugin sounds phenomenal. It is just like for anybody even if you’re not, you know, troubleshooting for a developer, if you’re creating a client site, this is going to have a lot of great information. I could see myself leaving notes for the client. You know, install a plugin and I say like “Oh, this plugin does this to make sure this is checked and things like that. So this is fantastic. So well you work at Maintainn which is part of WebDevStudios is that correct?

Russell Aaron: Correct.

Joe Casabona: OK, so I can see like how you would come to the conclusion that this would be a very helpful tool. When you decided to release it or even when you were before you guys built it did you do any research to see if there were other things out there?

Russell Aaron: So there are some other things very similar that there’s already another plugin admin kind of note thing and I actually, I’ve built a tool that it’s called ‘Query’ All the post types and it will actually show you all the registered post types on your site that, ‘cause you know, everything is some things can be hidden or some things cannot be queryable stuff like that so they were already tools that we have built internally or that we know the people who built that you know how the WordPress community is so we all know each other relatively, right? We did that but it was something where we just said how do we make this easier for ourselves but how do we also give back and say even if you’re not using us how can we help WordPress in general give better support to their developers ’cause I think that’s an area that is still kind of touchy right? It’s kind of cowboy in the sense of there’s no real handbook on how to do support. Every company is different so maybe we can kind of launch this out and just say here’s what we want to do. That’s part of that research is. Now that people are downloading it and installing and playing around with it will figure out like what else do people want to know about their site ’cause there’s a lot of stuff like post statuses. I didn’t realize that was a big thing instead of WordPress was the different kind of post like revisions and stuff like that. And when you install this plugin like 10 show up and you’re like “I didn’t know that.” and that’s something that even I didn’t know that came in WordPress core there’s just, it’s a lot of stuff that you can discover about WordPress that was not really publicly hidden but just wasn’t publicly shown.

Joe Casabona: Right, right, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So I could see this and I think a few, well a few months ago now but in an earlier episode in Season Two I talked with Tom MacFarlane about one of his plugins for showing the page template that’s being used in the admin area. So you go to pages, ad pages or all pages and it shows the template in a column and that combined with this would make my life a lot easier, right? Because now like I can get a high level overview of everything but that I mean like click click at it and see what template it’s using and stuff like that.

Russell Aaron: Right and to that credit it’s one of those things where it’s just, it’s kind of drilling down to say even if you don’t know how to solve the problem, here’s where you need to go and look, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah.

Russell Aaron: No, go ahead.

Joe Casabona: Oh. I’m just gonna say you know, so the research was essentially in using it. I like to ask if you’re part of a mastermind group? But in this case, you work for WebDevStudios you know, so I see the #wsd chat and stuff like or WDS chat and stuff like that. How often do you talk to your coworkers about little projects like this?

Russell Aaron: Every day. So this actually got started before I worked at WebDev was we had this tool that at anytime somebody sent out a support request to us they would use a plugin that we install on their site and it would actually email us this information so we know when somebody says “Hey, this is what’s happening.” We can take a look at this long text file and you know maybe off of that we can identify something right off the bat. And then that plugin kind of slowly evolved into what we’re using now. And then about two months ago we just decided we’re gonna build something cool that does something awesome. And that’s like what would version 3.0 be if we did this and it kind of rolled into doing this other thing.

So at WebDev we have another company called Pluginize that’s where we sell all of our plugins and add-ons and stuff like that Pluginize.com. And the director of that John Hawkins have took this over and said, ‘Alright let’s build this Maintainn tools.” And we just started pulling resources to build all this and we included devs in the company. We did on Slack, we did and here and we said what would you guys like to see and we kind of pulled our minds together and we released you know, version 1.0.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So this is on the Repo for free currently. Is there a paid version on Pluginize?

Russell Aaron: There is not a paid version. This is free. So what was eventually going to happen is we have an add-on that we use that Maintainn so if you sign up for our service we’re going to install an add-on that hooks into this to do some other stuff.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, that makes sense. Yeah, ’cause I can imagine, I mean this free plugin if i’m doing client work day in and day out is gonna save me hours, right? It would have saved me hours about six months ago when I was trying to figure out if the site was hacked or not. So add-ons to make it, you know, to give it even more functionality, it’s a pretty easy justification I think if you’re talking to the right people, like if you are a freelancer who maintains WordPress websites, this plugin absolutely will save you time.

Russell Aaron: Not only does it save you time but it’s just, it’s kind of like that Ground Zero of, I didn’t mean like that, but it’s kind of like that home base of where do I start, where do I look. And sometimes it can be solved relatively simply, right? Like there’s an error and it says something called like tribe_events and you realize that “Hey, that’s a post type” because I look in this plugin and I see that a match in the post type and now I know that that’s added by a plugin that just saved you know 40 minutes of trying to try to do like a grep in terminal trying to go through all the plugins or something. This plugin definitely saves time throughout the day. I don’t know the exact minutes but I’m willing to say it’s a light year.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And for me anytime I have to do anything in terminal it’s going to take me 15 minutes to look up what I need to use in the exact syntax for it. So I know I impress my non technical friends with my ability to navigate terminal but if you know anything about what you’re doing, you’ll know it doesn’t take me. I’m not very good at working within the command line.

Russell Aaron: Well it’s one of those things where we even have WP CLI, right? and even though it gives amazing tools you still have to FTP down everything to just to start going through that or you have to connect it. This is just kind of installing it for free, set it and it’s always there. You know, we’re not adding it, we’re not adding functionality to the front so it shouldn’t break. it’s basically reporting, you know, thoughts doing. it’s kind of a tattletale plugin isn’t it that I think about it.

Joe Casabona: Yep. It’s gonna be renamed Snitches now. So…

Russell Aaron: But it’s one of those things that with multisite like how many plugins are actually network activated like could get to that screen is like four clicks or you can just have this setup said away, you know, that “Hey, these are the five that are network activated” that’s time saving value added if you will. That’s just handy to know.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. So this is a pretty dev heavy tool. So I bet that and the guys at WebDevStudios you guys are pretty tough having books so I’m really curious to your answer for this question which is how did you build it? And I’d love to know, like did you know what kind of things you used to make this a team effort, what kind of methodology is used for coding, what’s your editor of choice and stuff like that?

Russell Aaron: So first of all, rule number one is escape everything. All HTML, everything escape it, right? Ao we started out we built a whole brand new Git repo up. It’s actually on GitHub that it just maintain tools as well. So we started with that and we gave the people who are going to work on this project the appropriate access. And we just started giving things up “Hey, you’re on this, you’re on that”, and we kind of just scrubbed it if you will, right? Here’s what we wanna build, let’s build this out. We have one of our guys, name is Gary, who’s just phenomenal and somehow knows every answer. So we just kind of said what would you like to work on and he took on the plugin notes and he’s a brilliant PHP developer. How do we start building off that, right? So a majority of the plugin is all PHP, we have our own internal it’s called the ‘Plugin Generator’ and so everybody generates their own plugin. And then once we got it to where a stable version, we merged everything together using Git, pushed it into a branch and then we started testing.

Joe Casabona: Oh wow! Well that’s actually I’m gonna stop [inaudible 19.19] that’s pretty interesting. So you all generated I assume you decided on what you want to call it and kind of the docblock and then you each generated drum plugin to work on the features and because the starting point is going to be the same and it’s not like a whole mess of merge conflicts and things like that, right?

Russell Aaron: Right, yeah. So we really actually didn’t have a name for it. Used to just be called the “Maintainn dashboard” widget and you know, to join Hawkins credit was just “Hey we’re going to call it Meeting Tools” brilliant idea, first of all. But essentially what we did was we all generated something and then how are plugin generator works is like I install a post type just by running a command and I would just push that up. And you know the way that the plugin is built it would just include that class and it’s good to go so it’s not like we really had merge conflicts as much as we just had to make sure that we were naming things correctly so we didn’t have code conflicts.

Joe Casabona: Right, right, right that’s fantastic. All right. So sorry to interrupt you but I just wanted to like parse that out a little bit ‘cause it sounded really cool.

Russell Aaron: Yeah, no. It’s first of all, I hate when people say yeah, no, so I apologize for that. It’s something that we didn’t really decide but if you use Git it makes sense, right? You only commit your changes, here’s what I did and then once we agreed “Hey this is version 0.1” then we pulled that. And that was our master branch and then we started building from there.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s fantastic. So you all generated your own version of the plugin. Gary took on the admin notes and I think that’s about where we were.

Russell Aaron: Yeah, so Gary took on the admin notes and I actually two months before we did this I actually had this idea for plugin notes. And I went to Gary and just said “How would you do this?” and literally he had like three coronas. He lives in Florida so he was underneath the palm tree, he works in his winter cold, he works in his hammock. So I’m outside on my balcony, he sits in his hammock. And literally the next day he showed up and said “Hey, check out this” and he had this plugin built and we were going to release that as a single version. Then as you know, as I told you earlier we merge it in. Gary built this and then I did all the admin interfacing for it so all the page views and how things get properly displayed and sorted. And then we have the guy, another phenomenal developer named Michael Beckwith and he made sure that all the info that gets emailed and sent all that stuff works and he made sure that was just dialed, right? So we had somebody developing this aspect, we had Gary developing new features and we had me making it into a cute little UI and that’s kind of how our flow works.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. So what is it like working you know, with the team? I know a lot of people are probably freelancers. We don’t really get into that too much on this podcast. So why don’t you talk a little bit about that ’cause I know that’s something that a lot of people and more are facing, right? You get a job at an agency or even your front end developer now so your brain has no room for back end or vice versa. So you find yourself working with people. So what’s it like working on a team? What some advice do you have for that too?

Russell Aaron: So number one, doing customer support you can’t just be a back end or front end yet you have to do both. I learn something new about support every day. Something comes in our inbox. I’m like I didn’t know you could do that. Working with a team like WebDev I get to bounce ideas off of people right? or it’s something where I can ask a question that says “Hey, how would you do this?” and then somebody sends me a zip file because the dev built that like six months ago. It’s kind of cool knowing that other people are this interested in WordPress as much as I am. And they’re doing it on such a higher level to where I can kind of pick their brains and then it only ups my game, right? So I’m an admin of the advanced Facebook group on Facebook and that’s another resource where if you are a freelancer and you wanna feel like you’re part of a team that’s a great place to go because you’re going to get a lot of helpful advice and you know some people will write code for you or they’ll suggest a plugin something along those lines. But from being freelancing to work into a team it’s night and day you know, because everybody has their own system and how they do things I like to use sublime text some people like to use PHP storm but at the end of the day once you merge in the Git it doesn’t matter what it was written in as long as it works. It’s kind of interesting to see that flow.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s see we are about 8 minutes out from the half hour mark. We talked a little bit about how the plugin got started and so why don’t we combine these two questions into one?

Russell Aaron: Oh I like it. It’s called the devil feature.

Joe Casabona: Exactly.

Russell Aaron: Hey, that you have a new segment on your podcast called ‘The Double Feature’

Joe Casabona: ‘The Double feature.’ I love it. I’m gonna write that down actually. So we’ve got, maybe you could talk about a significant change from version one to version two as I see it’s on version two in the repo right now? And then what are your plans for the future of this plugin?

Russell Aaron: So version one was just getting something out the door, right? No, the real answer here is version one was what we had originally was called the ‘Maintainn Dashboard’ widget which is just something that we installed when somebody signed up for our support service. And it was an easy way for them to communicate with us when they sent us an email. It just, it said this kind of a status overview of what’s going on when we started talking about how can we make this for the public. Well, the first thing is you have to give him some kind of UI, right? You kind of have to give me something to look at ’cause even if you are not a developer you can still install this plugin because you can see a top level view of all your posts types or all your post statuses or what your permalink structure is stuff like that. So even though you’re not a developer this is a great gateway into kind of learning about developing. And so we started thinking how do you put that into a UI sense? How do you display that somebody without making it look like a bunch of zeros at once, right? That was you know, kind of the kickoff and then eventually it was adding the admin notes,and then getting the Checksum in, and then making sure that we had all of our hooks for the add-ons that we’re gonna add into. And then the last version was escaping everything right? ’cause we don’t want to break anybody, how about without B as a support company if we say “Hey, go install this plugin.” And you know, the query monitor gives you this bad thing. So that was one of those things where it was, “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do.” Version one was what we have, version two is what do we want it to look like. And that was that build process ’cause sometimes some people’s version one is just building something and then saying where do we go. But we kind of already had that groundwork done because we already had this plugin built.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. And then where are you going for the future? What does version three look like?

Russell Aaron: Version three I mean, so one thing we would like to do is with the checksums, we’d like to start checking with plugins. The tricky part about that is that wordpress.org gives you that checksum value for the WordPress install itself for all the core files but they do not do it for plugins because that load on the server would be so astronomical that you know, like maybe they would have to start charging for WordPress. So we want to develop something internal that we could essentially start checking for maybe not all of the plugins but like you know, WooCommerce is the big plug-in, jetpacks stuff like that where we can just, where we can do some kind of check. Because again even though you use WordPress and I use WordPress and we were both catalogers, the plugins that we use to do our job might be different. But we might have the same plugins, you know, Jetpack contact form 7, WooCommerce something along those lines so we can take you know, like the top 50 plugins and start that way, right? That would be a good start.

Another thing that we’re working on is besides adding the admin notes like what else could we do with that? You know, what’s another feature that kind of counts as support but it’s not like “Hey, we just wanted to do this funny thing” that’s a ‘smiley face’ when you click this box, right? I mean so we have some things in the works that are not 100% decided but I do think we would like to build something that would just check core plugins. ‘Cause again you know, to Jetpacks credit, they are a very smart team, they know what they’re doing but they have a lot of features. And if you try to debug that to see if it’s been hacked, that would take a lot of time. But if you could have something, if you could have something that just checks Jetpack in an instance and gives you a number that would be so much helpful. Again, it’s all about saving time.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Well that sounds awesome. Definitely keep an eye on that. And with the last couple of minutes here, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Russell Aaron: Trade secrets?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Russell Aaron: Yeah, so first of all doing support you kind of have to ‘don’t care.’ And what I mean by that is some people get really excited and they get overwhelmed and like so they type in all caps. And then some people like you get the same person that sends you an email every day about their site and after a while you just like, “Ugh, this person again?” right? When you do support you have to treat every question as if it’s never been asked before and then you have to treat every question as if it’s the most important thing in the world ’cause that’s one of the hardest things about doing support especially through email is you cannot tell the person’s tone or diction in an email unless they use all caps and exclamation points. So you kind of have to assume that they are asking this from a good place and they’re just saying “Hey, we notice there’s a problem, how do we fix it?” instead of jumping off a cliff like, “Oh no! They’re yelling at us.”

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. That’s man, that’s crazy and that’s awesome. Way back in episode one of this podcast, Jason Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro talks a little bit about that and how you know, you need to not take support tickets like personally like it’s not an attack on you. Usually someone’s having trouble and they get frustrated and we’ve all been there, right? You know, I’ve sent many in nasty emails to my old Internet service provider so that’s great advice.

Russell Aaron: I mean we’re not gonna mention names but their hair color was AOL right? It’s something that I mean even with one of your episodes with Pippin Williamson talking about support, he mentioned a great thing about just if you document well, and he does something well, you kind of lower that support. And one of the things we do have to maintain is we didn’t build the plugins that people are asking for help with but it’s one of those things where let’s go and figure it out and now we all know, right? And that’s something that we try to blog about when we find something to blog about.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. And even better is we are right at the half hour mark, so fantastic. So that’s the regular interview. For Season Three, I’m doing something new. I’m doing the Fast Five. I think for the first few it’s the Fast Six that I’ve lost the6th question. But Fast Five sounds better, anyway. So the first four questions are going to be like gut check answers like what’s the first thing that comes to your mind. The last question you could put a little bit more thought into ’cause it’s a little more thought provoking. Are you ready?

Russell Aaron: Ok. I’m just kinda worried about your copyright infringement on the Fast Five like if it, does Vin Diesel or the rock know about this?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. They’re on their way to my house right now to rough me up a little bit but that’s OK ’cause [inaudible 31.46]

Russell Aaron: OK, OK. I am ready to answer it.

Joe Casabona: All right. What is your favorite book or the book that you just last ran?

Russell Aaron: My favorite book is a “Confederacy of Dunces”

Joe Casabona: That is a great book. Awesome.

Russell Aaron: It is one of my favorite books in the history of the earth.

Joe Casabona: A fantastic. That is I read that book ‘because it was like on the 100 books that every man should read and it’s just excellent. So if you’ve never read it dear listeners, definitely check that one.

Russell Aaron: It’s actually one of the saddest books because the guy that wrote it became famous while he was alive and then you know his mom kind of funded it and now it’s like what it is in international bestselling. He’ll never get to live that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s super interesting too. That’s a really great fun fact about your fun fact. Very cool. What is your favorite music?

Russell Aaron: My favorite music. I have two so I’m like really into oldies. I grew up in Reno Nevada and it’s all like the very first week of August. It’s called ‘How Long Estates’ and the whole town turns into the 50s and 60s so I love 50s and 60s music like ‘Dion & the Belmont’, and like ‘Jay and the Americans’. But when I’m not doing that like I said I used to like listen and go to like hard core metal shows so both of those. I like everything from all these too, like hard core metal.

Joe Casabona: That is really a kindred spirit ’cause we’re in the same boat there. I listened to ‘Slipknot’ like a whole lot when I was in high school. I just like…

Russell Aaron: I think we all did right?

Joe Casabona: Right, yeah. We got awesome. What is your favorite food?

Russell Aaron: My favorite food is Chinese food.

Joe Casabona: Chinese food. I want to get some Chinese food stuff.

Russell Aaron: So specifically it’s New York Chinese food and then send it and then San Francisco Chinese food and then any other common Chinese food.

Joe Casabona: I’m really glad you said that ’cause I live in Pennsylvania and like Pennsylvania Chinese food does not hold a candle to New York Chinese food. I was born and raised in New York.

Russell Aaron: I was just in New York two days ago. I was in the Lower East Side hanging out in actual Chinatown and I was looking at some street art stuff, and I was going to look at space invaders, and I walked by this place and I said “Cash only” Chinese food and that’s how you know, it’s really good when they say, cash only.

Joe Casabona: Yep, that’s excellent. Another piece of advice if you’re in New York ordering food is you know it’s a good pizza joint when you walk in and you say “Can I get a couple of slices” they don’t ask you what kind or how many. They just sent you two slices of cheese pizza. So that’s how I know I’m in a good pizza joint.

Russell Aaron: The best one is when they just slap you with it, right? Like you [inaudible 34.29.2] a few slices and they just say $5 and they hand you a plate. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Got to keep the line moving.

Russell Aaron: We’re busy people, I get it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah exactly. So I might have an inkling to the answer to this question. Who’s your favorite sports team?

Russell Aaron: My favorite sports team. Oh so you’re assuming that because I’m wearing the hat and the matching shirt but no no no. So my favorite sports team I actually have this tattooed on me is the Pittsburgh Penguins, a famous sports team. So I grew up amerio then ‘UFan’my very first sports jersey of any kind was actually like this knockoff Pittsburgh Penguins jersey. I mean literally, somebody I think wrote with, in pen to just said Pittsburgh, I give his hand but I was a Pittsburgh Penguins fan. I was about five years old with the ‘ they will six ’cause they won in 91,92 but ever since then I mean that was one of the very first sporting things that I ever watched. And so when they won the Stanley Cup those two years I’ve been a fan ever since.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome.

Russell Aaron: But to to the people at home playing the home game you assumed that I was going to say the Detroit Tigers because I’m wearing your 2014 post series shirt and I had, I have a matching hat, but I am a tigers fan but your question was favorite sports team, and you know they’re probably like four or five.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, gotcha, makes sense, awesome. And the last question: how did you learn what you know? so this is pretty open-ended but pick something that you know really well and tell us how you learned it.

Russell Aaron: I feel like this is where I go. I’d like to thank the Academy. I would like to say I’d like to thank the art director you know, without you, we’d have no score. So this is really like a three part question and I probably only know two parts but I’m going to try.

So I just started staying up late at night learning WordPress. How I got into all this is I would find a mom and pop business like, you know, an Italian restaurant or a bookstore and I would just see some kind of you know dreamweaver site that they have put up. I would spend two nights and I would just you know, I’d find the theme, I’d rebuild it and I’d walk into their door and just say “Hey, you know what? Here’s your new site you can have this for like 500 bucks” right? because that’s a problem with, well not anymore so much. But it used to be a problem where somebody wanted to buy a site. The person would say ‘Well, it’s gonna be a year right?” I was walking in the door and saying you can have this today like in an hour right? ’cause he gave him a zip. But in doing that you had to learn how to put things together. So as I started, like learning how menus work in restaurants and stuff like that, I just, I would stay up at night. I’ve just started learning and I started to read sites like WP Candy and WPTavern and Post Status and WP101. You know, I just started reading sites just like that. I mean I started going through and when the Easy Digital Downloads hit the market, I started going through Pippins office documentation, all this stuff with the guys over at like word impress I mean I just started reading everything that I could you know, because truly it’s really a free education in that sense like you can’t go to Yale to get a WordPress degree. You can get a degree in programming and essentially you could figure out the syntax but I mean for the most part you go to meetups, you go to WordCamps, you hit somebody up on Twitter and go “Hey, how do you solve this?” and you just you kind of learn at night. And that’s really what I do, and it’s what I do now. Currently when I’m trying to figure something out let’s just you know, let’s grab a cigar,. let’s grab a beer, it’s Cinco de Mayo. All right so let’s just grab a beer, let’s just grab a cigar, and let’s turn on debug and figure out what we broke.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s what I’m gonna call this episode. Let’s grab a beer, grab a cigar, and turn on debug.

Russell Aaron: I love it.

Joe Casabona: Russell, thank you so much for joining me today. I had a really great time talking.

Russell Aaron: Awkward silence. I just wanted to have the awkward silence ’cause I feel like everybody is so like jumping on the grass to say, “Oh no, thank you so much for allowing me to be…” I did the opposite. Yeah, I am such a big fan of your show. I listen as much as I can. I have it up in the browser right now and I constantly listen. Thank you for having me on the show. I gratefully appreciate it.

Joe Casabona: Well, thank you. That means a lot to me. See now we’re going back and forth thanking each other before this turns into an even bigger little fast.

Thank you so much to our sponsors Liquidweb who’s a season long and WP Site Care. Be sure to check them out. They’re great, great services, both of them. I am their big supporter of the WordPress community.

And finally if you like this show, please go ahead and rate us and review us in iTunes or Apple podcasts which they recently changed their name to. That really helps people discover the show. So the more people discover the show, the more listeners we have and the longer I’ll be able to do this. So head on over to Apple podcasts which is also iTunes, and leave us a rating and review, and maybe I’ll even read it on the show.

So thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.