Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

You Are Not Your Code

This is not exactly what I said at WordCamp US 2016, but it is a great deal of it.

I started my slides for WordCamp US so many times, I probably have enough content for a week of blog posts. The weight of what I was going to say there sat on my shoulders like I’m Atlas. Trying to dredge up the pain from the rejection and harassment I’ve felt over the years, all in order to write, reminds me of the carrion birds, ripping apart Prometheus, while he heals only to be torn anew each day, all for presenting humanity with the gift of fire.

Perception: We Are What We Code

Too often, when we think about our contributions to WordPress, we think of them in the literal terms. I have written code. I have fixed CSS. I have beta tested. I have created a plugin, a theme, a blog, a store, a book, a career. We make the fatal mistake of boiling down what we are to one thing. The contribution. The code.

Reality: We Are What We Create

We forget something crucial, that these creations are just that, creations! We have invented something out of nothing, purely with the power of our minds! We’re artists and dreamers and believers and builders. Anyone who’s studied art, music, journalism, knows that there’s a strange dissociation that we have to build in our hearts. The separation between what we create and who we are and what the reviews will be.

We Can’t See the Forest For the Trees

Artists are, often, seen as temperamental. Capricious creatures who fall to the whim of our desires and passions. People who obsess over one thing to the exclusion of others. Who trash hotels when frustrated. Who lash out. Who take the rejection of a bad review so closely, so personally, they cannot separate themselves from their art.

If you saw my talk at WordCamp Europe earlier in 2016, or read my post about it, that sounds familiar. We, we contributors to open source, are exactly the same. Which is why it is hard, so so hard, to separate our hearts from our heads. We wanted to bring fire to earth. We wanted to share our joy. We wanted to do the right thing and change 26% of the Internet for the better. Give or take.

Instead, we’re told our code sucks. If we don’t offer free help for our work, we’re called greedy and vain. Being driven to fix one part of WordPress is wasting our time, no one uses it. Creating new features? We should fix what’s broken, even if we don’t know how. We are pulled by a million masters, our users, and we can never do enough.

And what about when our contributions are less visible? What about the people who spend hours making sure this WordCamp flowed smoothly? The ones who ensure funding? The one who fixed the inline documentation for core? The people in the support forums who help people for free? The people who review your themes and plugins and try and keep things fair for all. Oh, oh yes. I know that one.

The problem here is that we all do things for good. Everyone you see at a WordCamp, everyone who is a speaker, a volunteer, a contributor, is doing this for good reasons. Maybe not entirely altruistic, we’re not all socialists and software communists like me, but I promise you, every single one of us who steps up and does things for the greater good of WordPress is doing so with the best intentions. We care.

And they don’t see that.

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
— Aral Vorkosigan in A Civil Campaign, by Lois McMaster Bujold

One of the points I wanted to address in my talk was that there are a LOT of days when you know you’ve done the right thing, and your reputation tanks. While a lot of people here like me, appreciate my work, and respect me, I’m not so naive as to think that’s universal. I know very well that there are people who watched my talk, who read this blog, who dislike me for, say, closing their plugin or deleting their reviews. Or worse, not deleting a review.

The Cost of The Greater Good

I want to say the good of the many outweighs the good of the one, or the few. And there are days where you’re the one. You’re the 20% minority. These days, as my father taught me, will outweigh the ones where you are praised, thanked, lauded, and cherished. It’s the dark part of human nature. You will, you WILL do things for the best intentions, and you will NOT be appreciated for it.

What you do when these things happen? Well you have choices, like I mentioned this summer. And there are downsides to each one. Otto, who’s somewhere around here, spends time talking me down from correcting people. I have a strong urge to “Well, Actually…” the people who insist I have evil in my heart and I’m power hungry. Other people listen to me vent a little. And sometimes I subtweet.

But this is the part that hurts. You can’t win. It’s impossible. People won’t believe you if you defend yourself. They won’t accept your explanations, they’ll see them as excuses. Silence will be seen as proof they were right. Fighting back? A show of weakness or a cover up. There is, literally, no way to win it. Ever.

Outsmart, Outplay, Outlast

Outsmarting them can be a pyretic win. Outplaying? You can try but I wouldn’t. But what if you keep going. Then the win is not a win but sort of an eventuality. Awesome, I know.

You can’t teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and annoys the pig. That’s a Southernism from my inlaws. There are some people you just can’t reach, no matter what you do. That’s where the remark of “I’m sorry you feel that way.” comes from. When I say that, I’m not giving up, I’m accepting futility.

And yet. You know that saying? The one about serenity and accepting what we cannot change? I hate it. I don’t believe there’s a single thing we cannot change, just perhaps not as quickly as we’d like. Accepting futility means I accept that there is no way I can, right now, explain myself well enough to change a mind. Yet.

It’s not about being smarter than someone else, it’s about being smarter than yourself

If you can convince yourself not to be stupid, you will protect yourself from just about everything. Outsmarting yourself is hard, though. You want to believe that you’re right. You have to remember that there is always someone smarter than you, somewhere. And no one is stupider than past you. That’s why we leave ourselves notes in documentation. To make sure future you remembers. Not being stupid means not picking fights. It means recognizing when you’re wrong.

The secret behind outplaying is you’re outplaying your own tendencies and habits. You know yourself. You know when you snap off a reply you shouldn’t, or when your humor is more biting than it should be. You have to play yourself and not do those things. Fool yourself and you’re the fool, but play to your strengths and you can keep yourself humble while preventing your inclination to be stupid.

If you outlive everyone, then you get to write the history. That takes a lot, A LOT of patience. More than most of us have. And it requires being able to tell someone you’re sorry you can’t help them, or you’re sorry they feel that way, and you walk away. And you wait. And wait. And wait. The being quiet part is the hardest, because people like to fill silence, especially you. But you must wait to survive.

Survival is not about the Fittest

I could tell you how I survive. I could tell you to subtweet, to blog, to scream, to ride your bicycle until your lungs feel inadequate and your legs are on fire and your blood pounds so much, your Apple Watch wonders if you’re having a heart attack. I could tell you to talk to someone, a loved one or a professional, and maybe to try meditation. The Breathe app? Pretty nifty.

Remember how I said everyone at a WordCamp wants to make WordPress better? And remember how I said you’re not code? I lied a little. You ARE code in that you, me, everybody is WordPress. And while I cannot tell you the right answer for you and how YOU can survive the storm and the hate that you will face, I can tell you that you are not alone. That you are one of us. And that WE are here too.

As a team we are stronger. We can rely on each other. We can lean on each other. We can take our shared love of sports, or food, or a same birthday, and find connections with each other.

What I Don’t Know…

The one thing I cannot tell you is why people hate. I don’t understand it myself. I suspect I never will. But what I can tell you is that we are better together. The way to make it past the hate is together. I am strong, mentally, because I turn to my community, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly, and ask for help. There’s no shame in that.

16 December, 2016
AMP It Up
We’ve all heard about how Google wants to make mobile pages faster. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is there to deliver and process a pared down version of a webpage, prioritizing speed. Since speed is important to your SEO, and I’m on a bit of an SEO kick, you bet it was next on my to-do list.

I admit, Joost talked about this at his WordCamp US talk this year, and among my notes was this:

Add AMP – not set it and forget it

This is so, so true.

The AMP Plugin

First its like all things WordPress, you install the plugin AMP by Automattic and activate it. That does the easy work. Of course then you have to customize the hell out of it to make it look right. Still, out of the box the plugin adds a /amp/ so if you go to https://halfelf.org/2016/amp-it-up/amp/ then you’ll see my AMPlified pages. If you’re using Multisite, you may need to re-save your permalinks for the URL to work.

There are some big warnings about this though.

1) No analytics tracking
2) You don’t get to design your AMP page
3) It doesn’t work on the front page or pages or cpts

Don’t worry! We can fix all that!

Analytics

If you’re using Monster Insights for Analytics, supposedly they added in some code to make tracking work, but I was unable to find it in the code or documentation. More than likely it’s in their Pro version. I don’t use that plugin simply because I found it easier to use a 28 line mu-plugin for my network and I don’t need to see my stats all the time. I used the AMP WP recommended method and put it in the same mu-plugin as I have my regular analytics.

Design

This is a little messy. Design is a very complicated word. If you just want to change the colors, you can do this via Appearance > AMP. Whaaaat!? That’s right, it lets you change the header color and font color right there. Super simple. If, though, you want to make your CSS tweaks directly to change that light blue header to navy, perhaps, you can follow the AMP WP directions for CSS additions and have this:
```
add_action( 'amp_post_template_css', 'halfelf_amp_css' );
function halfelf_amp_css( $amp_template ) { 
	?>
	.amp-wp-header {
		background-color: #013659;
	}
    <?php
}
```
I strongly recommend making few changes. Oh, color of course, but don’t go and make a 1 meg CSS file. The point of AMP is to load faster, after all!

There’s a whole second level of design that I’ll get into later. It needs its own post.

AMP your CPTS

Right now you can only do it via code. The AMP WP directions for CPTs state they may come up with a better way, but for now you do this:
```
add_action( 'amp_init', 'my_amp_add_this_cpt' );
function my_amp_add_chars_cpt() {
    add_post_type_support( 'post_type_this', AMP_QUERY_VAR );
}
```
It’s pretty direct, and I added this in the bottom of my existing CPT code.
14 December, 2016
RankingCoach Drops the Ball

I’ve been using OnPage for SEO assistance recently and decided to check out a couple other options, one of which being RankingCoach.

tl;dr – Traditional Business Only

If you want to skip the rest of this post, the summary is that they don’t meet the needs of a non-traditional business. While the interface is nice and the UX better than OnPage, the end result is that it doesn’t understand the more outré of rare businesses, and it’s not very adaptable. Oh and you have to give them your credit card.

No Location? Nonsense!

For some reason, RankingCoach assumes that all businesses have to have a physical presence. It’s 2016, and as shitty as this year has been, they don’t. A lot of businesses don’t matter where they physically are, it’s all about the virtual presence, and that’s okay. While you can force it to understand that you’re international, the idea of being non-national is still lot on them, and oddly prioritized.

The rarer the business, the worse the results

I’m going to put this out there as a level of stupidity and ignorance that upset me. There’s only one value for LGBT businesses and it’s a fucking gay bar.

I’m going to be frank here. This moment set and sealed this product for me. Gay bars. That’s it. That’s the only gay business? What a crock.

I tried putting in TV Entertainment but there’s nothing for that:

Business Directories First

Instead of angling for SEO by teaching you how to make your site work better, RankingCoach tells you how to get listed in business directories first. Instead of being about SEO, it’s about how to promote your business. It also gave me 30 tasks to do for helping my site rank better in local SEO, even though I marked my site as international.

Missing the Mark

Now look, I know the site says its for online marketing, but the website says this:

State of the art software for online marketing, SEO and social media

It can’t see my Twitter account, which is linked on the page. It thinks I should get backlinks from Tumblr. I happen to have a link back to the main site from the Tumblr.

There was some weird advice that was useful, like having a static front page, but it couldn’t detect half the things I’d already done, and it was totally unable to understand non traditional businesses.

Summary? Not for me.

12 December, 2016
WordCamp LGBT Tribe is Code

Last Friday we had the first ever LGBT+allies party at a WordCamp. It wasn’t really the first time we all got together, but it was the first time we stated to the world that this was what we were doing.

How did it go?

We sold out our 150 tickets. We ran out of shirts. We had an open bar and music and food (real food) and pins and stickers and a million little things. It was loud and a great many more people than I thought would show up did show up. Matt was there too.

Tracy and I kvelled about it. We never expected that. We thought maybe a dozen, or fifty at most, would show up. We thought it would be mostly the queers, filtering in and out. We thought it would be more of a flow.

What we got was a packed house. We had around 200 people who came in, queer and straight, to be there for each other and to support and hug and be there. What we got was a moment where our two tribes were there. Our nerdy WordPress people and our fabulously gay people, together, combined to remind everyone that the best part of us is the us.

Community is what makes WordPress so amazing. I spoke about that on Friday as well, that individually we are not our products, our code, but together we are 27% of the Internet. Individually, we are not just gay, straight, queer, trans, or ace. Together, we are the LGBT+ tribe. Together we are the queers of WordPress. We are a huge slice of WordPress and we are not alone.

I like to joke that WordPress makes queries for a reason, that WordPress is queer. And it really is. The last four years WordPress has gone from quietly supportive into publicly proud.

Thank you, everyone, who sponsored and came to the party last week. You stood up and reminded us that we are not alone. And as much as 2016 sucked, we have each other’s backs.

I don’t know how, but we will have to figure out how to do this next year at Nashville, because this was too amazing to do it as a one-off.

9 December, 2016
OpenGraph Images and Taxonomies
As I worked my way through optimizing the SEO for my Dead Lesbians, I hit a recommendation that I found difficult to handle. It was presented simply. Add an open graph image to the page.

The problem was the page was a category page (a custom taxonomy).

Easy: Yoast’s OG Image

The easiest solution if you’re using Yoast SEO is just to make a custom image and upload it. Go to the taxonomy page, edit it, go to the Yoast section, click on the sharing icon, and you’ll see what needs to be added.

If you want to automatically handle the open graph image with Yoast SEO, it’s filterable.
```
function halfelf_wpseo_opengraph_image( $image ) { 
	return $image; 
}; 
add_filter( 'wpseo_opengraph_image', 'halfelf_wpseo_opengraph_image', 10, 1 );
```
This means if you have a specific image for a category if the image doesn’t have a post thumbnail, you could do something like this:
```
function halfelf_wpseo_opengraph_image( $image ) { 
	global $post;

	if ( !has_post_thumbnail() ) {
		if( in_category( 'foo', $post->ID ) ) {
			$image = get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/images/cat_foo.png';
		} elseif( in_category( 'bar', $post->ID ) ) {
			$image = get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/images/cat_bar.png';
		}
	}
	return $image;
}
```
That’s really bad code, by the way. There are smarter ways than hard coding, especially since you can do some pretty nice stuff with primary categories in Yoast SEO. I would probably have it grab the primary category for the post, force the image, check to make sure the image exists, and have a fallback (just in case someone else added a new category).

The problem is that the filter doesn’t work on categories and taxonomies because they don’t have the filter set. Posts and pages are fine. Not categories.

Easy: Adding via wp_head

Adding in an open graph image via the wp_head action is similarly possible.
```
add_action('wp_head', 'halfelf_opengraph_image', 5);
function halfelf_opengraph_image( ) {
	echo '<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/og_image.png"/>';
}
```
This is extendable and you can customize it to be as simple as my example or as complex as pulling a specific image per category or featured image, depending on your theme.

Not Easy: Reality

Besides the fact that I can’t use Yoast’s filter for categories, I had a bigger problem. The way I designed my theme, most of my taxonomies had a custom image picked. The images are all SVGs. And you know what doesn’t work on OG images? Yeah, SVGs. Good news was that I had a copy of all the images as a PNG as well, so I was able to use the second method to create default images using the PNG.

More bad news? I didn’t actually know how to grab the taxonomy ID. While WordPress has a handy function is_tax(), I couldn’t use a global like $post to grab a $tax->ID. Thankfully I could use get_queried_object_id() to set my term ID like this:
```
add_action('wp_head', 'lez_opengraph_image', 5);
function lez_opengraph_image( ) {

	// If it's not a taxonomy, die.
	if ( !is_tax() ) {
		return;
	}

	$term_id = get_queried_object_id();
	$icon = get_term_meta( $term_id, 'lez_termsmeta_icon', true );
	$iconpath = get_stylesheet_directory().'/images/png/'.$icon.'.png';
	if ( empty($icon) || !file_exists( $iconpath ) ) {
		$icon = 'square';
	}

	echo '<meta property="og:image" content="'.get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/images/png/'.$icon.'.png" />';

}
```
Obviously I know where I’m storing the images. You’ll want to change that for yourself. I went with a fallback image of “square” in case there wasn’t one available, just because I hate having nothing show. Also here I only wanted the custom taxonomies to have this image, not the regular categories and tags.
7 December, 2016
Custom Meta, Keywords, and Taxonomies

As I continue using OnPage, I was able to make some pretty fast gains. All the work I did with Yoast and CPTs immediately saw me picking up higher rankings for some of my keywords. That meant I had successfully optimized the pages for shows and characters.

The hard work happened next. See one of the terms I wanted to rank for was “dead lesbians” and if you look at that right now, we’re not in sight. We own the domain deadlesbians.com which sends you to https://lezwatchtv.com/cliches/dead/ but how do we amp that up?

I don’t want to have to customize every single taxonomy and, initially, I had the default titles set: %%term_title%% Archives %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

This translated into “Dead Archives – LezWatchTV” and that’s pretty good but it could be better. Since I’m talking about character clichés here (characters have clichés and shows have tropes you see), the title could be better as “Cliché Archive: Dead Queers” and that takes two changes. First I rename the taxonomy to “Dead Queers” and second I changed my default titles to be prettier. But that made me think of a couple things.

If you look at the above screenshot, it shows that I only have an ‘orange’ for a good title. After some fiddling, I determined that Character Cliché Archives for %%term_title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% gave me green results, though not a full bar. The reason here is that the length of what you’re using matters. Meta descriptions should be around 160 characters (Yoast’s crew have seen 135-250) but meta titles are a little odder.

Before I get too far into that, I have to explain that there is one annoying thing about keywords when it comes to taxonomies. If you have the premium version of Yoast SEO, then you can pick multiple keywords for posts and pages. You can’t do it for taxonomies. That means even though my page is named “Dead Queers” I was going to have to manually give it a custom keyword and handcraft the title.

I do not recommend this in the long run for everything. And in fact, this is the only place I plan on doing this. I manually made the keyword ‘dead lesbians’ and worked from there. Doing that gave me a different sort of direction, since I got the following message:

The SEO title contains the focus keyword, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning.

Of course. That made perfect sense and I changed the title to start like this: %%term_title%% Character Cliché Archives

Once I had done all that, I went back and changed the focus keyword to “The big list of dead lesbians.” Now this is not a keyword. But it lets me do this: %%focuskw%% A collection of all queer female TV show characters who have fallen prey to the cliché of %%term_title%%.

Originally I wanted to make a custom term meta and variable (like I made for %%actors%% and %%shows%%) but I couldn’t get it to output. Since the focus keyword is there to help me optimize things, I don’t see anything wrong with this but …

Warning: the variable %%focuskw%% cannot be used in this template. See the help center for more info.

That’s what happened when I tried to set that on the Taxonomies page. And I can see why. It’s frustrating though, since I really do want it just not to show if I don’t have it set.

In the end, I had to make that page the one with a super custom meta.

The big list of dead lesbians. A collection of all queer female TV show characters who have fallen prey to the cliché of %%term_title%%.

We’ll just have to see how that goes. I would much rather make it as flexible as possible, and lot of this would be easier if I was using a specific page and not a custom taxonomy listing. But there are still some limitations when you’re working differently.

5 December, 2016