As a personal project, I made a WordPress plugin. I actually did this a few months ago, but forgot to post about it then. I was listening to a podcast called Track Changes, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, the founders of Postlight. Postlight is a software engineering Agency. They make really cool things, and also have a really informative and entertaining podcast. It’s sort of like 90% educational, and reluctantly(?) 10% self-promotional.
Anyway, in one of their podcasts, they announced they’d completed a major project. When they were still a very new company, and didn’t have clients lining up, taking all their time, they decided to create a free web service that can help any site become AMP compliant. Basically, that’s a way of creating special versions of pages that can be viewed by mobile devices more quickly and efficiently – it’s something Google is really pushing for – and they’re rewarding people with higher search results if they do it. The name of what they created is Mercury.
Listening to them talk about this was really inspiring – it was a really cool project that could help a lot of people – and even save other companies huge amounts of money. But it’s not just for big companies – it’s for everyone. I work at Bluehost, and talk to many, many people who use WordPress to build their sites, and don’t know anything about coding. While using Mercury is really easy, you still have to be a bit more tech savvy than the average wordpress user in order to incorporate it into your site. I wanted to try it out immediately, and by the time I’d set it up, I knew there was going to be a large amount of people who just sort of have a phobia for any kind of coding – no matter how simple. I also realized, from a technical standpoint, it’s not really the best idea to add that code to a theme file, which is what you have to do if there isn’t a plugin. This is because themes often are changed or updated, and you want to be able to preserve integration with Mercury across changes like that. So I set out to make a plugin.
My main problem at that point was that I didn’t know PHP, which is the code WordPress and its themes and plugins run on. I didn’t let that stop me, and took 2 days to simultaneously learn some PHP and design the plugin, and submit it to the WordPress repository. PHP is gross, and I hate it, but it was still really fun and satisfying to do this. And I made sure to get the approval of Postlight before publishing the plugin. They were happy to have me do it, and we talked about incorporating something requiring people to agree to their TOS, which I was able to implement. Another few days later, it was accepted, and here it is! I call it AMP With Postlight Mercury.
I just recently updated it to make sure it only affected the correct web pages, and with the help of my wife, made a nice banner image and icon for it. So there we have it! My first WordPress plugin!
I’m still working mostly on learning Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but this was a really fun side project, which is something people can actually use that benefits them – with no effort on their part. As a side note, working for Postlight would pretty much be my dream job, and while they are headquartered in NYC, they are open to people working remotely. I don’t have any illusions that this will land me my dream job, but it certainly can’t hurt!