I don’t think I can let this evening pass without writing a small post about some of the numbers from this year; 4 months ago approximately, I released my first full plugin as a creator, where I publicised the fact I had created it and started recording WordPress Youtube Tutorials.
Now, I’d written plugins and contributed to the open source before MainWP-IAWP, but I’d never written something that was not just for me before; I’ve created little tutorial videos before, too,
My first one was a segment for one of Kevin Geary’s videos showing you how you would do something he did in a video on Adobe Illustrator using Affinity Designer in Oxygen Builder.
This year, I developed more PHP than Python for the first time, contributing to a fair amount of Python in private repos over the last few years.
I have, according to GitHub, made 621 contributions in the last year; I’ve created more than 10 plugins
Plugins Created
I’ve created to name just a few:
- Bricks Builder (Foundations & Webhook)
- Gridpane MU email deployments,
- EmailitWP (both SMTP and API),
- SureForms and Webhooks,
- Petty (the whole WordPress debacle)
- MainWP, Client Reports, Cloudflare and IWAP
- Bubble and Komodo Intergrtors for Guttenberg emebeding of videos
- Dozens of Gists
Product Launches: Including Premium Plugins and Tutorials
I have developed my premium plugin brand this year https://reallyusefulplugins.com , and my first two premium plugins, Response for SureForms and Response for BitForms and my first “paid for the article” Sell Access to Certain Posts / Custom Posts Using SureCart, which allows you to sell single post access with nothing but SureCart.
I’ve released about sixty videos on YouTube, about one hundred bubbles (not support-related), and about five have been published on this site. With this, I will have written three blog posts for Techarticles.co.uk.
In hardware and software in my journey this year, I’ve gone through three microphones, three video editing software packages and two microphone arms. In addition, I’ve spent $1000’s on plugins and other WordPress-related items this year as I sought to bolster my plugin access and secure access to the tech I need to continue in what is growing into quite a hobby.
My personal use of plugins, WP-Tasks-After-Install, Ninja-Updater and foundations has come a long way. Thanks to these three plugins, I can spin up a site in no time and do some things that I used to dream of only being able to do, all coded and in place by me.
What does 2025 offer?
I don’t really know; nothing is going to change. I will still be recording videos and writing posts, and my plan is to spend 2025 concentrating on this side of my life. I will take a week off in January and take stock of my growing portfolio and my “stack” and review what I can offer.
Currently, I plan to start offering “care plans”, concierge and custom solutions directly to people in 2025, utilising my skill and expertise to educate further and pass on what I know by offering these services; they will allow me to divert more time and resource into this venture, including increasing the products I will promote by affiliate link.
In the words of Natasha Bedingfield – “Today is where your book begins, The rest is still unwritten”
So thank you for 2024, thanks for reading, watching and engaging, and I look forward to what 2025 brings
