Looking back in the month of September, I have a feeling that it’s a slow and unproductive month. However, my progress tracking notes on my journey to become a Happiness Engineer seems
Self-hosted WordPress
Early of September, I took the plunge to sign up a web hosting account with Exabytes and setup my self-hosted WordPress sites, one of the sites is this blog. So most of the tasks I did for the Happiness Engineer job application this month was focusing on familiarizing myself with Gutenberg and WooCommerce. Although these are not the requirements in the job application, I think it’s good to have the knowledge in order to be a great Happiness Engineer. 🙂
So here’s what I did on the web hosting plan:
- Signed up a 1-year plan with Exabytes
- Registered a .blog domain
- Setup my personal blog, a test site for WooCommerce and another test site for general WordPress troubleshooting purpose.
- Installed SSL certificate for my .blog domain and wrote a blog post about it.
Explore Gutenberg
Not long after I activated Gutenberg on my sites, WordPress.com started to allow users to try out the new editor on their WordPress.com sites. That’s a great news to me since I have Gutenberg access to both of these platforms.
I started writing on Gutenberg as soon as I activated it, not only on this
So far I’ve used these blocks on Gutenberg:
- Heading
- Paragraph
- List
- Image
- Shortcode (for Gravatar and testimonials)
- Embed
- More
- Table
- Page Break
WooCommerce
One of the main reasons I signed up a web hosting plan is for WooCommerce. I’ve always
By referring to the content on Archive.org and my rusty memory, I managed to build a mock site with only a few products and simple shipping fee setup. I’ve even used it as a test site to try to help out in the WooCommerce support forum.
I went ahead and posted my first reply which I think it might not be what the user was asking for based on the user’s response. Anyhow, I managed to have my first resolved topic on WooCommerce a few days ago. Although it’s not really related to WooCommerce, I gained a great sense of achievement by being able to help others.
CSS
Since last month, I started to enroll in web development/CSS courses trying to learn the basics of this style sheet language. So far I’ve completed four projects on FreeCodeCamp‘s Responsive Web Design Certification course. Other than that, I’ve read some of the articles regarding CSS:
- CSS Tutorials by HTML Dog
- 9 Important CSS Properties You Must Know by Zell Liew
- Getting to know CSS by Shay Howe
To put my limited CSS knowledge to
DNS
I revisited this blog post many times to make sure I have a checklist for each of the skills listed in it to improve for the job application. So I re-read How Domains and DNS
Make WordPress Training Team
I have to say sorry to the Make WordPress Training Team as I did not committed as much as I was in August. In September, I had only contributed to editing one lesson plan on What You Can Do With WordPress.
On top of that, I presented two lesson plan ideas: installing SSL certificate for WordPress sites and WordPress.com vs WordPress.org. I have published blog posts on these two lesson plan ideas so I can make use of the material to draft the lesson plans and prepare the slides for them.
WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2018
This is one of the most exciting things that happened to me in September 2018. I was invited to become one of the editors of the WordCamp KL 2018 website and posted three posts (using Gutenberg!) so far.
The organizers gathered the volunteers and whoever interested in the event in a meetup in September. It was a great and successful meetup as we’re thrilled to see more people attending the meetup than what we expected and offered to contribute to the community.
We had many discussions and brainstormed some great ideas for the events like having a Contributor Day on the next day after the WordCamp event. I’m so excited to be part of the team for the Contributor Day to share about the Training Team as well as trying to recruit people who love WordPress to give back to the community.
We have around 6 weeks until the actual event date on 17th November. The organizers are busy liaising with the speakers and sponsors for the event. I do hope I could do more in helping them, especially on the actual event itself.
Customer Service
I did a small book haul in September which I didn’t do for a very long time. I purchased books on customer service and some other business/self-help books to learn how to become a more efficient person.
In The Customer Rules by Lee Cockerell, I gained a powerful insight
Summary
So by looking back at the list, I can still say that I’m making a progress even though not as aggressive as previous months. I’m ending this blog post with one of the Automattic’s Creed.
I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.
Featured image by Anthony Da Cruz on Unsplash
