Today is the day I turn 26 years old. For those who don’t know me yet, let me tell you a little bit about myself.
Who am I?
I am a full-time software engineer with a strong passion for web technology. I started OMNINOGGIN as a personal blog in 2007 in an effort to share my knowledge in the general field of software engineering. I wasn’t getting many readers by 2008, so I finally decided to niche-ify this blog into a blog that mainly talks about WordPress and a few other web development topics.
I developed my first WordPress plugin and wrote my first WordPress article in March 2008.
Now I have have authored 8 WordPress plugins and have written quite a bit of articles about WordPress on OMNINOGGIN. In addition to that, I make it a point to write on Weblog Tools Collection about once week.
What I learned in the past year?
- The good
- WordPress is a wonderful platform and I enjoy developing plugins for it very much.
- To have a popular blog, it’s 80% what you know and 20% who you know. Focus on writing great posts/plugins and the rest will take care of itself.
- Sugar, Spice, and Vitamin blogging strategy works quite well for me.
- Writing more documentation and troubleshooting guides for your own plugin helps save you a lot of time spent on support.
- The bad
- Developing WordPress plugins for free will never make you enough money to compensate for your time spent, but it does get you more traffic.
- Supporting a popular WordPress plugin is exhausting!
Do you enjoy my plugins and content?
I didn’t want to do this, but I just had to ask since it’s my birthday.
I spend a lot of time writing plugins/articles and I make them available for free. If they have helped you in anyway, or if you are using them for commercial purposes, then I would love it if you can support me by any of the followinig methods:
- Making a donation (small or large, everything helps!)
- Buy the WordPress Plug-in Development book through my affiliate link
- Get your friends to subscribe to the OMNINOGGIN RSS feed
- Link to and/or write about one of my articles or plugins.
Of course this is not mandatory, but it would make a really great birthday gift!
What’s next?
I will continue to support and make updates to my current plugins, but I don’t see myself releasing any more plugins unless I think they will be as revolutionary as WP Greet Box and WP Minify. I will also be launching a support forum for my plugins to encourage community discussion/support rather than just 1-on-1 support in comment forms. With plugin support taking less time, I hopefully can focus on more WordPress articles and tutorials for you all!
This will be the most personal post I’ve ever written on this blog so far.
