March 14, 2016

Apply Filters
Apply Filters
Episode 57: Product Releases and PressNomics Highlights
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A big thank you to a new sponsor of ApplyFilters, Gravity Flow.  Head over to GravityFlow.io to find out how they’re changing the way business processes are streamlined and automated.  Gravity flow enables WordPress sites to automate custom processes both for internal routing, reporting, and scheduling, as well as customer facing collaboration tools.

Today we have updates on our latest projects as well highlights from the recent PressNomics event.  

Brad announces the release of WP Offload S3 1.1.  which includes these new features and changes:

  • A change to the way license usage is calculated to make it less confusing and more fair to customers
  • A new download tool for all files
  • Public-private toggling for use when viewing an attachment’s details   
  • The ability to define any and all of the plugin’s settings via a constant
  • More docs and  a new addon which integrates with the advanced custom fields image crop plugin

Pippin has three main areas he is focusing on currently:

  • A lease on an office space, moving him outside of working from his home-based office with the hope it creates a better separation between work and home
  • An update on Recurring Payments 2.4.2 after information-gathering
  • Release of  AffiliateWP 1.7.15, which includes small enhancements and minor fixes

Highlights from PressNomics:

  • Discussions on piggybacking on a feature plugin that needs background processing
  • The benefits of meeting like-minded individuals and team meet-ups
  • Pippin’s speech based on his blog post titled, Be a Little Selfish, which has led him to determine that in order for his team to take care of its customers they need to focus on what they build as opposed to what other developers have built.

Brad concludes today’s episode with some thoughts on conversations he had with some people from SiteLock concerning the security of storing passwords in the cloud.  They believe while not ideal, it offers a pretty secure option when passwords are encrypted. When he asked about passwords in regard to using Google Spreadsheets the response was not so positive and he explains.

If you attended PressNomics we’d love to hear your thoughts about it, or feel free to reach out to us on any other topic.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Sponsor: Gravity Flow

WP Offload S3 1.1 Released

PressNomics

Apply Filters Episode 56: Background Processing]

Background Processing in WordPress by Ashley Rich

Pippin’s blog post which his talk was based on: Be a Little Selfish

SiteLock

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes.  Thanks!   

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 57. This time, Pippin and I will be talking about what we’ve been up to and a little recap of PressNomics. But first–

PIPPIN: This episode is sponsored by Gravity Flow, and advanced add-on for Gravity Forms that allows you to automate your business processes, whether you need to set up workflows for purchase orders, job applications, admission forms, project initiations, vacation requests, or any other kind of workflow that involves feedback loops, approvals, et cetera. Gravity Flow allows you to do this easily while also leveraging the power of Gravity Forms. You can find out more information at GravityFlow.io. Be sure to thank them for sponsoring this episode.

BRAD: Awesome.

PIPPIN: All right, Brad. What have you been up to?

BRAD: Well, we just actually released a major release this week. WP Offload S3 1.1 was released.

PIPPIN: What is new in that?

BRAD: Lots of stuff, but I’ll give you kind of the highlights. One of the big things is that we moved to kind of the same model we used for Migrate DB Pro. That is that the upgrade, the pro upgrade version is a replacement for the free version. When you upgrade, you have to actually kind of drop in this other plugin and deactivate the other plugin.

PIPPIN: It wasn’t that way before?

BRAD: No. It was a bolt-on. The upgrade was a bolt-on to the free, so you had to run them both. What we realized was that it was a pretty big advantage, actually, to have it run on its own as a standalone because then we could release the free version, then test the pro version for a week, and then release the pro version. In that kind of time span, if there were any issues discovered by the free plugin users, we could fix those and roll them into a patch and patch the free version. Then when the pro version goes out, those fixes are in it for our customers, so the customers get that extra little benefit.

That doesn’t mean that we’re going to not test the free version and just push out crummy code, but we still test the free version thoroughly, of course. But, it’s just nice for our customers to get that kind of benefit of the free version being out there for a while first.

PIPPIN: Is there going to be any kind of upgrade pains for changing that model for existing customers?

BRAD: We did run into an issue. I guess we didn’t quite test all the scenarios quite right because if you deactivate one plugin and activate the other plugin. Anyway, there was some scenario where things didn’t work. When we pushed out the free version, things broke, so we had to roll it back right quick and do some fixes. Then we rolled out the fixes.

PIPPIN: Yeah, that’s always frustrating when that happens.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Welcome to development.

BRAD: Yeah. Exactly. It’s to be expected. To be fair, my team did an awesome job of recognizing the problem and containing it, so we only actually had ten people complain to customer support. That’s a win in my book.

PIPPIN: Yeah, that’s good.

BRAD: Yeah, so kudos to my team for that. We’ve also changed the license, the way we calculate usage of the license, so the usage is based on the media library size. It was just that, so no matter if you had offloaded any of your media library to S3 or not, it would count the full size of your media library. Some people didn’t like that.

A lot of people expected it to only count the files that you had actually offloaded to S3 towards the limit. Yeah, some people were put off by that. We said, "You know what? You guys are kind of right. It should be farer to only count the files that you’re actually offloading to S3."

PIPPIN: Right. It makes more sense to price it on how you’ve actually used it as opposed to how you might use it.

BRAD: Yeah. The whole idea of that licensing model was to kind of capture the size of the site and relate what you pay to the size of your site so that bigger sites pay more kind of thing. But I could see why people didn’t quite like that idea.

PIPPIN: Yeah, for sure.

BRAD: So, we changed it up. We also added a download tool, so you can download all your files that you do upload to S3. You can download them all back to your server. There’s an option.

PIPPIN: Download them as in download a big archive of them or download them as in import them back into your media library?

BRAD: Yeah, so what happens is there’s an option in our plugin that says, "Remove files from server," so when you upload a file to S3, it’ll actually remove it from your local server. A lot of people used it because, if you have gigs and gigs of files, you probably don’t want to be taking up your local hard drive space.

PIPPIN: Right. Point of the point of offloading them to S3 is to actually offload them.

BRAD: Yeah, exactly.

PIPPIN: Not just clone them.

BRAD: Exactly. The download tool allows you to download all of those files in bulk back to your server. For example, if you wanted to stop using our plugin at some point, you could use this tool to do that. Actually, one of the reasons we built the tool is because some people wanted to start over. They messed something up when they were setting up the plugin. Things got out of whack, so they just wanted to download everything back to their server, just uninstall the plugin, start over, and re-upload everything. This allows them to do that.

It does find and replace as well. It gives you the option when you click "Begin download." It’ll prompt you saying, "Do you also want to do a find and replace on all your content and revert back to using local file URLs in your content?" Referencing the local file. Yeah, that’s kind of like an uninstaller, I guess, but we couldn’t make it part of the typical WordPress uninstaller because it needs to be batched. We couldn’t do 200,000 media library items, for example, in the uninstall process that WordPress provides.

PIPPIN: No. It would just die.

BRAD: Yeah, exactly. The other thing was private toggling, private/public toggling. You can actually set a file as private on S3 just by clicking the link when you’re viewing the attachment details. That’s for like if you’re dealing with a third party plugin that wants, say, EDD for example, that wants the files to be private. Then that’ll work.

Oh, this one is cool for developers, and this was a request. We didn’t get tons of requests for this, but a few people requested it and we thought it was a good idea. You can actually define any setting that you can set in the UI you can now define in code in your wp-config.

PIPPIN: I saw that in your blog post. Of all the features you put in, that’s the one that really captured my attention.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: As a developer, let’s say I run a lot of sites and I always use the same configuration. That’s awesome.

BRAD: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s who it’s for, right? One of the things that we did kind of above and beyond was we locked the UI. The UI will actually show what the setting is, but it will be grayed out, and it will say, "Defined in wp-config.php."

PIPPIN: That’s great. Kind of like how if you defined the site URL or the home URL for WordPress in wp-config, those settings, in general, cannot be changed. They show you what they are, but they can’t be changed.

BRAD: Exactly.

PIPPIN: That would be great for people running client sites that don’t want clients possibly changing the settings.

BRAD: Exactly! That was the request. That was the request that we were getting.

PIPPIN: That’s very cool.

BRAD: People didn’t want their clients screwing with the settings and screwing up their site. This allows them to at least see the settings. Actually, what we did, we told people what they could do easily enough. It’s just using WordPress’s filters; you could remove our menu item and stuff. But they were like, eh, well, it would be nice if we could still see the settings.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: So why not. Then we just did some UI updates, lots of docs, and we added a new integration: Advanced Custom Fields Image Crop plugin. That’s an add-on to Advanced Custom Fields. We integrate with that now so that they work together. Yeah, that’s about it. It’s a pretty big release, like I said.

PIPPIN: Yeah, that’s huge, man.

BRAD: Those are the highlights.

PIPPIN: Congrats on getting it out.

BRAD: Yeah. Thanks. What have you been up to?

PIPPIN: Well, I’m just getting back from PressNomics. I’ve had kind of three main focuses. These were partially on the plane ride home and then also once I actually got home.

The first one is that just before I left for PressNomics, I signed a lease on an office space, so I am in the process of moving out of my home office. I rented an office near downtown where I live. I’m working on setting that up. I’ve got all of my Internet set up and configured yesterday. Now all I have to do is move furniture. I actually worked from the office most of the day yesterday on a card table.

BRAD: I can picture it now, Pippin putting on his suit in the morning, going into an office, brewing himself a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. It’s probably not going to go like that, right?

PIPPIN: Not quite, mostly the whole suit process. This is something I’ve been actually wanting to do for a while now. One of my struggles that I’ve always had, and I think most people that work from home have this, whether they recognize it or not, is the difficulty in separating work from home.

I have a home office. It’s a separate room, and I try to treat it as: if I’m in the office I’m working; if I’m not in the office, I’m not working. But, that’s pretty difficult. I find myself working at the breakfast table or working from the couch in the evening, or various things like that. That can easily put strains on family time or just in not taking enough breaks.

It’s too easy to work too much, and so one of the things that I’ve wanted to do is create a better separation. Part of that is to get an out-of-house office. Also, I’m going to use it as or another reason why I’m excited for this is I strategically picked the spot that is perfect biking distance from my house.

As long as the weather is nice, my goal is to bike to work every single day. Biking there and back once a day will be something like ten miles. While it’s not a huge distance, it’s enough that it’ll help to take care of my physical health.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: I’m excited for that.

BRAD: Yeah, man, I struggle with that.

PIPPIN: It’ll be an experiment.

BRAD: I struggle with that stuff as well, and I have considered getting an office as well, but I love — I love every morning when I can just go from downstairs in the kitchen, after breakfast, to upstairs. I’m always thankful for that, especially when it’s miserable outside.

PIPPIN: Absolutely.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: The nice thing is that even with a dedicated office space, I can still do that because I have the freedom of, you know what? Today, I’m going to work from home.

BRAD: That’s true. Yeah.

PIPPIN: But one of the problems that I have with my home office is that I think I am too quick to go straight from I wake up, to the office, and not taking time to enjoy the morning, not taking time to really get ready, not taking enough time for me and family in the morning because the office is right there. And so, it takes a little less commitment to go and get started, in a way.

BRAD: Is your family home a lot of the working day for you as well?

PIPPIN: Yes. Yes, almost every day.

BRAD: Right. That makes a big difference. I would definitely be getting an office if that were the case. My wife and kids are gone during the day.

PIPPIN: Okay. Sure.

BRAD: It’s kind of a different situation.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: When my wife was home on maternity leave, and there was a crying baby in the house too, that was some trying some times. I almost got an office during that period, so I can sympathize.

PIPPIN: Yeah. In one way, we can look at it as an out-of-home office allows you to remove distractions. In another way, because you’re removing distractions, it means that it takes a lot less time in the day to get things done, which means I can quit earlier. It means I can go home and be done, and so that time that we do have, family time in the evening or in the mornings, is much more engaged. It’s not I’m still thinking about a work thing while trying to play with the kids or trying to make dinner, things like that.

We’ll see. It’s an experiment for me. We’ll see how it goes in six months. I’m sure I’ll probably have an update. Other than that, I’ve had a couple of plugin updates that we’ve been working on. During PressNomics was a fun opportunity for us because some of our customers of our new recurring payments plugin for EDD were there, and so we got to sit down and talk to them face-to-face and kind of work through some experiences they’re having, either good or bad, and kind of get firsthand feedback about anything that they’re seeing that they would like improved or like added. We did that and then decided to immediately jump on them and go ahead and get them addressed.

One thing that I’m always surprised by–it shouldn’t surprise me any more, but it does–is how complicated subscriptions are, how many caveats there are, especially when you take into account things like license keys and being able to renew a license key, extend a license key, being able to cancel a subscription, or being able to update the payment method on a subscription when the original card fails to be charged or something like that. There are so many little edge cases, and so we were able to see some of those edge cases when sitting down firsthand with some of our customers and work on getting them addressed. We are preparing a quick release that’s going to go out some time in the next week. It’s just about done.

Beyond that, then we also did another quick release for Affiliate WP, which is 1.7.15. I can’t believe that we’re up into 15 for our point release. We’ve actually had this big 1.8 version planned for, oh, man, it’s got to be close to six or seven months now. We’re determined to actually push out 1.8 at some point, but we’ve been pushing out a point release, I swear, probably every three or four weeks before that. Before we get there, we might be up to 1.7.27. Who knows?

BRAD: Nice.

PIPPIN: Yeah. We got 1.7.15 out for Affiliate WP, and it’s got just some little things, little bugs here and there, and a couple of small enhancements – nothing too major, but a nice one to push out.

BRAD: Right. Nice.

PIPPIN: Yeah, that’s about it. Otherwise, just trying to get back into the swing of things from being gone for a week at PressNomics. We were having a team meet-up at PressNomics, so the whole team flew in, or most of the team flew in on Monday before the event and didn’t fly out until Sunday, so we were all there for almost a week, and so lots of catch-up after that, lots of trying to get back into the normal flow of things.

BRAD: Did you guys actually not sleep very much because you were working or because of other things?

PIPPIN: You know, a combination of all of the above. Yeah. Before the event, we have times when we’re just staying up late because we’re just chatting. We’re spending time together getting to know each other better. The times that we’re actually working then during the event, you also have after parties go late and things like that, so it’s difficult to get a lot of sleep in that kind of an environment. And so, you come home and you’re just exhausted.

How about PressNomics? Do you have any highlights or anything that you want to really share from the event?

BRAD: Yeah. I’ve got a good one, actually. It relates to our last episode of Apply Filters, actually, because we covered background processing in the last episode. One of the dilemmas, I think I had talked about in the last episode, was that how do we get it into WordPress Core? How do we get background processing into WordPress Core? A feature plugin doesn’t really make sense.

And so, I talked to Mike Schroder, "Shredder," as he’s often referred to in the WordPress community, and Aaron Jorbin, who both, I think, are core committers or they’ve had core commit access. I don’t know. Anyway, they’re very involved with WordPress Core, at the very least.

They gave me the idea of piggybacking on a feature plugin. Find a feature plugin that would need background processing and build the background processing into that plugin. Then that way potentially both could go in at the same time. My mind just blew up at that point.

PIPPIN: Ah! That’s an excellent idea.

BRAD: I was like, "What?!"

PIPPIN: Really, the background processing is needed for that feature, but it also gives you that opportunity to build it as a generic API that that feature just happens to leverage.

BRAD: Exactly.

PIPPIN: Cool.

BRAD: Mike actually gave me an idea of a feature plugin. I don’t know if it’s just an idea now or it’s actually being pushed forward yet. I haven’t looked into it, but it’s on the fly image generation. When a page loads and an image loads on the page, you could kick off a background process to create a more appropriate size of image for that particular screen resolution that whoever loaded the page at that particular time.

You serve the image that you have that’s the best fit, but also go in the background and process an image better suited for that display. I was like, "Oh, yes! That is a good idea. That does sound like a pretty good fit," so there might be something that we’re going to try to push forward with that idea of kind of helping out another feature plugin.

PIPPIN: That’s very cool.

BRAD: And trying to get background processing in. That would be really cool to see.

Yeah, what was the highlight for you?

PIPPIN: Definitely our team meet-up and getting everybody there in one place. We had almost all of the EDD team there, and we had a couple team members that none of us had ever met in person before, so getting to know them firsthand was definitely the highlight for me.

Now, event related, my favorite thing about any WordPress event is sitting down and being able to talk to people that either I don’t know or I have not met in person before, or I don’t talk to very often. Just sitting in the courtyard and having conversations – by far the highlight for me. I don’t think there’s any particular conversation that was exceptionally better than any others – all of them; all of them combined.

BRAD: Me and you, we talked, right? That has to be the best one.

PIPPIN: That’s true. But you know I talk to you every other week, so.

BRAD: Yeah. But, you gave a talk too, right?

PIPPIN: I did.

BRAD: It was similar to the blog post that you wrote recently, right?

PIPPIN: Yeah. A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled–

BRAD: Be a Little Selfish.

PIPPIN: Be a Little Selfish. That’s what it was.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: I actually wrote that blog post while trying to prepare for this talk. One of the ways that I find really helps me to put an idea together is to write it as a blog post and to kind of organize my thoughts and put them into words better is to write it as a blog post. While I was preparing my presentation for PressNomics, I decided to write that blog post and use it as the foundation for what I discussed.

The premise of it was that in order for us to stay healthy, as individuals and as a team, and I don’t mean just physically healthy or mentally healthy, but also to be happy with our work in order for us to do good work, to do what we want to do, and to really thrive in our products or services that we offer, we have to be sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and that we are taking care of our team.

It was based around the premise of being a little bit selfish. By that I mean, if you realize there’s something in your work or something in your daily life that you really don’t like, you’re really tired of doing, or something that’s bothering you, try to address it. I have a couple of examples. One of them was work related, and one of them was very personal.

On the work related note, in the Easy Digital Downloads ecosystem we realized a few months ago that we’d kind of got to this point where we had to decide who we were going to be. We had to decide are we running a marketplace for other people, for people to sell their EDD plugins, or are we selling our product?

Up until a couple of months ago, we had been really kind of running both of them at the same time, so we built our products. We built the EDD plugin, and we built our core add-ons that kind of served as the foundation for the platform that we built. Then we had this whole slew of other add-ons built by other people that did other things.

We were selling both of them side-by-side kind of advertising them in the same way as though they’re all one cohesive product and platform when in reality there’s a lot of mix and match. There’s a lot of different quality of work. There are a lot of hidden conflicts here and there, like maybe this EDD add-on doesn’t quite work with this one, and so, when you put them together, you have unexpected behavior.

BRAD: Right. It’s not a seamless experience.

PIPPIN: It’s not a seamless experience. Right.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: That’s very natural in the WordPress ecosystem because you have thousands and thousands of plugins built by thousands of different people. But we realized that, wait a minute. We want to build this one, single, cohesive platform. It may be distributed across multiple plugins, but if you install this EDD add-on and this EDD add-on built by the core team, or maybe even not built by the core team, they should just work together naturally.

We realized the only way for us to do that was for us to really take control of our product and really own it. By that, basically we had decided: Look. We can’t run a marketplace and build a platform at the same time. It’s kind of one or the other.

We decided that we are going to–I put it this way–be a little selfish and take care of our products and not try to be the platform that takes care of everyone else’s as well. That goes both for a sales platform, but also in terms of selling plugins through the EDD website, but also through the support platform. If you sell a plugin on the EDD website, we support it because we believe pretty firmly that if we sell it, if money goes through our accounts, we are responsible for the customer experience. Therefore, we are responsible for the customer support.

We’ve realized that that’s not something that we can really continue doing indefinitely, so we’re kind of trying to bring everything in and focus just on us, focus on what we build as a team. We can still let everybody else do their own thing and build off of the platform, but we have to take care of ourselves.

BRAD: I thought it was a great talk, by the way.

PIPPIN: Thank you.

BRAD: I really enjoyed it, and I liked your point about putting your team first, even before the customer–and the customer want this–or even in front of the people that are kind of contributing to your community by building add-ons. By putting your team first and them second, I think that made a lot of sense, even though you don’t want to disappoint anyone. But, by not disappointing everyone, you probably still are disappointing some people that are even closer to you, right?

PIPPIN: Absolutely. One of the first steps for us in this whole process is to create a much better separation between what we build and what other people build. That means that we don’t list. If you build a plugin for EDD, we don’t list it in the extensions catalog anymore.

We’ve built a new page that has just a list of all of the third party extensions that we are aware of. But, what we used to do is we would basically create an entry in our catalog so you had a product page. You had an image. You had a description. You had all this information about your product, and so we helped you sell it.

We realized that we were spending so much time maintaining those that it was taking away from what we were trying to build, and so we decided to change that. There are some people that were unhappy about it, and that’s just the way it’s going to go. You can’t please everyone, and you have to take care of yourselves.

BRAD: Right. I think it’s also kind of the phrase, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," kind of applies here too, right?

PIPPIN: Mm-hmm.

BRAD: If you’re just trying to appease to a small number of people, you could end up jeopardizing the experience for everyone, right?

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Right. Yeah, so in one way you could say it as, look. In order for us to adequately take care of our customers, we have to focus on what we build as opposed to focusing on what maybe ten other developers have built. Yeah, so that was really kind of the gist of what I talked about. I included some personal information on it too.

This whole topic, I don’t think, just applies to the business or the way that you operate a team. I think it applies all the way to your personal life as well. For me, actually, they’re very closely related because where I am in my personal life is pretty closely tied to where I am in my professional life. Shitty day at work; shitty day at home – kind of thing.

BRAD: Right. They spill over.

PIPPIN: And so, yeah, I told a little bit more about some of that experience and some of my own personal struggles with being overwhelmed and how that has affected me and some of the things that I’ve done to address that.

BRAD: Yeah. I really related to what you were saying on the personal side there. I think I mentioned this in our kind of year in review episode that I wanted to be more selfish with my time. Unless I felt "Hell, yeah!" about a time commitment, I would say no, and I’ve been working on that. For the most part, I’ve definitely said no in a few situations where, last year, I definitely would have said yes. And so progress seems to be making a difference.

PIPPIN: I think that’s so important, and it’s definitely right along the same lines of you have to realize if I am not super excited about doing this, or I don’t want to do this, it’s going to be a burden. It’s going to be something that I’m going to regret or I’m going to begrudge the entire process. I wish we could say the same thing for paying taxes and doing things like that, but those are obligations. Those are different. But, in things that we have the power and control to say yes or no to, we need to be selective. We need to be selective on what we do, selective on who we work with, selective on what we build, etc.

BRAD: Yeah, for sure. Cool.

PIPPIN: Well, any other highlights for you or things that you really got out of it?

BRAD: Yeah, I’ve got one more interesting one. I was talking to a couple of security guys. Darn! I don’t remember the name of their product. That’s so bad. I’ll figure it out and stick it in the show notes. That’ll be just as good. It’s a security product.

Anyway, they’re very security-minded people, so I was asking them about storing passwords and if they were fans of Last Pass or One Password now has one password for teams, which is like a cloud app for password sharing. Of course, these services, they’re in the cloud, and all your passwords are in the cloud, so I’ve always been kind of nervous about using them.

PIPPIN: Yeah. If they get hacked, everything else is hacked.

BRAD: Yeah, and Last Pass was hacked last year, wasn’t it?

PIPPIN: Yes.

BRAD: Anyway, so I asked them about them. They were like, "Yeah. Not too bad." They were kind of like it’s not ideal, but it’s pretty good. The passwords that they have in the cloud are encrypted, and you do need your key to decrypt them, so it’s not a terrible system.

I asked them about spreadsheets because a lot of people just use Google spreadsheets, right? I was always like, "You know what? Google spreadsheets can’t be that bad. When does Google get hacked? Never, right?" Google is a huge target and they never get hacked, or at least we don’t know if they do.

Anyway. I asked them about that, and they said, "Oh! No!" They were so against that. The reason is because of encryption. When you store stuff in a Google spreadsheet, they believe anyway, that it’s not encrypted. If anyone did access the server, your password is just sitting there.

PIPPIN: Right, in plain text.

BRAD: Yeah, in plain text. If somehow someone got a hold of your spreadsheet URL or something, right?

PIPPIN: Well, I believe that’s precisely what happened in the Hollywood hack, pretty close to it.

BRAD: Oh, is that right?

PIPPIN: Six months or a year ago, one of the big Hollywood studios had a breach.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: One of the things that leaked out was this giant spreadsheet of user names and passwords for all the different services they uses.

BRAD: Right. Yeah.

PIPPIN: I think it’s that scenario right there.

BRAD: Yeah, that’s bad. Anyway, we’re going to use one of those cloud apps, I think.

PIPPIN: Yeah. We use Last Pass.

BRAD: Do you?

PIPPIN: I do, at least, and some of my team does.

BRAD: I think we’re going to use One Password for teams just because all of my team already uses One Password, and it integrates with the personal version. It will just be natural for them.

There is one feature with Last Pass that I kind of liked, which allowed you to share. You could share the login with someone, like anyone.

PIPPIN: Yes, you can.

BRAD: Without actually giving them the password.

PIPPIN: I’ve never used it, but I have heard that it supposedly works very well.

BRAD: Yeah, so if I you wanted to allow someone to log into your PayPal account or something, you could just send them a link.

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: It would log them in, but it wouldn’t show them the password.

PIPPIN: It’s a pretty cool feature.

BRAD: That is a totally cool feature. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if One Password for teams has that, but I’m not sure. Yeah, so anyway, I thought that was very interesting.

These are the kinds of conversations you have at conferences, right? You just never know what kind of value you’re going to get out of conversations. I walked away with notes, just kind of a smattering of notes that are just everything from book and movie and music recommendations to things like this that I can implement with the team and hiring advice. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

PIPPIN: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the beautiful things about PressNomics is that it’s just such a dense meet-up of brilliant minds in not just business, but development and all of these different areas that, if you have a question about any aspect of your process or anything like that, there’s almost certainly going to be somebody there that could answer it or help.

BRAD: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I love it. I had a really good time this year.

PIPPIN: Yeah, it’s one of those events that I will go to every single year unless there’s a reason I can’t.

BRAD: Right. You’re a four-peat, right?

PIPPIN: Yep, I’ve been there since year one.

BRAD: Yeah, the same here.

PIPPIN: Worth it every year.

BRAD: Yeah, for sure. Awesome. All right, should we wrap it up?

PIPPIN: If anybody has any thoughts or anything they would like to share, perhaps related to their experience in PressNomics or anything else, feel free to let us know. Otherwise, I think we should go ahead and wrap up here.

BRAD: All right. Talk to you next time.

PIPPIN: All right, talk to you soon.

BRAD: Thanks, everybody.

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