How has your life changed? What opportunities have opened up to you and kind of where you are currently? And they go do what they need to do to go help people buy and sell and become one of the best. It's just literally a decision that every single person can either make or not make. I want to go out. I want to be the best. I want to work hard. I want to show the world what I got. I want to be best in the world at something. How can I create a platform where every agent can do business with me in some form or fashion? They say 10% of agents are actually using social media to market theirself and their listings. 90% are not. The name of the game is going to be How big can you build your database? I think there's still plenty of opportunity if you are strategic about what you're doing. The business opportunities that we don't even know about that are three to five years out. That's what's most interesting to me. Welcome back to the real estate agent school podcast. I am incredibly lucky to have the one and only Ricky Kruth on with us today. He doesn't even need an intro. He is the master of real estate. He is the social media king of all things real estate. And I have looked up to Ricky pretty much my entire career. Ricky, thanks so much for being on with us. Yeah, man. My pleasure, bro. Good to see you. Yeah. I remember back when I was a brand new agent, I would DM you questions. And the one thing that stuck with me is you always reply. You've always been one of the kindest people on social media to actually talk to people, which is super, super cool. Cool. You've cared. You've just actually wanted to be a part of real estate agents lives. And so that's, that's kind of what I've wanted to talk about in this episode. I want to get it out of the way for the people that are going to hop onto this video and just watch to see, Oh, Ricky Kruth, what does he do? But in reality, there's your four step thing where it's data collection, conversations, conversion, and pretty much remarketing to those people. And so for the people that are wanting to know the basics, Ricky has thousands of videos on that type of stuff. And really it comes down to just having conversations with people. And so what I would love to know from you is since you've got into real estate, you've been in it now, decades, how has your life changed? What opportunities have opened up to you and kind of where you at currently? Yeah. Well, at all stems, I think from hard work, I grew up roofing houses. So that kind of blood into real estate and just determination to be the best.  So I'm kind of in competition with myself. I mean, when I was coming up, of course, I saw guys at the top, I want to beat these guys. But there's always going to be somebody higher than you. So having that mentality to try to get better and better and be the best in the world. You know, I was just on a zoom call. And, you know, I just did week four, the six day challenge with everybody. And I was like, you know, or there was a guy that I haven't trouble making calls, you know, getting over the hump of, you know, actually setting the time aside and he's been paying for red X for like four months. He hasn't made one call. And I'm like, this is normal, right? It's normal for everybody to be in that stage and to be, you know, to make excuses and to stay busy doing other things and stuff like that. But he feels a lot of anxiety because he feels like he could be doing more. And he feels like, you know, he's not living up to his full potential and stuff like that. And I said, everybody runs into that, but the future mega producers at that point, they're like, I don't want to feel like this anymore. I'm going to go do. Yeah. Right. And they go do what they need to do to go help people buy and sell and become one of the best. And every single person can make that decision. Like every it's it's literally everybody's decision, whether they become mega successful or not. You know, they choose, hey, I don't want to feel like I'm not living up to my potential. I'm going to go do so that I do live up to my full potential. They make that choice. And then they go take action or the people that stay mediocre and average, they make the decision not to go out there and be the best they can be and, you know, continue trying to get better and strive to succeed at higher levels. It's just literally a decision that every single person can either make or not make. So I was a kind of person that made the decision. I want to go out. I want to be the best. I want to work hard. I want to show the world what I got. I want to be best in the world at something. So yeah, just I made a lot of money. I lost it all. I came back around to I made it. I learned from my mistakes. And then, you know, after I was the number one remix agent in Alabama for a long time, I was like, man, this is the way I did this was so unique. You know, let me share this with as many people as I can. So I wrote a couple books and started speaking, writing and coaching became the world's first completely free coach. And you know, it was like I got bored with real estate. So I wanted to take on this other challenge of more of a global brand because real estate is very local. And I'm like, you know, this local thing's great. I'm making a million a year. But what about this global opportunity, you know, on social media because I didn't touch social media for my real estate business. Yeah. Let me go tackle this global opportunity via social media and see what I can really do worldwide, you know, and then it just came back to okay, I'm kind of starting at the bottom. Let me have the desire to be one of the best in the world at this and continue to get better. I had a lot of times where, you know, I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I coaching? I should be just focusing on selling real estate. Yeah. You know, same thing the guy ran into with why I'm not making calls. But there's just something inside of people who are going to succeed at a high level that they make the decision that they're going to go do and live up to their full potential, you know, and it's kind of an it factor. Some people have that. Some people don't. So anyway, through becoming a free coach and building a global brand, you know, now I travel three times a month and speak, I'm not even going to listing appointments anymore. My dad handles the day to day. I've got brokerage, mortgage, sales, investment and coaching, right? I have five different arms of business, you know, that I run. And it's great because when I started the Ricky Krooth brand, I was like, how can I create a platform where every agent can do business with me in some form or fashion? Right? You want to join my brokerage? No. Do you want to do mortgage with me? No. Do you want to invest with me? No. Do you want to refer business back and forth? No. Do you want to join my free coaching platform so that I can help you guys increase volume? It's like, what where can we work together? And now after six years of social media and building the brand, you now actually have that platform in place where it's tangible. And I can go out here and partner with agents in some kind of capacity, whatever capacity they want. So it's pretty cool. And putting together more platforms as we speak, like I'm working on something right now where basically people can plug and play on like the weekly email because that's a that's a struggle for people to create the weekly email. Yeah, create a platform where people can just answer a couple of questions every week about their market. And then it just automatically creates spits out this amazing Ricky style email for them that they can send out that week. It's going to be really cool working on things in the AI department, right? To kind of teach agents how to use AI in their business and to be more efficient and stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, there's some really cool things on the horizon. I'm excited about, you know, the future of not only, you know, me, but also, you know, the industry in general, the direction is going, it's really cool. Yeah, that's amazing that there's a couple of things that I want to hit on real quick that you said there's the aspect where there's a ton of anxiety in this business that you're trying to alleviate from a lot of real estate agents where they're super like, man, I don't know how to succeed. I don't know what I'm going to do to succeed. And we're out here just trying to tell them it's it's the factor of just going and doing a lot of agents have the content have the tools to just go out and do what is needed to succeed. It's just the factor of actually doing it. And that is when the anxiety goes away is when you're actually working because real estate's not that hard. If you're just having conversations with people to grow your database, grow your reach and actually reach more people. And so with what you're seeing in the industry right now and the things that you're doing, what would you tell agents specifically right now? If you could sit down with every single one of your followers one on one and tell them something? Well, it depends on where they are in their career, you know, everybody's at a different stage in their career. They have different ambitions. They want different things. Not every agent is doing social media. They say 10%, Nar had did a study. They say 10% of agents are actually using social media to market theirself and their listings. 90% or not. I would advise those agents differently than the 10% who are. You're doing podcast. How many agents are doing that? I would say practically zero.  Some agents are part time. Some agents want to make a million years. Someone I know agents who say, if I can just make 200,000 a year, that's all I want to make. Some agents want to make two million years. Someone to build their own brokerages. Someone to get into investing and developing and different things like that. There's so many different things. So really, it's such a customized situation where you really got to know where someone is in their career, what step of the journey they're in, what has worked up to this point and where they really want to go, and how bad they really want it. I mean, there's a lot of pieces. There's a lot of ingredients there that have to be hashed out before I could really say, hey, this is what you should be thinking about. This is what you should be doing. You know what I mean? So it's kind of a tough question to answer, honestly. I can say that I believe prices are going to continue too. I think we're going to be in a really positive appreciation market for a long time. I don't see, right now, from January 1st to now, we're positive appreciation. I think we'll see double digit this year just because of the supply and demand issue. We've got more 33 year olds now than we've seen in since the baby boomer generation, just based on birth rates in 1990, and that's going to continue for 16 more years. We've got so much demand. This is the beginning age of first time home buyers. We've got so many immigrants coming in to the States. That's also going to be a demand for housing. And you've got sellers who are sitting on 3% rates who don't want to sell and builders who can't keep up. So we're going to be, I believe, in a very appreciation positive market for a while, but it's also going to be a very tight market where there is really low inventory and it's going to be tough to go out there and get listings. It's going to be tough to represent buyers when there's going to be so much competition for every listing. We're seeing more multiple offers now than we saw a couple of months ago per listing. Days on the market for existing homes are down right now from where we were a couple of months ago. This is just something that's just not going to work itself out any time soon, and we're kind of in this new normal where we're in this low inventory high demand market where prices just continue to stay high, which is really bad for first time home buyers, right? Because they're sitting on the sidelines waiting on mortgage rates to come down. Meanwhile, prices are going up. People who own property, they're loving it. They're just watching the value of their home continue to increase. So it's just a very interesting market that I believe is going to take a decade to really wash out where we do see some inventory at the market. So we'll see how everything plays out, but for the everyday agent out there just trying to build their business, right? Just trying to take it from zero to 100,000 to a million a year from, you know, 200,000 to 500,000 to a million a year or wherever you are in your journey. The name of the game is going to be how big can you build your database? You know, how many conversations can you have with property owners to see exactly what it is they want to do right now? I think that because we are in this tight market talking to second home owners, absentee owners, vacation property owners, Airbnb owners, long term investment property owners, commercial. I think that that's the play because these people can sell that property, but they don't have to move, right? This isn't their primary home. I think that's really going to be the play right now is to kind of try to focus on those owners also for sale by owners, people who have raised their hand and said, you know, I might sell or I would sell or I need to sell. I think those are good opportunities and expires people that actually were trying to sell, right? It's a good opportunity to begin a relationship with that person. See if they still want to sell. If not, is there something you can do to help them stay in touch forever? So on and so forth. So yeah, no, I think there's still plenty of opportunity if you are strategic about what you're doing. I think what was working three years ago is not necessarily working great now, but there are things that are working great now, you know, and I think being a new agent is tough no matter what when you jump in, whether it was in 08, 2015, 2020, 2021 this year, I think being a new agent is always hard and it's going to continue to be hard. And only the strongest going to survive. Yeah, I do feel for brand new agents right now. I mean, it would be extremely challenging. And so that's a question I have for you with the scripts that you've taught in the past of reaching out to homeowners, just seeing their timeline, asking them how you can help them and what you can do for them. But that may take a while to unfold. Are you just pretty much saying, Hey, the name of the game is quantity just have as many of those conversations because it's a it's a numbers game at that point where you'll eventually find somebody that is ready to sell or what are you telling agents that are trying to survive, but also want to build an awesome business and it's taking a little bit longer than usual. Well, like I'm saying, I mean, it's not really going to take you longer than usual if you're strategic about what you're doing. If you're not, you know, if you think about it for a second, like calling absentee owners, second home owners, people that don't live in the property you're calling about at where prices are, there's going to be people like that who are thinking about selling at these higher prices. They have plenty of equity on the table. They need to set they need to take that cash and put it somewhere else or they want to put it somewhere else or whatever. Maybe they want to sell this bad, bad asset, what they feel like is a bad asset and then roll it into a better asset. Maybe they want to sell their portfolio of single family homes and buy an apartment complex or a strip center or warehouse or whatever. You don't know what people want to do till you call them and ask them. So I think being strategic about who we're calling that this could be a potential deal. I mean, if you're calling people, if you're calling primary homeowners who feel like they're locked into their 3%, 4% rates right now and don't really want to sell because they don't want to buy, rebuy into a 6% or 7% rate market at higher prices than what they were, the thing is, is some of these people will sell because the thing is, is they have so much equity built up in their home, they'll have all this money to put down on their next home from what their prices are up so high, they'll be able to put that equity into their next home and really help on the payments. Another thing people don't think about is 28% of the deals last month were cash deals in the US. A lot of these really wealthy people have cash. It's not like every deals in mortgage. No, it's not. More than a quarter of the deals are not mortgage. They're cash and these really wealthy people, they can just bypass the entire mortgage rate situation by paying cash. Yeah. There's just so many opportunities. If you stereotype the market and say nobody's doing anything, then you're dead. If you walk in with the objective to create as many relationships as you can in the market, then you're good because you're going to go out there and create a lot of relationships. You're going to run into people who want to do stuff now and you're going to build a huge database for your 2028 business that's going to be massive. Yeah. That's what I love about real estate is if you're having enough conversations, a lot of the times with just restructuring people's finances and truly seeing if you can help them out, if they do want to move with all this equity or with their cash, there's so much opportunity out there. I'm a doorknocker. I never really made consistent phone calls and those are the conversations I'm having where people want to move. They just don't necessarily know what the math looks like and there's so many deals to be had if you're just talking to homeowners, which is the incredible aspect of being a real estate agent. Just talk to people. With that being said, what silver lining or motivation can you give real estate agents right now?  What do you agents have to look forward to if they commit and actually grind for the next couple of years? What can they expect to see if they really put in the work? Well, same as any era. Let's put it like this. The market surges back, right? A hundred and ten percent of the time. It's always going to surge back. Are we seeing less transactions now? Yes. Why are they suppressed if there's so much demand? Because there's no inventory and also there's a lot of buyers on the sideline because of mortgage rates that when we don't even understand how much pent up demand we have, more in history, I believe, just due to immigration and the amount of 33 year olds that are entering into the market and this just isn't going to go away anytime soon. All that pent up demand is sitting there and it's just going to get worse and worse. It's building. Every day that we have less transactions that we're having now, the amount of transactions now is so much lower than what we've seen over the past 10 years. Every day that goes by that we're at this lower amount of transactions is just building demand. When is that damn going to break? When is the tsunami going to hit? When is everything going to unleash? We're going to see a lot of that when mortgage rates ease down a little over the next 30, 60, 90 days. In my opinion, we'll see if that comes true or not, but I mean, as far as the rates coming down, I'm saying I know that the tsunami is coming. I'm saying my opinion is rates will come down. I don't know that they will. That's just my opinion. If they do, we will see the tsunami come, but that's not really what I'm talking about. That's one type of surge, but what we need is inventory. If you have this five, 10-year vision to build the largest database in your market of people who are getting your weekly email every week on the same day of the week forever and you're doing social media and you're doing all the stuff, then it's just a matter of time. Number one, you're going to have great years. You're going to sell 20 million a year, 30 million a year, all the stuff, but when the market breaks loose and we do see inventory rise for whatever reason, then you're going to see a massive jump in your business for doing nothing different, where you're going to be grinding, grinding, grinding every year.  That's just because the snowball effect of you building your business and then that colliding with the market surging back and then everything kind of coming to fruition. But if you let your foot off the gas, then the smaller that surge is going to affect your business. You know what I mean? So it's like go out there and grab as much market share as you possibly can right now for the day that things do break loose because they will in fact break loose. Yeah.  Do you feel like there's any change necessary in the message being shared currently to home owners or what do you feel like the consistency should be over the next little while for real estate agents to be marketing to the people that they're trying to gain the business from? I think it's the same man. The email should be used as a media outlet to share market information and where we are, what's going on. Email is a social media platform, right? You go on your phone and check your email how many times a day, right? About the same amount as you check social.  It's the same thing.  You're scrolling, right? That's your weekly email. It's going to catch their eye. They're going to go in. They're going to get all that local market data that they want. And just keeping them informed of the market, right? Of where prices are. Like a lot of media out there, mainstream media talks about prices are down for the first time in 12 years because it's a little bit down year over year, okay? But prices are up over the last 60, 90 days. And just in every market, it's up over the last 60 days.  So I think just keeping them up to date, you know, so that they, they know that they have all the information so that they can make the best decisions possible, right? And they're going to appreciate that coming from you. They're going to view you as the expert in the market.  Yeah. I can't imagine the positive impact it would have on not only the market, but the economy in general is if every agent truly applied this to their database and gave them true market information regarding their hyper focus market of, Hey, no, we really are appreciating in the last 90 days. And so homeowners can truly understand like, Oh, wow, like it isn't doomsday like there is, there is things happening and we're going to be okay. And that would move the market forward if agents would actually just take initiative and actually share this type of stuff. And so yeah, over the next year, five years from a personal business, obviously, since you're still cranking deals as well as your professional and speaking and just your career in general, where are you headed? What, what type of stuff do you see and plan on doing in the future? Well, yeah, that's a good question. So right now I'm just really focused on, I've built out the platforms, right, where all the agents can do business with me in some form or fashion. And so now I'm just trying to deepen the relationships with agents in my network to make sure they're aware of all the different ways they can do business with me or be partnered with me or connect with me so that we can collaborate, right? And it's crazy because through that and I have these ways agents can do business with me or partner with me. Well, then the relationships develop, right? And then we deepen the relationships. And then all of a sudden two years down the road, six months down the road, here's another business opportunity, right, that we can collaborate on and build together. You know, so the business opportunities that we don't even know about that are three to five years out, that's what's most interesting to me. So I'm doing the same thing I'm telling agents to do, same way I built my real estate business, I'm telling agents to go out there and build their database to the moon, right? Massive database, everyone knows who you are putting out content on social and email and everything. I'm doing the same thing in the real estate agent space, you know, I'm building my database of agents who know who I am, I'm doing social, I'm doing email marketing to the real estate agents so that in three years, in three years, I have a massive business in that space. Same thing with real estate agents, build the base, do the email, do the social so that in three years, you're going to have a massive business in the space. It's the same, it's the same formula. And the cool thing is, is am I paying the bills now? Yeah. Will my business be 10x in three years? Yeah. Same thing with agents. Can they, if they do this, will they pay the bills now? Yeah. Will their business be 10x in three years? Yeah. Yeah. That's insane. It's funny how it comes down to pretty much the basic answers every single time. If you're just being consistent, networking with the ideal person that you want to get in front of and just staying in touch with those people and building deeper long lasting relationships. And I know you were saying this one time of just picking your mode to do so. It doesn't really matter how you do it as long as it's a mode where you can have a ton of conversations. And obviously for us, it's about efficiency and effectiveness where there's some methods that you're going to have way more conversations with people than others. But if you're not happy doing those methods, then whatever, just pick whichever one you can be consistent with and successful at and just do it. Just crank that for the next three years and you're going to absolutely crush it. And so, Ricky, I 100% appreciate your time on this, on this podcast and I'm super grateful for you. If they're, what is the last thing you'd give advice to real estate agents right now? Is there any golden nugget that you want to share that you're passionate about or just want to give them a wake-up call for? I think we said it all, man. I think that just being incredibly focused on whatever the two to three things are that you do really well, try not to have anxiety about that you're missing business by not doing this or that or the other, what you're hearing outside. I didn't even realize that there was a market crash in 2008 because I was so focused on my business and making a million bucks. I didn't even realize social media was a thing until I started trying to be a real estate coach. I never used it from a real estate business. That just tells you how super focused and dalled in I was on calling property owners, creating relationships, doing with the emails, and I was doing direct mail at the time. Now, I believe you trade direct mail for social media, you make calls, you do emails, and you do social media. That's the way I would do it in today's world. Then, realizing, hey, at some point in like 15 years, we're not going to want to be in this rat race of selling real estate forever. You're only good as your last deal in real estate. We want to build businesses that can be residual. You can do that on the back of social media. Learn how to build a business on social media through being a real estate agent. Then maybe down the road, you can use social media to build a more national or global brand to go out there and really take things to another level. If in fact, you are ambitious enough to do those kind of things. There's just so much opportunity out there for the people who are willing to work hard to have that long-term vision and to just not make excuses around how they may feel about this or that. But more so, I want to live up to my full potential. Let me go out here and crush it. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for that. The true potential that real estate gives somebody is insane. One, you can make an incredible income doing it, but two, you have all these incredible other opportunities that then open up to you of, of to grow your business and you're never going to have to be stuck potentially in being a real estate agent if you don't want to, because you can take the initiative to grow from there. So thank you so much, Ricky. Grateful to have you on the podcast and we'll catch you in the next episode of the Real Estate Agent School Show.


Yesterday, Ireland joined only three other countries, alongside them Belgium, Spain and Malta, in demanding that Israel institute an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Here is what its foreign minister, Miehl Martin, had to say on the matter. There has to be and must be a humanitarian ceasefire immediately. We'll be asking that support would go to the Secretary-General of the United Nations in respect of his quest and the efforts that he is making to bring about such humanitarian ceasefire. Here is the problem with the Irish approach. Demanding that Israel agree to an unconditional ceasefire isn't a statement that's in any way congruent with so-called neutrality. Demanding that Israel institute a ceasefire without preconditions is the exact same as asking Israel to forego its very legitimate military objective of destroying Hamas. It's asking Israel to accept only your very selective interpretation of proportionality and the application of international humanitarian law. It's backseat driving Israel's war effort and asking it to tolerate foreign indefinite and open-ended period a terrorist entity on its doorstep which is not only hell-bent on its destruction but determined to repeat time and time again the atrocities of October 7th, including beheading civilians, raping women and mowing down party goers. It's asking for Israel to give Hamas time and space to rearm, regroup and re-strategize and prepare again to do exactly that. Demanding a ceasefire without preconditions isn't neutral, it's pro Hamas, it's pro terror and it's certainly very anti-Israel.


Aaron, what did you think of the energy at the stadium tonight? It was, now you can ask me.  I mean, amazing 10, 12,000 fans, whatever are in there. You know, the energy that was created, we haven't seen that since, you know, 2019. So it was a fun game to be a part of and, you know, the guys did a lot of really good things tonight.  So it was a fun night to play the game. You mentioned defensively some solid plays made. What did you think of the one from Glaber specifically to turn that double play to get out of the inning? Yeah, I mean, that was a great play. I thought he made a couple really good ones tonight. But that was, you know, that's about as hard as one you're going to turn. And for them to pull that off right there in that spot.  So, yeah, it's really good to see that and play in that way on that side of the ball. What's the feeling like in that dugout when John Carlo Stanton is as locked in as he is at the plate?   And I just love his mindset, his preparation, his game plan, his process. And he's going out there and carrying that out and obviously, you know, finding results with it. Bruce Beck, please unmute. Aaron, do you feel like everyone really wanted this a little bit more, even the guys that weren't there in 2017? Was there a sense and a feeling that this was a game that, you know, there was a purpose to it in a way? I don't know. Yeah, it probably felt, you know, you have games every now and then in the regular season that feel big and feel important. And obviously, the crowd being as engaged as they were from the onset, you know, I'd be lying if I told you there wasn't an extra level of energy. You know, those games that you have every now and then, whether it's when a good Boston team comes in or, you know, a good Houston team or Tampa, you know, when there's just that energy that adds to, you know, the feel of the game, you know, I'd be lying to you if I said that wasn't there at a little elevated tonight. What do you think your ball clubs rise into standings since, you know, you were struggling at 6 and 11? And how do you think that they respond that overall? We're getting there. We're getting there. You know, I feel like we've been playing a lot better on the defensive side. Tonight was a terrific defensive game. You know, obviously the pitching's been there. The starting pitching's been rock solid for us. The bullpen's been there all year. And now we're starting to see our guys really string together tough at bats, even though we weren't really able to break through there with with cranky after the first inning.  But I just like that the guys are really starting to grind out at bats in a really strong fashion. We go to Brendan Cutty. Aaron, I think a lot of people expected a tense atmosphere tonight, but did you expect this? I mean, it was it was all game. It was it was intense. It was I mean, you could feel it when you walked out there.  And what did you think of the crowd riding specifically out to they all game? Have you ever seen something like that? I don't know. I don't know that I've I don't know that I've seen that it was it was definitely an energetic crowd and they express themselves. You go next to Brian. Hope we saw a door walking a little bit in the dugout. What's your early read on where that is and how are you going to kind of fill in? Yeah, hopeful. He went for an MRI. So hoping that, you know, some good news comes with that. He was moving around pretty good here actually before he left, even in the clubhouse and stuff. So, you know, but I don't really want to speculate other than say we're we're hopeful that, you know, we we get some decent news.


When you think about the major transformations that the world will see over the next decade, at the top of the transformation is the power of intelligent networks, the Internet, if you will, that will bring to change every aspect of our lives, not just how we work or how we play, but change our health care, change how we live, change job creation. When you think about these type of technology changes, it will not only drive innovation in every industry, it will also drive GDP growth and job creation and productivity. Our view is that we think the future will be built upon five foundational priorities around the network. The first is the infrastructure, those are routers and switches. Second is collaboration and how collaboration evolves into the cloud, which is one of the hottest technology areas given, and then how you combine video architecture together to solve business needs. Whether those business opportunities are in health care or education or manufacturing or any aspect of our lives. Hot areas in terms of the growth is the ability to bring expertise to the end user result, much like we've done before in terms of the Jordan education initiative and are now doing with the Jordan health initiative. Probably the most exciting thing that's happening in high tech, it's going to be any device to any content and it's going to be video everything. Video will not just be the way that we communicate, it will be the way that we deliver IT or business transformation. It will allow for new business models, it will build upon what our young people understand from the social networking side, it will combine words like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube really to say how we do enterprise collaboration and the next generation of tools to enable this. Along with the video is mobility. Any device to any content over secure capabilities networks, completely a proliferation of all devices and at work it's bring your own device type of mentality. The third change that we see occurring is you'll see pinpoint products move to architectures. How you go from the cloud through the network into video into voice into any device access and combine it in a way that really allows you to change your business models quickly or to change the way you interface to your citizens at a very very rapid rate. When you think about how we as organizations and many of the organizations attending WEF can change things, it's all about innovation but it's innovation enabled by technology and operational excellence. About 10 years ago we started on this jointly with WEF in terms of the Jordan Education Initiative and we've learned what organizations can do working together to achieve a common goal. Most recently Cisco has been heavily involved with the leadership in Russia about how do you transform a industries or a country's infrastructure in terms of business creation of many new industries and how you take the capability and have the courage to move as the Russian leadership is doing in Skokov and creativity around iPrize type of examples to capture the imagination of a country and then to build up a number of new innovative industries. Another example would be how we see partnering with global universities. Universities around the world it doesn't matter if it's a Duke or a Stanford or the ability to what we saw occur in Virginia the other day where you had four universities come together with the government governor of the state to say given our budgets are going to be squeezed how do we not only share our teachers and this collaborative type environment how do we generate an incremental hundred thousand degrees. The ability to say how technology transforms every aspect of our lives I think is the most basic thing we're going to see in the next decade. When you think about our ability to change the world and improve the world I think the things that our young people have learned you do this through collaboration social networking if you will but you also do it by bringing together communities often with different backgrounds public private partnerships if you will to not only achieve the goals of citizens or respond to an opportunity or a terrible challenge but also to create jobs to help fix the economies and get the global economic scenario back on the tracks that we all want to see for the future it also has the capability to rethink how we do education or to rethink how we do public health care like again we've done in Jordan along with other world economic for members and the leadership within Jordan.


How's it going? Good day so far? So this talk, Getting Your Job Done, worked for us a little bit, it really came out of Jen and I give talks on a regular basis and we often end up in hallway conversations for 15 to 30 minutes about the tools we use and baiting what's better or worse and so we want to talk about the current state of our own because it's also something that we love hearing about from other shops and agencies. Okay, so just a quick overview of what we're going to talk about so you know what to expect, we're going to do introductions so you know who we are, we're going to talk about our process so how we go about developing sites. We're going to talk, hopefully, how the time to go into some of the many grids of power, fair development and some of the tools that we're using and then at the end of the time you guys can share what you're doing, how you're doing things, maybe you can take some questions and if not, we'll hang around afterwards and you can come. So, I am Shai and this is Jethra. I am the Chief Web Mechanic so I am the person who makes the engine go what's under the hood to run well and Jen is the Chief Pencil Trojan and she is the person who cares about the form and the aerodynamics and how the tools come together for a great sleep-visual design. We met and first started working together about 14 years ago right here at USM actually and we started our company Shai and Jethra the laboratory is 10 years ago and we chose laboratories for a number of reasons but one of them is because we all have more value that we share is that we want to have an environment created for building an experiment and teaching as well as a company that's making full sense and being profitable. Our typical clients are now agency work so marketing agencies that need a technical backbone and some larger, ongoing clients that have big maintenance needs and tools developed for them. We build almost entirely custom WordPress installs that means custom themes, custom design, custom plugins and a web project of ours typically involves about four to six people a project manager, a developer, a designer a content and text support person and occasionally a photographer as well. We do also want to say that we don't typically cover we do put in search engine optimization but we don't do search engine campaigns or marketing like that. We also don't typically do e-commerce work and we almost never do site builders. Let's get started. We just want to go through sort of what our process is for a technical site overall process is important it's good to have a standard and an understanding because then you have a pattern and you can repeat it and you can improve on it to make it run better and also understand the risks of points and where things might go off the rails. I will say we're talking about our preferred process but if you've worked with clients or you've worked on other sites you know that every client is different every project is unique so although ideally we would like to do this in every instance we do want to recognize that sometimes steps get skipped they're out of order so we just want to sort of lay this out to give you an idea and these soft skills and processes are just such an important part of project success beyond the technology that we decide to use. So the first thing we do is we have an interview questionnaire before we commit to any work so that they're happy when we work on a referral if it's an inappropriate match if we can't make them happy and meet their goals then we're not going to get a great referral so we want to as early in the process determine should we continue on with this project and do a proposal or not Yeah, and so out of that questionnaire we can usually get some priorities of the client and some of these would be like what are their goals for their website clients should always have some clear goals and then they have something to measure whether or not the project was a success budget is also very important having them know what their budget is going in quite often if someone comes to you and they don't know what their budget is it means they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they really want and so they probably need to take a step back and you can certainly help them with that process timeline is important is there any sort of event or need that the client has that you need to meet and what are your current workload sometimes really busy can't take projects on because of the timeline and then of course technology do they have certain technical requirements is that a good fit for you can you accommodate that and most importantly it's your first gut read of the people that are going to be working with what are the early indications of whether or not you're going to be a good match you are able to communicate well what do they need where are the handholds the handholding going to need to occur within the project that you can figure out really early in the process yeah like have they worked with WordPress before that's a useful thing to know and then I think what's really important going into any project is what is our or your priorities as either a company or a developer for your personal skills so for us these are some of our priorities but we're evaluating the project we want to fill client friendly sites that elevate the content that are backed by really good code that is accessible and perform it and when we're doing the work we want to use best practices we want to use cutting edge tools make a polished design at the end and have a smooth development and deployment process and along the way we want to work on something with our own skills so we evaluate these things and if we think it's a good match we put together a proposal and if it's accepted we move into discover, research, plan this is sort of the prep work ahead of building a website since we do a lot of work with agencies quite often they'll do a lot of heavy lifting on this but we still need to know a lot about the client some of the background planning is really really important for a successful project and so at this point is when we start actually to make dates we map out the calendar we have a timeline for when we expect things to get done and when certain things are due either from us or the client and we come up with a list of deliverables what are we going to be handing off to the client in the end what can they expect we do sort of a tech check so what kind of technology access do we need probably access to DNS do they have any APIs they're using if they have a current site we need access to that so we can potentially move content Google Analytics all those sorts of things that you'd have to check off and then as any project or many projects whoever is doing the interview and the proposal quite often is different than who's going to be part of the project team so who are the stakeholders who are you going to be working with and sort of get up to speed for that part so the next step and I will sort of stop and say these aren't necessarily so clients will quite often some of these things are happening at the same time but I am a big fan of starting content very very early in the process because content is really what you're doing you're supposed to be featuring their content so if you're doing a design it should support the content that they've decided to have so I always push for content very early in the process especially if the client is doing their own content they never have a good expectation of how much time it's going to take it is probably the most time consuming part of the entire project building the site is easy I think compared to gathering content writing content it is the highest risk weight that we have in a project they say oh I'm totally going to do all the content and I'll edit it and do everything and it's going to take me like two weeks I'll get it right back to you maybe if they've built the site before they have some understanding of that and also again it doesn't have to be done perfectly but having at least some I know I'm going to have news articles I want to have a headline there's going to be some sort of external link and kind of mapping that out also doing an inventory or audit of current content that's maybe going to move over is it going to get rewritten and then also gathering assets this is a great time to start thinking about do you need to hire a photographer because you want new headshots for your website where are all the logos the designer like created them years ago you need to track them down so to sort of gathering content should start happening really early in the process and before we do anything we should also cover the most important rule that we have if it isn't documented it was never done this is applicable for lots and lots of things but the really key things at this point is to have documentation of the hosting environment and maintenance decisions because if you find out oh I was expecting to host on our own environment then totally familiar with and then in the end you need to be working with a shared hosting environment and you didn't anticipate that that can be a lot of work later on having a skill of work, design brief document the non-med requirements who is hosting email do you need to touch that at all and then the most important piece of what we do is we have a functional spec for every single project a functional spec is essentially a list of all of the templates that we will be creating for a particular site all of the globals the header, the footer and any short codes that we need to produce for that particular client and this is documenting down to a pretty fine where I need to what exactly needs to be the functionality power to say and this saves our lot all the time because if we are documenting it early enough in the process then any time there's a chain we're able to reflect back and say hey this is what we were trying to like agree to do we need to change the budget do we need to do a change order can we replace something else so it's about documenting it and sharing it with the client so that they go yeah I'm on board with that and you have that cable trail to cover you and it's not just holding them accountable or approving what you said you were going to do it's also like we forget what we say we're going to do especially if a project is like and then it's 12 months you're not going to remember what we said in the early part so being able to refer back to that document and say oh yeah this is supposed to be a file upload oh right they're going to have a slider here okay so hopefully we understand the client at this point and their project and then you've got a proposal and the budget's all set and we definitely need some technical choices because we produce all this documentation we have our functional spec we've got some at least content or at least idea of the content and some assets so we've got logos we've got fonts, maybe some photography and we've got again the documentation and so now we're actually ready to do the fun part I think which is build the site and we're going to talk about the development tools a little bit later we're going to give a really quick and high level review of the development process we use okay I do the front end invisible piece so one of the key important parts for this step is doing some sort of wire framing this can be super low fidelity pen and paper on a white board or you can get fancier with specialty software or you can even wire frame with html but basically if you're not familiar with wire framing it's taking we take the functional spec sort of what the content is going to be and we sort of lock out a map of each template so we have some idea of how it's going to lay out of where the pieces need to be and this is also super helpful because quite often there's things that come out in wire framing that we didn't think about when we're writing our functional spec because our functional spec is quite often an outline document when we start drawing on a board we're like oh yeah there's going to be a drop down how's that going to work in this instance so this is pretty important step and it really doesn't have to be I think a lot of times with budget it sort of can get dropped it doesn't have to be super time consuming and it's really going to help you later on the other piece of this is actual visual design working with agencies quite often they have a designer in house so I might get psds that I need to use to write css and html to make the website look like what the psd is it really depends it might be a sketch file it depends on the designer's presence if we do the design in house which we do sometimes I'm very comfortable writing code so I tend to just skip and not use graphic software to design I just start writing the browser write some markup write the css and then we take the design especially if I'm getting a static file from a client and I start writing html css and javascript to create the visual front end and what it will look like and at the same time mostly concurrently we're implementing the functionality I don't want to skim over it too much but basically for us this comes down to functional spec well implemented if it is we go through it we implement that functionality just go right down and we're spinning it out onto the templates it shouldn't have conditional like there's no design we just need to have a WordPress admin as done as possible so that we can start getting content in and as the visual design is then completed and the markup is written then you can come back and integrate the two together and we're doing this with javascript, php and sql so like the functional spec might say we're going to have a template for uh... classes we're dealers a client has a bunch of dealers and they need to list them in a dealer search we're going to need a custom post site with a dealer and address it always needs to default to main and they're going to have a phone number in a website I'm just going to make sure we have all of those fields and then I'm just going to output them to the front end appropriately conditionally so that it doesn't show up if it's not there and then content this is where we've got back end done so that's all the functional piece, the admin piece hopefully the visual design is done and then someone whether it's us or the client is moving content, adding new content and this again is a great place to or often is a place where you find things that you can consider in the functional spec and also the design so we had a site recently where the designer had designed a really nice looking case study and then we did the programming and we made it so it was like supposed to be just one line the client actually wrote two paragraphs for that so we had to go back and amend the functional spec and say okay actually this is going to be a different input field the design had to change because the font was like this big and had to squeeze it down so moving the content will also usually require some adjustments on design and functionality which is why we had to review and adjust we need to do an all hands meeting at the end look at our checklist of what's been documented and actually go through and figure out where are the missing pieces, where do we have code that is not available and one really key rule to keep in mind during this is if it isn't documented it was never done and it was approved and you can't charge for that so if there's a big enough change we want to have that documented so that we can then go back and say we need to do some adjustments along the way in order to meet the budget that was laid out so we do change the document because we are a little big on documentation so change the functional spec email confirm the change if you talk on the phone and you have an in person meeting just write up an overview it doesn't have to be long or complicated but write up that overview to capture the date, the conversation and the decision this helps with my memory too because a lot of times I'm like I get burned in my head what we originally agreed and then if there's a change if I can't actually look up what we said I'm just going to do what we originally said so we've done the visual design functionality comment reviewed everything and buttoned everything up so we launch I'm sorry we test what are you saying um so there's obviously some sort of testing you're not the process I'm sorry I know I love that you do some thorough testing so there's definitely testing that goes along the way because you know we want to make sure it looks good and some browsers that your client might be looking at so you're probably doing some level browser testing before they even look at the site the first time there's a bunch of different kinds of tests that you can do you know you might do user testing if you have a really awesome budget that's great but some of the things that we always typically do no matter what you browser test to make sure how does it look with different devices different operating systems, different browsers validation of your code is huge especially quite often there's something that looks weird validate your code you can usually find it is usually a div that is a close or a paragraph um accessibility testing we make that a priority on every site no matter if the client is a priority for the client or not um it's a priority for us so we make sure we're testing for accessibility and then of course just generally bugging to make sure that the site is running smoothly so then we launch but we're not quite done yet um we also need to consider post launch and maintenance because yeah we did not do this well in the beginning of our company um you want to talk early in the project about who's maintaining the site because when you build it they will expect you to maintain it and if you haven't agreed to what is the return structure on how you maintain it how long are you responsible for minor edits are you responsible for maintaining it in exactly the same state that you launched it are you responsible for editing it because they had their needs changed knowing who's going to be doing that regular work on will help you better constrain the client's expectations along the way in the relationship because you could build a site for someone they're like no no we're going to host it and then it breaks and they call you and you're like well we've got to charge you hourly and they're like well you built it like you're responsible for it and so you've got to lay that out pretty early like what does that actually mean when you build a site and who's going to take care of it later so we typically only work on sites that we maintain um which we also incentivize in our pricing structure clients to do that because it makes our lives so delightfully easily easier if we know what our system is and we know who has access basically the only person in the company that's FTP access is me and I'm not supposed to use it so we have deployment structures in place so yeah it's a lot easier for us if they're working on our system then how hard do I okay so this part we're going to sort of talk about some of our development um environment, our tools we use this changes and evolves I am doing things differently than I did six months ago sometimes just because the tools change, the technology change, browsers get smarter and cooler and so hopefully if we have time we can sort of like hear some of the things so wait before we go there um just a quick reference like how many people are typically editing WordPress um through a code editor and how many people are typically interacting with WordPress online like probably the browser code editor versus the browser what's code editor so uh what's a like a text editor like notepad um so when we when we're editing we're editing things which are code um and you might be editing things through the web interface yeah I use visual studio code I just switch over to that because I want to try it out we use some line packs so this is our environment so we host our sites on WP Engine WordPress hosts they're pretty fantastic, they're a little expensive but they're worth it they're totally worth it they have great backups, you're able to roll up staging servers really quickly staging server being a direct copy of your site so that in a different environment so that you are able to you know with a hammer and install it live GitHub is our version control system so that allows us to track any changes within our um code we use deploy HQ which is the connection between our version control and the server environment so that allows us to make changes and then track who pushes the changes to the server and no one is able to edit the actual server files yeah so we're editing on our machines and then I push my changes to the repository which is where we keep all our code and deploy is the thing that then pushes it to the server so we're hopefully not breaking things and if we do we don't want to roll it back well and we also know we broke the changes there's some good messages like there's a great next KCD if y'all know the comment about getting tired and your quality of posted medicine hover is what we use for domain name registers so if you need to register a domain name we love hover and Amazon group 53 if anyone is familiar with that is our DNS our domain name server so make sites faster if anyone wants to talk to me about DNS afterwards and the pros and cons I do highly recommend it it makes your site much more significantly more performant but it's a little bit complicated some people really like building into DNS some people don't I doubt you I don't like doing that another important thing that we have developed for doing this so long is we sort of have a core repo as repo is a term for version control we have a core place and punch list where we have things that we use over and over and over again we build so many sites and there are things that we just keep doing repetitively and so we sort of save all of these things up in this one place so that we can copy and paste or download it every time we start a project and again we're happy to take questions about what we have included in this or not but you can do this at whatever scale you need to do it but having the punch list and prediction it's a hard method because we love our vacuumation and our punch list but it's wonderful because it allows us punch list is a carpentry term but essentially it's a checklist and that needs to be done we've got to think, trim, we've got to put on the carpet it's traditional in carpentry but we call it punch list it's the same thing, we've got to change the font and hook up the programming so we use a punch list but every time we spin up a site we know I'm not entirely sure where we all are in levels of things but how many revisions do we want to have in place, we don't typically want to run as many revisions as default because that takes a huge amount of database space so we're always going to want to change the number of revisions we're always going to need to make sure we have access to the DNS so we have this laid out because we're going to need it for any project that we have and then we also have things that we've worked over the years so we have a default internal plugin so we have a house plugin that we've written which is all of the debugging things that we need all of the functions that we like to debugging we always have a couple of things that we need but you could do you could construct whatever you'd like what are the things that you need to spin up every site and what are the things that you need to test and launch your site and if you have that then you have a pattern that you work on with every single time we always put our name and phone number and email dashboard so if a client logs in or maybe someone who's not familiar with us is like hey we built your site, if you have a question we'll call the clients a year or two later don't always call their web host and be like hey by the way we sold the business and here's your new contact and so the website may have an exchange with somebody new how do they contact us so we always have a widget which is front and center that says website related things call these people so yeah all of the things that we do we also have a scaffold so we're writing to us in plugins so one of the things that I know I'm always going to have my file structure in a certain way we have in-house standards we just collect that up and put that in an email plug and I have similar scaffold for front end theme development so we use underscores as our starter theme because it's great it's got a lot of built-in functionality and it has almost zero design in front end which I like because I'm going to start from scratch there are things about underscores that I do differently so I to write all my CSS which is shows what the presentation of the site should look like I use SAS which is a pre-processor for CSS I have my own way that I like to organize my files I have code that I reuse I have my own SAS setup that I save and throw in every time I start a new file supporting libraries getting in the weeds a little bit I use Gulp my Gulp setup which helps create my CSS it's the same every time pretty much maybe the file directory structure is changing but I just do these things over and over so we set them up ahead of time so we're not starting from scratch and then of course the punch list this is something that is a constant evolution we know something that we missed on one site we added in because we know we want to do it every single time and then third party plugins if you know a lot of sites you probably have favorite plugins that you use over and over again these are the ones that we pretty much put on every single site we're doing as we said very customized WordPress builds which usually means very customized templates very customized data so we're using advanced custom deals pro all the time it's amazing and that is something depending on where you're at that's something that's not terribly complicated to jump into and get a little bit more like if you're dipping your toes into the first time of if you're dipping your toes in for the first time to editing a theme or templates advanced custom deals is one of the ways that you can get to doing something a little bit more dynamic and funky which is pretty fun and then forms I don't know when I've ever built a site where they didn't want some sort of form we really like grabbie forms but I'm sure everyone has their favorite form software grabbie forms is worth the licensing fee it's so great 100% we use mainwp we have a number of sites so mainwp is a method for managing and looking at the security plugin theme, updates available other information for all of our sites in one dashboard so that helps our client manager go through and look at oh I'm doing maintenance this is what actually needs to update if you look at it in one place rather than basically the site and then Yoast everyone's probably fairly familiar with Yoast most of the sites we put it on especially because we're doing marketing agency work and they want absolutely to have that installed we're doing a really small site sometimes we won't bother because it does add some red but it's a great plugin and that's really to help with your SEO so we talked about some of the things that we use some of the tools that we do and how we work we just wanted to like take a minute or two to talk about maybe some specific software that's always my favorite thing when people talk about how they do stuff like what are you actually using for software or how are you doing these things I think I mentioned I really like SAS if you're writing maybe your CSS you should look into it it allows you to do some more advanced things with CSS and chunk up your code I use Gulp which is a task runner basically you can set it up so you have a bunch of tasks that you do over and over again and it will do it automatically so for me that's compiling my CSS I have one set up for sprites doing some minification for my job script we use GitHub for our repository I use GitHub for Mac which is a GUI interface there at least use the command line and then I use Firefox for my browser and I highly recommend if you're just hitting into developing that you always look at the web inspector it has so much information it's so powerful tool you can learn so much just from using that I have some other image manipulation things that I use while I was talking tools but we're running out of time so I'm not going to get into that right now my dev setup my code editor is live text I love using a linter which helps me format all of my code appropriately p2p tidy is a package that you could use I also love git gutter just shout out for them because that is amazing at letting me see what has changed since the last commit to version control and so it's much easier to go in and identify see that's why I like the GUI see that see that and then I turn on other packages as needed I use man for pro or local by flywheel I'm playing around with local by flywheel that's an application that lets you run a local install on your computer which is handy if you want to develop that work and not work in a live server so local by flywheel or man for pro which do you prefer I am midway between the two I think that local by flywheel is great I occasionally have needs that they cannot meet but I'm not you're new to that too yeah I think local by flywheel is pretty good it does eat up a ton of memory we'll run on vc I think so I was pretty sure I use iterm as a terminal and the get hub the command line interfaces I use are get hub, the void hq and wpcli which I think are interesting to command line tools that's a really good one to start playing man for workers and from I use inspector and the web developer toolbar extension and the one other shout out I would give is on a Mac clip menu any clipboard history application I use jump cut she uses jump cut I use clip menu if you search for clipboard history for your operating system being able to go copy copy copy copy and then jump over here and go paste paste paste paste that is amazing and then you also have the history of like I say clip menu I use jump cut but I don't know if there's still updating jump cut the other thing is if you're doing programming get to know your manuals having the understanding of what this connects and how it's organized and what they're going to cover so that you have some comfort and familiarity php or javascript main manuals for all online understanding kind of how that manual is organized allow you to debug and do cooler things faster yeah and I would also just say like there's always something new and it's really fun to try new things and also don't be afraid to like use whatever works for you if you're comfortable writing regular CSS and that works for you that's great you don't need to install all of this stuff just because that's what I'm doing or do something else because someone else is going to hit there's a lot of different options out there so really sticking with what you're comfortable with and what makes sense I think is something these are some of the testing tools that we use oh I'm sorry that's yours we're running out of time so I'm going to go through these fast these are just some of the tools there's lots of tests you can do you can test your code we already worked with those slides with further information for some of the things you've said out loud that was hidden because it would make this slide very messy yeah so this is by far not an exhaustive list but these are some of the highlights that we like I care deeply about accessibility so we're using like web aim which is a great little browser extension AX which is also an accessibility tool that is for Chrome WC3 Validator that can validate your code super useful finding mistakes I know you can go down a radical I don't know if your program is weird and then you just look at your code and you're like oh there's just an error graph the client didn't close or something and also that will help with the accessibility Lighthouse super powerful tool it's in Chrome and it's built by the folks over there that's going to give you reports on performance which is useful information having a nice fast well run site they have accessibility audit in there so if you've never played around in the Lighthouse it comes built in Chrome it's built in, right? it's built in it's very powerful I recommend checking it out the other thing we might do is ab testing, scrutiny for MAC is a really good link checker also an SEO it will check your SEO maps so this is really helpful for launch Android IOS really early days we made a decision that I would be Android I would be the in-house checker representative for Android and Jen would be on so if I get a tablet I'm getting an Android tablet and that hasn't worked out really well to always have devices available because although we use browser stack which is a browser checker sometimes it's really handy to actually have physical it's different it can be different and I'm a fan of friends and family tasks can you look at this website for me and see how it looks sometimes browser stack is so powerful but just having someone else look at it gives you at least a low level of user testing as well with my browser it's really helpful for clients that's going to send you all the information about what their browser information is so you can replicate it to test any bug that might come up like hey this is not showing anything on this page okay this is a send in that link it'll give them a special link to send back to and it'll give you very detailed information about what version of browser what operating system, what size monitor they're using do they have JavaScript turned on and that is usually invaluable because then you can use like browser stack spin up a machine that is running the same thing and you can usually find out what's going on and um they don't know what it wants yeah and google if you're if you're doing any analytics campaigns um the google LAX debugger extension is awesome at looking at what is actually being sent over okay and then just really quickly talk about what kind of project management tools that we use we use Slack for internal communication um we are on some Slack channels with uh some of the agencies that we work with have Slack so we're on theirs email of course we're using this email Google Docs our punch list um we're using documents in there these Google Docs for our functional specs and all our documentation Trello keeps track of to-dos you can have sort of a template and um use that to replicate checklists so every time we do maintenance every month we just spin up a new Trello and work flow rate is like we're in terrible larger scale um tracking everything we have gone through a lot of project management tools over years we're lo-fi this is an incredibly lo-fi project management stack we have enough processes we are people that have the habits that it works for us to do this and it works for our clients to be hands on to get a new Google Docs it doesn't have any spin up time but um there are certain people who need more um and but this is what works for us and then we have a few other tools like we have site monitors that run on all the sites that we host send us text messages and Slack alerts when the sites go down so that's helpful a lot of information so we are Shining the Jacker um we will put our slides up later in the day as well as moving some of the content around just to make sure that the physical representation has the sum of what we talked about in it you can email us at hello at ShiningtheJacker.com and um we are going into a break so we are certainly going around on the break if you want to have one more competition but does anyone have any questions what are you talking about using SAS um do you is there something with WP Engine where it um compiles it on RD just do all that compiling on your local I do it all on my local yeah so I set it up I use Gulp, there's RUN there's um I used to use a piece of software now I just yeah yeah and then commit my changes to the repository and it gets pushed out but I don't have to deal with anything I have another question you were talking about you're developing your front end how do you successfully merge those two so that is a great question one of the ways that we do that is um something that we're working on but it's we're midway through the path from being a fully test-driven development shop so this is the midway point is um Jen actually goes in and she writes PHP which outputs static html and puts in a couple of small variables of the things that are going to come from the admin so advanced testing fields you need to get something out of that field and then put it smart so she's going to put variables in for that information from the functional stuff and then just returns all the static output then I take it and convert it into more dynamic code with all the conditionals in place so she writes static and so it's static markup and then you just you turn that into an actual template yeah so the stack markup is used you just include it in the template so you go through and create all the templates so you create the templates first yeah just create the template files so you we have done it the other way too is it just fits everything out onto a page and I go through and say we'll see the paragraph this needs an h3 you know whatever yeah if I'm ahead of her I just go ahead like placeholder put the thing here yeah we don't want to keep anyone it is officially but have her to chat more yeah


An accused baby killer may soon get out of jail. 30-year-old Sarah Korton had her initial appearance in Red Lake County Court today.  Korton was caring for the baby, for the biological mother, her cousin, who was in jail. The medical examiner determined the child had multiple skull fractures and her eyes had been detached. Korton's lawyer says that findings by the medical examiner are inaccurate and his client is ready to have her story heard. In court papers, she claims she dropped the baby on accident. Today, the judge reduced the bail from no bail to $50,000 bail. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


When we talk about the BJP's rise, let's also put it, for a long time, the same platform was contained on defeat. It was defeated in the national movement where Hindu nationalism was a platform that the BJP put, the RSS had put forward. That was the Hindu nationalist agenda they had put forward. And for a good 60 years after the independence, also they didn't really get traction. The communal politics, which is what the Hindu nationalist agenda is supposed to be, what it is, that started gaining traction only when the colonists vacated what I will call the economic nationalism space, which is the basis of the Indian national movement and also what we saw later as the development of what's called the Nehruvian state, which is really building a relatively more autonomous economic space for itself. Of course, the big issues here as well. So I think we need to really reflect on what kind of nationalism BJP is building and can it be contested on the basis of what was called neoliberalisation or an economic agenda of untrammel import of foreign capital into India and really try to integrate with global capital. I think that agenda we have to examine. I would say on one hand we have to look at the economic agenda itself, what it meant, what it means today. And we have to talk about the class agenda that if we want to unite the poor sections of the people who are Muslims, who are Dalits, if we try to unite them on the basis of identities, you get a BSP, you get an SP, you can get different kinds of parties, but you're not going to get something which brings everybody together. If we have to defeat the BSP, we need to get those sections who are really being today increasingly impoverished, who are really being relatively much more poor. If we want to get them together, we need a transformative agenda which rises beyond identities. I think it can help a few people as we have seen, it helps in a section, but it doesn't help the communities as a whole. It is not that the Dalits have benefited out of BSP, some sections. And I think that kind of transformative politics, neither the SP or the BSP can go forward. And it really depends on how this transformative agenda to be put, that the Dalits, the poor peasantry, the landless labor, the artisans, which is what the Dalit communities and the peasant communities represent. How do you bring them together with the working class politics and how you can transform, therefore, an India which empowers the people, really gives power to the poor and takes away the power from the rich. And essentially a redistribution of wealth is the transformative agenda. We have to put power over the country. The analysis of the crisis of what I would say is neoliberalism must be also coupled with the crisis of what I would call liberalism. Neoliberalism grew out of a crisis of the state itself. The state which was seen by both liberal, bourgeois liberal parties, social democracy, and the left, the working class parties, the communist parties, as an instrument of redistribution. Neoliberalism started by attacking this concept of state itself. Now that legitimization of the state as an instrument of redistribution has proceeded to the extent, even if neoliberalism has run out of steam, which it has right now economically, the de-legitimization of the state still continues. So you are seeing, therefore, the rise of a Trump-like phenomena, a billionaire, who is, the people are not bothered about the fact that it is a billionaire, but is promising to curb the so-called Washington Beltway. So this is one part of it. The second is, you have seen also the rise of larger forces, which are not now just pure German nationalist, French nationalist, English nationalist or American nationalist, but they are really xenophobic, white nationalism. And therefore anti-Muslim, it is an interesting issue that you are seeing the rise of imperial powers whose earlier demand was that we shall go and conquer the rest of the world and they must open their doors to us. Now say we need to have barricades, preventing Muslims from coming in, immigrants from coming in, by the way, a lot of the Modi-Bhakts love Trump and they think that he is a great guy because he is a white nationalist and therefore an alliance with Hindu nationalist. Well, Barron's one of his famous books is by a French author who shows how Indians can come into various places, can flood white countries and looks upon Indians as completely dirty. Modi appeal in UP did work. The polarization that we had, the communal polarization we had seen in UP also remained where it was. What we have to add to this is essentially what the BJP has been calling its social engineering, which is that it has appealed to among the OBCs. It has appealed to the non-Yadav OBCs, given them seats on the ticket, has been also able to cobble together a coalition even amongst the Dalits which are the non-Jatav Dalit votes.  Somebody else can come and engineer a set of micro identities if you will, within the identity you have created and then you get into the problems of you being identified with one section of the OBC or one section of the Dalit and somebody else can then cobble a different identity alliance together. Do you have a long fight ahead? It's not going to be simple and it's also clear identity politics has reached its limits in India and unless we take up the issues that are really far more important to the people on identities we are not going to get anything but fractured mandates and that is always going to help finally the ruling parties which are there.


What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you are awesome and Undying Games has posted the items for ethereal on their website in a searchable database. Ethereal is a third person mobile currently in development. Now we still don't know myth kits or stats, but I think it would still be fun to try and make a few builds based on what we do know. Once the game is released, I'll try these builds out and see if they actually work. As Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Most of you know that I identify as a support main, however I really want to play Malia in ethereal and she's a reaper. Reapers are the assassin class with a passive that allows them to wall climb, Malia will be our first build. A few things we need to consider before we start is that we have 6 item slots to work with. There is a 7th slot just for boots so we can consider those to be free, and there are also separate slots for potions so no need to worry about those. Part of the build includes a pre-made loadout that we can pick so we'll add that in at the end. Finally, we'll choose which familiar to use with the build. Familiars are little sidekicks that do have their own abilities so this isn't just a cosmetic choice. However we don't know yet what any of the familiars do so I'm just going to wing it. Now let's get building starting with what we know of Malia. She's an assassin so imagine we'll want to jungle with her.  My goal is going to be to create a bursty assassin that relies on lifesteal in conjunction with her shield to sustain herself long enough to get a kill and then peace out. I'm not sure if the shield just mitigates damage or blocks a certain amount, I just know that shielding and lifesteal go together like jinn and juice. For the build we'll only be looking at fully upgraded tier 3 items and we'll start with our boots. I'm going to slot in spiked boots, this gives us 60 movement speed, 15 physical power, 10 physical pin, and a passive effect called frenzy, a stacking 5% attack speed bonus when we land a basic. It caps out at 5 stacks for 25% attack speed. Our first item will be a mark which is a jungle item. The tier 3 mark we'll build into is mark of the sentinel hunter. This one is a bit unique, the other tier 3 marks evolve from having a smite effect at tier 1 and 2 into having an ability that affects enemy myths instead of minions at tier 3. The mark of the sentinel hunter is the only one that retains the smite effect. I would usually want something that affects myths instead of neutral minions in the late game, however you'll understand why I'm picking this one when I go over its second active. The mark gives you 500 health, 25 armor, 25 magic resist, and 20 movement speed. The secondary active breaks crowd control and makes you immune to CC for 2 seconds. I know from my days of using hunters guile and shimby that having CC immunity is invaluable for hot assassin checks. I'm going to be dependent on lifesteal and I can't swing if I'm stunned. Our second slot will be blood packed scythe. This item gives 15% lifesteal, 40 physical power, and 20% attack speed. It has the blood litter passive that gives us a percentage of health back when we kill an enemy. That could be a minion or a myth. The heal is increased exponentially when it's a myth that gets ganked. What I'm really interested in is the shield you get from the excess healing. I plan to ambush people with Malaya and get a few hits in before they even know I'm there. If I can convert the lifesteal from that damage into a shield then all the better. I'll be able to stick to people even longer. Next I'm going to get the crimson dragon sword. This comes with 90 physical power and 25% lifesteal. The passive called with fire and fury causes 75% of health we gain through lifesteal to apply a 3 second damage over time. This maxes out at 500 damage. This item seems essential to any lifesteal build. The fourth item is a spear called delta's rupture. It gives us 15% attack speed and 15 physical power. This comes with 1000 sided strike. Every 30 seconds your next melee hit will strike 4 times for a total of 150% damage and 2 of the strikes will apply on hit effects. The 30 second cooldown can be reduced by landing some basic attacks. Now that we have a badass spear that quickly applies on hit effects what are we going to do with it? We're going to equip heaven's blade. This will give us 100 physical power, 15% lifesteal, 10% attack speed and a passive on hit effect that will knock enemies up on the 4th melee strike for 1 second on a 10 second cooldown. With our delta's rupture applying 4 hits and 1 we're sure to knock up as soon as we ambush someone which will give us more time to build shielding via blood pack scythe and damage via the crimson dragon sword. But wait oh there's more on top of all this we'll pick up the torment rifle. We get 30 physical power, 25 magical power which I don't think we'll care much about and 15% attack speed. The passive for this one is corruption rounds. Landing a basic attack corrupts the target and causes subsequent attacks to deal 3-7% of their health as magic damage.  In the event that we get CC'd we can just break it with our mark. I would say that this build has too much lifesteal however the crimson dragon sword will be converting that into damage. And even if it caps out at 500 I still think this will be a pretty sweet assassin build. I do see two problems here though. One we're going to be a glass cannon that really leans into that lifesteal. And two there's no crit chance or armor pin. Well there's a little bit of armor pin on the boots but that's about it. And that's going to reduce our burstiness we need to be a bursty assassin. Hopefully we can shore up the weaknesses via our loadout but from what I've seen crit isn't something you can take. The undying is leaning away from the RNG factor that the critical strikes provide I'm not real sure. I'll probably take the assault tree here and invest in penetration but I'll have to see the finished product first. As far as familiars I don't really know until they reveal what the familiar abilities are but I guess for now I'll grab the sword rat. He's cute and he's got a sword so why not. And that's it for now folks I'll be putting some other builds together soon let me know what you think of this one in the comments below. Check out all the items on the Undying Games website and tell me what you would sub in or how you would build. As always hit that like button if you enjoyed the video but for now this is the Mangoo signing off you guys have a good one. Mangoo!


This study examined the effects of normothermic machine perfusion on the immune system of donor organs. The researchers found that the immune cells present in the donor organs before perfusion were largely composed of neutrophils, which decreased significantly during perfusion. Additionally, the researchers observed an increase in the number of monocyte macrophage cells, which could be responsible for the information seen during perfusion. Overall, this study provides valuable insight into how the immune system responds to normothermic machine perfusion, which can help inform future intervention studies. This article was authored by T. Horts, S. Solcher, M. Fodor, and others.


What's happening? It's Shane here. And today, I'm going to be talking about whether or not a college degree makes people live longer lives. So this was an article that was sent to me by one of my students in the College 101 course, which you can find linked down in the description below. But basically, it was an article by CNBC Make It, which is a fantastic website. And they talked about how getting a college degree makes people live longer and apparently the gap is growing. Now, before we begin, make sure to gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, and ring the notification bell so that the YouTube algorithm will notify you whenever I post a new video. But to put things in perspective, let's look back on the life expectancy throughout history.  So the average person would only live to 22 to 33. In the year 1900, the world average life expectancy only rose to around 31 to 32 years old.  Now, in the modern world, the average life expectancy all throughout the world is 72 to 73 years old. So it's more than doubled over the last 100 years. So for all of human history until up to the last 100 years, the average life expectancy was basically like one generation or maybe one and a half to two generations. And now life expectancy in the United States, for instance, so a first world country, is thought to be somewhere between 78 to 80 years old, right? So this is probably due to many different factors such as modern medicine, improving diet, access to healthcare, and not having to go out and do extremely dangerous things just to stay alive. Now, according to this article, basically the life expectancy of somebody 25 and on, which is a little bit different than what I just talked about, that was the life expectancy at birth. But basically, there is a difference between people who get a college education, get a bachelor's, and those who don't, right?  They live to, it looks like almost 47 years after the age of 25. So about 46.7 or so, something like that. And then with those who don't get a bachelor's, no BA, they only live to about 44.5 or so, somewhere around there. So there's about a one and a half year difference between those who do get a bachelor's and those who don't. Another similar study found that there was about a three year difference in those who get a bachelor's versus those who don't get one. Now, there's a few things to talk about here. First of all, you know, you always have to address the whole idea of correlation versus causation. It could be that people who are more likely to get bachelor's degrees are people who are just a little bit more conscientious and more likely to take care of themselves. And there could be other confounding variables there, where basically, there's a correlation, but there's no actual causation. But I think there are a few variables here where to me, it is pretty convincing that it might not be correlation.  And not only do they make more money, but they're more likely to be employed. So people who graduate with a bachelor's, for instance, are much less likely to be unemployed than those who either only had a high school education or didn't even graduate from high school. And employment means that they would likely have access to medical benefits. And even if they didn't have access to medical benefits, they would still likely be making enough money to where they could cover their medical costs. So that's obviously a huge hot button issue here in the United States, the ridiculous cost of healthcare, many people decide to just not go in and get things checked out just because of the fact that it costs so much. And so therefore, you know, maybe somebody could go like 10 years with high blood pressure before they actually go in to get that blood pressure corrected, very, very common to see same thing with diabetes. So I could definitely see that having a negative effect on patients health outcomes. On top of that, people who graduate without a college degree are more likely to go into jobs and careers that are not only more tough on the body, but they can actually be more dangerous as well. Right. So I'm a pharmacist, and I've had many patients who work in the trades, for instance. And one thing that I see commonly is after a full career in the trades, they have back problems and they have leg problems. And many of them end up taking painkiller medications for those issues. And then the third factor I think is very important to consider here is people who go to college likely make less money. And people who make less money are more likely to take risks, right? So they're more likely to engage in risky behavior. Now this could range all the way from the good type of risky behavior, which is maybe like starting a business or something along those lines, to bad types of risky behavior, like, you know, selling stuff that they probably shouldn't sell because it's against the law. And then of course, risky behavior can lead to accidents, which can shorten people's lifespan. So yeah, very interesting article, a lot to think about there. A lot of it could be correlation causation. I think that some of it is causation though. But I think that instead of having everyone go through the ridiculously expensive process of college in order to get people educated so that they can live longer, I think a better alternative to that is to either reduce the cost of college or come up with alternatives to college that are just as good. So anyways, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video and I will see you next time.