Welcome to Considering Your Methods Options, part of the Research and Assessment and Cycle Toolkit offered by the Association of Research Libraries and made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This presentation is part of a module that focuses on collecting data, evidence, input, or other information for library assessment projects. It describes a variety of methods, strategies, approaches, and tools that can be used to collect information for library assessment. We hope the content is useful to library practitioners seeking to conduct library assessment projects. At the close of the presentation, you will find a link to a feedback form. Please let us know what elements were useful to you. Once one is determined to focus for an assessment project and considered the type of data, evidence, or other feedback that is required to address a project's information need, a next step is selecting methods that will offer the best options for eliciting the information necessary to address the assessment focus question or problem. There are myriad possibilities when it comes to choices for assessment methods, strategies, approaches, and tools. This slide includes a number of options and is far from exhaustive. Some of these choices for data collection are described in this presentation in the order listed here. Others are covered in separate presentations in this module. In all cases, this information is provided to help library assessment practitioners get started with an approach. More research into particular methods is advisable before enacting any approach in practice. One method for gathering possible assessment data, evidence, or other kinds of information and feedback is the recording of anecdotes. Library users often volunteer information to library workers in various ways. An impromptu telling of their experiences during a transaction is one common context for this. Many library workers can describe any number of anecdotes shared with them by users. While this approach to gaining feedback is typically somewhat informal, it can also be formalized into a tracking system. Libraries might decide to record such anecdotes in a systemized way, recording dates and times, contexts, events, etc. as they're reported or observed, related outcomes or impact, or any other kinds of information deemed necessary. Gathering anecdotes in an organized fashion provides a wellspring of stories that can be used to provide context for data collected in other ways. Another method for organizing data and information that is central to assessment is the balance scorecard approach. A balance scorecard approach links performance measures to strategies, usually in a strategic plan or similar document. In general, a balance scorecard is focused on four or more perspectives. Typical perspectives include a user perspective focused on how users view the library, an internal perspective centered on library excellence, an innovation or learning perspective focused on what the library can do to improve and create additional value for users, and a financial perspective. Connecting performance measures to these perspectives helps to connect relationships among various areas within the library and help surface choices and balances among them. For example, a user perspective within a balance scorecard approach focuses on users, their experience, and the value provided to them by engagement in library services, resources, and spaces. The internal perspective may focus on processes or how tasks are accomplished within the library, competencies, productivity, and capacity. The innovation and learning perspective centers on the ability of the library organization to grow and develop new services. It can also focus on organizational culture and professional development and training of library workers. The financial perspective dials into funding and the stewardship and balancing of library funds. Within each perspective in a balance scorecard process, there are typically objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives aligned with each. Target setting can be challenging, but basing targets on stretching a bit from historical levels is a common approach. It bears pointing out that this approach not only helps think through library strategy and incorporates assessment into that strategy, it also helps communicate strategy, both internally and external to the library. Our next method for assessment is benchmarking and the use of comparative indicators. Benchmarking, the process of measuring services, resources, or spaces in comparison to other similar or aspirational organizations, can be a useful tool to understand some aspects of an organization or process in relation to others. Composite indicators can also be used to benchmark, but typically involve more complex concepts that can be better captured with a combination of metrics rather than one or even several metrics on their own. Benchmarking is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and there are several approaches you can take to compare the information most relevant to your organization or situation. Some ways to categorize benchmarking approaches include performance versus practice. Performance benchmarking often uses quantitative data to make comparisons about some aspects of performance in order to identify gaps. Practice benchmarking tends to be more qualitative and focused more on personnel, processes, or technology. In addition, benchmarking can be internal or external. You may want to compare information across departments within your organization to see where improvements can be most effective. Alternatively, benchmarking externally can give you better understanding of how your organization compares to similar institutions. By looking at differences with other institutions, you can be in a better position to recommend changes that may allow your organization to perform more like your aspirational peers. This is one example of a benchmarking process. In this example, a series of repeatable steps would be followed for continuous assessment and improvement. In step one, which is focused on planning, the focus and plan of a benchmarking study would be decided upon. Next, in step two, data are collected to make comparisons. Then, the data would be compared and gaps in performance discerned. Finally, in the ADAP stage, goals for improvement would be developed along with action plans for achieving those goals. In general, having a systematic benchmarking process like this in place increases transparency and allows for repeatability. It also makes it easier to pinpoint where adjustments may be made to make benchmarking less labor-intensive. Composite indicators are used to measure multi-dimensional concepts that can't be captured with a single metric or data point. These are useful for attempting to assess complex concepts by breaking the concept down into constituent parts and providing a way to combine metrics that represent each part into a single value that can be compared over time. The underlying data and process for building a composite indicator can be simple or complex. However, several key elements in a robust indicator include things like establishing a sound theoretical framework, selecting appropriate data and applying data cleaning techniques, normalizing variables for increased comparability, applying appropriate weighting and aggregation methods, and conducting uncertainty and sensitivity analyses. Like any methodology, composite indicators have advantages and potential drawbacks. Advantages include the ability to distill complex concepts into more easily digestible and comparable results. In many cases, the disadvantages of composite indicators can be mitigated with transparent processes and open communication about construction, interpretation, and recommendations. Moving on to another method for gathering assessment information, the critical incident technique can be a useful approach on its own or as a part of another method. Generally speaking, critical incident technique is used to gather information about an event that was memorable to users. They are asked not about the most recent time, but about a memorable time when they had a particular experience. For example, users may be asked about a time that they remember interacting with the library and then describe what impact that interaction had on them. Here you can see a few examples. At one university, for instance, users were asked to think about a time when the library helped them and then to share what help they received and what they were able to do or achieve with that help. Customer feedback analysis is a related approach that many libraries have traditionally employed. While it can take on many forms, customer feedback analysis, generally speaking, typically consists of a feedback or comment form in which users make known their perspectives, experiences, and views. This information is most useful from an assessment perspective if it is organized, analyzed, reported, and used to provide context for other assessment data or create change based on user feedback. Two common ways of organizing customer feedback for assessment uses is to track the feedback by problem or by question theme. The Delphi technique is a method that gathers and processes the collective expertise of an expert panel. Of course, expert in this sense can be applied to any number of forms of expertise, including academic interest, for example, but also lived experience. In this way, the Delphi technique can be used not only for working with quote-unquote experts in a specialized academic area, but also users who have common experiences that are important to understand better. The goal of the Delphi technique is, generally, to reach a consensus on a topic through the elicitation and processing of a range of views. This is a facilitator-guided approach that demands significant time investment from participants. Generally, a set of questions is posed by experts on some topic, then the experts reply and their responses are compiled for a second round of review by the same experts who provide additional opinions and perspectives. This process continues until consensus is achieved. This graphic lays out a typical process for a Delphi method approach and demonstrates the significant investment and back-and-forth communication between facilitators and experts throughout the process of identifying issues and working together until a consensus emerges. Another useful assessment approach is the analysis of documents. Any number of documents can serve as an inspiration or fodder for this type of approach. Document analysis might center on user feedback forms, strategic planning documents, policy and procedure manuals, user communications like chat reference transcripts, or documents that are external to the library such as course assignments completed by students, syllabi, institutional documents, and the like. In a document analysis assessment project, documents should be checked for credibility, representativeness, and meaning. Typically, a schema and method for coding the documents is agreed upon and may be applied by a single or multiple raters. When multiple raters are used, it is often good practice to check for inter-rater reliability. Economic studies are also often employed as assessment tools. Such projects might focus on return on investment, financial stewardship or savings, comparative costs, and so on. This approach can be challenging in academic contexts as there can be significant difficulties in using financial surrogates in an academic library environment in ways that are not nearly as troublesome in, say, a library in a corporate context. Having said that, many studies have been conducted and some of these have attempted, most often in public library contexts, to develop economic calculators as an assessment approach of one kind. Environmental scanning can also be used in an assessment context. The goal of an environmental scan is to check in on and observe events in a library's external and sometimes internal environment. Typically, the focus here is to anticipate issues that might become obstacles or opportunities that the library should prepare for. There are a variety of areas in which environmental scanning might focus, social, demographic, and cultural issues, legal, ethical, or political issues, economic issues, technological change, environmental issues, and so on. This approach usually leverages other strategies including document analysis, statistical trend forecasting, reviews of publications, and expert interviews. Ethnographic methods range widely in specific use and application. Very generally speaking, ethnographic approaches are observational in nature and seek to explore and represent the worldview of the participants being observed. In some cases, assessors or researchers can be immersed in the group. Other times, other approaches are employed. Typically, the goal of this type of method is to explain what is happening in a situation, describe why the group of participants is acting as it does, and to learn from those observations and descriptions. Another assessment approach, the experiment, can be tricky in library assessment contexts. The term experiment often makes one think of a randomized control trial separated from real life, so to speak. Certainly, in the real world of academic library assessment, it can be difficult or impossible to control variables in the way one might in a lab situation. While the traditional type of experiment that often comes to mind may be challenging or not possible or not desirable at all, particularly due to the ethical problem of withholding access to library offerings, quasi-experimental and retrospective designs may still be an option. While the details of this approach, like any other assessment method, need to be considered weighed and thought through in far more detail than is possible in this presentation, library assessment does not necessarily preclude designs that consider and account for users that have or do not have a particular library experience and then comparing it across groups. This may sound simple, but it is not, as various experiences that are co-mingled with the having or not having of a particular experience are not easily teased apart. Because true randomization of experimental and control groups are often not possible, pulling from the same population may help for our quasi-experimental design like the one depicted here. Having said that, the more the groups differ, the more threats to validity there are. So this approach to library assessment isn't straightforward, which can be reflected in the terminology for this kind of approach, which is often called a compromise design. Learning Analytics is one of the newer additions to the assessment toolkit. Learning analytics can be defined as the use of institutional level systems that collect individual level student learning data, centralize it in a record store, and serve as a unified source for research, seeking to understand and support student success. For libraries, this assessment approach connects library data with data held by parts of the institution to explore connections between library engagement and user outcomes. When students are the focus, the goal of learning analytics is to help librarians, faculty, advisors, and other members of the educational team to discover challenges to learning in order to plan systemic and structural changes to remove barriers and facilitate individual level communications to connect students with relevant supports. This diagram demonstrates the ways in which various kinds of institutional data are incorporated into a learning analytics system, consolidated into a record store, used for analysis and provided to students, faculty, institutional administrators, and others to enable change and improvement. Currently, this is a new area for libraries, one that will likely become a more common library assessment approach as time goes on. Peer review is another possible approach for library assessment. This strategy focuses on asking qualified experts to assess a library service, resource, space, or other offering. Once qualified experts are identified, specific assessment criteria should be established and agreed upon, strategies for transparency put in place, and a structure for reporting that is clear and accessible for all involved. Rubrics are another tool for library assessment. While often associated with the assessment of learning, they can be applied to library services, resources, or spaces as well. Essentially, rubrics are a structured approach for describing outcomes that are hoped to be achieved by an interaction or engagement of some kind, as well as expected levels of achievement for each stated outcome. Thus, rubrics can be used to articulate clearly the outcomes of a library offering, the ones it's designed to achieve, and describe the levels of performance along a continuum of success. It's worth pointing out that there are several types of rubrics and each type is designed with a different purpose in mind. Analytic rubrics can assess the component parts of a service, resource, or space. Holistic rubrics assess a library offering as a whole. Task or performance rubrics are designed for a very specific one-time assessment, while developmental rubrics are intended to be used over multiple episodes, events, time periods, or groups. The success of applying a rubric to an assessment relies in part on ensuring a match between the assessment need and the rubric type. User experience is an assessment approach that focuses on deeply understanding users and their experiences. It emphasizes user needs, abilities, tendencies, and limitations with an overall goal of improving user interaction and engagement. A variety of assessment methods can be applied to user experience. There are also some tools and strategies that are closely tied to UX goals, some of which are listed here. The end result of user experience projects is typically proposed solutions, perhaps prototyped and tested, as well as productive collaborations. A final, at least for this presentation, approach for library assessment is the tracking and analysis of usage data. This data may already be collected for a variety of purposes including service provision. From an assessment perspective, trends and patterns in resource use and service transactions can help librarians understand user experiences and engagement. This approach may leverage service, resource, or space use counts and may involve vendor supply provided data, web analytics, or other data collection. The data may offer session data, search information, access or download counts, or other indicators of use. This data can also be abstracted to user groups by role, level, and so on. This presentation includes a wide range of assessment options for gathering data, evidence, feedback, and other information to answer assessment questions or needs. All of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses for any particular assessment project. Oftentimes, the only way to counteract or minimize the disadvantages of a particular assessment method is to combine methods. Using multiple and mixed methods reflects how we make sense and meaning as humans. We do tend to develop sense and meaning by combining information. By using a variety of approaches to listen, learn, and explore concepts, issues, and experiences, we are more likely to gather different perspectives and ways of understanding. In general, using more than one way to understand a complex issue provides greater understanding than one method would offer alone. Therefore, best practices for library assessment include applying more than one strategy to respond to an assessment information need, problem, or project. Whatever method or methods are selected to respond to an assessment need, a few other general principles apply. Some of these are shared here. Regardless of approach, library assessment practitioners should observe ethical standards, processes, and policies. In some cases, library assessment work will be strictly tied and guided by IRB and other institutional processes or professional practices. In all situations, professional ethics should be adhered to. As a general rule, get permission, allow participants to withdraw, explain your purposes, and how your data will be used. Provide your role and contact information to participants. Don't make assumptions, explain things clearly and simply. Arrange participant engagements in assessment logically and in a straightforward and transparent manner. Before working with participants for a particular assessment undertaking, pilot and change your process based on their feedback. After the assessment, analyze your results thoroughly. Make sure you know why you're analyzing in the way you chose and what limitations those decisions introduce. Don't make claims that the data can't support, and always acknowledge your positionality, your limitations, your sources, and your collaborators. No matter what assessment method you select for a project, ethical practice considerations must be thought through and implemented. Many institutions require training in this area. Among the important areas to be aware of and apply are informed consent practices, privacy practices including thorough analysis and handling of confidentiality requirements, duties of beneficence and care, awareness of power differentials, consideration of costs and benefits, rights and protections including those of ownership and access to data, avoiding biased or selective designs or analysis, and reciprocity. Finally, other criteria will influence the selection of an assessment method or approach for a given project need. Among these are the appropriateness of the method to the research question and purpose. If the method selected won't ultimately serve the intended purpose or anticipated decision-making requirements of the project, that can upend the utility of the assessment entirely. Resulting data format and type is another criterion. Will the data that result from the assessment tool or approach fit the need and purpose of the project? Does the library assessment practitioner have the capacity or access to others with the capacity to accurately analyze and report results? Does the selected assessment method align with the overall assessment plan and program over time? In other words, does it fit into the entire and whole assessment strategy? Furthermore, does the assessment choice fit the resources that can be provided? This is a cost issue. Are there sufficient financial, time and personnel resources to implement, analyze and report out results for this approach? Are the costs associated likely to be one time or ongoing? These and other local criteria may have a major role in selecting among the major assessment approaches available to library assessment practitioners. Making the best choice possible matters as the selection of methods for understanding impacts many other stages of the overall assessment process. Thank you for viewing this presentation on collecting data, evidence, input, or other information for library assessment projects. Please use the link provided to complete a feedback form on the usefulness of this information for your purposes.


So good afternoon. My name is Maggie Kurth Baker. I am a science journalist. I'm the science editor at boing boing net And I just spent the last two years working on a book about the future of energy It's called before the lights go out conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us And it's really about the big picture what I'm trying to do here Is look at all these little projects people read about in the newspaper and then pull back so we can see where things are Actually headed, you know, what are the big trends that are going to be shaping what we can and can't do in the years to come? And as I researched this book, I noticed something really interesting The future of energy at least in the short term is probably going to be a little bit boring And that's probably something you've noticed today as well during this conference I'm sorry, and that's probably something you've noticed today as well during this conference So what I really want to talk about here today is why 2030 is likely to look a little less exciting than we probably Hope and why that's actually an okay thing To start off with that I want to look at what the future of energy could look like if we make no changes to the way we currently use and make energy This graph is based on data from IGSM, which is a model put together by MIT and IGSM looks at Making predictions about things like climate change and energy and how those two things interact with one another And what you see when you look at this chart is really a whole lot of more you see more consumption You see more use of fossil fuels and along with that you see more emissions and you see more risk Basically by the time you get to 2100 you have that sense of us. This is it. We're all going to die and That's exciting, but it's exciting in all of the wrong ways So what happens if we avoid that exciting future? What does this veritable hippie utopia that we all kind of want to build actually look like? IGSM that same model I told you about a minute ago has also been used to make predictions about what the future of energy could look like if We take action on climate change and limit atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 550 parts per million Now bear in mind. That's actually a somewhat stringent goal. We're currently at 390 parts per million We were at 330 parts per million 30 years ago and there are more countries Industrializing and adding to that burden all the time So the changes that we have to make to hit 550 parts per million are not small and you can see that by the time We get to 2100 massive changes have happened. We have a great big energy reduction I just said mispredicted. We're using a lot less oil and natural gas. We're using a lot more biofuels We're using a little bit more renewables and all of our coal has had the carbon emissions scrubbed out at the smokestack But what happens if you zoom in what happens if you look at 2030 in? The short term even if we do things right and we head towards these big goals You find the 2030 doesn't look all that different from the reality where we don't take action If you look there are some differences if you look side by side here at the 2030 where we've done nothing and the 2030 Where we have capped carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere You see that we're using a lot less coal and you see that we have an energy reduction Ultimately, we're using about 17% less energy in the future where we've taken action than the one where we've done nothing But when you look at what this means in the big picture, they're really kind of the same We're still relying primarily on fossil fuels our lives have not changed in any significant way This 2030 is not a future where everyone is driving around in electric cars with solar panels on their roofs This is kind of boring and it's boring because of the past The last time we made major changes to our energy infrastructure was in 1882 when the first electrical grids in the entire world were built They were both built in the US and you're probably familiar with the first one which was put together by Thomas Edison on Pearl Street in New York City This is a replica of the second Electric grid in the entire world and the first hydroelectric power plant in the entire world It was not anywhere near New York City. It is in Appleton, Wisconsin and it was also Not put together by Thomas Edison The people in Appleton were a consortium of business local businessmen and they bought technology from Thomas Edison But really put together the grid on the seat of their pants essentially They had none of the expertise that Edison had they could not invent their way out of problems and they also made some mistakes along the way There is an old engineering proverb that says you can have something done right You can have something done cheap or you can have something done fast and you get to pick two And the people in Appleton chose cheap and fast and it showed my favorite story about this is how they went about Monitoring voltage on this electricity grid Thomas Edison had invented a voltmeter and he used it at Pearl Street But the people who built the Appleton grid did not want to pay for that piece of technology So instead they had a guy a guy who sat in a shack very much like that one down by the river And he stared at a light bulb and if the light bulb got too dim or if the light bulb got too bright They knew that they had a voltage problem So you can see that the electric grid in Appleton did not work exactly the way that people had originally planned for it To it also did not make money like they had intended it to the Appleton electric company actually went bankrupt in fact it went bankrupt several times and So did many of the other first utility companies in the world Thomas Edison made a lot of money off of his patents But it would be decades before anyone else made significant amounts of money off of electricity In fact if you look at the history of electricity what you actually see is this history of failure You had 80 years of different inventors tinkering around with the incandescent light bulb trying to get to something That would be reliable and commercializable and then after Thomas Edison did that you had another 40 years of Different companies trying and failing to make a business out of electricity and there's a reason for that in 1882 There were only a few things that you could actually do with electricity You could light a light bulb you could burn your house down Or you could accidentally electrocute yourself and all three of those are really common but only one of them was popular and You could not make enough money on just light bulbs alone To actually make back the cost of building this brand-new infrastructure It wasn't until the 1920s After a concerted effort on the part of electric utilities to invent small electric appliances like the toaster oven and The curling iron and to find more things to do with electric motors that the business was actually able to take off So what I learned about the history of electricity prepared me for what I was going to learn about the future of electricity The truth is that this kind of massive change is really messy and it's also Kind of banal. It's not flying cars that shape the world. It's things like the invention of the toaster oven Today we are not trying to build a new electric infrastructure from scratch In fact, we are trying to do something a lot harder We are trying to take this old infrastructure and solder on all these new Technologies that are meant to solve problems that nobody even knew existed when the original infrastructure was built That's not easy We talk a lot about political willpower in these conversations about energy this idea that if we just got all the politicians on board If people could accept the science of climate change We could move forward and solve our problems very quickly and that's simply not true The truth is that politics matter, but there are things that matter besides politics and those get in our way Reality is messy and because reality is messy 2030 is boring Let's take a closer look at this. This is again that graph from IGSM showing you what 2030 is likely to look like if we take action on climate change and try to limit Atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 550 parts per million. You've got that reduction in energy use You've got less coal, but still a lot of natural gas You've got a little bit more renewables But not a great deal more and I want to talk about why this is the factors that make this 2030 kind of boring The first issue is the rebound effect and This really ties into that reduction in energy use because if we're going to get a 17% reduction in energy use We're going to need a lot more energy efficiency Energy efficiency is one of our greatest tools Conservation can help but energy efficiency does something conservation can't do it allows us to use less fossil fuels While simultaneously maintaining these comfortable clean and convenient lifestyles that we all enjoy and for good reason We need energy efficiency, but energy efficiency has a problem and that problem is the rebound effect This is an actual quote from a story about energy efficiency energy efficient appliances in my local newspaper from Southwest Minneapolis My husband is an energy efficiency analyst and I about became a widow when I he read this story in his head almost exploded This is an example of the rebound effect The rebound effect is what happens when as we reduce our energy use through energy efficiency We increase our energy use in other ways. Let me give you another example I work from home so because of that I don't have to drive every day on a commute And that's a form of efficiency because I still get my job done But I just don't have to spend fuel to do it and because I don't have to spend fuel I save money in fact I save about $1,200 a year that I would have otherwise spent on gas Coincidentally $1,200 is just about the right amount of money to fly my husband from and me from Minnesota to Florida during the dead of winter So you can see how The rebound effect can eat away in nibbles and big bites at the kind of energy efficiency that we really need And part of the problem with the rebound effect is that we don't actually have a good idea right now of how big it is Economists and researchers have really only been studying it empirically for maybe 15 years And while we do know some things about it from direct effects. We don't know what it does to the entire economy So the big lesson we need to learn about this energy efficiency Is that it's not going to be as easy as we'd like it to be and we need to start paying more attention to What we can do whether that's through a carbon price or whether that's through other factors to allow people to see when they are using fossil fuels and When they are depleting the energy efficiency gains that they've thought they've gotten The second thing I want to talk about is storage We've talked a lot here today about batteries and vehicles, but batteries on your electric grid are also kind of a big deal And we don't really have any the truth is that our electric grid is Not terribly stable at any given point in time We have to have almost exactly the same amount of electricity going into it as we have coming out and Maintaining that balance is a 24-hour seven-day-a-week job that never ever ever ends Why is it so precarious? As you saw in Appleton, nobody designed this grid this grid evolved and it evolved just to get the job done Not to do the absolute best job that possibly could no matter the cost And we're dealing with that now because wall the grid got the job done with fossil fuels It doesn't work quite as well with renewables and it can't work very well with them for long You've heard about brownouts, but what about whiteouts it turns out that too much electricity on the grid is just as bad as not enough and They've learned that in the Pacific Northwest in to October of 2009. They had a day that had Very sunny very nice Saturday afternoon when a lot of people were outdoors and energy Demand was low, but it was also a windy day and so energy production at all of the region's wind turbines were fairly high So you had a lot of electricity going into the grid and not enough electricity coming out of the grid and that could lead to a Really bad situation where essentially the grid fries itself and shuts down In that situation the only thing that people could do to solve the problem was to call up these wind farms and have them just shut off They had all of this Energy that they couldn't actually make use of all of the supply that just couldn't go anywhere that's not an isolated incident and it's not something we would have a problem with if we had more electrical storage on our utility grid the Experts tell me that we really only have a limit to the amount of Renewables that we can incorporate into our grid that it's about 20 to 30 percent wind and solar Before we're going to need to make some big changes changes that cost a lot of money and changes that take time Storage is one of those but we also need more smart grids that can help us balance supply and demand better And we also need more transmission that can carry power from places that have too much wind to places that don't have enough Until we make those changes We are going to be reliant on coal and we're going to be reliant on natural gas and that's what you see in that 2030 The third issue is Decentralization and this is really about where we get our power from today and how we can better take advantage of resources in the future Let me give you an example I grew up in Kansas and Kansas does not have a great deal of hydroelectric power In fact, the entire state has about one megawatt of hydroelectric capacity And when you think about that initially it seems to make a lot of sense because Kansas also does not have a great deal of water I was in Dolt before I ever saw a lake that wasn't built by human hands but the reality is that that situation has less to do with Kansas's resources than it has to do with how we have traditionally gone about harvesting those resources if Hydroelectric power has to be something big if it has to be something where you find the right site where you can build a Reservoir and you can build a dam and you can get hundreds of megawatts of capacity or thousands of megawatts of capacity Then Kansas is out of luck But if hydroelectric power can be something different if it can be something that's set into the run of the river if it can Be something that comes in capacities between 1 megawatt and 50 then Kansas has a lot of potential that it has not tapped into yet In fact, the Department of Energy thinks that Kansas has the potential of easily captureable hydroelectric capacity To get up to 300 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. That's a big increase It's not enough to get rid of coal power in the state But it's enough to displace a lot of coal power in a state that's pretty coal dependent and that makes a difference better is better But this is not how we do energy today And there's a reason for that Historically it has been a lot better economically to build a great big power plants in the middle of nowhere and Ship that power to places far away Then it's been to build a lot of little power plants closer to the people that use it But there are some factors that are changing that I Told you earlier that it's expensive and it takes a long time to build transmission and that is true for coal Just like it's true for wind Experts have told me that it is more expensive today to build the transmission lines for a new power plant than it is to build the power plant itself and That is opening up some opportunities for us to build Energy at a smaller scale not the scale of you know Your rooftop but the scale of communities or regions or states rather than multi-state And when you do that you also get the ability to capture some resources that you could not otherwise capture as you can as I Told you about with Kansas's hydropower, but there's more than that It also enables us to better capture landfill gas It enables us to better capture more sustainable versions of biofuels and it enables us to use more Combined heat and power plants that make allow us to use natural gas in a way. That's a lot more energy efficient All three of these things Decentralization storage and the rebound effect add up to being what makes 2030 kind of boring These are the things that build our future that we're looking at today and that's okay 2030 can be boring That's because our goal today the goal that we have before us is not to create a utopia as fast as we possibly can That's simply not possible because all of these different technologies that are solutions to something have their own problems We're going to run into their side effects We're going to run into problems of integrating them with one another and you can't do that and build something that's sustainable Not just environmentally, but sustainable monetarily and sustainable technology wise in a very short amount of time Boring is good because boring is the first step that leads us towards something that is sustainable within the real-world constraints of time and money Boring is good. I don't know exactly what the future of energy is going to look like in 2030 But my hope is that it's going to be boring in all the right ways Thank you


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us solve the following problem that says PAB is the midpoint of a line segment between x's, show that the equation of the line is x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 2. Let us now begin with the solution. And first let us interpret the given question in the form of a figure. This one is y axis and let this be the line segment between x's and let RQ be the line segment and P is the midpoint of RQ with coordinates a and b. We have to show that the equation of this line is x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 2. Now let this line makes x intercept u and y intercept as b and this point denotes 0, 0. Now intercept form of equation of line x intercept is u and y intercept is v is given by x upon u plus y upon v is equal to 1. So let us denote this equation by equation number 1. So the point Q has coordinates u, 0 and v is 0 v. Now by midpoint formula we have 0 plus u upon 2 is equal to a and 0 plus v upon 2 is equal to b. So this implies u is equal to 2a and v is equal to 2b. Now substituting the values of u and v in equation number 1 it can further be written as x upon 2a plus y upon 2b is equal to 1 or x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 2. Therefore equation of the line is x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 2 whose midpoint is pab and is between the x's. So this completes the solution. Hope you have understood it. Take care and have a good day.


Prime Minister Carlson, Mrs. Carlson, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the White House. Nancy told me much about the warmth and goodwill that was so evident in Sweden during her June visit. We both have looked forward to this opportunity to express our appreciation and to return the hospitality so graciously extended to her. I welcome you, Mr. Prime Minister, as long overdue friends. Sweden, while quite some distance in miles, has never seemed very far away to me. As a boy in northern Illinois, I had neighbors with names like Hansen and Lund. This morning, in the course of our discussions, I realized and knew that what I have long known, that Sweden and America share the same basic values and the same hopes for a more peaceful and prosperous world. We often pursue our similar goals through different means, but our democratic traditions have bred in us both an appreciation for diversity and an understanding that there is often more than one way to achieve a goal. Today, we welcome our guests with special warmth because this is not merely the visit of a prime minister on an official trip, but also somewhat of a sentimental journey. In 1960, Mr. Prime Minister, early in your married life, you went to Northwestern University in Illinois, where you attended graduate school, and Mrs. Carlson worked in the university library, a hardworking young couple building a future together. I'm happy to note that the still young Carlson's next month will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. You've heard this and let me add the warm congratulations of both Nancy and myself. I understand you'll be visiting Northwestern again this Saturday, and I wish you a most pleasurable return to this special place. Mr. Prime Minister, our countries have been friends as long as the United States has been a country. Today, we've had the opportunity to reaffirm the bonds of affection between our peoples and to talk of the issues we as the leaders of two free nations face in the world. Prime Minister and Mrs. Carlson, I raise my glass to you and to the Swedish people. In friendship, and I ask all of you to join me in this toast and in a hearty skull. Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, ladies and gentlemen, this beautiful dinner in the White House is the culmination of a day of intense and interesting talks with our American friends. The splendor of this evening in the opulent beauty of the Washington summer highlights the character of the Swedish-American friendship. In several respects, no comparison between our two countries is possible. We obviously differ in size. We certainly have different influence. We have different histories, and we sometimes voice different views. But in many other respects, our two nations are very similar. What has been called the American Way of Life has a great attraction for many Swedes, not least for the young. American trends in art, music, and sport seem to reach our shores faster and stay longer than in many other countries. But some of the influence has also been in the other direction. During the last century, more than a million Swedes came to this country, and most of them came to stay and start a new life here, bringing with them a part of Sweden to this land. You will still remember many of them. One is Carl Sandberg, the son of a Swedish immigrant who became one of America's greatest poets. Another is Jenny Lind, a much-loved Swedish singer who toured this country for several years in the 19th century. The aviator, Charles Lindberg, was the grandson of a Swedish farmer. And if we look at the most recent wave of immigration, we find that there are no less than 22 Swedish players in the teams of the National Hockey League. There is still great interest among Swedes in traveling to the United States. This interest is encouraged, for instance, by an extensive student exchange program and is, above all, supported by the generosity of American colleges and universities in admitting students from overseas. I am one of the Swedes who once studied in this country. The year which my wife Ingrid and I spent at Northwestern University in Illinois was one of our most memorable. We very much look forward to returning there this weekend to revive old memories. Mr. President, during our talks today, we agreed that the close and friendly Swedish-American relations are in a dynamic phase with intensified context in many fields. One very good example is, of course, the visit which you, Mrs. Reagan, made to Sweden in June. Permit me to add, Mrs. Reagan, that your knowledge of and your dedication to the great problems of drug abuse made a profound impression on your Swedish hosts. Two days ago, I had the privilege of personally visiting the USS Constitution, a very fine ship in the port of Boston. We were there again reminded of the forthcoming bicentennial of the American Constitution to be celebrated in Philadelphia next week. We are proud that Sweden is one of five countries single out to be honored there for having had diplomatic relations with the United States for more than 200 years. Next year, we will see another celebration of the 350th anniversary of the first Swedish settlement in America. We deeply appreciate it that you, Mr. President, on this account have proclaimed 1988 as the year of New Sweden. I spoke initially about the differences and the similarities between our two countries. We are both engaged by and concerned with events beyond our borders. This is national for New United States as the major partner in several military alliances. But it's also a natural cause for Sweden as a neutral country since we too are affected by international developments. In particular, we know that we are all under risk of annihilation in nuclear exchange. Let me therefore, Mr. President, in conclusion again assure you that Sweden will support every effort by you and your Soviet counterpart to begin a process of reducing nuclear arms. I understand that you are near an historic breakthrough in the endeavor to start dismantling nuclear weapons. There are millions of people around the world who share your sentiments, Mr. President, about the immorality of a nuclear war. The fact that an agreement is near which may make such a war somewhat less likely is a signal of hope to all mankind. May I finally ask you all to join me in a toast to the President and Mrs. Reagan, to the American people and to the friendship between Sweden and the United States? Down to me, I didn't get much Swedish. The German and the French and the Italian and all of that came later. But I would like to try to sing this beautiful Swedish song for the Prime Minister and Mrs. Carlson with great love. And a song that I think is of tremendous beauty. Well, Marilyn, your American operatic debut had critics assured that the future of American opera was indeed bright. In the years since, you've thrilled audiences both here and abroad, bringing you a truly international following, a major force in the revitalization of the works of Handel and Rossini. You were the first artist to bring Handel to the Met. And you were one of the few vocalists in the world who can sell out a house for a recital appearance. And I can certainly see why. As a matter of fact, I've been able to see that for a long time because you sang it when I was inaugurated to Governor of California. Marilyn Horn and Martin Katz, congratulations on 21 years together. And I think I speak for everyone here when I say thank you for sharing your great talent with all of us here tonight. Thank you.


Good. We will go to listener David who, um, man, I love it when we learn things that we don't know. And this is definitely one of those things. He says, uh, I recently gave up to do this because I retired and no longer need a to do manager that complex and just started using Apple's reminders for all my to do needs into do this. I was in the habit of creating right reminders from emails simply by forwarding the email to a special to do his email address. It was very handy, but reminders did not have such a feature. If it does, please enlighten us and feedback it. Mac geek.com. He says, so in Mac mail, I looked for the very for the share sheet and soon remembered that there was none. He says I'm on big sir, but a quick search of Google says that there's no share sheet in Monterey either. He's right. I haven't found it. He says, uh, there is no men menu entry anywhere for creating reminder out of one email. One might think that it, uh, under the message menu might find a share submenu or maybe a cremate create reminder button, but no, however, there is a hidden and undiscoverable way to do just that. It turns out that one can create a reminder from an email message by control clicking or right clicking on the subject field of the email. When you do this, the contextual menu that pops up includes a share submenu, which contains among a few other things reminders and it works. He says you click the subject field, clicking anywhere else in the message will not bring up the share submenu. So you have to do it on the subject field. It works. It's fairly easy to add a date, time, et cetera, to the reminder you create. But why does Apple hide it so thoroughly? David, I don't know. I don't know, but thanks for sharing that quick tip, man. That's a good one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm definitely gonna use that. So yeah.


This is my first WordCamp. Is this everybody's first WordCamp? Yes. Okay, so we're all in this together. Good. So I'm going to be talking about WordPress.com versus WordPress.org. And this is probably the first decision that you need to make when you're looking at WordPress. You need to recognize that there are two different ways to approach it. And you need to understand the pros and cons so you can make a good choice. If you're getting someone else to make the site for you, this is a conversation you need to have with the person who's making the site for you. What kind of site are we building? What are the pros and cons of what you're making for me? So Alex gave me a great introduction. There's not much I can add to that. As he said, I use a couple of sites right now. Some are.com, some are.org. On the one hand, that means I'm completely unbiased as to which is the better way to go. On the other hand, perhaps it means I haven't made up my mind yet. If you want to find out more about me, check out my website. It's www.coval.ca. So I'm going to start at the very beginning. When you're making a website, you need three things in addition to something to put on the site. But I'm assuming you already know what you're going to put on the site. First, you need some software to build the pages and to build the site for you. And the software we're looking at obviously today is WordPress. WordPress is about 60% of the market for software to run websites. The next biggest competitor is Joomla at just 6%. And after that, there are many other software companies that make software to build websites, but I'm probably not allowed to talk about them since this is a WordPress game. If you've got your software, the next thing you need is a host. And this is to make your pages available on the internet. A host is really just a special purpose computer that delivers the web pages. It's called a web server sometimes. And typically, you rent server space from a hosting company. The third thing you're going to need is a domain name. Domain names are how websites are identified. That's how they're found. So that's how they're searched. You can either buy a domain name or you can share one with the hosting company. Now, it's technically possible to make a website without any of these things, but that's really hard and it's not a good idea so we're just going to skip over that. So as I said, WordPress is your software for making websites. And before we talk about whether it's .com or .org, let's just look at what the software is. It builds your web pages. It makes your blog posts. It's user-friendly. If you can use a word processor, you can build a page in WordPress. If you know a little bit of HTML, you can use that to make your pages to make some little customizations to it. WordPress also organizes your site pages and your blog posts. It looks after things like setting your home page and building your menus so that people can navigate around your site. It also looks after comments for you. It allows comments if you want them and it can moderate your comments. It also sets the overall appearance of your site and it will modify that appearance for different devices and this is very important because people are going to look at your site on desktop computers with huge monitors. They're going to look at it on big screens. They're going to look at it on telephones, tablets, everything in between. WordPress takes care of the themes in WordPress. Take care of rearranging your site so that it's good to read on any device. WordPress also manages users. There might be more than one person working on your site. If you're setting up a site for a club or an organization, you want several people to have access and WordPress can control who has access, what level of access they have. It keeps track of who is making changes to pages. Finally, it organizes photos and other media that you might add to your site. You can do simple editing on the photos after they've been put into WordPress. It organizes where they appear on pages. Do we have any questions so far? Please don't hesitate to speak up at any time if you do have a question. Do we have an IA computer? No. It's entirely internet-based so that the work is all happening elsewhere. You just need to be able to log into the site. An older computer is fine and any operating system is fine. It's all browser-based. You can even operate it from the iPad. I wouldn't know how to do that, but I'm sure you can. When you say it sets the home page, I'm having trouble with someone else set up and I want to change the home page. Is that possible or does that come with the theme? No, that's possible. Different themes allow you to do different things, but most themes let you specify which page is your home page. That's something we can talk about later if you like, but yeah, it's generally possible. Just the organizing of the photos. Once things are uploaded, things are on the web and you can't access your computer or anything else unless you've uploaded your files, PDFs, and pictures. Yeah, it's once you upload it. Everything's accessed from there. There's no communication with your computer. 99.9% of the time. If you really want to run a website from your personal computer, you can do that, but it's a really bad idea. It's technically possible a bad idea. WordPress is your software, but what are you going to do for the other two components you need, your domain name and your hosting? Well, there are three ways that you can get WordPress. The first is WordPress.com. That's a complete solution. It's the software, it's a domain name that you can share, and it's hosting. It's very much like renting an apartment. If you open a lot of money, it's your only choice. You have the option of moving into somewhere fully furnished and maybe it's expensive so you share the bathroom, you share the kitchen, but hey, it's a place to live. You don't have a lot of responsibilities and if the stove breaks, well, it's the landlord's problem. And WordPress is a really good landlord. They will come and fix that stove right away, no problems. If you can afford it, you can rent a really nice place. By using rent a place, you can rent an apartment that is so nice nobody's going to know it's an apartment. Inside from the outside, it looks like a fabulous place. But it's not your place. You can't rip up the carpet and put down hardwood if that's what you want to do. You can't change the kitchen covers. You've got to be happy with what they give you. They can give you something really nice, but there's a limit to what you can do. WordPress.org, when we're talking about WordPress.org, we're talking about just the software. You must purchase hosting and you must purchase the domain name. It's a little bit like buying a condominium. Price-wise, maybe not much different than a nice apartment. It could actually be cheaper in the long run. And it's your place. You can do whatever you want. You can change the flooring, you can change the coverage, you can do the bathroom with purple fixtures if that's what you're into. The budget is entirely up to you. You can do all stainless steel in the kitchen or you can get cheap appliances. But if the stove breaks, that's your problem. Nobody's going to come fix it for you. Toilet backs up, that's your problem. And the third option is a WordPress multi-site. This is a complete web solution, but it's not supplied by WordPress. So it's a little bit like WordPress.com, but it's a little bit like WordPress.org. It's like renting somebody's condominium. You don't have the responsibilities of ownership. It could be a really nice place. But the rules and the costs are going to depend entirely on your landlord. You're not going to see WordPress multi-sites too often. If you're online and you're looking to set up a site, most of the offers that you're going to see are either directly from WordPress.com or there'll be companies that are selling hosting and when you sign up, you'll get WordPress.org. Where you might see a WordPress multi-site, you might see an app that says, we have WordPress sites, especially for stamp collectors. Sign up with us. We'll give you a free WordPress site and be preconfigured for everything you need for stamp collecting. Something like that. They serve niche groups. In most cases, you're going to be choosing between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. And each has advantages and disadvantages. If you have no money, or if you're working for an organization that has no money, well, your only choice is WordPress.com because you can set up your website absolutely free using WordPress.com. Otherwise, if you've got a little bit of money, you can go either way. WordPress.org is much more flexible than WordPress.com, but WordPress.com offers plans and services that will make it more powerful and flexible. One thing you may hear online is that you can't use WordPress.com if you're making a complicated site or a large site or that WordPress.com is only for lobbyists, only if you're not having your own domain name. And that's simply not true. All of the organizations on the slide there, other organizations as well, the National Post newspaper, those are all WordPress.com sites. Now, they use a special plan called VIP, and if you have to ask for that cost, you can't afford it, but it's not as simple as WordPress.com is blogs and simple sites and WordPress.org is complicated sites. WordPress.com can be used to make a fully featured, high-powered enterprise level site. If you wanted to make an online store with shopping, I would probably go with .org, simply because you've got the flexibility to install things like WooCommerce, but you can often install those things with WordPress.com as well if you pay extra money. So it comes down to comparing the features and the costs. I've just recently started my website, and so I've got PostGator as my post, and then I did the install through them. Yeah, so this would be a WordPress.org. And then I had a GoDaddy domain that I've had for a year that I was sort of holding on to to get to this point. So I'm obviously in the work. So with .org versus .com, I would have to pay for services with .org. I'm creating it essentially myself. In a lot of cases, yes. Now, can I purchase a theme and then add plugins through .org? Yes, you can. What we're going to do is we're going to go through a lot of details about how to choose your site, how to choose your site, pros and cons of different features. That's probably a simple question, but if you have a domain name that's about .com domain name, can you use it on a WordPress.org? Yes, you can. You can use it on both. If you are using WordPress.org, which means you're going through a hosting campaign, you have to have your own domain name. That's the only way to find the site. If you're using WordPress.com, you have the option of using your own domain name. We'll look at some of the details. Before I get into that, though, I want to stress the importance of knowing which one you have, both before you buy and after you're set up as well. There's an awful lot of online help for using WordPress, but some of it is addressed to WordPress.com, some of it is addressed to WordPress.org. Most of the time that's okay. The core software, WordPress software, is the same, regardless of whether you're looking at it through a .com organization or a .org type site. Features like adding a link, making a link open in a new tab, adding a page, and you're done the same way, regardless of what type of WordPress you have. When you start getting into more advanced features, there's different differences. For example, an image map. This is a picture where if you click in different areas of the picture, different things happen, different links open. If you're using WordPress.org, you would probably do that with a plugin. If you're using WordPress.com, and you can't get a plugin to do that, you have to do it with HTML. There's instructions online to help you both ways, but you have to know whether you're working with .com or .org to get the right set of instructions. When you're looking for online help, know whether you're looking for help for .com or .org, and know whether the instructions that are there apply to WordPress.org or WordPress.com. Same thing if you're talking to someone here. If you have a WordPress.com site, let them know. That way they can give you advice specific to that type of WordPress. So let's look at the various aspects of both of them in more detail. Well, the first thing is the software. When you're using WordPress.com, all of the software, the core software, updates automatically. You don't need to do anything. You'll log into your site, it'll tell you it's updated to software. And there are no modifications or plugins. You can't make any, none are going to be made. Now, although WordPress.com doesn't allow you at the basic level to add plugins, it does have some features that are like plugins. And if you're willing to purchase some plans, you do have the option to add plugins. With WordPress.org, they give you the software that you are responsible for updating your site. It's not hard to do, but it's very important to stay on top of this. Because security is often an important consideration. You have to keep your site up-to-date to keep it secure. If you're using WordPress.org, you can modify the core files that make the site offering. That gives you incredible flexibility. But if you make a mistake and the site stops working, you'll have to fix that. Or hire someone or find someone to fix it for you. With WordPress.org, you can install any plugins you want. You can even create your own plugins. Again, if you have the coding skill to do that or if you hire someone to do that for you. But just as you are responsible for the security and the maintenance of the core software, you're also responsible for the security and the maintenance of any modifications and any plugins that are made. One benefit of having the software on its own is that you can install it locally. You can actually install WordPress software on your own computer, and you can run a WordPress site from there. You should not do that to make your site available to the public. But it can be used for testing. If you're working with a large organization and it's critical that the site be tested before it goes live with WordPress.org, you can have a copy of it on your computer. It's completely local. You can do your testing and make sure it works the way you want it to. Can we talk later about how to do that? Because I don't want to be live, because I'm working in progress, trying to do better. But I did set up the SSL and everything on there. So I am live, but there's nothing there other than my menus. And I changed the image of my front page. And I just said under construction we'll be back later kind of thing. But I really don't want them seeing my content because when I unveil it to social media, I want it to be a surprise. Right. You have other options besides a staging server that may be simpler. What you can do is restrict the visibility of the pages so that it's only visible if you log in. And that way you can have one public page that sits right under construction. You don't have any menu buttons on that page just out of the standalone page coming soon or whatever you like on that page. And the rest of the site can be entirely private. It'll be visible to you, but no one else. And under what heading do I go in to do that? It's somewhere under settings. I have to fish around to be sure. Under settings? Yeah, we can talk about that later. For what you're looking for, that may be a simpler alternative to making a local version. So I mentioned that WordPress.com includes hosting. It's free up to 3 gigabytes. And 3 gigabytes is actually a lot of space as long as you're not putting videos there and you can't get 3 WordPress. You can have sites that are hundreds of pages within that 3-gigabyte space. If you need more space, you can increase that with a payment. There's also no traffic restrictions. Most of us don't have to worry about too much traffic for our website, but if that's a concern, there's no traffic restriction with free WordPress. And they do include statistics so that you can see who's coming to your site, what they're reading, how long they stay and so on. When you're using WordPress.org, you're buying the hosting separately. So what you're going to get is going to vary depends on how much you spend usually. There may or may not be limits on your traffic. Again, for most of us, that's not a big concern. One thing that can be an important concern is that if you are purchasing your own hosting, you have the option to specify where that computer is physically located. And this is important for some companies. There are some companies that want their website to be in Canada. The server, where all the data for that website is stored, to be in Canada. If you need to make that kind of decision, you'll have to go with WordPress.org, purchase hosting from a hosting company that says our servers are located in Canada. It may apply to other countries as well. Again, if you need to serve to be in a particular area, you'll probably have to purchase a host that can make sure the server is in that area. The mention of WordPress.com includes statistics. If you purchase hosting, most likely you're going to get statistics from your hosting company. That's a wash. If you really like the WordPress.com statistics package, you can actually add that to a WordPress.com site. The Jetpack service, which is a big part of WordPress.com, a lot of the extra features, is also available for WordPress.org. Any questions on hosting? And as I mentioned before, the third thing you need to make a website work is a domain name. With WordPress.com, a domain name is not required. You can create a site with them, and it will have the address, whatever you want, within reason. WordPress.com. If you want to use your own domain name with a WordPress.com site, you can do that. Your own domain name is always a good idea. It looks more professional, and it's generally $10 to $20 a year. But if money's tight, you can share your domain name. If you're going to purchase a domain name, you can purchase it from WordPress.com, right within WordPress. There's no need to deal with a separate company for the name, and they'll do the work of associating the domain name with your site. It's not terribly complicated, but I'll look after it for you. If, on the other hand, you bought your domain name from a separate company, a domain name registrar, or some other company that had a good deal on domain names, you can still connect that to your WordPress.com site for a small fee. Now, with WordPress.org, you must buy a domain name, but you're already buying posting, and a lot of posting companies include a domain name already. So, again, it's a bit of a wash. Any questions on domain names? Something else we need to talk about is email. WordPress.com is website software. It does not look after email. Email is handled separately. There are, just as there are web servers that deal with websites, there are email servers that deal with email. WordPress does not include a mail server. Now, if you're using Gmail for your email address or another online mail service, you don't need a mail server. So it doesn't matter to you. You only need a mail server if you have a domain name and you want to send and receive email that uses that domain name. For example, you purchased the domain name HalifaxPuppies.ca, and you want to be able to send and receive email using the email address sarahathalifaxpuppies.ca. To do that, you're going to need a mail server. If you only want to receive email using a custom domain name, WordPress.com can handle that for you. You've got a custom domain name. WordPress.com will take up to five email addresses with that domain name and forward them to another account. So suppose you've got your email address sarahathalifaxpuppies, that can be used. You'll receive email. WordPress will send it to your Gmail account. Then you can reply to it using your regular Gmail account sarahatgmail. Does that come with a regular free WordPress.com listing? Or is that involving upgrade? This would be if you purchased a package that includes a domain name with your site. If you're not using a domain name with your site, you wouldn't be able to use a custom email address. Unless you had your own registered redirected domain. But through WordPress, what's the monthly cost of that? Do you have a rough idea? The plans start, I believe, five or six a month, depending how you pay. And you can add a domain name without going through a plan. I believe at $17, but I don't know if that's still available. Either way, once you pay to use a custom domain name with your WordPress.com site, that email forwarding is available. The drawback of that email forwarding is you cannot send using the different custom domain email. For that, you need a mail server. There's a couple of options. WordPress.com is also able to forward email to a separate email server. For example, when you purchased your domain name, depending who you bought it from and how much you spent, it actually may include an email server. So what happens is somebody wants to see your site using the custom domain name. It goes to WordPress. WordPress shows in your site. Somebody wants to send you email using the custom domain name. WordPress looks at it and says, okay, this is email. I don't deal with this. I'm going to send it off to this company, which has a mail server. And then you can send it and receive your email using your Sarah at healthxpuppies.ca. So if your mail hosting is included with your domain name, all you need is WordPress.com to forward it, and you have your mail hosting. If you don't have mail hosting included with your domain name, there is an option to purchase it. WordPress.com has an arrangement with G Suite. It lets you use Gmail with a custom domain name. So there are ways around this. One way or another, you can get email with WordPress.com. There's a couple of different options. Now, if you're going with WordPress.org, well, again, you don't have email because email is not part of WordPress. But if you have purchase hosting, most of the time, your hosting plan is going to include a mail server as part of that. And typically, even the most basic plan would include, say, up to 100 email addresses. So if that's the case, if you're using WordPress.org in a hosting company, your email is handled entirely through the hosting company. WordPress has nothing to do with it. So a lot of different options on email. The main thing to be aware of here is which way you go. WordPress isn't handling your email completely, but WordPress can forward your email to look after that. The different options. If your domain registration includes an email address or a couple of email addresses, for example, I have one package where my domain registration includes one email address. I only need one email address, so I can have WordPress forward the emails to my domain registrar, which is where my mail server is. Ideal depends how many email addresses you have as part of it. And you may already have G Suite through another organization for another reason, in which case you can take advantage of that. What is G Suite? G Suite is a package of features that's basically a premium version of the Google services. For example, you can have Gmail for free, but you have to use an email address that includes Gmail.com. Whereas if you pay them a little extra money, they'll let you use their mail service but with your own name. So if you can have a custom domain name, Gmail can still do all the heavy lifting of storing and sending the emails, but with your own domain name. It's up to they to do that. Yeah? I'm not sure how that would work, to be honest. I can say with some degree of confidence that you're unlikely to outgrow a WordPress but it's certainly easier to get everything from one company. There are advantages to getting your hosting from one company and getting your domain name from another company. Even if you're using WordPress, there are sometimes still benefits to getting your domain name from another company. It's more convenient to get everything from one supplier but you are kind of more committed to that supplier for future changes. As a general rule, if you have your domain name registered with one company, you can change it to another company and I would assume that applies to your domain name away from WordPress as a registrar as well. There's usually quite a few moves to jump through because everybody in fault wants to make sure that the transfer of the name is legitimate because people don't like their domain names getting stolen. But yeah, you could probably arrange to transfer the domain name to a new registrar and it would be the same to export it from WordPress.com as from any other registrar. So it's back and forth. Yep, it's trickier and certainly trickier if a site's become abandoned and you're not sure who's looking after it now. Another thing to consider is backups with WordPress.com you don't need to make backups. If you want the data is yours, you can export it at any time there's a function for that and if you want to be extra careful you can purchase a backup service. For WordPress.org you are completely responsible for the site. If it goes down it's up to you to restore it. I mentioned that you have to do your own software upgrades. You should take backups before you do a software upgrade when you're using WordPress.org. Now the good thing is that if you purchase posting there's a good chance that posting includes some backup provisions. There's another question on the security it just went over there. Sure. I have a WordPress.org site that has passwords protection but it's being hit by a whole bunch of spots looking to log in and it just shuts down their IP address. Is the only protection I have is strong password. That's actually not something I can just do with sorry. If you talk to one of the folks at the happiness party they know a lot more about that than me. When it comes to user accounts if you're going to create a WordPress.com site you'll need a WordPress.com account that becomes your login. One account can access many sites. If you find yourself looking after 304 WordPress.com sites you can use one account to access all of them. With WordPress.org well you don't need a WordPress.com account. You might still want to get one though to take advantage of some of the features such as jetpack. And you will need a separate account for each website that you set up through web hosting. Themes as we mentioned before themes control the appearance of your site. With WordPress.com there are 153 themes and another 200 that you can purchase. And if you purchase a plan that opens up a few more themes. Most themes have a limited amount of easy customization you can change the font you might be able to change a few colors of a colored scheme. If you've got deep pockets unlimited customization can be purchased. With WordPress.org the web host usually supplies a few themes but there are thousands available for free and there are thousands that can be purchased. You can make your own. Some of them have easy customization and that depends entirely on the theme but there is essentially unlimited customization. Ultimately you can have any appearance you want with any version if you've got enough money. When it comes to support with WordPress.com and WordPress.org there's a large community folks here today online support know which version you have. If you purchase a plan from WordPress.com that's going to include email and chat support at any time you can send somebody a question and say how do I make this feature work. That's not available with WordPress.org. You're relying on the community you might be able to get some assistance from your web host if there's something with the site not working but they may not be able to help you with WordPress specific questions. There is lots of help available but if you want the convenience of being able to send off a chat note and say how do I make a picture smaller that's available with WordPress.com if you purchase a plan. Something else to consider is advertising. If you've got free WordPress.com WordPress is going to place ads on your site and there's going to the branding there. If you have tons and tons of traffic there's revenue share available but for most of us that's not an issue and you cannot run your own ads you are allowed to do self promotion if you're a lawyer you can tell everyone that you're a lawyer and you have services available and you can put affiliate links up within reason but you can't actually run ads you can't make a lot of money running Google ads or something like that. If you purchase plans you have the option to run ads and remove the branding With WordPress.org there's no advertising the branding can be removed you can run your own ads you can do whatever you want you can even run WordPress.com ads and make money also if you have enough traffic it's the same either way there's advertising to bring people to your site that's separate from advertising on your site if it's a WordPress.com site it has to be a legitimate site that has content it can't just be pages of ads Is that a question on the time? Alex? We're just wrapping it up now we can do Q&A We're just at 9.30? Yes, it was half hour I thought I had 45 Nope Take another 5 minutes We'll go through a little picture here Yeah, I'll wrap it up as quick as I can An issue on content because there's more to your site than I have hopefully If you're using WordPress.com mature content must be identified and certain types of content and certain types of links are prohibited so read your terms of service basically if you're going to put anything up that you're not sure about it's probably not allowed Now I have some seen some online warnings that say don't use WordPress.com they will pull your site if it violates the terms of service Well, yes, they will Now with WordPress.org as far as WordPress is concerned you can put whatever you want on your site but the hosting company is going to have restrictions so again, read the terms of service Good rule of thumb if it's not allowed on WordPress.com it's probably not going to be allowed on the hosting company site either Now I haven't talked much about multi-sites most of the time using a WordPress multi-site is a lot like using a WordPress.com site but just remember that the terms, conditions, and costs are all set by the owner and operator of that site For most people a multi-site doesn't have much advantage over a WordPress.com site but if you're setting up sites if you're setting up a site for a franchise or real estate office or some other situation where people might have their own sub-sites then you'd be looking at a WordPress multi-site and you must use WordPress.org to set up a multi-site Big question for a lot of people what's it going to cost? Well, WordPress.com starts at 3 and it goes up to 390.60 a year for the basic plans A good place to start is a plan that is $60 a year that will remove ads it will get you one domain name doesn't include email service but if you need that you can get it from G Suite for another $60 a year you may not need it WordPress.org the software itself is free but you need to purchase hosting and hosting generally starts around $60 a year that's going to usually include one domain name and email server it might not include a security certificate security certificates generally start around $40 a year so there's not a lot of difference in cost depends a lot on your requirements yep, that's a monthly charge and those are based on annual payments for monthly charges what about if I created it myself as your cloud employer do I have to... renew anything? whatever you're using for WordPress you have to renew annually so how are you going to make your decision WordPress.com is easier to set up and maintain no question there WordPress.org is more flexible it allows more features and more parents options if you want one stop shopping and support you probably want to go with WordPress.com if you want to set up multiple sites you need to go with WordPress.org if you don't have any money you need to go with WordPress.com if you need to know your server location or choose your server location you're going to have to go with WordPress.org and purchase hosting where you know the server location if you're not sure go with WordPress.com set it up for free, get started for free you can add paid services and add features later and WordPress.com very easily migrates to WordPress.org if you decide you need the full feature and flexibility of that approach we've had a few questions but I've got time now for more yes sir when you say affiliate marketing there's going to be a lot of links there yeah basically people click on the link and do some blockchain and I'm not sure about what the best theme for that is so whether it's a certain theme that's going to be set up a template for me that would be installed because right now I'm just having a bunch of blogs and I'm going to fix that out today with the links if you have too many links on there you may run afoul of www.wordtrend.com content rules on linking the way it works with affiliate links let's suppose for example that you run a book review site so each post is a book review and you have a link to that book on Amazon and it's an affiliate link you'll get the funds if someone makes a purchase that's allowed but if you try and run an online bookstore where you have a page which is my favorite books this month and then the rest of it is links to Amazon and they're all affiliate links that's probably going to run a follow-up to your content so if you're going to have a lot of links you might be looking at .org we're putting an affiliate link in your blog let's say how does that affect the I'm trying to figure out with all the gdpr stuff and whatnot do you have to put a disclaimer on your website to save if you have links in your blog that are affiliate links I'm not familiar with all of the gdpr requirements but if you're using wordpress.com they will give you the options to automatically add the disclaimers that you need for gdpr as far as privacy policy and cookies and so on if you're using wordpress.org you're a little more on your own there now will wordpress.com do it automatically or do you have to ask them to do it what I've seen with wordpress.com in the last couple weeks they've been popping up a little note that says something to the effect of you may need this gdpr banner if your site is visible in Europe like here if your site is only visible in North America you wouldn't need it but in most cases your site is going to be visible worldwide so it's kind of a good idea to have that European banner on and the gdpr on if you have time for wordpress absolutely sir I was just wondering if you have received a website that has a particular theme and I believe we're using gdpr is it difficult to switch over to another theme if you decide oh yeah this is it's actually very easy to switch you can preview themes in a lot of cases I often tell people don't settle on a theme until you've got your content in because you often can't determine exactly what the site is going to look like until you've got your content there then pull up and see how it looks in the theme see if the menu is where you want it to be and if it isn't just select a different theme it's usually just a matter of minutes now what would happen another maybe one theme supports three menus and the next theme only supports two menus if you see one of your menus disappear but really the only way to get a theme that you're happy with is to have content in your site apply the theme see what it looks like see what the modifications and settings for that theme are then be happy with that one or try a different one yeah yeah the themes are small number of themes that are supplied by your post the rest of them you can obtain from WordPress or from third party suppliers so where in WordPress do I go you'd actually go to the WordPress.org site and fish down that way the best way to do it is to talk to one of the folks who are happy with this part they can show you where their treatment is from WordPress has some themes there's other themes that for whatever reason are not available through their site but available separately there's lots of companies out there that make themes so you may be able to just Google search word themes but talking to one of the folks at the happiness bar about the best way to do it there's a tab that says themes and things I've never looked for one there that's where I go to start looking that's why I say talk to those folks I stay away from custom themes that's my personal thing just one other question gentleman in the back have a question yeah that can be tricky sometimes if you're using complex themes so again myself I stay away from complex themes I like it simple is there I was just wondering is wix better than WordPress or is it because I hear wix is so easy you know also is that a good hosting site okay I gotta be careful when I say we don't have the hosting conversation here we did have a conversation a couple like a couple months ago now hosting is a very sensitive conversation we do have a lot of different sponsors so I would like to table that if you wanna ask people's opinion separately everybody will have a different opinion and different experience we don't talk about hosting it's a heated controversial it's like talking about Trump there are two things there are two rules to word camp we don't talk about Trump we don't talk about hosting just to answer your question about one of WordPress's competitors again there's not a lot I can say there but there's no denying that WordPress has a little bit of learning curve but in my experience I recommend WordPress I recommend it you recommend WordPress I switched to WordPress in 2012 as I mentioned I turned up with no patch decades ago I learned Greenweaver and more complex tools like that I found them more than I needed I've always been a web hobbyist not a developer I use the internet I'm not into websites so I went with Microsoft front page with serious web developers and then expression web when Microsoft stopped supporting expression web I switched to WordPress and not looking back very happy with it one of the question on the page if you have two things about it would you switch from one page to another if it's already a site full of content like you said some of the content maybe the menus are missing if you switch back that you still reappear not necessarily no you'd be very impressed you're not going to lose any of the content that you've created your pages, your photos none of that will be touched but how they display and some of the navigational language may be affected you can do one previews too you don't actually have to commit there's a preview option when you're testing a different theme all right


Fantastic Beasts the Crimes of Grindelwald. Is it fantastic? Are there beasts? Do you pronounce it Grindelwald or Grindelwald? I don't know, but anyway, one's ready, let's go! How's it going guys? It's Justin. I've just taken the latest step back into the Wizarding World and let me tell you that this is definitely a movie full of twists and turns and fun surprises and unexpected surprises especially at the end. We're not going to talk about that because this is a non-spoiler review. I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter franchise and this brand new entry into the cinematic universe that is the Wizarding World has everything a hard core fan would desire out of a movie kind of like this. Hey, it's written by JK Rowling and she wrote the last one and because of that the amount of detail in this universe is massive. A newcomer to the franchise would probably see this film. If they saw this film first they'd probably freak out. They'd be like that's a lot of stuff going on and I have no idea what's happening but maybe I can be interested in the in the story that's happening and I think it works. You've got a few characters that are split up and it's like that story and that story and that story and yeah maybe it doesn't work that well. There isn't a singular main character of the film unless it's Grindelwald. Maybe they've taken a page out of the Marvel playbook and instead of it being the heroes are on their own journeys it's actually about the journey of the villain and how the villain story will interact and interconnects with everybody that he meets. Not to say that we don't still get to enjoy Newt's Commander as our hero of the day. He was in the last film and he was definitely the kind of bumbling hero but I think personally the Newt's Commander character would work better as a side character and I think this film kind of actually made him a bit of a side character. Grindelwald is definitely more engaging and more interesting to watch because it's Johnny Depp and Johnny Depp is pretty much great in everything that it does except for all the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. Yeah. That's your brother? I think that might have been the best moment of my life. I've got to say though as a fan of the franchise reading the screenplay is probably a no-brainer. If everybody else has read the books for the Harry Potter films read the screenplays for these movies because the amount of detail that is spoken because of the way the JK Rowling is as a writer a lot of the detail isn't in the visuals even though the visuals are astounding and that's very much thanks to David Yates and his direction but there's something about these kind of films that I think it benefits from being able to read it whether it when it comes out on home video it's reading the subtitles and actually truly understanding what all the characters and all the dragon actually means. All you Harry Potter fans out there might enjoy the extra details I certainly do and it's always good to be able to see the brand-new stuff that comes out of Miss Rowling's mind. There is something a little bit odd about some of the choices some of the characters make though like it's something that didn't really meld with the way that the character has been up until now and the choices that they've done I think serve more the franchise than the film itself so we'll see how that turns out. All the performances in the movie they were pretty good there's nothing to really write home about nobody's going to be winning any Oscars for any of the acting in this film but what could garner some Oscar bars is the production design. These Wizarding World films they look spectacular and there is something about the direction whether it be from JK Rowling's brain or whether it be from the director himself whether it be from the production designer whether it doesn't matter who it's from but this film and all of the other Wizarding World films that have come before it they truly have a really great style to them and once again we are in the 1920s so we get to have a little bit of the old-school look and feel of what it used to look like back in those days especially for the Wizarding World. All in all guys this brand-new entry in the Harry Potter universe is definitely one that the fans are going to crave and one that the casual fans are just going to enjoy because they like seeing these people again. Are you looking forward to this film? If you are let us know in the comments below let us know everything that you're excited about this movie and if you've already seen it let us know spoiler-free because we've got to protect those secrets. Thank you guys for watching please don't forget to like the video subscribe to our channel follow us on all of the socials links are in the description. Anyway my name's Justin and until next time I will see you nerds at the movies.