The session is called sell smarter use a headless starter because I just want to go over some scenarios when it comes to the commerce and when it comes to automation and challenge the norm of what we've been doing and what we've been using so far in the WordPress world. I only started my WordPress journey in 2018. So I'm not as well senior than some of you are in this situation. However, because I came from a marketing background and other technical aspects, I was able to gravitate towards WordPress pretty quickly and then start to understand it's a system of systems. And those systems can create a lot of bloat when you're looking to get where you need to go and do what you need to do. So this option in this situation will help eliminate some of that bloat and give you back some performance without having to compromise on the outcome that you're looking for. The two tools that I need to do this are short part a short trigger so I'm just curious by a show of answers anybody heard of these plugins or these tools or platforms. Okay cool so it'll be something new for pretty much everybody here. So these are two plugins. They have plugins with their actually platforms and that's the reason why I use the word platform before because they are platforms that are awful for a press. And they connect with WordPress and give you what typically like a little commerce would give you or it's a deal would give you, but without having to, again, use a lot of bloat have to do with a lot of blow or have to deal with a very expensive tool because they've been a sheet job we all know WordPressers can be a little sheet but keep it real. So, I'll quickly go over like the technical definition of my breakdown with this. Thank you. I had this plug in for WordPress is like a kind of seems helper that does his job without telling you where your website will handle important hack and data management in the background, while letting other tools take care of how everything appears on the screen. This way your website can work faster and more efficiently as the plug in focuses on its specific job without getting mixed up with the websites design. And basically it's really just a fancy way of saying that you letting something else do the work for you, because anybody got time for that. We got other things that we need to do and get done, and you need to have helpers help you out so you can get where you got to go. So, with that being said, that's what this is all about is helping you get what you got to go a little faster again without compromising what it is that you're looking to get. Now why automation integration using automation integrations and WordPress makes it easier to manage your website, save your time and helps you create a better experience for people who visit the site. By properly connecting different tools and making tasks automatic, you can avoid mistakes and keep everything running smoothly. This allows you to focus on more important things like promoting your website and handling other business matters. I know for a lot of developers out here and people in that such area that is hard for you to hear, because we like to get in the weeds sometimes we like to have control sometimes. Sometimes we don't want to let it go sometimes. Sometimes you got to let it go. And that's hard. So when we talk about automation and integration is letting it go, letting something else take care of things. Now you got to check it out sometimes it's not a set it and forget it scenario. But hey, it's going to let you get to a quicker destination and that's what automation integration is supposed to be doing, in my opinion, in a very simplistic or overly simplistic standpoint. So let's dive in a little bit of that first platform plugin that I mentioned before called Shortcard. So here's a couple of features of Shortcard and overview as well trying to hit two bars of one stone. So first of all Shortcard gives you a very simple setup and customization. The way that you would set up this plugin I'm going to go into a demo of it but the way that you would set this up is not necessarily the same way you would set up WooCommerce. WooCommerce is very heavy when it comes to the end of the road. WooCommerce comes at a cost but it's a great plugin for specific reasons and specific needs. However, what people don't talk about is when you get into that WooCommerce world you're going to have some moves and some woes that follow you afterward because you got extensions and you got data management and optimization and people don't like that. All that stuff that you're doing, I feel like for the average people, and this is what I was talking to Ben and Ron about last night because you know, they be trying to challenge you when you get an idea. He tried to challenge me, he hit me up with that. Hey, Ron set me up for failure. Ron was like, hey Mike, tell Ben what your idea? What is it going to end up like? I told him what it was and we talked and by the end of it all he agreed with me. We need to simplify this stuff. I tell people all the time I love having the ability to serve clients for the last session. He was talking about at the end of his session how he was helping people within the business and everything like that. And I love doing that but there's that part right there where you have to understand that there's the education part and then there's the profit part. And there's the control part and then there's the empowering part. And when you are making people have to use WooCommerce in order to sell something and they don't need all that stuff. You're not empowering them to do what they need to do on their own. So you're making them dependent on developers and other people like that. Again, I like money. You know what I'm saying? I like to use what I got to use to get where I'm trying to be.  You can get in the car or something. I skateboard, I kick push. I was Lupe Fiasco before Lupe Fiasco. But at the same time now I could drive places because I spent some money. The simple setup is huge and speaking of the money, multiple payment gateway. See, again, you've got to add things to it to, you know, it comes out the box. Does it come out with PayPal? Does it not? It's like double Dutch. I don't know if I'm jumping in, jumping out. Like, what is it? It's somewhere. It depends on the website I got. Sometimes it has a PayPal. Sometimes it doesn't. I got to use 15 strike plug-ins. Which one does what? You're going to conflict with what? Listen, I'm telling you it messes up your money when stuff goes wrong. People are having conflicts. We don't think about that, but it does. The short part, it has Stripe that has PayPal. We all know through Stripe you get other currencies and connections. And then they just got a model as well too. And then they're doing more as well. But the thing is, is they're baked inside the plug-in. You're not adding an extension to it. So that is the difference maker with it. Product management. In short part, you're able to do product management. You're able to do over versus food commerce versus the short part or comparison so that you guys can see that they're both needing automated taxes. So that's another thing too. When it comes to taxes, y'all know we got to take care of that. Y'all know we got to take care of that. You got to take care of that. And if you're doing international transactions, whether or you're doing local transactions, depending on what you're doing, you got to have, you got to take care of your taxes. So what's good about short part is that it has automated taxes baked inside of the plug-in and taken care of for you because they have a, they pay for, that's a better word to say, they pay for tax jar, which is one of the biggest automated tax companies in the world. Like I said before about affordability, tax jar and cheap. So if you want to do it on your own, then you're going to have to pay that toll. And I had to pay some tolls. As a matter of fact, I got to pay the toll before I leave here today. They got that new thing when you're driving. They don't even tell you what the money. I'm like, what the heck is, I see signs coming through. You're going to call this number. I'm like, oh shoot, do I call it now? Do I wait till I get to the thing? My destination? I've never seen that. I'm just being real with y'all. That had me in a panic at first. I thought I was about to crash or something trying to pay the toll while I was driving here completely. Automated taxes, that whole scenario is with short part again, it takes care of it with tax jar, with WooCommerce. People don't think about it this way. When you want to start taking care of taxes, you got to either do it manually and know all your territories and all, know all the details and all this stuff that we don't really want to talk about.  And the jet pack connects with tax jar. And for those of us who know what jet pack is, we know what that comes with. You don't know what you're doing. Once again, you're adding more complexity to your situation for no reason. That's what I'm trying to share with people throughout the process. I don't care what you use and how you use it, just what you're going to be adding, what you're giving and what you're taking from the situation. These days we got everybody doing this thing. I could have it all. I could have nobody came. You got to know what you got to do. You have to give and take. That's what life is. Choices and consequences. Look, I'm going to keep it real with y'all. I might not like some of the realness, but I'm going to keep it real with y'all. We're not just here to talk about workers. We talk about life. This is life. Discounting coupons. We all love a good discount. We all love a coupon. Discounting coupons is not something new. We've commerce has done it, but I'm just letting you know, ShortCart has it too. And then reports and analytics is very important as well. ShortCart has very simplified reports and analytics right now. Maybe they'll get more complex later, but they at least have it. So these are the key features when it comes to ShortCart. And as I mentioned before, we have PayPal and we have Stripe, and we have Maui as well. As far as the payment gateways today, I don't want to tell you what's on the roadmap because that's just that's not important. You know, we want to see what they're going to do. We all been tricked by the roadmap before. Do you have a question on this? Yes, it has the Apple Pay and Google Pay. Has it already connected with it? Absolutely. Through Stripe. So integrations-wise as well, it has LearnDash and this is just the native integrations. There are other ways you can integrate into it, but I'm just going to give you all the native integrations. LearnDash, MemberPress, ShoreMembers, Lyftr, LMS, and BuddyBoss are the current ones that it integrates with natively. Meaning when somebody makes a payment, it can do something in this platform next. You've got to break it down sometime. You've got to be waving terms. What did he talk about when he says integrations? We talk about connections, which we're all here for. Technically, we're all integrated here at WordCat Buffalo, aren't we? Performance optimizations. I told you I was going to warm up, y'all. Y'all thought I was playing.  Performance optimization tips. Store settings. So in it, you can connect to a honeypot. That's for spam, for those of you all who know about that spammer. How many people are tired of when they start a new site? And then for those of us who don't know, I told you I came in here in 2018. I'm thinking I'm using it for my business. They said, no, you could use it for free, personal stuff. What? You're saying for personal? I'm like, how many people out here are really paying for the business side? I'm looking at some people right now in your eyes. He probably was using it on some other people's sites. And this says you're supposed to use one site for personal. No judgment, right? Recapture. So we got recapture three. We do that right there. For those of us who want to keep some of the bots away, you got to keep the bots away, like the bugs away, like bug spray, but for the internet. Then we got fraud monitoring. So yeah, if we're using Stripe, because that was the good question with the Apple Pay and the Google Pay, you have fraud monitoring as well too, because we all know there's some tricksters out there. So it just has some features that are just already natively within the tool that unlike WooCommerce or WooCommerce, you don't have to add. You have to add all these extra extensions and stuff. I don't know if somebody in here is WooCommerce heavy. He's like, it's bad. We also have a driver's script, ESM loader for all of us nerds out there. And I think that's most of us out here. So yeah, it'll help now. This is a different one because sometimes it does good. Sometimes you have to turn it off. But most of the time you want to turn this on just to help with more performance to help mitigate those scripts running. We want to keep those scripts from doing all that. I ain't gonna say the word. This is family friendly. I got y'all. Disable slide card out. And that's another one too. WooCommerce has the cart slide out when you go to the site and the cart comes out. So if you can turn it on and off and the great part is with this thing when you turn it off and you don't need it, guess what it does? It gives you more performance. So we're all talking about performance while I'm up here performing. I don't need tips, but I appreciate it. And then let's go to a little, let me show you a little demonstration real quick. So it's so you what it looks like underneath the hood. I apologize for the angle. I apologize too much. This ain't my projector. But at the same time, I know it's a little blurry on the side. So this is a short cart right here. What it looks like. Now, I think because of the pro project, you might, there may be some words that's something like great. It's that contrast thing. So this is the dashboard right here. You can see revenue orders, average order. I'm in a guest demo site. So I don't want y'all to see how much money I'll be making. We're gonna be asking you stuff afterward. So this is my guest account that I made right here. You can make one for free. The best part about short cart, you can start it for free. All that stuff I just told y'all that seems a free account. That should have been a hand clap. Y'all never been in a comedy show before. Yes, I told y'all that seemed a free account. All right, now we got let's go to the dashboard. I was in the dashboard. So let's go to the products right here. So this is orders. Excuse me. This is orders. I'm gonna see if I can move this so I wish I could see a little bit right there. Okay, boom. So orders, then we have products right here. So we like make some test products right here and then we have the coupons. I told y'all to do coupons. And then here's we have subscriptions. And then the best part about this is it comes with subscriptions. So we all know was it woo subscriptions. Come on man 200 dollars for the year for the book subscriptions which are doing this. You already know we got paid $200 for everything else we gotta do and we gotta do that. And you don't get integrations when it comes to other things because everything when it's the great integrates with woo subscriptions. And so it just gets crazy when you start talking about WooCommerce and really trying to build out a fast efficient transactional e-commerce ATM. I'm saying ATM machine. I'm talking about you put one in you get 20 out. You know I'm saying that's how we should want it to be. I'm showing y'all something that does that subscriptions and then your customers right there. And then you have your cart right here. What I like is that you can customize your cart as well too. And they let you customize your cart basically with Gutenberg. So now you're using two birds with one stone. And that's another thing with short cart. It uses Gutenberg when you build out your forms and you're building out your cart. And that's something that it gives you more performance benefit because you don't have to use something like the element or beaver builder. Say that five times fast. What else is out there at Divi etc. etc. You're using where WordPress is technically heading and WordPress is heading in the Gutenberg era and that's just it is what it is. Now I'm not saying that you have to or don't have to use it. I'm saying that's where WordPress is headed. You ain't got to go WordPress is going WordPress that we going this way. And you can be saying I'm going that way. And see how it goes. But again, just the whole concept of this plugin is meant to actually optimize your website while helping you make money. What commerce ain't meant to optimize your website. I'm looking at heads right now the money is on different. No, it's not. So this thing is meant to optimize your website. What I love about it too is for example, I'm going to just do this right quick. And then just to show you like the whole pricing part. This is one of the magic right here is being able to add your different type of payment type so you can do one time payments. You can do installments. You can do subscriptions. You can do free trials. You can mix and match this stuff to do like a page trial setup right here. That one I've actually thrown one. You can do the free trial here and then the allow customers to pay what they want so you can turn it into a donation. So you can turn this thing into darn near office prime. You know what I mean? You can get into that whole transformer scenario. You can make your whole do whatever you want. I'm showing y'all a real time. This ain't trade. I'm giving y'all a demonstration inside WordPress right now. This ain't no snapshots. We not in the matrix. So at the same time, you can do this whole thing, but just add to what price you want. As I mentioned before, you got the integrations. You can do down those digital downloads. It just the options are endless. So let me go back to the slide, but I basically just wanted to show you all that you can do a lot with that. And that was a short card, but a nutshell as far as building out the pages and stuff. Just for the sake of time, I'm not going to show you all that, but hopefully you get the gist right with WooCommerce. That was like 10 different plugins y'all. That's what I'm trying to do. Like I'm telling you that was extensions. Everything I showed you with another extension, another extension with another extension. That came in the free account. So let's talk about short cards, short cousins, short triggers. Short triggers is an automation plugin. So obviously I'm hoping I don't have to tell y'all that it's made by the same company. But if anybody here is not sure it is made by the same company. Yeah, I did come off that with the top of the head. I'd be freestyling y'all. In practice, none of this. Maybe I'll share. He was drinking some things last night. Overview key features. Let me go back more over real key features of short triggers. So short triggers is a savior alternative. One of the great parts about short triggers is you have the visual builder and multi steps. So multiple steps to be specific. So you can visually see the automations you're building out when you're trying to connect different apps together, different plugins together. And you can do it with multiple steps. And again, this is right within WordPress, or you can just do it on their platform. The best part about this plugin is you can just choose whether or not you want to do the automations and creations and WordPress or if you want to do them on just the platform itself. You also have multiple plugin and app integrations savior still the king of that. This is more of a new plugin. They only have the free plan right now. And they have been out for I think about a year or so don't pull me to that. But there they are new. One of the best parts about short triggers is that you have site to site integration capabilities. And that's not really easy to do in a seamless way. The thing that I think that most people don't understand when you're trying to connect multiple WordPress websites until you have a solution like this. So for instance, there's a tool called WP fusion. I'm not sure if anybody's heard of WP fusion out there, but it was a way as you can connect sites through tagging through a tagging system. Right now there's uncanny automator. There's other ones where you can share the login access. So when somebody comes in, I forgot what the plug in is called, but you can share like the credentials from one site to another. However, it doesn't always share all the information like the tags and say you have certain tags and people in certain lists and you want to share that it gets complex. This tool helps eliminate all that because it's not based on your WordPress website. It connects to your WordPress website, but it's not based on your WordPress website. So it just allows you to easily say, Hey, I want to transfer all this information from this WordPress website to this other WordPress website very simply so smooth like baby's bottom smooth. Then you have filters and conditions. This is where you just want to say I want to do basic certain things based off of certain criteria you have scheduling and delays. As you can say, I want to hold off on doing this task or I want to do this task at a certain time or a certain day, and then API webhooks. And I don't know why I forgot to decay, but it's supposed to say webhooks. And again, that's where connections as well too. So this is just an example of some plugin and acts that it has so far. I think it has currently 150 and their goal is to get about 300 relatively soon. They have everything from active campaign to affiliate WP and a sauna Amelia fluent CRM fluent forms easy to download Twitter, Femio spectra list goes on so MailChimp and a lot of these are common tools that we've heard of. I'm sure everybody in this room has heard about few tools on here and how we use the few tools on here. So it does connect with those and it's getting more and again the whole purpose of me telling you about this is it's about simplicity and it just it keeps things simple. And then we have the interface itself. I'm a big fan of a very clean and user friendly interface and I think that short triggers offers that it offers a clean interface. As well to I like Zapier a lot. There are other tools like Pavley. I was a big fan of Integra Matt and then they turn to make and they have a more complex interface.   So just got to be careful with that. And then here are a couple of workflow automation tips. So when it comes to automations, I think that you should properly name them. That's a big thing. Because if you start to compile automations to the dozens at a time or hundreds at a time and you don't have a proper naming convention things to start getting confusing, especially what other people are there to manage it on your behalf. Then you really can get confused or you're going to get somebody else confused. At the same time, you want to check connections, actions in your triggers. So that's what a short triggers it calls. It's different way that I guess activities the connections is what the apps actions is what happens first and then the trigger is what happens next. And then keep it simple. So keeping it simple as possible. We get over a conflict when it comes to sometimes these automations, you just got to keep it simple. Okay, they say KIS keep it simple. Sometimes you just got to stop being so complicated with life and what's the published automation when you're done. So once you're done, you just want to remember to publish automation. Sometimes we forget to publish our WordPress pages after we just built one same concept. Just remember to actually hit that publish button after you done all that work. You want to also test your automation multiple times after you publish it. So again, same thing when you're building out your WordPress pages, you want to test go to the page see does everything work well work how it's supposed to work. It's the same thing with automations. I think a lot of people sleep on that process right there as far as testing the automations when they're done they just think that it's just going to work. I can't tell you how many times I've sat with people and I had to remind them hey you need to test this need to test it three times four times five times, because they would come to me and say hey this is not working. The first thing I'm saying is that you test it.  And it's the same thing as when you clean out your closet or you spring cleaning or you are cleaning out your database, you're cleaning off your computer, you want to have a good method of knowing when you need to put a stop to something, or when you just need to get rid of something. And that's basically what I'm saying with that. So once you stack enough all these automations, you want to keep a monitor on which ones are actually useful. Because if it's not useful, just let it go and I can see a lot of us here, probably have a lot of stuff on our computers, or Google Drive or Dropbox that we haven't seen in years, yet we just don't want to delete that sucker. You guys just let it go sometimes because I know it's the only one in here. And then as far as a demo just like with the shore part, you should share with you guys real quick just what shore triggers looks like on the inside. Okay, so this was one of the screenshots I had shared before as far as just what the dashboard looks like. I think it's pretty clean. It just gives you the information exactly what you need. And then from there, you can dive deeper into it, but I like having a very clean and nice looking dashboard that doesn't feel over confusing or overwhelming. And then you can see your workflows right here. So workflows are all your automations. And what I like about this too is when you hover over an automation, it just shows you which what it is. These are little things that I appreciate. I want the tool that I'm using to give me these indicators as I'm moving about and navigating through my way because it saves me time to try to think about it. I don't want to be thinking about everything all the time. So can you give me a proper visual indicator of what it is I'm looking at. So I don't take these little things for granted. I think that helps out a lot. So when you hover over the number here, you can see, oh, you have two more automations in this workflow. Again, those are the little things that matter in life. It's little things. And then as far as turning them on and off, you can easily just click the click this toggle here so they may be very easy.  I don't know what I'm talking about over here. Come on now. But yeah, we have to refresh it in my nerves and I click the button and I got to refresh. I'm like, we still got to refresh. I put on the other one this morning. That's the only refresh and I'm trying to do after. Maybe I'm just too, I don't know, too modern times for y'all WordPress. I don't know. Y'all tell me history.  I like that. I like having transparency. We all need to know our history in America and the world. We all need to know our history and we need to know our history and automations as well too. Apps. So we have apps here. So now you get to see, okay, he was talking about the apps integrations. How do I actually connect them? Well, this is where we go down the yellow brick road. Okay, Alice. I guess that was I messed that one. I messed that one up. Who's going to correct me? Y'all don't even know that one Alice wasn't. Yes, I was waiting for her. See, I've got to see if he wanted to tell sometimes that I can call myself out accountability. But if y'all call me out with me, what are we doing here right now? I'm supposed to be teaching me to some. So yeah, whether you Alice or your Dorothy, look, we buy a Kansas or the yellow brick, whatever it is, wherever we are, I don't know. This is how you integrate into that. This is how you add your integrations and automations into short triggers. You do it through the apps. And so you just connect the apps. You connect the app right here. And you just click it. I'm not going to click it right now, but you see how, you know, the hand is over it. So you would just click it and then you would just connect very easily with your account for the situation. And this is a combination of plugins and it's a combination of apps and as well to which is really nice. So I like that. That's very clean. And then you can see which I have connected here. Even open AI. So for those of us getting into the AI, and especially dealing with chat GPT and open AI, boom, you got that right there as well too. Okay, and then settings wise. You can export, you can import. And then this is where I said that because hopefully this makes more sense. Where I said that this is not just a plugin. This is a platform because right here is a setting that says display short triggers interface inside your WordPress site. So right now we're connecting to the platform through a plugin, but it's not based on the actual plugin that is headless in the sense of using it in WordPress right now. And I'm saying that that's important for you understand because that's what Ben was challenging me on what headless is to him and then what headless is in this situation and he understood oh okay in this situation this is headless right here because it says turn this sucker off let it let turn it off let it go I can turn it off right now it's not gonna show up but my automations don't stop.  So then as far as the benefits of using them both together. You have a unified automation solution when it comes to that I specifically mean that you go back to the apps, and then you go to connection, you can see here, it connects the shortcut. Of course they should that would make sense that they would have a connection with themselves that would be pretty crazy if they did. And so you have a connection right there and then once you have a connection right there. This is, let's go to an example of what it looks like under the hood. As for example, and it was the trigger that comes first in an action that comes second, as far as just the order of events just to go back to that real quick. I want you to know, you know, exactly what it is so trigger right here you would start the flow with your trigger, and then with shortcut you see see that right there. What I like about this though is I can always change this out at any time but if I wanted to just update this right now I can update this easily through here and then I can choose based on what type of event that this automation or this workflow is going to start so we have everything from purchasing to refunding processing order processing customers created subscriptions. So types of subscription stuff, more refund order fail as we just mentioned before in our introductory panel that I was laid at and don't judge me I don't want I see your eyeballs rolling at me.  When that order fails, what do you do next that's important because that's how you sometimes get to keep your money.  What is that something happening that you want to create a scenario on. Most likely it's there and if it's not you can add you can request it, but again this is something that you don't get with WordPress without me will commerce without using some another tool and when you do get that will commerce. The other tool, sometimes it's not as efficient. And there could be a lot of issues and glitches so it's even think of it almost an Apple ecosystem scenario to a degree where yeah you can use it with other product use Apple with Microsoft. But are you really going to mix venerable water on a time like we can we know we can make it happen but it's going to be some separation at some point in time. So in that that that equation, I'll put it like that. Sometimes I got to use the big word job calculations and equations and technical infrastructure to the data man I'm just saying, what we doing here. So unified automation solution and then we have increased productivity and efficiency. So it just as I talked about earlier as far as just making sure that you are doing the things that you can and the best way you can without having to exert a lot of energy. And that's what these two tools when you're combined together, you increase your productivity and your efficiency by using them as one. And then you also save time you save money, because all those activities happening typically are things that back in the day people will have to do on their own you have to hire somebody do these things now we have technology and we have automation tools, where we can just have the tool do it for us. So it just save a lot of time and it does save a lot of money through commerce is costly as I keep explaining, whether you pay for it based on who you're hiring or you're paying for it based on the money that you're losing. You're paying for it based on the time you're giving for you paying for something is not going to be a free scenario. And then we have improved customer experience as well so the forms of shortcut are very very. They're beautiful out the box they have a really modernize checkout experience that who commerce does not have who commerce to check out experience is terrible unless you actually enhance it through other plugins and through other tools. And that matters a lot. Because of the fact that people that are on your website they don't care about what you use and how you use it and what you did to get where you wanted to be and you know how many kids you have and how long it took you to get through college and you know how long it took you to work camp buffalo and care about none of that stuff they want to get what they want and get out quickly and we be caring too much about what we did and how we did it to tell our story and we all got a story and we don't think about the customer and other size I don't care. I just want to buy that thing you got on your website. You make it hard for me. I could be a r&b song. year because they are, you're making it hard.  And I'm telling you, I know I'm oversimplified and I'm making jokes around it, but that's how people can easily win. No Charlie Sheen. Winning comparisons. Yeah, I don't know what a couple people say. I'm 36, y'all, but I got to owe so. Comparisons. So, Short Carton versus Wu Commerce. We all know about the Wu. Y'all learned about the Shore. Let's see where we are. So, Short Carton is a headless platform and a plugin. And a custom checkout experience, as I told you before, you could use Gutenberg to actually customize your forms and your checkout experience. It has multiple payment processing types. Also, it has automated taxes. As I mentioned, they have a, or they pay for tax jar. I was going to say they have an account, the tax jar, but either way, they take care of the tax jar dollars for you and then multiple native payment gateways as well too. And then Wu Commerce is a hosted plugin where you host it on your WordPress website. It has inventory management. And so that is what's different between Short Carton and Wu is right now it doesn't have inventory management. Commerce also has physical and digital products. It has a mobile app. The mobile app is okay. I wouldn't say it's the best as far as usability, but it's better than nothing. And then extensions and integrations. Commerce does have a lot of extension integrations, which is some people that's a positive, but at the same time, depending on what you do and how you do it, it could become a negative. So that's some examples of Short Carton versus Wu. Then we have Short Carton versus Easy Digital Downloads. I've already mentioned the things about Short Carton. When it comes to Easy Digital Downloads, it is a plugin solution like Wu Commerce. It also has extensions and integrations. Easy Digital Downloads has advanced reporting. And then it also does digital products only. And Short Cart right now does digital products only, but Short Carton is getting ready to do physical products very soon, whereas Easy Digital Downloads will always only do easy digital download. Oh, come on, man. I keep thinking I'm going to let y'all sleep on me. Y'all look y'all got my sounds right now. We was in one of my sessions online. I'll be hitting my soundboard waking y'all up for real. That's part of my session, but I couldn't do it here, so I didn't know what was going on. Y'all left me. But you're going to learn today. Short Triggers and versus Sapier. So let's go to Short Triggers. Short Triggers is a headless platform and plugin. It connects to WordPress websites. It has affordable pricing and it's made for WordPress. Same thing with Short Cart. Sapier is a SaaS app software service. It integrates with thousands of apps. As I mentioned, Sapier is the key of automation and integration. Most popular connector app, and it has established a well-established customer to support, depending on your experience. Some of y'all may like that. Some of y'all may not, because sometimes Sapier support be tripping, but they do have support. And then there's another automation integration plugin on WordPress. It was one of my favorites. Before I got introduced to Short Triggers, it is a plugin solution. It integrates with hundreds of apps. I would say that it's more built, and they would say it's more built for developers, even though the average person can use it. And it has unlimited automations, which Short Cart does not. You have automation limitations based on your plan. But right now they only have a free plan. Getting started. Free versus paid. When it comes to Short Cart, here's just, I just wanted to share a quick chart with you all about some of the comparisons between the free version and the paid version of Short Cart. You have subscriptions like the standard on the free, but you have advanced on the paid. Then when it comes to installments, they both have installments. They both have sale tax. You both have free and paid trials. Support is a little bit different when you're paying for product amount. You have 100 on the, so that is a limitation. You have 100 on the free, unlimited with the paid storage is a difference 500 megabytes versus two gigs and plus order bumps. So when we talk about sales funnels and actually building out like marketing funnels and sales funnels, we got to think about order bumps and up sales because that matters. Most people don't buy the first time. And if you can increase your order value with when it comes to your journey, I think that's going to help you make more money. Short Cart does not have that in the free, but it does have that in the paid. There's a plug-in for WooCommerce called cart flows. Cart flows is basically the click funnels for WooCommerce. So when you think about click funnels and how that all works, cart flows is native scenario was to be able to have a connection with WooCommerce. And then you have cart abandonment as well too and the free, not in the free in the paid, but not in the free. Then here are some support and resources. You have your, they have a blog, they both have a knowledge base and they both have a change log as well too. And then like I mentioned before, if you want to do some feature requests, you can always go to one of their future request pages and request and roadmap and they have a roadmap as well too. So in conclusion, I would say that Short Cart and Short Triggers is just a great way for you to be able to optimize your website's performance without compromising on all the features and benefits that having a robust e-commerce solution and automation solution will give you using a headless OA versus using a plug-in web. Thank you very much. My name is Marshall Stevens again. You can find me on LinkedIn and here's some of my social media stuff.


pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, PDAC, is a highly aggressive form of cancer that has a high mortality rate due to its resistance to traditional treatments such as chemotherapy. Recent research has shown that certain genetic mutations and molecular changes within the tumors can be used to identify which patients would benefit from certain types of targeted therapies. This knowledge could lead to more effective treatments for PDAC patients, increasing their chances of surviving the disease. This article is authored by Hiramitsu Iyashi, Takaki Iigashi, Tatsunori Miyata, and others.


Okay, but actually, Peter, you know, what is the electric cars in this state? We only have 10,000. We have a million cars, but only 10,000. What's going on here? Well, 10,000 is an accomplishment. We last month saw, past that mark, you know, Confucius said, you can't get to a million cars without passing 10,000 cars on the way. So you say, what a wise man. Yeah, he was very clever. And we have passed that 10,000. It's not huge. It's not as big as we like, but it's a milestone. And in honor of that, anybody who has an EV on Wahoo, on Maui, or on the Big Island, can take advantage of a car wash for only $10 in participating dealers, a little way of saying thank you. This is through November 10th. So even if you're not listening live, you can take advantage of this. You may recognize that voice and that face. Let's see that face again. Where is it? I'm looking for that face. I don't see that face. That's how cold the opening is. That's why I call it cold opening. Anyway. That's Peter Rossig, OK? And actually, at this point in time, we should probably say what the show is, Mitch. Yes. Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy, sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. So we have Peter Rossig from Hawaiian Electric, and Shane Eugenio also from Hawaiian Electric. Through the magic of our technical staff, we have Karen Shue all the way from California. We only have her picture. San Carlos, I remember. And she's with N-L-E-N-E-L, which is N-L North America. Whenever you want to make, I was thinking maybe Think Tech one day would be Think Tech North America. There you go. Think Tech Global, I thought. And that's Mitch Eugen, who just introduced everybody. One more question, Mitch. What are we talking about tonight? We're talking about smart chargers and electric vehicles and demand response. And the Hawaiian Electric guys and Karen are going to tell us all about it and what it is. Yeah. So welcome, everybody. Welcome, Karen. Nice to have you here with us. I hope you can do this again when you're here in Hawaii, Ney, you know? Yeah. Definitely. We'll be onsite next time. So Peter, you were saying, and we want more about the Car Wash program. Okay. This is actually organized by Drive Electric Hawaii, a consortium that we're a member of along with Ulupono and Blue Planet, the county governments and the state departments that are involved with energy and transportation. We've been around about two years now, Drive Electric Hawaii. In honor of this milestone, which is a big deal, it's a small big deal, but it's a big, big deal. If you know what I mean, we were passing 10,000, probably sometime late last month, we passed 10,000 electric vehicle sales and registration here. So a number of car washes are offering $10 car washes, which is a bargain for anybody with an EV. You have to have a coupon, which you can see on the screen right now. On the way you get that coupon is by going to Drive Electric Hawaii, driveelectrichi.com, and you'll see a site there, and you'll see a link to click on, and you can get that coupon. And that coupon, it'll show you which car wash is, a couple of Mon Capulani here on Oahu and Lahain and Maui, and one on each side of the big island, I believe. You know, a lot of these car wash places offer gas, too. Yeah.  Does it include the gas? Well, if you have an electric vehicle and you need gas, you're in the wrong line.  And you know, we like to keep the electric vehicles clean, and because everybody's looking at them, everybody's admiring them, those Teslas, you know, those lanes. Sure, people love their electric cars, they love them, you know. Drivers love them because they're fun to drive. So this is just a way to say thank you, a way to, for the, these car washes, to really say, you know, even though you're not going to buy our gasoline, because you don't need our gasoline, we want to, we want to participate and we want to help you out. And Drive Electric Hawaii is the organizer of this, and we put a lot of, a lot of work, I didn't personally, but people I know, put in a lot of work to get these folks lined up, and to get the coupons out there, and as I say, if you want a coupon, you go to driveelectrichi, driveelectrichawai.com. Well, it's all part of, you know, Hawaii's leadership in clean energy is what it is.  We are a leader. The rest of the country is not coming along as quickly as we are, and we have to keep on pushing. We have to be out there. We have to be out there in solar. We have to be out there in hydrogen. To the extent we can, geothermal, gee, what else, wind. We have to, we have to push all of these things and meet or even exceed our targets, you know? Absolutely.  Well, Jay, you know, it's already happening in many ways. Hawaiian Electric folks go to conferences. Our president, Alan Oshima, is at one right now in Florida. The American, American Edison Illumination Association, I think I have that right. And, you know, he's getting an award, actually, and he's talking about the fact that we built the Schofield Generating Station, which is using biofuel, and which is doing a lot of remarkable things, and it's safe from hurricanes and tsunamis, because it's up in the, off the waterfront. So we are already doing that. Shane's going to talk a little bit about our DR program. We go to places. He and his boss go to conferences about demand response, which is perhaps not the sexiest thing, but, Shane, thank you. You know, Peter gave you a good segue here. Thanks for having me. So what are you doing for Hawaiian Electric, and why do you care about electric cars, and why do you care about charges, and why do you care about Karen Shue? Well, it's going order. So for Hawaiian Electric, I work with the demand response group, and I guess if you're not familiar with demand response, I guess the theory is it's basically trolling customer-cited, like demand-side resources kind of in aggregate in order to deliver like a grid service or some type of beneficial service to the grid. So anything behind the meter, I guess behind the meter is the term you hear a lot, can be traditionally demand responses, like water heaters, air conditioners, in commercial settings, it could be like a building management system, like HVAC or lighting or anything. And basically what we do is we... Your plate is full. Well, this is the legacy stuff that was in place before I started working. So if you were to send these, our system operations department would actually kind of take a look at the load, take a look at the generation forecast and everything, and make a call that they'd want to reduce X amount of megawatts of load based on what they see, and that load would be coming from customer resources, just not demanding electricity at the time. So the traditional resources worked well, but we're starting to see now, like you alluded to earlier, there's a lot of PV installations out there, there's a lot of battery storage. We have these electric vehicles driving around. Those are all new customer-cited loads that we're seeing as being a lot more agile than traditional resources, like water heaters. So basically, what we see is the EVs providing a flexible resource that can connect to the grid and be managed by an electric and provide these grid services. So why do you care about Karen Shu then? Well, Karen, she, generously from NOX, offered to partner with 20 Electric to allow our customers the chance to acquire free EV charging equipment for their house or for their small business. And in exchange, we would, I guess, guide them through demand response demonstration to kind of proof out the concept of using EVs as a resource. So it's kind of a collaboration on this project. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay, how much of what he said, Karen, do you agree with? Oh, 100%. I mean, I think Shade only cares about me because we're offering something free to his customers. So now I'm just kidding. She's been great and we've been partners, you know, really trying to push out, leverage smart grid chargers into the territory. And then with a partnership with Elemental Accelerator, we're connected to HIKO or Hawaiian Electric, basically, to offer this free program for EV drivers to adopt a level two charger in their homes. And then we have 350 chargers available at this time for free for any Hawaiian Electric customer. So it is a really good deal because you're not really having to pay anything normally. We're charging about $600 for our solution. Mitch, I have a question, Karen. So what's the secret sauce for your device?  Yeah, so it basically reflects everything Shade had mentioned. It is smart grid connected with the intent to make sure that we're providing the EV drivers the best rates that are available for forward-thinking utilities like Hawaiian Electric and then also leveraging the cleanest energy that's available on the grid to charge their cars. So like, for example, if I go and plug my car in at any old time, theoretically, then your smart charger, depending on the cost of electricity and the availability, would not charge my car until the cost of electricity comes down to some targeted level. Am I correct in saying that? No, we never want to say that people can't charge at any time because, you know, it's like pulling up the gas station and then the gas station says they're out of gas or, you know, you can't charge or you can't pump gas at this time. It's really up to the customers. So normally people 80% of them charge at home, right? So I come home at the end of my work day, I plug in, I forget about it exactly like my other appliances. So it's a lot of time that the utilities will be able to kind of play around when the charging should happen. And then we always notify customers of, you know, any type of management that the utility would like to do and get their consent in order to manage the system. And then we reward them with a thing called juice points where they could redeem it via PayPal for incentive money, just by participating and allowing control of the stations. So they get a text message on their phone then when an event is going to happen? How does it communicate to the client?  How do you know that something's going to happen? So our smart chargers are connected into a mobile application or software web portal. And then so we'll send a push notification, exactly like the ones that you'll get when Yelp has a new restaurant that opens to the customer saying, Hawaiian Electric would have an event in the next, you know, two hours, can you participate? We would reward you this amount of money by participating. And it's important that this is a demonstration project and being funded, as Karen said, by the Elemental Accelerator to get this program going. So part of the question is, when are people actually charging? We know kind of anecdotally that people charge at home. We know that, you know, something about their charging, but this is going to be a much more scientific way to know exactly when people are charging because the smartness of the charger will tell us that. And then, then, you know, the future steps will be, will be, we'll do some tests to see how this works for demand response, how this, how we can be sure there's a certain amount of energy available or certain amount of energy not being taken. And in the future, especially as the number of cars goes from the 10,000 to the million point here in Hawaii, we'll be able to use that to support the grid with with the kind of weird stuff that I never understand called grid services. But it takes a lot, it's more than just the electricity you use, it's the ability to push that electricity out through the wires, it's the ability to control balance the grid. And those are what we call grid services. So we think we think that these electric vehicles will be a big part of that. And we want to test that out. Yeah, I can see how this is valuable to Hawaiian Electric, to get the data to know when people are charging or not, and to develop a good response, good response, response, magic word response to that very data. Yeah, well, I guess you guys brought up a good point as well, too, that I guess typical human behavior for cars to come home, get off work, plug your car into your charger, and then you kind of get on with the rest of your evening. Coincidentally, at that time is when the sun starts to set, and we're starting to lose solar generation, which means all of our fossil plants are going to have to start firing up to basically their max capacity. And, you know, these EVs are not insignificant loads on the grid. Each one is Well, and as Peter said, it won't take too long before they are much bigger. But even just per house, I mean, an EV, especially with NOX's chargers, they can use as much as or more than a full house load, you're looking at 7.5 kW or something. So it's kind of in our best interest to get ahead of it and try and see if we can control it and make it more grid beneficial than just to have customers kind of just use their typical human behavior to plug in and then try and, you know, in hindsight, try and go ahead. So I love smart things. And does that mean that, you know, the electronics in these smart chargers are going to be updated from time to time? Is it like a little Internet of Things IP address and all that where the information is going back and forth? Is that right, Karen? Yeah, absolutely. So it works exactly like, you know, your Nest thermostats at home. The software is always being updated. Currently, it's also integrated into, you know, Amazon Alexa, Google Homes, making a home at the end of the day. And you just tell Alexa, hey, I need my car out by 6am the next day. And then everything on the software smart technology side will know exactly when to charge the vehicle. Jay, pretty soon, you're going to be able to have Alexa glasses. So they now have an Alexa ring, Alexa glasses. So you're not going to have to look around, where's my little, where's my little hockey puck? You're just going to look up into the sky and say, Alexa, I want my electric vehicle ready to go at 6am tomorrow. Is it great to be alive or what? So that's, that's, that's for real? Well, the glasses, yeah, they're not available. They're available to select audience right now. But there's also a ring that people can wear. So you see these pictures of people, like in the old days when they used to pretend they were listening to the on the microphone, you put your hand up by your ear and you talk to the ring, and it's Alexa. So yeah, it is, you know, there's a lot of bad things about the internet, including taking your privacy and all the rest. But there's so many good things. Yeah, really, this is really a good thing. Technical questions, Mitch. How does it work? Ask about the special technology involved in the electronics sauce? How does it work? You know, is it all in the software? Or is there is there also hardware involved? Yeah, what also you have to do you have to pay a fee for the for the software? Do you have to pay like an annual licensing fee for it?  Yeah, like, like every other computer or software service? Yeah, it's just so when you get this, this unit, and I understand the street value of the advertised value of these units is five to 600 bucks. So this is real valuable. Is that it? Or, you know, you have to subscribe to something and and send money somewhere in order to keep it going year after year? Karen? Yeah, so absolutely. On the residential side, when you're putting these boxes in your garage, we don't charge you anything for the software. We actually build a utility that they want data and control. For the commercial side, if you're looking to, you know, maybe collect payment and we have to keep the stations activated on the cellular network. That's when we start charging for the software component. But on the residential side of the technology is free. It comes with the box. You don't have to pay extra to use Alexa. And essentially, I don't really know what the magic sauce is. I think that would be a lot richer. Magic sauce behind the juice box. But it is, you know, hardware that goes into your garage. It kind of looks like the standard, you know, panel box that you already have. Let's see a picture. Karen, we're going to show you a picture. Okay, we have a picture of something, a device black and looks like orange orange hanging on a wall with some cable. And there's an electric car right nearby. What is that picture? Can you tell us what that is? Yeah, sure. So that's our flagship product, the juice box. We have a couple versions of these that are available on the free program. Pro 40 that charges at the 40 amp level and then a pro 32 that charges at the 32 amp level. The standard Tesla chargers come at a 30 amp 32 amp to 30 amp level. So the 40s actually get the Tesla drivers out much quicker. And then the other component that, you know, is inclusive of our boxes, it is semi portable. So as long as you have a dryer socket that is 1450 NEMA, you can actually plug it in directly into your standard dryer socket. And we also sell adapters so that if you didn't want to switch out and kept, you know, slow charger, you can put it into a standard outlet. But we should be clear for people in Hawaii, if you want to take advantage of this free offer.  There's a list on on the website, which we should mention here pretty soon.  It tells you here are some recommended installers. You know, this, this is a serious electrical equipment, it has to be done correctly. And so if there if there is a cost, and some people may encounter that, you would have to pay that yourself as the customer. I understood it seems only, you know, if you were buying, if you were buying any get the device, that's what you get, you get the device for free. You do have that responsibility to take make sure it's it's char it's put in properly with it with an installer. But you would do that have to do that anyway, if you were paying for the 600 bucks for the for the equipment, you'd have to still have to go get an installer to help you. So is this happening right now? Yes. If I'm watching this show right now live, it is live, right? Some of us are a lot colder. Yeah, what do I do in order to get in on it? Because it's only 350 have to act now. Now, one thing you can do is you can go to the Hawaiian Electric website, go look under electric vehicles, there's a big box there with that same picture of that same lovely juice box charger, you can click there and that will take you to nlx. You can go to I think it's nlx.com slash store, is that right Karen? And to to sign up. And either way, probably the simplest is to go to HawaiianElectric.com and let us link you through. Get there, you get the explanation, you'll see what where to go, you get the explanation, you see what's required. You read the small print, don't forget to read the small print. And you have to own an electric car. You have to own or lease, we don't really care. And you can if you buy one tomorrow, you still can qualify for this and also for the $10 car wash if you buy an electric vehicle. It's like ordering from Amazon or anyplace else. You got to go through that that motion and sign up. But it's about as pain free as you could possibly make it, I think we certainly as we made it. Yeah, I'll say. Well, do you think this will incentivize electric cars in Hawaii between the one program and the other? Are we going to see a boost in the sales and leasing of electric cars now? Because we need to we need to have these programs to remind people yes, is a great thing to do. Yeah, we hope so. I mean, from what we can tell, it's a great deal for customers to get a free charger and a $10 car wash. So I would expect people to jump all over that. Okay, but 350 may go fast. I mean, this is substantial value here you're getting for free. I would not wait. And you know, if anybody hears about they're going to get online and get one. Anybody that's got an electric vehicle right now and probably many people I know do the trickle charging just using the regular standard plug. Because you know, they figure well, my car is going to be in the garage for eight hours every night anyway. So why should I upgrade but here's a chance to upgrade to level two must much faster charging much more dependable and you know, at a very, very, very reduced cost. So if you have a car or you're considering getting one, and you don't already have a level two charger, you should really really look into this and you know, this is the beginning where we're glad to be working with NLX, but we're gonna we're always looking for for partnerships that will help us great statement of the future. It's a great statement of the embrace of new technologies, the next chapter kind of technology. And it's a great statement about Hawaii's commitment to to renewable energy and electric cars. You know, the thing about demand response, which I think is very important is we are incentivized we incentivize the customers to do what we ask them to do. This is not a freebie from the customer is not a gift. If you're going to help us with this, help us with that demand or respond to our our request for you to reduce demand or move demand, we're going to give you an incentive. You know, we give people right now have our hot water heaters with a little electric box to give them $3 a month. Not a huge amount but over the course of a year it adds up and we give them that whether we use the system or not.  Yeah, but they're also part of a community, a community of clean energy, which is, you know, Hawaii's destiny, I hope. Absolutely. So camera almost out of time. I'm very sad about that. I am sad. I think all of us here can say the same thing. We're sad that we're almost out of time. And we want to offer you the opportunity to say fair well. Yeah, perfect. I mean, thanks for inviting me. I hope, you know, I get to be in the studio next time your background looks amazing and Hawaii's always amazing. But thank you for inviting us on to the segment. Yeah, but we're not entirely finished, though. Mitch has more. Yes. Okay, I want to get one plug in. Yeah, that's exactly why I am a policy forum. All you people out there, they're listening to the show, and you think it's good, and you have friends, you may not have your own electric vehicle, but you have friends who have electric vehicles, get this out viral. So everybody's informed about this. This is why we do these shows. So don't just sit on this information. You can help one of your friends and you can also help Hawaii increase the number of electric vehicles out there. So get the word out. Just the idea of something for free from your electric company, not to get everybody something. It just doesn't happen every day. Let's face it. I guess not to mention too, as the cars start to get longer ranges, it's going to be more important for you to have a level two charger versus trickle charging. Because if you're expecting to be at 100% charge after 12 hours, those those up just wall plugs will not get you there in a Tesla or something like that. So yeah, I think Shane, you have like the point that I wanted to bring up. I think most people don't realize for the Tesla models, you're talking about on the trickle charge plugging in for 43 to 70, 80 hours on the trickle charge unit. For the level two chargers that we offer, we cut it down to the range of six to 10 hours. And that's, you know, completely update to full. So that gives a lot more flexibility for the utilities also to be able to control and participate without, you know, no longer duration, plug in time. If you have the trickle charging it. Karen, what's your website? The NLX website? So the website that you can get the charger would be ED charging.nlx.com slash ex hyphen store. Okay, but I think as you mentioned, it'd be easier to link directly from the Hawaiian Electronics website. Admit you want to summarize and close this is your big opportunity. Yeah, sure. I'd love to close. First of all, thank you very much, Karen. It was great. And it's good seeing some of this technology that was developed in Hawaii by some of our brain year people. I guess your company was a participant in the elemental accelerator. So it's good that this was kind of developed in Hawaii, and we funded it. And it's really great that you've teamed with Hawaiian Electric, who is a big company that has a real interest in getting this out there. So it seems like a perfect marriage. And for getting the word out, getting the data and showing this works and so that you can expand this out. So just make sure your marketing materials, it's like a little made in Hawaii. You know, we started out with a cold open. Yeah, okay. I want to show you how we do a cold clothes. Watch this.


This is just a piece of the pie This ain't even everything that she went through.  This is part two if you have not seen part one yet Just make sure you stop this video go watch part one first because part one I just got finished in with you guys and showing you guys Actually showing you guys the message that she got from a PA school Professor on Facebook who was trying to get trying to complain and tell talk to her Dean and get her Dean in trouble Get her my wife in trouble for her social media name Just some of the the stuff that she experienced but right now write the freak now This is where it actually gets even better and gets good Not better, but it gets good because I'm about to share with you guys and expose some more messages From Facebook and even an email that my wife sent that just shows you guys as black PA students Pre-PA students as well as those who are non-white to be able to see Just some of the stuff that my wife as a black female Experience while being in PA school. So I want to share this with you guys right now Again, if you're new to this channel, please go ahead and subscribe hit the like button You know do all that other crap and share this video man because people need to see it black white Don't even matter people just need to see and experience especially within the PA community whether you're a pre-PA PA student or PAC you just need to See and experience see what African-American students A lot of them go through just by being in PA school So again, if you haven't seen part one stop this video go see part one if you've seen part one Let's continue because the rest of this stuff is is even crazier than the message that was on part one. So here we go All right, you guys so once again, I'm just kind of resuming back on the comment where my wife Where the lady responded to my wife with her moniker of a Don of the PA that whole jazz and information So this is this is what people this is back to Facebook. This is that physician assistants Facebook group where apparently Right now they're deleting and removing comments of people who are posting about things Revolving respectable comments about revolving around the The riot I mean not the the protests that are happening the and and relating it to the whole fight pretty much all together for the injustice of Black people in black communities black and brown people and relating it to medical related stuff Relating to PA school how it affects this stuff and they're just removing comments and it's crazy how they're removing those comments, but They keep these comments that I'm reading the racist stuff. So listen here. We go So back to this back to this right here, right? So once again my wife I mean I posted on behalf of my wife the lady responded with regard to her problem with her moniker of a Don of the PA Now this is what people this is what the that community on the Facebook group was writing. Okay This is what they were writing. Do you guys this is what they were writing you guys? These are Pete. I'm assuming physician assistants. This is what they're writing you guys. So this is what it says it says Someone named TJ rack this is not appropriate and is essentially false advertising your wife is not and again Let me stop you for a second again. This is when my wife was in PA school and she's using the Social media handle a Don of the PA. I already talked about that So again, if you haven't seen part one go to part one because you need to get the context behind that So anyway, it says your wife is not I repeat not a PA She is a PA student and first year wanted and a first year wanted that talk to me when she's past the pants And it's actually worked alongside doctors in the ER for a few years This page is for PA discussions not slinging her how to get into PA school after the third try After the third try now, let's continue Jeremy Pau says I'm waiting on the how to pass the pants after the third try because I was too busy making documentaries laugh face I barely had time to brush my teeth in didactics TJ for real, how good of a student can you be if you're spending all your time trying to get people to pay for your education instead of actually studying This other person why the hate on this lady lol or am I missing something you guys look man These are people these are PAs and they're talking about a PA student You guys you're talking about a PA student This person said I'm waiting on the how to pass the third because Trap because I was too busy making documentaries. I barely had time to brush my teeth Well, how about the video of the black woman who got through PA school through racism and discrimination? Pastor pants went on to become a trauma and general surgery PA physician assistant Certified and is now the number one video content creator for PA related videos on the internet How about that video? How about that one? My wife is freaking dope.   That is an amazing career, but that unfortunately only four percent of Students across the entire nation are of color African-american specifically four percent You guys this is what my wife went through This is this is the comments that were written on that physician assistant group That's why I that's why I wasn't shocked when I heard what people are saying now that they're deleting comments from people who are Leaving respectable comments about this movement to to better our African-American people and the community at large and And address and presenting questions to this PA forum on how we can improve the PA community And it's being removed I Wasn't shocked Because this happened three years ago to my wife Three years ago. She was going through this I haven't done. Let's watch this. So so now so now let me show you this So now not all before I get into right now. I'm about to wrap this up because I'm gonna get into I'm about to show you guys the actual comment that someone on that group posted that referred to my wife in slavery I'm being a slave before I show you that I have to show something positive because look I want to shout these people out because again once here we go So this right here again same physician assistant group BAM right here These are some of the comments of people other people within that group, right? This is what some of the said Ashley Comer shout out to Ashley. She said there's a lot of hate and going on here Please keep on with the informing videos Adana the PA Justine the TA Fox where's the sense of community and support here PA school is hard enough without having added stress By judgmental future colleagues This is a white person appreciate you. Love you girl Or no dude. Sorry Justin Lisa. I am a pre PA and never got the feeling she has misrepresented herself I actually enjoyed this video and all her encouragement. She is inspiring as a student in a future PA So why all the hate people you guys look man Adana Adana survived PA school Not just because she's strong and dope as hell, but because she has support She had the support of her family She had the support of of her friends and dang it She has the support of you guys right now who are watching this video She had the support of these people right here who posted these comments on Those on the same thread as where the people were trying to destroy her She survived because of you guys if you guys aren't supporting each other man Y'all ain't gonna make it you ain't gonna make it you got to have a support system You got to support each other even if it's one freaking person if it's your spouse your best friend another PA student You got to support each other and if you're white and you're watching this you got to support them, too You got to support each other man my wife made it because of people like that now Let me get to this and put this on the end note just to just to just to to put an Exclamation mark on the kind of stuff that an African-American student can and may experience while in PA school on top of Just being in PA school, which is hard as heck anyway. Here we go. So There's right here this comment right here. So put this this way All right, so once again, let me show you guys this so once again This is a physician assistant group as you guys to see right up top of there now Let me just stop you there. So look this is in reference to excuse me wife Me posting for my wife on the PA group Particular video some video that had to do with helping pre-PAs with something So this person posted a picture. Let me just show you this person Joe Justice posted a picture and said and his caption says So this isn't the good place to sell my used books Trying to make a little jokey joke about oh, she could post that about her YouTube video Maybe I should post some about books mind you Mayo's little red book. I'm not sure exactly what that is I'm about to research that somebody Google that right now because I don't even know if that's a hint to something racist, too But anyway, my response was when someone makes a cheesy joke Bam when someone makes a cheesy joke, right?   Just be just be just be just be normal You know I'm saying like be you be you but if you is not funny and you leaving stuff like this I mean you got to get clown a little bit in response to that. What does this guy say?  This is a slave owner This is a slave owner holding a gun While people are working And this guy's response is break is over everybody back to work This was posted on the physician assistant group page This was not deleted May have been deleted since obviously, but obviously during this time it was not deleted and The admins of that group were okay with this But weren't are not okay with someone posting today Seeking answers or suggestions on how the PA community can be better Due to everything that's going on in our world with the African-American community You get deleted and removed for that post But a guy being racist blatantly can stay so I Was not surprised. I wanted to share this with you guys And not to discourage you but to encourage you you guys look man Our world our world got we got a lot. We got a lot more to do We got a lot further to go and I appreciate so much I'm looking out on these this TV and I'm seeing protests and I'm seeing white people black people Hispanic people Indian blah blah blah people people of all Cultures and colors coming together for black people and that's the thing man people were coming together for black people In the black calls when someone says black lives matter and you respond all lives matter Well, yeah, duh, but all lives is not the issue right now It's black lives that are the issue. So we're coming together in support of all lives black lives matter Well, blue lives matter. Well, duh, but that's not the issue right now The issue right now is someone who is African-American who's being discriminated against in the in the Police realm of things and all of a sudden now someone dies from that And it's been happening and now people are coming together in support of this and because of this It's now bringing attention to other Racial and and and discriminatory things within workplaces within schools within organizations And that's a good thing these should be brought out not just to be talked about Not just to not just to post something as an organization saying we don't approve of racism Well, that's good You shouldn't but what are you gonna do about it within your own organization within your own community within your own school Church job, whatever the case is. We don't need another post We need a post that that follows action Excuse me that a post where action is followed.  It's an awesome job And I guarantee that you will be fulfilled in this job My wife is very pleased and loves her job and listen I don't know if a PA you'll talk to that will hate that will tell you all I hate my job If they hate their job more than likely it's not because of their job It's just because of the people they're working with but the job itself, you know, the career is great So if you want to be a PA and and I want to say this to all the black people right now who are watching who wants to be a PA Or who is in PA school currently listening to me very carefully You can do it. You can make it through but just know this Your experience is going to be just a little bit if not a lot bit more difficult than your white counterpart You have more obstacles to get through and of course, I'm speaking generally some of you guys make guys move Some of y'all ain't got no issues just generally speaking More than likely your experience as an African-American in PA school Come be a little bit more difficult, but my wife did it. My wife is normal My wife is normal. She's awesome. She's great. She dope, but she's normal. She's a wife.  She's just like some of you guys watching right now Y'all just you're normal She ain't she ain't nothing special that she can make it through and you can't if she can do it You can do it if she can make it through all of this this that she went through Which mind you is a fraction of some of the stuff that she went through while in PA school as an african-american But if she can do it you can do it so freaking like this video right now Share this video right now comment down below. What are you guys's thoughts on on everything that you have seen thus far Within your experience um on becoming a PA Share you comment down below if you're a white person or a person not of color and you want to share a word of encouragement I don't give it.  She's gonna continue No matter what to be able to help you guys see that as an african-american you can be successful You can get into PA school You can get through PA school and you can be a dope PC As an african-american. So man. I encourage that to you guys. I love you guys adana loves you guys And uh, thank you man for watching again. This is just this is the perspective of a husband Just a support system man. Who am I?  All right. Peace


Hello everyone, welcome to another CNCF Undemand recording. In this video, we're going to explore what is the best way to install Calico and give you some insight into what happens when you install a CNI such as Calico in your Kubernetes cluster. But before we get started, let's get to know each other a little bit more. My name is Reza and I'm a developer advocate at Tigera. Tigera is the company behind the open source project Calico where we do all kind of fun stuff to revolutionize Kubernetes networking and security. I used to be a security consultant, a system engineer, network administrator and a full stack developer. Currently, I'm advocating for a community that I love. I'm always eager to learn new stuff and open to suggestions. So let's connect and exchange ideas. This presentation is divided into five sections. First, I'm going to talk about Project Calico and give you a brief overview of what it is that we do at Tigera. Then I'm going to talk a bit about Tigera operator and our motivation behind making it an open source project. Then in a short demo, I'm going to demonstrate how to install Calico in a Kubernetes cluster by using the Tigera operator. After that, we will explore some basic Kubernetes networking and container networking interface concepts to get everyone up to speed for our journey into the inner working of CNI installation. Where I'm going to demonstrate how to install a CNI manually in a Kubernetes cluster. If you are new to cloud networking, don't worry, I'll get you covered. There's a slide at the end of this presentation with all the links and information that you might need for your adventure. So what is Project Calico? Project Calico is an active community about cloud networking and security. We have a thriving community with more than 300 contributors and 8,000 Slack channel members. Feel free to join our community using these social networking handles and drive the conversation where you feel a need for a change or seek help for your Calico adventure from developers who are actively working on the project. Our Slack channel, slack.projectcalico.org, is an inclusive environment dedicated to Calico and support for our open source community members. Project Calico offers a pure Layer 3 approach to virtual networking and security for highly scalable data centers. Calico is a free and open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports multiple architectures and platforms, such as X86 and ARM64, so you can basically install it on any environment. Calico is designed to be modular and its pluggable data plane approach offers EBPF and IP tables data planes for Linux environments and host network service or HNS for Windows environments. This modular architecture makes Calico a great choice for any environment and gives you the required tools to be in charge of your software-defined networking traffic. In fact, Calico, EBPF, and HNS are some of the foundational technologies that provides networking, security, observability, image assurance, and runtime threat defense in our enterprise solutions at Tigera. Now, let's start by our motivation behind promoting the Tigera operator as the recommended way to install Calico. A lot of people trust Calico for securing their environments. To support such a wide variety of platforms and needs, we had to develop a unified way to install and maintain Calico. And that is why we transition the Tigera operator, our enterprise installer, to support the Calico open source installation process. The beauty of operator installation is that it's just a one-liner command. After installing the operator, you can configure all Calico components from your installation resource within the Kubernetes environment. The operator then monitors the installation resource to make sure your Calico is always configured correctly. The operator provides a simple way to troubleshoot each Calico components that are installed on your cluster. And just like Calico, the Tigera operator is free and open source. In fact, you can use this QR code to check its GitHub page and get involved with its development and shape its future. Tigera operator is based on the operator framework. The operator framework is an open source SDK that allows you to put the operational knowledge into a software, and it's the foundational software that the operator is based on. The best part about an operator is its integration with Kubernetes, which allows you to install, configure, maintain, or upgrade your software. An operator can create or modify pods, deployments, config maps, or services that are required for your cloud-native application by providing a single interface to manage and deploy them. If you're interested to know more about the operator framework, use this QR code and head to their web page. Now that we have a basic understanding about Tigera operator, let's use it to install Calico. So first, I'm going to use kind to provision a three-note cluster in my local computer. The only thing worth mentioning here is that I'm using the disable default CNI value in order to not provision any CNIs while creating the cluster. Now, because my cluster doesn't have any CNIs, my nodes should be on a not ready status. I can verify this by running a coopcatl getNotes command. Alright, to change my nodes status to ready, I just need to install a CNI. So let's go ahead and apply the YAML file for the Tigera operator. Inside the Tigera operator manifest, there is a Tigera status capability that will be added to the Kubernetes API server and could be query to get information about the state of Calico components. Alright, everything is set. Now, all I need is to create an installation resource and tell the operator how to configure the Calico. And as you can see, I can use the Tigera status command to get some information about the states of deployment that my Calico and API server will go through. That is all that you will need to install and run Calico in your environment. From here, I'm going to explain what happens in your Kubernetes cluster and how Tigera operator does its magic to install a CNI. Since Kubernetes has a modular approach to networking, it delegates this responsibility to CNI or container networking interface plugins. Prior to version 1.24 of Kubernetes, Kubelet was in charge of CNI arguments and you could have adjusted it by using config-cni-dir or config-cni-bin arguments. And these arguments would have allowed you to change the location of CNI config or binaries in your cluster. In version 1.24, however, this has changed and your container runtime interface is in charge of managing CNI config and binaries. There are a lot of CNIs out there and each one provides different set of features. For example, these are a few features that Calico provides for your environment. Calico has its own IP address management plugin, which allows you to create different IP pools, allocate static IP to endpoints or tunnels, and a lot of other cool things. Calico uses BERT to implement BGP or border gateway protocol routing between your cluster resources and other BGP-capable devices in your network. You could take advantage of this feature by pairing your on-prem environment directly to your Kubernetes cluster. Calico extends the Kubernetes network policies and allows you to write cluster-wide security policies to secure your cluster. It also offers a range of new selectors that can tailor security policy to target any resource from inside or outside of your cluster. Calico has a pluggable data plane architecture and multiple data planes. These data planes are based on IP tables, EVPF technology, FDIO or Cisco's VPP, and Windows HNS that allows you to be in charge of your software-defined networking traffic. Calico offers multiple networking overlays such as VXLAN and IPIP that can help you to establish networking in restricted environments such as cloud providers. Calico integrates with other awesome open-source projects like Istio to establish application layer policy enforcement, service mesh and observability. Calico has integration with WireGuard for node-to-node or pod-to-pod traffic encryption. For busy clusters, Calico deploys Tyfa that holds a cached version of Kubernetes API server information that will be used by Calico components instead of directly querying your Kubernetes database. Okay, it's time to manually install the CNI on our Kubernetes cluster. So again, I'm going to provision a three-node cluster by using kind. However, this time, I'm also going to add a script file that I wrote to help with the CNI installation, but more on this script file comes later. Okay, now that we got a cluster, let's go and verify that our nodes are not ready. Now, last time we used kubectl get nodes after our cluster provisioning to verify that the Kubernetes nodes are not running. This time, let's go inside the control plane node and check this from the CRI perspective. Okay, just like last time, our CRI cannot find any binary files or configs inside the binary directory or config folder. All right, so let's go ahead and apply the Calico CRDs. These CRDs will help Kubernetes to know what are the capabilities that our CNI will offer. And since these CRDs are in the project calico.org API group, we will need Calico Cattle to interact with them. All right, after installing Calico Cattle, we're going to use it to get information about IP pools that are currently inside our cluster. As expected, we don't have any IP pools. Now, let's use the cluster info command to get information about our cluster sider and use it to create an IP pool. From here, let's SSH into our control plane node and continue our progress from there. The CNI requires a certification in order to talk to the Kubernetes API server. To solve this issue, I'm going to create a folder and issue a certificate request inside it. Now that I have a certificate request and a private key, I need to use my Kubernetes certificate authority key to sign and actually create a certificate from my request. Keep in mind that you can change the expiration time of your certificate by changing the days value in the previous command. Next, I'm going to store the API server IP address into an environment variable and then use coop cattle in order to generate a coop config file for my Calico in order to be able to talk to the API server by using the credentials that we just created. After creating an identity, it's always good to tie it to some permissions so that our credentials cannot do anything more than they're supposed to. Here, you can see the cluster role that I'm going to deploy for my Calico CNI in order to only be able to access some parts of the information that Kubernetes API server offers. Alright, so inside Kubernetes, a cluster role on its own cannot do anything. It's more than just pointing what should be done, but in order to actually make it affect the cluster, we need to create a cluster role binding that ties the permission and the entity together. We're almost done. So let's download Calico IPAM and Calico CNI binary files and store them inside the OPT CNI bin folder. Next, we have to copy the config file that we created by using coop cattle inside the Etsy CNI net.d configuration folder and set the right permissions for it. Now that we have the permissions in place and actually copied the kube config file inside our config directory, let's go ahead and create a conf list. A conf list will be used by Kubernetes or kubelet to tell the cluster about capabilities that our CNI will offer. Now, if we go ahead and issue a coop cattle get notes command, what do you know? The control plane is now ready for the action. From here, we just have to go into each node that are participating in our cluster and do the same procedure again and again. All right, so I'm going to use the power of anything in order to speed up the repetition step. So if we go ahead and issue a get notes command again, we will see all nodes are now in a ready state. However, our pods are not able to acquire any IP addresses. We can verify this by issuing a coop cattle get pods command. As you can see, both core DNS pods are now stuck in the container creating phase and that's because they cannot get an IP address. This is because we haven't installed Calico node, which contains the Felix or the brain of Calico. So we have the CNI and we have the IPAM binary, but they cannot communicate with the Felix. All right, so let's go and create an identity for our Calico node by creating a service account. Now let's create another cluster role for our Calico node and then tie it with a cluster role binding to the service account. All right, everything is set. Now we can basically just deploy the Calico node demon sit and wait for it to come up. After this phase, if we go ahead and issue another coop cattle get pods dash a command, we should see all our pods are now in a running state and we have a fully functional Kubernetes cluster. As promised, these are the links for all the commands that I've used in this presentation. Don't be shy to contact me if something goes wrong. I'm reachable at these social places and Calico users slack. Well, that's it for this presentation. I hope you have enjoyed it and I'd like to thank you for viewing.