Hey, Psych2Goers, welcome back to another video. Before we start, we would like to thank you all for the support you've given us. Psych2Go's mission is to make psychology and mental health more accessible to everyone, and you help us do that. Now, let's begin. Are you aware of how you treat others? Do you often reflect on your behavior and find positive ways to improve? Being self-aware means that you're mindful of your own feelings and behaviors. People who are self-aware tend to know how they interact with their environment and other people on a daily basis, but sometimes it can be hard to step back and be aware of your relationship with yourself and others. So, here are 10 things only self-aware people do. Number one, you choose your words wisely. Have you ever heard of the saying, think before you speak? It's about choosing your words wisely and knowing when or when not to say something. While it doesn't mean that you should deliberate over every word or blurt out anything that comes to your head, it's important to keep in mind the things you're saying. Being self-aware is to be able to speak carefully and calmly to communicate what you really mean, which can help build better relationships and healthier habits. Two, you aren't afraid of new ideas. Do you dismiss your friends' beliefs or ideas without thinking? Self-awareness includes the ability and willingness to listen and understand people with different views. Listening to opposing or different views can help force you to explain, support, and reflect on your own ideas. This can help you take into consideration other people's ideas as well as help you become more aware of your own. Number three, you manage your time well. Do you procrastinate when it comes to huge assignments or projects? While it's not easy to learn, time management is a crucial and applicable skill to have in your everyday life. People who are self-aware know their strengths and weaknesses, and so are able to estimate how long their tasks will take them to complete. This awareness helps them plan ahead of time and prioritize their assignments well. Number four, you journal. Have you tried writing down what you did or felt in a notebook? Studies have shown that journaling can help you worry less about your stressful tasks and identify the causes of your unhappiness. Oftentimes, you may end up bottling up overwhelming emotions or thoughts because you couldn't express them throughout your day. Journaling therefore can serve as an outlet for your emotions so that you can better comprehend and be aware of your mindset. Number five, you practice patience. Are you easily irritated by traffic jams and long lines? Do you make impulsive decisions when your patience wears thin? Being able to wait for things without anger or frustration is a vital skill to have. It can help you become more aware of your mindset and understand your emotions so that you can avoid making impulsive choices under stress. Number six, you use empathy. Do people often tell you about their problems? Do you care deeply and think about how they feel? Being self-aware is not just about understanding yourself but also about your ability to sense how your actions affect other people. Empathy is important for self-awareness because it helps build stronger social connections and helps you increase your compassion towards others. Number seven, you accept your failures. Do you own up to your mistakes and apologize when necessary? People who are self-aware learn from their mistakes to grow and improve. If you make excuses for your failures, it only goes to show that you're unable to understand your own strengths and weaknesses. Being self-aware means that you know the limits of your abilities and are able to find ways to improve and grow to become better. Eight, you are humble. Do you often refrain from showing off your talents unless asked? People who are self-aware avoid the need to show how confident they are in their abilities. They're aware of their strengths and weaknesses and don't need to go out of their way to boast. Humbleness is important because it improves self-control, leadership skills, and work performance. Number nine, you ask for feedback. Are you scared to show other people your work or have you tried asking your friends or teachers about the ways you could improve? Whether it's your work, performance, or general personality, people who are self-aware often ask others for feedback. By asking questions, you're usually afraid to answer yourself. You may actually find yourself receiving helpful feedback, which can help you grow as a person. Then number 10, you talk to yourself. Do you talk to yourself when you're going through your tasks? According to Live Science, saying things out loud sparks memory and helps make the end goal appear tangible. Furthermore, according to psychologist Linda Sapidan, talking out loud to yourself helps you validate important and difficult decisions. So people who are self-aware are better able to organize their thoughts and remember important events.  Let us know in the comments. If you enjoyed this video, please like and share it with others who may find it helpful too. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell icon for more Psych2Go content. All the references used are also added in the description box below. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in our next video.


Hey, and welcome to the session on K-Ops, recent advances and the journey tone open source software Kubernetes distribution. My name is Urimarkis, I'm a head architect with SportVeter and I will kick things off with an introduction to K-Ops. So K-Ops is what we call a cloud aware Kubernetes installer. And what we mean by that is that K-Ops will first take the cloud vendors API and provision things like instances and networking. And as the instance is built, K-Ops will start installing a container runtime and Kubla, and then it will start installing the main components like HCD and the Kubernetes core components, which make up what we call the control plane. And then finally, it will install other vital components such as a container networking and DNS. And until recently, that's been kind of the main concern of K-Ops. But what we see happening now is that more and more functionality is being split out of this larger control plane and into separate standalone components. These new components can be things like search drivers, it can be image potential providers. Even the part of Kubernetes that interact with the cloud vendors such as the thing that takes a service object and a type load blancer and converts it into a cloud load blancer. The typical install instructions for these split components is like apply this large amount of YAML or use the soundtracks. These new split components, they have their own life cycle and you have to track your, as an operator, you have to track yourself the compatibility between the control plane and these split components. And that's pretty big additional burden on the cluster operators. So what K-Ops aim to do is to take on these components and manage them transparently, just as if they were a part of the old control plane. And that's what we mean by becoming an open source software distribution. So you have the kernel, the control plane and in addition, you have all of these smaller components around it. And of course, for those who have an existing production cluster, we want to make the transition from the larger control plane into using these split components. So for example, when we added support for EBS CSR driver, the migration is completely transparent and the user doesn't have to do anything. It just happens in the background and we will track the, to ensure that the right version of the driver is being used based on what Kubernetes versus your running. So in addition to these very essential components, we also started supporting things that aren't essential to the cluster, but that is typically installed on every cluster. Things like cluster auto scaler, if you're running GPU workloads, the device drivers for that, when AWS typically wants node termination handler and so on. And many of these Adams are not that easy to install either. They might, for example, require additional permissions to the cloud vendor. And the chaos will just handle all that for you. Our goal here is not to support like an immense large number of Adams, but rather a few really essential ones. At the same time, we also don't want to support every feature of these components, but the ones that most people typically will need just to reduce the burden of operators. So one of the things worth mentioning around this is that we have now start to support external permissions for these Adams. So instead of the Adams inheriting the instances privileges to the cloud, they will get their own roles and can interact directly with the vendor and authenticate directly. So this is what is known as IAM roles for service accounts on AWS or workload identity on Google Cloud. So that means that in order, for example, to support cluster auto scale, we don't have to add permissions to instances themselves to be able to set the desired flag for ASGs. It will be assigned to the service account of the Adams instead. And this will ensure, for example, other posts that are running on the same instance account we use that those privileges. And that's a pretty significant increase in security. So actually, if you are using external Cloud Controller Manager, then the control plan instances don't really need any privileges. So they're all just a small set that Kops itself requires in order to bootstrap the cluster. In addition, Kops can also install IAM roles for your own workloads. So you can, in a cluster configuration, you can specify what kind of permissions they need and the service account. And Kops will provision the role and set up the trust relationships and everything. So that's everything from me. And now I will hand over to John who will talk about security improvements. I'm John Gardner Myers, a principal engineer at Poofpoint, and I'm going to be talking about some of the security improvements that have been made in Kops. One big behavioral change in Kops 119 is that update cluster and export cube config no longer export an admin credential by default. There is a new admin flag one must use to do that. The create cluster command still exports a credential by default. Additionally, the lifetime of an exported credential will be 18 hours. One can supply the admin flag with a different lifetime duration. If you authenticate to the API service with something like OIDC, you can instead use the user flag, specifying the name of an existing cube config user to use with a cluster's context. The combination of these changes should reduce the probability and impact of these admin credentials inadvertently leaking. We have improved the way we provisioned several certificates. Previously, all certificates and private keys for our cluster were created and placed in the secret store by the Kops command line when the cluster was first created. All certificates were given a 10 year lifetime. Notes would use their instance role or other ambient credential to read the certificates and keys from the secret store. That mechanism is still used for certificate authorities and the service account signing key, but we have made changes for client and server certificates. Control plane nodes now use their access to the CA private keys to issue their own client and server search upon node bootstrap. The lifetimes of these certificates have been reduced from 10 years to somewhere between 455 and 485 days. That 30 day skew in lifetimes is so that the nodes created around the same time would be likely to have their search expire on different days. This increases the chance that an expiration would be noticed and fixed before it happens on multiple nodes and thus becomes a service outage. The skew in lifetime is derived from the node's interface addresses so that all the certs on a given node will expire around the same time. Kops also has a new mechanism for provisioning certs on worker nodes. Nodeup, which runs on the worker node while it's bootstrapping, generates the private keys for the certificates that the node is going to need depending on the configuration. It sends the corresponding public keys to Kops controller, which runs on the control plane and has access to the CA private keys. It authenticates its request using cloud provider specific instance credentials. Kops controller, after verifying the credentials and performing an authorization check, then issues the certs and returns them to Nodeup. Asserts have lifetimes of between 455 to 485 days using the same skewing algorithm as the certs provision for the control plane. This mechanism is currently only implemented for AWS. Other cloud providers still have worker nodes retrieved shared tenure, certs, and corresponding keys from the secret store. Implementing the cloud provider specific authentication for other cloud providers is an area where we would appreciate contributions. As a version 122, Kops supports graceful rotation of the CA and surface account signing keys. All of the necessary components have been extended to support trusting multiple CAs. There are new commands for performing the steps of rotation, creating and staging trust in new keys, promoting the new keys into active use, and removing trust in the old keys. By default, all of the CAs and the service account signing key are rotated at the same time. There is a documented procedure for performing a rotation, complete with rollback instructions for each step. Kops has improved its support for using local asset repositories. Local asset repositories are for when downloading files and images directly from the internet is undesirable. The ability to use local asset repositories has been a longstanding, but obscure and poorly documented feature. To use it, one provides in the cluster spec, locations for an image repository and or a file repository. The problem then becomes how to get the assets into the local repositories. The previous mechanism was particularly obscure and hard to use. Kops 122 adds a much simpler get assets command for either copying assets to the local repositories or getting the list of assets one needs to feed into an external process. With fees and other changes, Kops continues to improve the security of its default configuration and the ease of securing it further. Next up, we have Peter Riffel who will be talking about advancements. Hi, my name is Peter Riffel and I'm a software engineer at Datadog working on our internal Kubernetes platform. I'm also a Kops maintainer and I'm going to be talking about other recent advancements we've made in Kops. First is our Azure support. As of Kops 120, Azure clusters are now supported in Alpha. Kops can create virtual machine scale sets in availability zones for each Kops instance group. It supports using either public or internal load balancers for the Kubernetes API. We can specify custom VM images to use in instance groups and clusters can run on shared networking defined outside of Kops. For example, shared virtual networks, subnets and route tables. And this is what our Azure roadmap looks like. Azure DNS will allow the Kubernetes API to be accessed via domain name. Blob ACLs will allow finer grain permissions for objects in the state store. As John discussed earlier, we want Azure nodes to join clusters using Kops controller similar to AWS. And we plan to allow Azure resources to be defined in Terraform similar to our existing support for AWS and GCP. If you're interested in Azure support, please give it a try and subscribe to that GitHub issue for updates. Another area of focus has been our end-to-end testing. We've recently began testing more add-ons and running their own test suites to confirm functionality. We also have tests for IPv6 in AWS as we work to stabilize those efforts which Cyprian will discuss later. Upgrades of both Kubernetes and Kops are now being tested in addition to ARM64 and CA rotation. We recently added testing in DigitalOcean which helped with its Kops support being promoted to beta. And we plan to do the same with Azure soon. All of this testing aims to catch bugs earlier in our Kops release process so that we can offer a more stable experience to users. Lastly, I'd like to discuss a new feature in Kops 122 for Terraform users. Kops will now define many of the state store objects as Terraform resources. This includes add-on manifests, static pod manifests and node-up config. This is primarily to resolve a race condition during upgrades where Kops update cluster yes was updating objects too soon. They will now be updated during a Terraform apply which is closer to when launch templates are updated which reference these objects. A nice side effect of this change is that it improves discoverability of changes to these resources. Even that you can preview the content changes with a Terraform plan which was previously not possible. At the moment, this is only supported by S3 but we plan to expand support to GCS and other cloud providers as they adopt Terraform support. And next is Cyprian discussing the future of Kops. Hello everyone, my name is Cyprian Hackman. I'm a senior DevOps engineer at IO and today I will be talking about the future of Kops and IPv6 support in particular. So let's get started. 20 years ago, everyone thought that the end of IPv4 is near. They were wrong and feels like the lifetime ago but things are finally starting to happen. IPv4 addresses are harder and harder to obtain each year and much more expensive. For IoT, telecom and large enterprises using IPv6 is no longer a preference but a hard requirement. Is Kubernetes ready for this? Is Kops? I think the answer is yes. These days, most companies use a cloud provider for their infrastructure. As the biggest cloud provider, a history of AWS support for IPv6 should give a better idea of where we are today. Until 2016, the IPv6 support in IPv6 was limited for various service endpoint. It was useful to expose services but was yet not appropriate for large scale setups. Five years later, AWS added IPv6 support for EC2 instances in VPC. Still not ideal as it meant working with individual IPv6 addresses but it made it possible to experiment. Microservices pushed things forward and this year seems to be the year of IPv6 in AWS. Assigning prefixes to EC2 instances enabling IPv6 for services like instance metadata, time sync and DNS adds most of the missing pieces. Kubernetes also unofficially supports IPv6 since its very early days but official support was added only four years ago in version one nine. And since then it's been quiet until version 116 when IPv6 graduated to beta and support for dual stack was added. There was a major milestone. Finally, operators could use IPv6 but also connect to IPv6 services which allowed for a more gradual migration of the infrastructure. It took a while to fix most needs and this year dual stack support graduated to beta and was enabled by default in Kubernetes but what about KOP support for IPv6? Discussions about IPv6 support were started early last year by Antonio Ojea one of the initial developers of the Kubernetes feature. Ecosystem was not yet ready for IPv6. Many of the things were still available only via IPv4. We decided to wait a bit longer and with the release of Kubernetes 121 and dual stack support, we decided to give it another try. A few weeks later, the cloud provider part was ready and we moved to the networking setup. We used in parallel both CaliCo and Celium with unique local addresses, which means not. Quickly it became obvious that something was missing. The AWS Cloud Controller Manager was not aware of IPv6 addresses, which was a wow moment for us. We tried to create a patch, we submitted it upstream and with the custom built based on that we moved forward to testing and it was successful. Finally, we could say that KOPs can work with IPv6. Conformance tests were passing and everything looked great. So coming with KOPs 122, IPv6 will be available as an option. What's next? Global addresses using prefixes instead of unique local addresses is a much better solution. This would allow clusters to communicate with the outside world without any need for that. Simper setup when AWS will allow using launch template for prefixes is also preferred. The NAT64 appliance will also be a much needed addition. What are the challenges? Cloud provider support is still being developed. We would like to see better support for this from other cloud providers and a better API from AWS. IPv6 prefixes are still not quite easy to configure at OS level and each OS handles them differently. CNI support for IPv6 is missing some features that are available only for IPv4 but considering the recent advancements in cloud provider support, I think this is not very far. As for any open source project, KOPs is always looking for new contributors. This is what drives it forward. We would like to invite anyone interested in contributing to join our weekly calls and see if you like it. Thanks everyone.


This is one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do. Three, two, one! This is your vlog, right? It is. I'm the bear at his bad news? Yes, Jim, come on. Oh, we should get started. See, one of the great things about life in academia... And mic drop. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Now you've heard. This is called Gaia. I'm gonna let you in on my little secret. And as a kid who was interested in space, further down that rabbit hole we go... So the idea is simple. Those moments of like, inspiration.


I'd like to talk to you today about preprints, and about preprints and neuroinformatics, and ask this question of, well, where are we at with this? So let me first start with the story. This is Professor Ron Vale. He was at UCSF, and a few years ago he noticed that his graduate students were taking a long time to graduate with their first author publication. And he looked at some data and he realised that it genuinely was taking years longer to get that first author publication. He dug into it and he saw that if you looked at the amount of panels in the figures that there's a lot more data being crammed into each publication, of course we all kind of know why this is, is that everyone is racing to get very high prestigious journals on their CV so they can move forward with their career. So publishing is being tied to evaluation processes. Now Ron and a lot of other people were like, hang on a second, can we really help this situation? Can we help to break apart the fact that publishing and evaluation are so tied up together and it's really taking a very long to get every bit of science out? So in 2016 Ron and my colleague Jessica helped co-organise this meeting of publishers, of funders, of journal editors to discuss the use of preprints in biology and whether it could be something that could happen. And this was the start of ASAP Bio. ASAP Bio is a non-profit, it's based in the US, and we are a biologist-driven organisation with a mission and that mission is to improve transparency and innovation in life sciences communication. So what we do is we research and produce informational resources about preprints to help you to make an informed choice in this space. We also speak to a lot of researchers, that's what I'm here to do today, to promote awareness and information about preprints and to encourage you to talk to each other about it a lot more. We are actually a very small team, so there's me, there's Jessica, who helped co-found ASAP Bio. We've also got someone working with us on a particular project and I'd really like to point out Ron and Jessica really what ASAP Bio was until I joined them a few months ago and Jessica's made most of these slides before. I've always adapted them but really this slide says hers. And actually ASAP Bio is all of you. It started as a hashtag so actually it's a social movement as well and you can absolutely be involved. We're funded by a lot of research funders. Here are the specific ones who fund the preprints side of the work, which is what I do. And it's already been introduced but I come with my own biases. It's very nice to see someone talk about change in publishing and how E-Life are helping with that. I also am on the board of directors for DRIAR to care a lot about data sharing and I used to be in neuroscience but I can't pretend that I really understand your talks anymore. I'm sorry. Okay, so why preprints in biology? What's happening in neuroinformatics? And actually what I really want to do I want to get onto this part of the talk where I actually ask you what would you want to happen with preprints in neuroinformatics? So this is how it's going to... This is the structure of my talk. So I'm sure we all recognise this is the traditional publishing process. A lot of it happens behind doors. You submit to a journal. You might have to submit to several journals. You might get rejected, be asked to revise and then ultimately months to years later there's a peer reviewed paper that's out in the open. Who's frustrated by this? Can you put your hands up if you're frustrated by this? I put my hands up. You can put both hands up if you like. I'm going to ask you to do this quite a few times. So this is kind of like a practice run, the exercising. There you go, okay. So a few of you are frustrated by this. So, preprints. Preprints are complete scientific manuscripts that are shared openly online before journal organised peer review. That's the definition. Now peer review is also essential. A lot of scientists think peer review is essential and actually preprints aren't here to replace peer review. What they do is they work alongside peer review to make your work available almost immediately. They take a couple of days to get online when you send them to a preprint server and then some community feedback and discussion can happen on the preprint all the while the journal process is happening and then actually what you've done is that you've shared your work a lot earlier yet you still get to be published in a journal. Okay, so who's read a preprint? Can you put your hand up? Wow, that's most of you. Okay, brilliant. This is a preprint on bioarchive. It's not the only preprint server, but it's definitely a dominant one. So this is what it looks like when you hit a page for a preprint and preprints are fully featured for more scientific outputs. You can see these slides online. There's a bit link at the bottom. So I'm not going to spend too long on this, but I would like to point out that it tells you on the preprint page if it's now being published. It's the most recent version and this when it hasn't been published says this content is not yet peer reviewed. So it's very obvious to people arriving at this page that it's not been peer reviewed. There are lots of benefits for posting a preprint and I call out... Actually, I've got... Sorry. I call out here this Accelerate Discovery bit because I want to talk about it more later and it's the one that's more of a collective benefit as well. These grey ones are all very much individual benefits that you can pick and choose, is one that I really want to talk to you about. We've got some evidence of this. There's some early evidence about the science of preprints are starting to come out. This was a preprint a couple of months ago and that the journal article, if it's been preprinted, the journal article itself has on average one and a half times more citations than journal articles that have not been preprinted. This is citations on the journal article, not on the preprint. So there is definitely a visibility advantage going on. We hear a lot of stories where young or sorry, early career researchers talk about how they've managed to get their next job because they've preprinted their work. This is not an uncommon story. Actually, there's a lot of funders now that use preprints or talk about preprints and their policies. They encourage their researchers to preprint and they're using it as evidence of productivity and applications and reporting. I'm not surprised because this preprinting is not a new thing and if you look back to the 1960s, there's an experiment that the NIH did in America where they got scientists to share amongst each other their manuscripts in a closed circle and they estimated that this exercise, because of all the benefits that scientists reported from doing this experiment, actually saved $30,000 per preprint per year and that's adjusted to today's figures. That's quite a lot of money. I'm sure you'll agree so it's clear why funders are interested. As I said, it's not a new thing. It's been happening in physics and other disciplines for decades now and we're at this point now when preprinting biology started to take off. This is the number of preprints per month over years at various preprint servers that's now exhaustive. Amidst this graph is this whole context of a lot of policy development and tool development and things that are really helping preprints to happen. We're now at the situation today where there are a lot of preprint servers. They're not all relevant to all of us but basically a preprint server is anywhere that anyone has posted a preprint available on the web and some that are generic and some that are very community specific. I'll focus mainly on bioarchive in this talk because it's definitely the most dominant one in our situation right now. Okay. So, neuroinformatics. That was a very quick tour of preprints in biology very general. It's probably not new to you but let's actually get to what might be happening in the room. So we know that neuroscience is a major contributor of preprints. Now this isn't adjusted to how big a field neuroscience is. It's not really a comment on how many neurosciences are preprinting but if you look at preprints as a whole a lot of them are neuroscience preprints. On top this is neuroscience submissions in bioarchive and on bottom and on bottom this is in the quantitative biology section of archive. This pink one is neurons and cognition. I think that's what they call it. It's the NC. So there's a lot of neuroscience preprints out there. Okay. And a lot of the keynotes of this conference I did a bit of research. Actually a lot of them have preprints themselves so this is not unfamiliar territory for you all. So now we get to this point again where I like to ask you to put your hand up. So I'm just curious if you've ever posted a preprint would you mind putting your hand up? Okay it's about half. Have you ever cited one? Has anyone ever cited one in a tool core? And has anyone ever actually commented on a preprint? Oh wow that's more than I expected. Okay interesting. Thank you. Thank you. I'm still a researcher at heart. But this is a thing. So that's actually quite a lot of you. But we need to remember that we're a bias audience here. The INCF is all about sharing. People are very receptive to the idea of open and collaborative science. So I'm not surprised it's neuroscience and you're an open group. So a lot of people put hands up. But actually when we look at it preprinting is still quite early compared to all of biomedical science. So there's clearly some stuff that we need to do. So some work we need to do if we think that it's what needs to happen. There's a lot of reasons why people aren't preprinting as well. Here's some of the common concerns we hear when we go out and we speak to people. I'm very happy to cover any of these concerns in the discussion afterwards. You can talk to me individually as well. I've had these conversations a lot. And I've got some data and some evidence and some open questions to reflect back at you as well. So if you want to talk about it, please just come and talk to me. It's what I'm here for. Okay. So I'd like to pause. So that was a very quick fire. What's happening with preprints are near informatics and I could stop there. But I don't want to stop there because actually you've invited me into your space and I feel comfortable to raise some questions with you actually because what I really want is a discussion. Because I think there's an elephant in the room. And I think that we actually need to start thinking about our values in science and some of you already are and I'm not saying that you're not thinking about these things but you're not thinking about my time thinking about the value of science communication because it's now my job. And when I was in research at the lab I probably thought about it a little bit but I didn't have much time. So I'm coming here to share with you some questions that have emerged in my brain because I have the privilege of spending many hours thinking about preprinting and communicating and publishing science. So I'd like us to think about these questions when we come to sharing our science. What are you sharing? When are you sharing it? And with whom are you sharing it? Because I think these questions are really important. I know that I think that I want science to change. It's one of the reasons I left the lab. I want science to become more open. I want it to be more collaborative. I want it to be a bit more efficient. I really want science to bring benefit to society and there's some things that I see happening that I think aren't very helpful. We've all discussed these things already so I don't think that's uncommon when it comes to sharing to this space. Our values may be shared, they may be different. That's totally okay but I'd just like to have a conversation about it really. And I have this question because one of the benefits of preprints that we thought when we started ASAP Bio was that they should accelerate science. But I don't think that's a foregone conclusion. I think it's still a question. Will preprints really accelerate science? And will they really help with open science whatever that means to you? And will they really be reusable when we think about the fair terminology? So I can tell you that preprints are definitely not open and fair by default. For sure they're not because this relies on licensing and the majority of preprints on Bioarchive are not open access because they're not associated with a permissive licence for reuse. That's okay, that's the author's decision. You can decide to licence it however you like but I think it's really important that we don't conflate preprints with open automatically. We do have a resource that talks through licensing if you're interested and if you try to publish in journals that might be a bit difficult with licensing you should check that general policy first as well. We've got some resources, all these red things link to external resources and I've got a print out as well which has got loads of links on it and a bitly link so you can easily find all this information. Preprints could be the first step in peer review. There's a lot of people talking about this at the moment. There's a notable editor in chief of an open access journal who keeps tweeting about it as well and what the vision is, it has been for quite some time with journals now actually, is that peer review could be done on preprints that could help to show the sound science and then those sound science papers are curated into different channels for people to see and maybe that would be more efficient. That's still to be tested but it's an idea that's really percolating right now. There are some people that are doing this on their own already so here's a preprint from someone in the room. There is actually a review of this preprint that was posted on academic comments being archived in pub peer and then the authors when they finally published it in a journal acknowledged that reviewer in their paper for the comments on the manuscript so this process is already happening individually and we do know that 10% of preprints on bioarchive at least in 2016 had public comments of some variety. We're waiting an update on this figure but we do know that actually a lot of preprint feedback happens in private on email and that we know that this rate of commenting is much more than on journals because it's pre-publication not post-publication so it kind of makes a bit more sense. There's a lot of initiatives happening to kind of help you to coordinate that kind of peer review. Some of these are community based scientists starting things on their own and we know that there's a lot of talk about journals trying to do this as well. I'd like to flag there's one for circuit neuroscience if you're interested there's a peer community in group for circuit neuroscience but it's also important to recognize that there's lots of reasons why people preprint and actually this is another preprint from somebody in the room and I think this is fantastic because it's another example of open science and people are sharing a resource for the community and if you look at it when this resource was sent to the journal it took six months to come out but then they preprinted it so it was available two months earlier if you really look at the dates there's no way that this author could ever have benefited from pre-publication comments because it was two weeks before acceptance dates so we need to incorporate those comments at that point because it's really been peer reviewed so we've really got to think about this we've got to think about why people are preprinting when you're preprinting and what it is that you want from that you may not want pre-publication review that's fine but if you do you also need to do it in a way that people can get to you before you submit to a journal that's just a fact so we need to have a discussion as to what you really want to see happen with preprints preprints are not very modern or collaborative yet so the theme of this conference was about openness and fairness and data and so I just want to reflect that question back on preprinting and whether preprints really help with reproducibility with reuse which as Carol said is a different thing and with best practices overall now I did find an excellent example of this so Camille helps organise this conference and when you look through this preprint you can see that the data is shared they explain the scripts there's a notebook they cite all the software packages they use I mean I love this and I'm really into open science so I read this and I thought this is brilliant I knew I'd get a good one so I could, if I was really interested I could get back into this if I wanted to look at this and reproduce some stuff or reuse some things I could but preprints are just PDFs on servers this is the authors doing what they want to do and other authors do things differently and I commonly read preprints that have no links to data no links to scripts no links to software packages and actually it's very hard for me to see any kind of reusable resource other than understanding the story of their work so can preprints sit at the beginning at the middle of this hub and spoke model that we're presenting to illustrate fairness are preprints really interupperable are they reusable do they really link out to the other research objects that they are related to they could do and there's actually a technological effort in your own backyard that's happening right now to potentially help this happen maybe can help drive culture change that's something that Francis just told us about and the aperture publishing platform is an idea from the open human brain mapping project JB is in the room they're thinking about these kind of issues in their plan and actually there's a lot of people involved in this so if you're interested in changing publishing for your own community I definitely recommend you speak to them because that could be a point at which this happens I'm a bit of trouble with this sorry OK but I'm here because the real issue is social it's a culture change issue and so what I'd really like to think about with you and discuss later or in this session the questions is that preprints could be a relatively easy step towards more open collaborative science because they're taking a manuscript that you already have and asking you to post it in its PDF form when you submit it to a journal that's something you could very easily do today it might take a few extra minutes but progress towards this whole vision of open and collaborative and reproducible and reusable science very much depends on how we use these tools and that's all about knowing what we want to do, what our values are what everyone else's values are what we as a community support each other to do so if you collectively only use preprints as a faster way to publish and not perish and by this I mean stake your claim, get visibility get peer endorsement, get some recognition that leads to being funded to work on your ideas which is fine, that's all very good if that's what preprints are used for then that is what they'll be that's just a simple statement of fact it's it's really not surprising because I started this story with the fact that publishing is tied to evaluation and that's slowing things down and preprints could help relieve some of that pressure and if that's what they're doing then that's fine, that's what they're doing but there is a bigger vision here the bigger vision is that actually communicating science is about exchanging knowledge and information and accelerating science for the benefit to society and that is a grand vision that lots of people are working on and it's very hard to get there but preprints could play a part and if that's what you would like to happen then that's actually what we need to discuss because we need to think about how we might be using preprints in that way because it matters so my call to you is that preprints are tool to be shaped there's lots of reasons why you might do them for your own reasons and for scientific reasons but they're not a panacea and it's not automatic that they're going to solve issues in science and actually it's up to you to use them productively for the science that you're doing when we build tools that shapes practices our practices shape the tools we build and so there's this like fortuitous cycle or not that could be happening with preprints I'll end with this this is not all on you we're here to help, this is my day job is to help produce information resources and help you have discussions you can help with social change that's mainly the best thing you could do is to talk to each other and to know your values and the values of other people around you and why you are or are not preprinting this bitly link at the bottom is this one page information it has a lot of links that links out into our website but if you would like some simple take home one sheet information just to find out more I've got some for that some of that with me today how am I doing on time, am I am I good, well I'm at questions so there we go one of the side effects of preprints I would say was many people with whom I talk they say okay we'll submit some revision to preprint openly and then we publish final version in you know not open access open access journal so then we have access only to some version which might not be final might not be peer reviewed but then you know file inversion is behind the pay wall and that kind of it didn't it so that was their excuse to go for high profile but not open access so how to treat those people are we still friends I think we should always still be friends because we are working through this together I think you bring a really important point at the end of this slide deck that says that preprints are not green archiving I think this is really really critical when you talk about green archiving that is putting an accessible version of your peer reviewed manuscript online for others to see so preprints do not lead you to ticking the open access box for a lot of funders they're talking about the peer reviewed version so it's not really an excuse however it is really important I don't have institutional affiliations I use unpay wall there might be an archived copy if there's not there might be a preprint copy which is not the ideal version for me to look at because I have no idea what's changed but at least it gets me some of the way there so I don't think it's a good reason to preprint I don't think open access is not ticking that box but it's helpful to share your science and if that's all someone can do at this point then maybe that's what they can do then maybe we need to think about how can we help them to do the next step to be a bit more open with their final version I'll tell them to talk to you One more question I saw in one of your slides but you didn't talk about overlay journals as a strategy for having organized science and sort of review or endorsement without maybe all the slow parts like I have an overlay journal I put some preprints in there and probably no one reads it but it's like I've given it my stamp of approval and that counts for something and if someone had just given me their stamp of approval that would count for something is that part of a possible strategy or is that just silly? If it's a part of a strategy for you then it's part of a strategy I think it's fair it's exactly like Carol saying the fair is like this idea and we haven't quite agreed what it all means just yet and an overlay journal people say open science isn't that just science maybe overlay journals are just journals and that's what that is because someone's website saying I read these five preprints this week and I think they're really interesting is very different to XML produced manuscripts that are interoperable with a whole system of publishing and so there's a whole spectrum of what a journal is and actually as a community we need to really tick box we need this, we don't need this this is the actual cost of what this is to do this, how do we fund this there's a whole bigger conversation I won't go into it there's a whole conversation about this so let me rephrase that since you're plugged in in a way that I'm not into this what are people saying what are people doing what's getting momentum where do overlay journals stand as a strategy okay I'm being filmed aren't I there are scientists led efforts to coordinate peer review on preprints that are excellent journals have a lot of power in this system and if they think that's a threat to their model they can choose to ignore that peer review because they want to conduct a peer review in order to maintain this power for their own commercial reasons which is it's like a statement of fact I don't think it's that controversial to say that so whether these scientists led efforts to do peer review on preprints actually become a success or not really depends on which journals they work with and I think it's really interesting that there are journals now thinking about producing a service and also like my own personal bias is that I think editors are really important and there are scientists editors there are academic editors but there are also the editors who do it as a profession like the same way that I've stepped out of science and I do this as a profession gives me the ability to practice skills that actually like I need a lot of time to develop and I think that some professional editors really are excellent at doing that so we want to think about how we work them into the system as well whether it's to be successful or not I don't have a magic ball I'm sorry but we know that journals have consistently like some publishers have consistently shaped and it's about really getting to the heart of whether we let that continue


Averkost has accused the Markov who stayed taken after its neighbour's laid out conditions for the release of 46 Lithuanian soldiers held in Mali for two months. Averkost says that 49 troops were sent on a routine rotation for personnel who provide backup services for the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali. Manosma Ann has called for the release. However, the mandates of the troops remained unclear and were accused of being mercenaries. The UN acknowledged its functions in a note addressed to Malian governments and admitted that certain measures have not been followed. Three women in the group were released according to an announcement earlier this month.


Assalamu alaikum. Tonight, Muslims in Canada and around the world will celebrate Id al-Fitr. Id al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting and prayer. It's a time to give thanks and show compassion and generosity to those in need. This year, many of the traditions and celebrations will be carried out at home and online. But despite the challenges of COVID-19, Muslim Canadians have been putting into practice the values at the heart of Islam throughout Ramadan. They've been helping their neighbours by donating food and supplies to support those less fortunate, and our essential workers have been putting in long hours even while fasting. So as Muslim Canadians mark this special day at home, it's an opportunity for all of us to recognise the contributions they have made and continue to make to our country. Our government will always stand with Canada's Muslim communities and celebrate the diversity that makes us who we are. On behalf of our family, Sophie and I wish all those celebrating a joyful Id al-Fitr Id Mubarak.


Hi everyone, I'm Justin Florey and I'm guest featuring for this week's opensource.com top 5 from March 31st. In this week's top 5, we highlight VI mode editing, teaching programming with scratch, command shells, DIY smog sensors in Germany, and how to harness open source powers for humanitarian efforts. Coming in at number 5, open source job opportunities grow at crisis groups. Learn how you can use your open source skills to make a difference in the world. Kate Chapman talks about how open source powers can be used for good with emergency humanitarian situations and development opportunities across the world. Coming in at number 4, how to build a smog sensor with an ESP8266 microcontroller. A city in Germany is developing their own IoT sensors to measure air quality to help combat the smog problem. Haiko Rupp breaks down what's going on in Germany to combat air pollution and how you can even build one on your own. Coming in at number 3, which Linux command shell do you prefer? Linux command shells are almost as hot of a topic as text editors among Linux users. This week we asked opensource.com readers which command shell they preferred. What did over 1600 of you have to say? Coming in at number 2 is the scratch today like the logo of the 80s for teaching kids to code. Teach your kids or students about programming with the turtle and the cat. Anderson Silva shows us how this small side project from MIT mirrors the same effect that logo had on early programmers of the 1980s. And finally, coming in at number 1, using the VI mode in your shell. Get an introduction to using VI mode for line editing at the command line. Fedora contributor Adam Miller teaches you to borrow VI keybidings to use inside of your command shell. And lastly, as an honorable mention for this week, how to write a web service using Python flask. What if you could write your own web services? Tom McLaughlin gets you started with this tutorial. Enjoy this week's top 5, opensource.com.


And now we'll have a look at both the infinitive and the gerund. The infinitive is the word to followed by the base form of the verb. We'll typically use it after a verb, specifically verbs like want or hope. We can make statements like, I want to go to the beach. We also have our gerund. Our gerund is a verb followed by ing, but specifically used as a noun within the sentence. We have a verb plus a gerund. I enjoy playing poker. The main verb is enjoy, and although playing looks as if it's a verb, it's actually used as the noun within the sentence. We also can use it with a preposition followed by a gerund. How about going to the beach? We could also put it in the front of a sentence. Smoking is bad for you. Again, the verb plus ing can act as two things within the sentence. We've got the gerund, otherwise the noun in the sentence. Smoking is bad for you. You've also got the verb plus ing in the present participle form, where in its main verb of the sentence, an example thereof would be, I'm not smoking.


All right. Morning everyone. So yeah this talk is called Your Sales Page Sucks. So I'm Nick Adams. I'm the CEO of WP Buffs, we're a WordPress maintenance and support company based all around the world 24-7. Our team is on every continent except for Antarctica. So if anyone knows a good lead on someone I can get in Antarctica, a penguin, a scientist, anything is fine. Now so I lived here in Rochester for eight years. I now live in Saco Bay, Maine which is just north of Boston just south of Portland, Maine and there are more sharks than I am comfortable with. I kid you not just last week a fisherman was like fishing and pulled a whole like great white shark like it accidentally came on to the beach and he had to drag it back into the water and the thing was like way more like it was longer than I am is very concerning but anyways yeah Maine is wonderful, Boston is wonderful, but Rochester is wonderful which leads me to my next and most important point of the next point of the slide. Go Bills! So what's about to happen? First we're going to talk about some common mistakes that people make with sales pages. You may see yourself in this presentation metaphorically. I promise I'm not using examples of any real people but there is a chance you may look at that and think like shoot that one's me and any likenesses are unintentional except for pictures of Matt Graham which you know that's just stock images. You know we're going to go over best practices and then some parting advice. So let's get started. We have a couple people coming in late so I just want to make sure they get the most important point. Go Bills! Yeah you don't have to pay attention to the rest that's fine. So the common mistake number one is not having a sales page. This sounds like well duh but you'd be amazed the number of businesses that I've worked with where like they don't actually have sales pages like they expect people to like go to their website read some stuff and then want to contact them and buy whatever it is they're selling whether it's a service product or anything like that but they don't actually have dedicated sales pages and so honestly the biggest mistake you can do is thinking that your website is not selling something. It may not be something that you think of like oh I'm selling this product or I'm selling this service but you know if your website is just a profile of yourself what you're selling is yourself and so yeah we all should be thinking of our websites as having at least some kind of sales page if you know if you have a website for pretty much any reason it's to get some kind of buy-in. There's a couple thoughts on that. It is your most important page. Honestly especially if you're doing any type of business stuff people don't care about pretty much anything else you put on your site like they don't care about your story they don't care where you're from if they don't even know what you're selling and so that's why if you have a business website whether it's one person business a 50 person business you know people are most likely looking for one thing it's to find out what you're selling. You also only have about 60 seconds to hook them so a general marketing principle is you have less than 60 seconds generally to get people to actually be hooked on your site or they're more they're quite likely to go so you've probably heard about bounce rate and that's that is like the eternal struggle for marketers because so often people go to a website they either can't find what they're looking for or what they do find is pretty boring and so they're like no I'm done I'm moving on time to go to tiktok so you want to think about that all the time like what am I conveying to people in 60 seconds and you want to pin it to the front that's one of the other mistakes so this is all a sub-mistake which is they might have sales pages but they're like impossible to find they're buried like nine layers deep they're not in the menu they're not on the header I recommend take your most important thing you want someone to do whether it's sign up for something contact you whatever the goal of your website is put it like front and center like make it be like the main content you can put everything else after it but even better put it in the header like make a special section make it stand out and just have it be like this is why you're on this website give them the chance to ignore everything else but still fulfill the whole reason you have a website mistake number two not having a way to contact you so even if your goal is to get people to check out right on the website so you're thinking like well I don't need them to be able to contact me I just want them to buy whatever I'm selling what happens if checkout doesn't work let's be honest like all checkout systems even Shopify you know occasionally has an outage and you know WooCommerce might for some reason have an issue with Stripe where all of a sudden the checkout won't go through if they don't have a way to contact you then you're probably just gonna lose the sale of whatever it is but also like not everyone feels comfortable like buying without talking to someone and so you should always make sure you have a way for people to contact you my recommendation when you're doing that collect their email if you get nothing else at least get their email address don't even worry about the name before getting them to fill something out and then use like an abandoned cart plug-in that will like save like if they start filling out like the checkout or anything like that like even better if you have like an opt-in so you can just like market to them to their in email inbox I know we all hate spam emails but like if somebody goes to your website and puts in their email address it means they're actually probably gonna read your emails too you know that'd be kind of weird to like sign up for an email list that you really don't want to be on not saying people don't do it but yeah like you can get their name later but as long as you have their email address you can contact them I've seen a lot where like people say like that they want like somebody's phone number they want somebody's name and that's all great but I recommend if you have like a form make it a multi-step form make the very first thing their email address because with that it unlocks so much stuff because it's not actually just you can email them you can find them on the internet with just their email because yeah you Google somebody's email address and you get all sorts of information about anything else where they've posted that and don't make them search you want to make it as easy as possible for people to contact you so that you don't lose the lead I recommend doing like a thing in the corner where like a little contact button that can even like pop up and just say like hey if you want to send a message just something so that way like if somebody goes your website they can't figure out what you sell they can't they can't get check out to work make it easy for them to just click it and say like hey I want to sign up I want to buy your product but it's not working give them that chance to reach out so that you can then talk to them most people understand that software has glitches and so they are more they're very likely to be able to sign up even if they couldn't sign up right away because of issues as long as they can reach you because they're going to feel comfortable with you because they know that they can reach you they know that you're a real person and and they know that you make it easy for them because they're going to feel better when they go to reach you and that's just right there mistake number three not having a call to action cta so I'm gonna refer to cta several times now throughout the rest of the presentation funny thing that I'm not a marketer but that's one of those ones like I at first like was hearing cta all the time and now like I you know I dream about like cta's because the call to action is like the most important thing you can have because ultimately on your website you want people taking some kind of action and so your goal should always be for their lease to do something even if that is just put in their email address but that's not just because that's the transaction that gets you their information but also because there's like a psychological principle within marketing I don't remember what it's called but it has to do with buy-in and oh it's the sunk cost belief or the sunk cost fallacy which is people are way more likely to sign up if they feel like they've already started the process so by getting them to do something getting them to fill out a form getting them to do something even better you can get them to buy something like if if you're sure that they'll be happy with whatever service or something you're selling get them to check out right away because they're a lot more likely to follow through on it if they feel like why I'm already invested in this even if it's just five minutes of their time that's enough to hook somebody if you get them to sign up and then you send them an email and they read your email they're a lot more likely to want to engage with you for the long term so you really should always be thinking about call to actions that can be a button so it's basically you're literally just saying to them this is the action I want you to take any action is fine not everyone agrees on that but this is my philosophy and I'm 100% correct because go bills and so you want to do anything get them to join a mailing list get them to check out get them to jump into a chat like even if it's literally like a chat bot it's still best to at least have the option to like like just click it have a conversation and you want to make it early again like I said earlier you only have about 60 seconds with the average visitor before they're gone so you don't want to wait to give them an opportunity to act you don't want to make them scroll through an entire page to have like the call to action at the bottom you should have it so that like in those first like 10 seconds there's something for them to do because they're then more likely to stay for longer than 60 seconds if they click on it you know if it gets them doing something if it's a chat if it's you know getting started in the contact or check out process that's going to be super important and then mistake number four having way too much content that is one of the biggest issue that a lot of people have is they load up their website they're like well I want to give people all the information they want to know about my business so I'm going to tell them about my my very first dog that I had when I was a child it has nothing to do with the business but people think like well I'll just tell them everything about me it'll make them like me and then you know then they'll want to work with me instead what it really does is it means that the person is going to get like you know one third way through the first like like 500 word paragraph and just say I forget it I can just buy this from someone else so you really want to just make the sale you you really don't want to like get them as you can tell them like if you really want them to feel like connected to you do that after like get them to take the action in then you know then send them stuff because at that point like you know if you send them an email it's like well let me tell you about my very first dog maybe they'll read it maybe they'll say oh that's really neat but at least that way like you've already gotten them to do what you want your website to do and you want to get them from point C to point A and you're wondering why that because the call to action it's all about that CTA don't waste their time or yours if you're spending like hundreds of hours coming up with all this crazy content for your website but ultimately people are skipping it all because they're just trying to find how to sign up or how to buy whatever you're selling you're wasting their time of searching and you're wasting yours and mistake number five sloppy content did anybody notice yeah how like yeah how how much did it affect the way you feel about my presentation and how much did that one do it yes these are intentional my mother is an English professor so so I know the importance of that but I could you not I've seen so many websites where like there are so many issues and like just glaring mistakes and these people are like selling services worse is like I've seen that on certain companies selling like content services so they're like we'll write articles for you articles is spelled wrong awesome yes I'm gonna trust you on my website and that's true having sloppy content not cleaning up your stuff I've seen ones where people this one happens a lot people take my company's website they copy our content and put it on their own website trying to sell the same services they forget to change the business name so you go to this other business and it says we here at WP buffs like I mean thanks for the free advertising for us I guess because now people gonna be like who's you've had that happen right but yeah all sorts of sloppy content though can really kill you if you're sending out people stuff that has like spelling errors they're more likely because I mean maybe it didn't actually affect how to unfelt about my presentation but I'm guessing that somebody looked at this saw the your and your and probably was like yeah this guy's not great at living his stuff and then maybe you saw that and you're like oh no that's ironic he's talking about poor grammar and spelling and did that one wrong but really the point of that was just that like you think about you look at that and then for like that second you're just like oh that's not great but that's also with stuff I've seen ones where people start a sentence and then don't finish the sentence and then that's like on their main sales page so it's just like you should sign up right now and you'll get a free in nothing so maybe that's a good way to get people to be like oh I want to contact them find out what thing is but my guess is that more people are probably like I don't care because they couldn't even get that have an editor an editor does not mean you hire an editing service necessarily if you can highly recommend it because I know what to look for and often they'll find things that are not just about what you've said but how you've said it and give you good feedback on that so it can be an expert we can also be a friend or just really anyone who's spelling grammar content etc you want to get them in there to just look at it because fresh eyes will spot the errors before you will you can be great at that because like yeah like I've seen that with authors and everything else like they they're great at writing they made a grammatical error by accident they had a typo but because they wrote the content they can't see that error you can show them just that sentence 12 times and they might miss it every time just because like you wrote it you know what it's supposed to say in the way our brains work is you may know this about just the science of how people read as we actually read the beginning and end of words and we just kind of skip the order of the letters in the middle so already know what the word is supposed to say you're most likely gonna miss that it's got an issue and it really does matter I wouldn't blame you if you thought to yourself does it really matter you all make mistakes and absolutely you're correct we do make mistakes when you only have seconds to make an impression you want to show that what you do you do with precision and care you want to get that and feel like okay this is an expert this is somebody who's gonna do a great job because if you're selling cheese that may seem like well what is spelling have to do with that but they may think like well if they don't care about precision with that how do I know that they made the cheese properly how do I know that they aren't just like skipping through everything so let's just something to think about it really I think it does matter and I think it's it's worth doing and mistake number six not enough content they do need some info it would have been a good joke now I think about it if I had no other slide after this that explain expounded on this like not enough content but unfortunately I wasn't clever enough earlier so you want to tell them what you're selling if your website doesn't explain what you're selling what's the point of the website I've literally seen ones where people try to go full minimalist and they basically just have like titles but it doesn't actually explain what they're selling and sometimes that's like with WordPress plugins they're one of the biggest culprits you go on it and you're like cool like you have all these like buzzwords but like what are you actually selling I actually don't know what your plugin does but also you need content for SEO so that was just super practical if you try and go full minimalist like people are not gonna be able to like find you on Google and no matter how much you think your you know SEO doesn't matter it probably matters at least a decent amount to the point that you're gonna want to make sure that you have enough content to make it so people can find you so that was the end of the mistakes is anyone have any questions about the mistakes before I move on sweet yeah so these are best practices number one set page goals the other point other than go bills that I want you to walk away from this presentation is set page goals like even if you walk away from here and you're like I don't remember anything he said he was just busy making jokes about what was on his slide like that's fine but just remember to set page goals that's the like thing that so many people don't do is they think like like oh I'm just gonna make the content and it'll sell the reason you have a goal is because you need to know what the page is even for is it to inform people like maybe there is no like checkout but is it goal of a page to inform people is it them to a checkout page like maybe it's you know something that explains what you do in the on that page you want to be funneling people to the checkout page is it to collect their email and or is it to collect their money which is you know most checkout pages most product pages is ultimately you're just trying to collect the money and I think that's pretty legit because if it's a business website you need money to operate so that's a very valid reason we should always look at that for the page you just say why do I why do I have this page and how does this go tie into other goals so if you have multiple sales pages which is pretty common there's a sales funnel and a lot of times you start with like pretty basic stuff try and get them in and that's where you try to have your first call to action some kind of buy-in but then you may send them to another page to kind of get them down the funnel and the goal of the funnel is like you just try and get them closer and closer to the point that the end of the funnel is usually now they are a customer and so you need to think about like how do those work together because if every single page's goal is to inform then how are you ever going to collect their info or collect their money and so you always want to look at that and make sure that like each together because you also don't want to like have 10 pages where the goal is to collect their money because if you're doing 10 different pages for checkout just because you think like well I should always check out you those are probably not going to be great checkout pages because you're not gonna be able to focus on each one and when I talk about that that has to do with this tracking your goals so number two is once you know what your goals are track them traffic analytics so Google Analytics generally is what people use there are alternatives to Google Analytics and so if you aren't using some type of traffic analytics you should start even if you are literally just posting pictures of your favorite beanies from the 90s like you still probably want to know like how many people went to go see the one of the monkey which I think was named bongo yeah I think that was the best one I think we can all agree go bills don't just track page hits and if you're wondering what a monkey has to do with bills absolutely nothing that was just my favorite beanie baby don't just track page hits that's another mistake that people do so I probably put that the mistakes but really when you're doing goals don't just say like well I want to get a hundred people on this page because a hundred people on a page doesn't mean anything if all they do is go to the page you want to also be tracking events so like I mentioned before you want to have a call to action and you want to track that call to action in Google Analytics especially in Google Analytics 4 there's all sorts of things that you can track events so you can track every time somebody clicks a certain button so that way you can see like which buttons did people click on and you want to have goals for that you don't just want to say like I want people to click the button you want to say I want 50% of people who go to this page to click the button because that's going to also give you things to work on because if if only four percent of people do that and you're expecting that 50% of the people are going to click the button then that means that something is probably wrong and you need to to look at your page just what can be fixed to get you to the goals and that is why we use smart goals so they need to be specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound so like for specific yeah like we we want them to be specific we don't just want to say like I want sales because that's not really a good goal I mean technically that is like the goal but like in that like how are you gonna meeting that goal are you literally just gonna say like I made one sale this year so therefore it's great success most likely you're gonna want to do many sales so you can actually be making money and you want them to be measurable a lot of people make goals that are more qualitative which is somewhat you know somewhat still helpful you can't have qualitative goals we really want to try to have quantitative goals and ones you can measure so number of clicks number of checkouts it can also be things like amount of sales it can be even like cost per acquisition which is like how much did I spend for every customer who signed up so if you spent like a million dollars on marketing but you got a million customers to sign up like you're probably doing really well but if you spent a million dollars on marketing but you had one customer sign up then your cost of customer acquisition is probably unless you're selling a two million dollar product you're probably not doing great you want it to be achievable you don't want to say I want to sell a billion dollars like sure we'd all love to sell a billion dollars on our website but like you want it to be realistic partly because like if you're always just falling so far below the goal it's not really a goal it's just a dream and and you're not likely to be able to improve on it because if you say well I want this crazy lofty goal but not one you could ever get to anyway then how are you going to actually work towards that goal yeah you may make improvements but you want things that you can like measure and then a fee like you want to be able to hit however many of the of the goals you have you want to do that and you want to be relevant you don't want to like have a goal of like I want 50 people to send me recipes on my website that is selling car parts like because I know that like that's an extreme example but people make some pretty irrelevant goals some of them are like I want people to share my blog posts more that's one that I see a lot because people think well if more people read my blog posts they're going to sign up for my products most people will tell you that actually doesn't happen if people are just sharing your content without it have like very good call to actions and they're not actually sharing your like product pages odds are that like you're not really getting that that return that you really want and they want to be time bound you don't want to just say like I want to have a thousand customers someday you want to say like I want to have a thousand customers by like a year and a half from now anything like that and that's just so that like you can actually have goals achieve them and then reassess at certain intervals you want to be able to say like okay I got like four button clicks that's great but like that was over six weeks so like then if it's a six month goal then at six weeks you probably want to say like I need to figure out what I need to do do I need to change the text of these buttons do I need to make the buttons bigger do I need to make them stand out more anything like that so set smart goals and you want to know your audience part one of that is what are they coming for like if you don't know why anyone's going to your website why do you have a website like you know if it's really just because you felt like you needed to have a website then I mean I guess yeah if you really want to make a website just to make a website then this talk probably isn't relevant but mostly you want to think like your target customer what information will they want and will they find it so like if you're selling posters your people are going to want to know specific information like they're going to want to know how big are the posters what do they print it on how do you ship them so think about your customer and think about think about it like you are a customer and figure out like what would I want to know if I went to this website what information would I want to know on my on a sales page so that I feel like I have everything I need to know to make a decision and then part two what are they finding heat maps so like hot jar those are great tools where they literally show you where people go on your website just fair warning they will slow down your website load a little bit so don't like leave heat maps out all the time but when you're in the middle of like a campaign turn them on every once in a while you actually can write scripts to randomize it to so that it's only like every tenth person is done with heat jar and you can just build that right into your cookie consent thing that you're just telling people because you're not collecting their personally identifiable information except if they fill out your form and it goes to your stuff in which case they provided that no matter what but yeah the heat maps are not tracking everything they do on their computer it's just like where they go what they scroll to and generally like what stuff are they doing it'll show you did they highlight something did they click on something did they just kind of hover their mouse around something because that's one of those funny things what was that yeah yeah exactly yeah you can see like how long they were there including which section they hung out on and one of the funny things that people will do that you probably do and don't even know is when you're reading a web page it's quite likely not so much on phones phones have kind of messed us up but when people have mice they actually tend to kind of like hover the cursor around what they're interested in it's really funny to watch like when you look at heat maps you know literally see that like people's cursors just kind of like went back and forth over something that was interesting on your page sometimes it's a picture too like if it really gets people's attention you'll just see like that sitting around there but yeah that's a great way to know but you want to know like what are they finding like what are they coming for versus what are they finding and in this case that's where heat maps help but also just in general looking at it from that perspective like say like if i was a customer i don't want to know this information and then go to your page and say like do i have that information um and that's where like you know the title of this comes in like your sales page sucks because let's be honest we all probably like if we look at our sales pages and think about it from an outside perspective there's probably at least one thing that we're like oh yeah yeah i really i should have put that there because people want to know um then number four you want to focus on your content um start with the essentials um so what are the main things that people need to know start with that and only that i'm not saying that needs to be your entire website i'm not saying like just put a list of what people need to know and do nothing else but start with that um focus on the absolute essentials people need to know because you know in that example of selling posters if i went to one and it showed me what posters there were what it was printed on the size and how it gets shipped in the pricing and they had nothing else i'd still probably buy it because like that gives me everything i want to know about whether i'm going to get this poster or not um and you don't want to make them work for it um the goal is to get them to take action so don't make it hard for them to find what to do um so you want to be focused in that like you don't want to like fill it with all this information and then make them like hunt around because if they're on your sales pages if they're on your product pages or anything like that like most likely they're looking for a way to sign to buy it to sign up for whatever you have buy your product anything like that so don't make them work for it focus it so that like their attention goes to just that key information then you can later like add in some stuff you know once you're sure that you've given them front and center all the key information then add some fun stuff and again have a clear cta so i put this one in here on purpose like multiple times because call to action like get some kind of action make it clear what they should do um don't have too many call to actions like if you have like 10 cta's if you're like i'm gonna collect your email and i want them to sign up but also i want them to do a raffle also i want them like if you have so many things that they're like i don't know where to click then like there's a decent chance they're gonna be clicking on the wrong things because if you have checkout on your site that's probably really where you want them to go so don't have like pop-ups that take them somewhere else for something else when like that might distract them from ever checking out and i've actually i've seen that plenty of times we're like on a checkout like you can be on a checkout page and they have something that like does a full screen overlay that's like would you like to sign up for our newsletter and then you have to like click a button it's crazy like um or like they'll be like rate us on the app store while you're trying to buy and i'm like well yeah i'm gonna give you like zero stars because you wouldn't even let me sign up um and make it easy to take the action you want them to take um don't make them fill out super long forms to check out um eventually you'll need to collect some information but try and make it as easy as possible if there's information you can collect after they take action um try and do it that way get that get that action done and then do the rest after um get the absolute essentials um and yeah keep it simple or they might just quit number six is test your site this may seem very basic um but make sure your site works um it's not going to sell anything if it doesn't even work i see that all the time um i've seen that from yeah so many wordpress companies uh because we partner with a lot of companies and like there are sometimes when their website is just like straight like down or other times it's broken and like that can happen to any of us because servers crash and we have no control over it um but like when it's down like some of them have been down for like a week or two it's because like people on their team just didn't go and look at their own website um so monitor up time using keywords don't just monitor for status because like white screen of death is one of the most common things that happen in wordpress and that won't typically register as the site is down they fixed that a decent amount with like wordpress can do like a try catch that um you know will tell you like there was a fatal error but there's still a lot of things that can happen that can make your content disappear so it like monitoring will say your website is up but uh yeah most important thing is just look at it yourself like if you have if you're selling anything if you're making money from your website um then i can tell you right now you absolutely have time to check your website every day even if you feel like i have a million things to do if you really can't spare three minutes to make sure your website is up then like you need to change how you do business because like you always need to have time to just check that your stuff is working because if your website is down for two weeks i don't know how many sales you know might be lost on that but depending on if you have a hundred sales a day typically in your website is down for a week because you just weren't paying attention because you were doing other business stuff you know that's potentially 700 sales that you've lost in a week um and then you want to test the ctas so if there are forms like things like sign up for a newsletter if there are contact forms if it's a checkout if it's even just buttons make sure the buttons work um so many sites have like you click the button and nothing happens or you click the button and it goes to a 404 you absolutely want to be testing these obviously i don't expect everybody to go through their entire site every day but i recommend weekly just go through and just make sure again that's 10 minutes a week just go through and just click like okay can i fill out this form okay just check out actually work or does it throw an error as soon as you add the product to the cart um do these buttons go anywhere do these links go anywhere um but also ask other people to test for you but don't give them too many instructions because if you give them a whole bunch of instructions they test exactly like this then they're much less likely to be able to actually test for issues um there's a great um joke about uh qa engineers quality assurance engineers um and it's a qa tester walks into a bar and orders a beer qa tester walks into a bar and orders negative one beers a qa tester walks into a bar and orders potato uh qa tester walks in to a bar and orders cat like so like it just you just get crazier and crazier because that's what qa testers do they think um there's a great website called your your client your customer is drunk i think is what it's called and that somebody who actually he gets just drunk and then screen like does a screen recording of you of him going through it but you need to think like that like you need to assume that people are like if there is a form where it says like put in your credit card number you need to assume that they are going to put in their best friend's last name because people do the craziest thing so you want to like make sure that like you also are testing like will this catch that this is not the correct information and will it throw an error or will it completely make the entire checkout break um so don't give them too many instructions let them do stupid things let them click the button a hundred times because the first 99 it might work fine and then on a hundred your website crashes these are all things you want to know and get the outside input um ask non-experts um similar to the your your customer is drunk um ask non-experts like friends family or even strangers um you know like if you're hanging out at a bar and um somebody you know orders just says like give me potato that's the first you want to be like hey can you check out my website and tell me if you think that this checkout works properly because they're the one who's going to like just start doing crazy stuff um don't give them any info before again you don't want to instruct it to the point that they'll do exactly what you would have done because at that point like they're not going to give you important information and take it personal don't discount feedback is invalid because they just didn't understand a lot of people like to ask people like oh what do you think of my site and then when people are like oh this is confusing this is confusing this confusing they say well that person they're not a word press person they don't understand but the truth is like your customers are quite likely non-technical um and if the person you asked didn't understand then your audience might not understand either so you want to make sure that you take that feedback and and run with it and my final thoughts key points uh make the time if you're selling anything your sales pace just serves attention everyone can afford a couple minutes a day like if you're running a business you can afford a couple minutes a day to just make sure that your website is working you can afford an hour a month to go through it all you can afford the time that it takes and even a little bit of budget um you know it doesn't take a whole lot to you know to pay somebody you know 50 bucks to to just make sure your website actually works like if they're good at testing just have them do it um and keep it simple always have a goal make it easy to achieve that goal don't over complicate things because you're much less likely to be able to do what you really want to do and stay sharp keep updating your sales pages based on feedback and metrics don't expect the audience to get better at figuring it out they can guarantee you it will always get worse so if you think to yourself like oh these first couple months are rough but it's just because people haven't figured it out yet but sales will get better in the next few months that's probably not going to happen so just keep updating like watch those metrics watch what google analytics says people clicked on or didn't click on um when people message you and say i can't check out on your website go and figure out like even if it was an error on their part figure out why did they make that error what confused them and measure everything don't leave it to gut feelings and assumptions no matter how good you think your gut is i can tell you that it sucks and it's going to tell you that things are wrong when they're right and it's going to tell you that things are right when they're wrong so find a way to measure your goals and your pages thanks for listening go bills also add the wpbuff spoof we have a ton of candy and it all needs to be eaten today it cannot go home with me you can also get a discount code for wpbuff services we have some cards there and today at 220 we are giving away an ipad and airpods so you can sign up at the booth and then yeah possibly one of those i have like three minutes for questions yes it could be um oh yeah um so the question was um can sales be synonymous with the home page and absolutely it can be um that's actually a great way to do it if you think of your home page as a sales page that's cutting out a lot of excess um so yeah your home page can be a sales page if if the goal of it is to get people to sign up which generally it is so i do think of home pages often as part of the sales page at least the funnel um and it's to you want to get people off of that so home page probably just signing up even better if you have like literally a way to check out right on your home page i highly recommend it some people think you need to get them to go somewhere else but like if if you're selling something and you think someone can just like sign out uh or check out right on your home page do it um get them from yeah point a to point b as quickly as possible any other questions yeah yeah so the question was um just about how you get heat maps um so i use hot jar um that's the product and uh so they they just give you like a little snippet of code that you just throw right in the header there are plugins that can do that as well and actually hot jar has a plugin um so you can do that you just sign up on hotjar.com um there are other ones um i don't know off the top of my head the names but i know that there are others that i've seen um but yeah you can just do that install a plugin um and either put the snippet or use what i i believe hot jar still has a plugin and then yeah it'll just track that all but the the information will all be on hotjar.com it's it's a separate service that runs outside of wordpress any other questions all right oh yeah jeff yeah yeah i would absolutely think of those as sales pages um so yeah like anything oh yeah um so the question was whether like using the poster example um do you think of each product page as a sales page and absolutely yeah like um you can have 10 sales pages um and generally with that like your goal is either like if you sell multiple products maybe your goal is to get them to click the add to cart and then like the funnel is get them to go to cart and then check out but absolutely yeah those those principles would apply to every single one of those product pages all right and i think that's all the time i had thanks everyone