Welcome to my talk on generalized proof-of-knowledge with fully dynamic setup. This is joint work with Christian Badetscher and Wally Maurer. Let me start by giving you a brief recap of interactive proof systems and proof-of-knowledge in particular. An interactive proof system is essentially a protocol between a prover P and a verifier V, where the prover wants to convince the verifier V of some fact. In the case of a proof-of-knowledge, this fact is that for a given relation R and the statement X, the prover knows a witness W that satisfies the given relation. This notion has turned out to be one of the most influential and successful abstraction in cryptography and has a long history of formalization, ultimately with the one by Bellara and Goldreich from 1993, turning out to be the one that's now they accepted. However, throughout the years there have been quite a number of situations where it showed that despite being quite general with having this general relation R, proof-of-knowledge might not be general enough in certain applications, especially it might not be general enough when trying to formalize the goal of higher level applications. Let me give you some examples. For instance, consider password-based authentication. A user wants to prove to a server that they know their password or consider proof-of-ownership that comes from client-side-filed-in application. In a proof-of-ownership, a prover wants to prove to a server that they know the content of a certain file. So in both applications, it sounds like essentially a proof-of-knowledge. The prover wants to prove they know something. Yet, neither of those two applications could just be formalized using the common proof-of-knowledge formalization. Instead, both of those applications come with tailor-made security definitions that are entropy-based typically and often also fairly at home. So let us briefly revisit, like, in which aspect the proof-of-knowledge might be more general and what has been done about this so far. So first, we observe that in a proof-of-knowledge, the statement and witness are essentially rigid objects that are just given as inputs to the various parties. And essentially, the underlying assumption is that if that should not be true, then obviously we can first run some kind of negotiation protocol where we negotiate first on, let's say, the statement and then we run the general proof-of-knowledge. However, it has been observed that there arise non-trivial aspects if you consider such a negotiation phase. First, on a more practical side, if you have a very involved negotiation phase that requires the prover already to do a lot of work and then maybe we can get away later with a more efficient protocol rather than general proof-of-knowledge while still having the verifier convinced that the proof must know a given witness. Then, on a more theoretical point of view, there might also be non-trivial interactions with respect to security guarantees. Maybe as a fairly naive example, let's say you have a zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge but then throughout this negotiation phase the prover actually reveals their full witness. Then obviously the proof-of-knowledge being zero-knowledge is of no use. So it seems like in the end we really want that the combined protocol is zero-knowledge and not just the proof phase. So to remedy this problem, Kamanish et al. in 2009 actually introduced a generalized proof-of-knowledge notion that reflects this two-stage process where in the first stage parties negotiate the statement and then there's a second phase where they prove the actual knowledge of a witness. Second, the standard proof-of-knowledge notion does not consider set-up. Again, however, having both proven verifier access to set-up might lead to non-trivial effects on many of the fundamental concepts of the proof-of-knowledge, for instance on the notion of revinding as part of the science game. Indeed, in prior work Bernard et al. considered proof-of-knowledge in the random-oracle model and in more recent work Choudhury et al. considered proof-of-knowledge in the blockchain setting where all the parties are assumed to have access to a public blockchain ledger. And in particular in their work they assumed that the extractor cannot rewind them in this public ledger and obviously then leads to many non-trivial effects that might not be reflected in a standard proof-of-knowledge where the extractor is always assumed to be able to rewind the entire world essentially. Then third, also the standard proof-of-knowledge notion considers the proof relation to be static and fixed. So that means that for a proof-of-knowledge protocol first you assume that the relation is fixed and then you design a specific protocol for that fixed relation. And it has been observed very early on by for instance Wichström but also Damgar et al. That in many cases this might be too limiting and they put forward the so-called notion of relation generators that is essentially an algorithm that first generates the relation and then outputs an explicit description of this relation to all the parties. So a given protocol does not just have to work for one specific relation but for some kind of probabilistic relation generation mechanism. However, it's worth noting that in this generalization the relation is still assumed to be a true relation that is some kind of circuit and in particular this relation cannot depend on general dynamic setup. So for instance if your relation depends on some kind of hashing and you need to model this hashing as a random oracle you're still out of luck. Additionally, it's still assumed that this relation is public and everybody in the world can evaluate it once it has been generated. So to summarize there has been quite a number of potential generalization identified and with work tackling those. However each of the work so far essentially tackled a single generalization of a proof of knowledge and in our work we're the first one that tackle all of the generalization at the same time. In particular we're the first one that consider a general setup rather than just one type of specific setup and we're the first one to consider a proof relation that depends on the setup. A bit more concretely in our work we introduce a generalized notion of proof of knowledge that encompasses both dynamic setup and relation as well as this interactive two phase process where one first agrees on the statement and then actually runs the proof. We call our notion agree on proof and we observe that it actually unifies all the existing proof of knowledge generalization and our notion comes with clear semantics of correctness, soundness and obviously zero knowledge. So to demonstrate the usefulness of our notion as a definitional framework for high level applications that have some kind of proof of knowledge flavor to them we then go on and show two applications. First we considered proof of ownership and second we considered two factor entity authentication. I would also like to mention that in recent work Wittig and Tsang also used our agree on proof notion in their work at Eurogroup this year. With that being said now let's actually introduce our agree on proof notion. An agree on proof protocol is essentially a four type of protocols where both the pruer and the verifier are split into two phases. In the first phase the so-called agreement phase the first pruer interacts with the first verifier and at the end of the phase they both output a statement x as well as a state for the second phase. In the second phase the proof phase then they use the state to execute the actual proof and the phase ends with both parties outputting a bit indicating whether the proof has been successful or not. Now as already mentioned we want this to happen in the present of a generalized setup function f so in our notion all the four protocols have oracle access to such a general setup functionality f. Moreover there's also a so-called input generation algorithm i that beforehand interacts with the setup functionality and generates auxiliary inputs for both the pruer and the verifier. It's worth mentioning that the input generation algorithm is not part of a protocol but rather a protocol has to work for any input generation algorithm i. So essentially anything you want to make an assumption on you should model as part of the setup functionality f whereas any part of the prior knowledge or the state of the system you don't want to make an assumption on you can model as part of the input generation algorithm i. Then I should mention that the setup functionality is really some kind of general UC-like functionality that is a stateful probabilistic ITM. In particular when making a query a party actually provides two arguments the first one indicating who they are. So the setup functionality knows whether they're interacting with the pruer, the verifier or the input generation and can provide different interfaces to each of them. So we cannot just model something like a random or a CRS that is the same for all the parties but also more involved setup functionality where maybe the verifier gets additional information compared to the pruer or different information or so on. Okay let us now consider briefly the correctness game. In correctness when an honest pruer interacts with an honest verifier we obviously want that they agree on the statement they want to run the proof on. Additionally we also introduce general agreement condition C that specifies whether a given statement is valid given the state of the system such as the auxiliary inputs as well as the setup functionality. This is mainly there so that somebody who wants to use our framework can rule out trivial protocols in which the protocol would always agree on some kind of dummy statement for which the proof becomes very easy or even trivial. In particular we assume that there is some kind of special statement abort that means the pruer and verifier could not agree on a statement for which they can run the proof. For instance in the password based authentication example if the pruer is not given a password but only some garbage as auxiliary input then they might decide to abort. On the other hand if the pruer is actually given a valid password then a correct protocol should succeed and not abort. So in case the statement is not abort then a correct protocol must actually end with the second phase both outputting that the protocol succeeded. And I should mention here that the pruer also outputting the result is mainly done so that we know that they both agree on what the outcome was and worst case this can always be achieved at the expense of an additional round of communication. Okay let's now look at the more interesting experiment which is sameness which we formalize as an extraction game analogous to standard proof of knowledge. So analogous to standard proof of knowledge there's a proof relation R and the only difference is really that for us R is not actually a relation but a stateless deterministic algorithm that has oracle access to the set-up functionality. This really gives us a lot of flexibility because now the goal of a proof of knowledge can be phrased depending on the set-up functionality F. So in this extraction game however the agreement phase is run exactly once and so the agreement phase determines a statement X and only after this is done the extractor comes in and has to extract a witness for that statement X from the second phase pruer. This is really important because otherwise the extractor might try to rewind the first phase of the protocol until they result in a statement for which maybe extraction of a valid witness is much easier, something like this. Here we really want that if the honest verifier at the end of phase one thinks we're running the proof for a given statement X and afterwards this proof succeeds then the pruer must have known a witness for that particular X and not some arbitrary X. So in the extraction game unless the statement is a board then the extractor has to extract a witness for that statement X and in addition to black box revinding access to the second phase pruer we also provide the extractor with access to the communication transcript of the first phase as well as all the setup queries the first phase pruer made. This is really needed if we want to have this aspect that maybe a very involved agreement phase can lead to a more efficient proof phase. So let's say in the agreement phase the pruer actually send the witness in order to communicate the statement for whatever reason then now the proof is trivial and so is the extraction. In addition the extractor also gets oracle access to the setup functionality but here only in the role of the pruer obviously because just because the verifier can query something from the setup functionality doesn't mean that the pruer mute is valid because we have this possibility that pruer and verifier have different views on the setup functionality. Finally because the proof relation is no longer a public object we also have to give the extractor black box access to the proof relation so that for instance in a standard extraction the extractor knows whether they need to repeat to rewind once more or whether they're done so maybe even if the pruer themselves does not necessarily know whether a witness is valid in most cases the extractor still seems to need to know and obviously you can tweak our notion by saying that the extractor should not get access to this and stuff like this and yeah there are a lot of different variants but I think what we put forward makes sense for most applications but obviously feel free to tweak. So this finalizes the two main experiments and I really encourage you for the formal definition to look at the actual paper that's available either on e-print or in the conference proceeding. In additional we also consider some additional properties mainly zero knowledge and for zero knowledge we actually consider two experiments that formalize both pruer and verifier zero knowledge which is really in contrast to standard proof of knowledge but the difference here is really that in standard proof of knowledge the verifier does not have any secrets all the verifier knows is essentially the statement and the auxiliary inputs that the pruer knows anyway so there's no need to formalize that a dishonest pruer does not learn any secrets from the verifier. However, in our setting where we have setup functionality where the verifier might have different access than the pruer we also want to formalize that the dishonest pruer does not know learn additional information from about disinformation. So for instance in password based authentication the verifier might have access to the entire password database but the pruer does not so obviously we want to be able to formalize that during the protocol the verifier does not leak information about other users' passwords to a dishonest pruer and to make our notion more general we actually do not just formalize zero knowledge but we formalize zero knowledge with explicit leakage so even if you have a protocol or situation where perfect zero knowledge is not achievable but you have maybe some kind of explicit leakage or bounded leakage our notion has you covered by allowing you to specify an explicit leakage protocol that the simulator then can invoke in order to learn certain well defined information about the other party's secret inputs that is the other party's auxiliary input as well as view on the setup functionality additionally we consider also a programmable variant of our notion where the setup is programmable for instance if you have a common reference string, a CRS then most of the time this is only really useful if you assume that in the soundness game the extractor can actually program the CRS such that they know the trapdoor we formalize this by saying that there can be a trapdoor setup functionality for which the extractor learns the trapdoor but to anybody who does not know the trapdoor it still looks indistinguishable from the actual setup functionality that we assume to be present in the real world finally let me also briefly touch the issue of composability so in our paper we prove actually two results and both of the results are about a high level protocol invoking an agree and prove protocol multiple times in sequence and what our results show is that one invocation of the agree and prove protocol does not negatively affect the security of any of the order invocations and one of the results is about all the invocation all the protocols using the same setup functionality whereas the other is about all the instances using their own private setup functionality and I should maybe stress that while this might sound like the sequential composition theorem you know from proof of knowledge it's really quite different in spirit so in the way I understand it in the regular proof of knowledge the composability notion is really mainly a technical tool that's used to say that if you have a proof of knowledge protocol with a big soundness error you can just repeat it and get the knowledge error down without negatively affecting the zero knowledge property or the correctness or anything of that but there the point is really that sequentially iterating a proof of knowledge protocol results in a proof of knowledge protocol that's just better but less efficient on the other hand sequentially repeating an agree and prove protocol is not really agree and prove protocol anymore because each of the iteration might even agree on a completely different statement for which you then invoke the proof so the way I see it our protocol is really more of a user style composability result that says that our notion is strong enough so that you can use it securely okay so that concludes the second part of the presentation using the agree and prove notion and its properties as a third part let us briefly look at some of the application and first we consider client-side-filed application so in client-side-filed application you have a server that stores a bunch of files and the client approaching it trying to convince the server that they already know the content of one of those files this isn't particularly useful if you think of maybe a hundred users that all have the same file locally stored and want to outsource it to the same cloud storage provider so rather than each of the user uploading the file individually and then maybe the server doing some kind of server-side-filed application to reduce storage we can get something more efficiently by only the first user actually uploading the file whereas all the other users can just run this more efficient protocol but obviously this protocol must be secure in the sense that a user that does not know a file cannot trick a server into making the server believe that he knew it and then handing it out the secret file to the client indeed this application this is something that cloud storage provider are actually interested in and some of them even have deployed in practice unfortunately it turned out that many of those protocols are quite insecure in various subtle or less subtle manners this provide the Talevi et al in 2011 to actually formalize this task as what we nowadays call a proof-of-ownership however despite this proof-of-ownership sounding like a proof-of-knowledge they could not just say it's a specific instance of a proof-of-knowledge but rather had to come up with an entirely new security definition which in their case ended up to be entropy based so the notion talks about all the files having high mean entropy and then securities defined only for such file and so on in our work in contrast we show that proof-of-ownership really can just be formalized as an instantiation of our general agree-on proof framework that is we show that we can provide a specific setup functionality that formalizes this file database, the service stores we can formalize a correctness relation that defines that user that knows such a file must succeed and we can formalize a proof relation that formalized only a user that knows a file must succeed in particular we can then also look at the zero-knowledge definition with leakage that we have and we use that to show the security of a novel protocol we introduced which is essentially the privacy-preserving analogon well-known mercury based proof-of-ownership protocol so this mercury protocol the standard version of it is not zero-knowledge we then make it a set almost zero-knowledge but with some explicit leakage in particular to give you maybe some example the leakage that this honest prover might get is essentially whether the server already has this file stored or not and we believe that in the context of client-side file data application this is not really an issue because this seems something a user inherently has to learn if you want to have official protocols where if the server already stores the file we can skip uploading it but on the other hand if the server does not know that file yet then the user obviously has to upload the file as a second application we consider two-factor client authentication that is a client that wants to log into some server using both a password as well as some kind of second factor which in our case we model as an abstract hardware token and again we formalize this by just instantiating the setup functionality correctness relation and proof relation of our framework and here I would really like to stress that this is something that none of the existing generalization could have done because those relations really depend inherently on the setup functionality which in this case is the password database that stores user names as well as some kind of digest of the user's passwords but given that obviously users should be allowed to change their passwords new users should be allowed to join the systems and so on this is really something dynamic that the protocol cannot just assume to and hard code moreover inherently we do not want that the prover can evaluate the proof relation themselves because that would mean that anybody can do offline brute force attacks towards this system finally this example also shows that our agree and prove formalization actually can not only do proof of knowledge type of stuff but also can handle this kind of hardware token proof that is not really a proof of knowledge because there's nothing to extract but it's rather some kind of proof of our ability where a prover demonstrates that they have access to something physical which in our case we model as having specific access to the setup functionality to wrap up this talk we first revisited proof of knowledge and we've seen that there already existed many generalization however each of those sort of tackled a specific aspect where proof of knowledge were not very general so far in this work we present the first proof of knowledge generalization that unifies all of those aspects namely fully dynamic setup dynamic and setup dependent relations and third dynamic and setup dependent statement negotiation with an explicit agreement phase finally we showed that our notion is indeed useful for formalizing proof of knowledge type higher level security goals by giving those two examples but of course we believe that our general framework can be of use for also many different examples and we leave it up to you to come up with new exciting applications and maybe would love to hear feedback on whether you found our notion to be useful or but you had to maybe slightly tweak it and so on with this I thank you for your attention


Hey, everyone, welcome back. So remember last time we were talking a little bit about prediction. Prediction is one of the levels of scientific understanding. Prediction is very good for us. Well, it's not the most rigorous level of scientific understanding. You can actually do quite a lot with predictive value. So when we're talking about prediction, what we're typically referring to is correlation. And if you hear about scientific studies, especially psychological studies, you may hear things like one variable is correlated with another variable, or one phenomenon is associated with another phenomenon. Association is very often another way of saying correlation. When we're talking about finding relationships between two variables, very often we're talking about these correlations and we're talking about the correlation being a kind of mathematical interpretation or depiction of the strength of the relationship between two variables. So a correlation is going to tell you, it's this mathematical equivalent of both the direction of the relationship and the strength of the relationship. In this case, I'm talking about the correlational coefficient. So the values that I'm showing you here on the screen, I have a graph here on the left or up and down axis, also known as the y-axis, we see that there's one variable. And on the bottom axis, the one that goes left and right, horizontal, also known as the x-axis, we see that there are little data points that are depicted. And if you can see this or if I'm describing this for you, we see that the data starts pretty high early on and then as you go further into the study, as time goes on or as the x-value increases, the y-value decreases. So again, we're talking about the level to which one value predicts the other and we're also talking about a level of directionality. Knowing that correlational coefficient actually allows researchers to be able to communicate to one another and to be able to predict the value of an unknown variable. So while I'm showing you a number of data points in here, I could potentially use something called inferential statistics to infer the value and location of an unknown variable. If I know the x-value, I could potentially predict the value of something on the y-axis even if I didn't collect those data. Now talking about those relationships and the directionality, we sometimes have these terms that we use, positive correlation and negative correlation. When we say positive correlation, that's something where when you increase the value on the x-axis, you're gonna see a corresponding increase in the value on the y-axis. So as you go to the right, you're also gonna go up in the graph. So you tend to see this kind of 45 degree angle originating right there at zero, zero and kind of going up at a 45 degree angle.  A negative correlation is kind of the opposite where when you go up one unit on the x-axis, you're actually gonna go down a unit on the y-axis. So as one variable increases, the other decreases. A perfect negative correlation is negative one. And so again, that's the correlational coefficient. A negative correlation of negative one means that as you go up one unit on the x-axis, you go down one unit on the y. The closer you get to those whole values one and negative one, the stronger and more predictive your data are. When we say no correlation, we mean that you just simply can't predict knowing one variable what the other variable is gonna be. And so no correlation data is actually not super strong for us. And so remember just super quickly, those correlational coefficients range from negative one to one. The closer you get to negative one or one, the stronger your value is gonna be. If you have a negative one, correlational coefficient, that means you had a perfect negative correlation. If you have a positive one, correlational coefficient, you had a perfect positive correlation as one thing increased, the other increases the same amount. And then if you have no correlation whatsoever, it's gonna be close to the value zero. Finally, what I want to caution you with is though predictions are really valuable, though they can be really valuable, and sometimes that's the highest level of scientific understanding that we can get to. I want you guys to remember that correlation does not equal causation. And many people have heard this before, but what that means is it is entirely possible that you can have one variable that's increasing at the same time as another variable, and that relationship can be very, very strong. But that doesn't necessarily mean that changing one variable produces the change in the other variable. There is a video assigned in the study guide for this. But another example of this correlation does not equal causation is an idea of the fact that ice cream sales are positively correlated with drowning. And it doesn't mean that just because you're buying ice cream you're more likely to drown. It means that there's a third variable that occurs at the same time. So as the temperature increases, ice cream sales go up. As the temperature increases, people go swimming more often and there are more accidents and drownings. For that matter is the temperature increases because it tends to be summer and summer also produces more light. We also see that ice cream sales are associated with drownings and are also associated with home invasions.  It just means that all of those things tend to co-vary together and one can help predict the other even though it doesn't necessarily cause it. If you really wanna know if you have a causal variable the only way you can possibly know that is by doing an experiment. And as time goes on we're gonna talk a lot about experiments. This time around we're gonna stick with this idea of a classic psychological study which tends to be a between groups design. So come on back, we'll talk about between groups designs and we'll talk about the importance of random assignment.


Hello everyone. Now we are going to talk about the budget session which we are planning to do on March 1st and 2nd at Chennai. Of course, this is an interim budget what the government has presented and we are going to study about it mainly because budget is getting covered under the major topic fiscal policy for our UPSC examination and we need to understand about the receipts and expenditure and major allocation to the schemes and about the deficit concepts particularly about the fiscal deficit and related concepts for the examination purpose. So, we are going to have a look at the previous year as well as the current financial earlier data and then also understand about the budget allocations. We are going to do the session in Chennai on March 1st and 2nd and at Delhi on March 3rd. Subsequent to this in the next week on March 9th, we are going to have an examination. Those who clear in this examination of the 100 questions will also be given with scholarship like for the top 50 students they will be given to join into the March month pre-fit batch with us. So, we hope to see you all on the budget session on March 1st and 2nd. Thank you everyone. Good day.


Excellent. Let's talk about today's agenda. There are some user questions that I'm going to use throughout, but we're going to do kind of a brief overview of blogging. They're going to be the key steps that you need to set up a blog, including like finding a host in a domain, picking a theme, writing content, maybe some helpful settings on posts that you may not know exist yet. There's going to be another resource on organizing your content. We'll talk about the fact that you can manage comments and a little bit on plugins, but I think we're going to, that's going to be about the first third. So it's going to be a very high level overview. And then we're going to talk about some like best blogging tips. And somebody asked about AI and what, like, should you use AI, chat GPT, some of these, these conversational bots to write blogs. And yeah, so we will explore that a little bit. So one thing that I did in preparation just because WordPress is very big in that you can, it can do basically anything that you can dream. If you know enough code, it can do a lot of things, even if you don't know any, any code. But what I have done is I've provided some resources because again, we're going to start with a really high level overview. You are welcome to use this, this Google Docs to learn more. And this is a kind of a weaving together of resources that we have over on learn.wordpress.org. So some of these are text-based courses that'll take you anywhere from 30 minutes to maybe two hours to complete. When some of them are short video tutorials, they are between five to 10 minutes. And then some of them are former sessions that I've run, like if you need help brainstorming. So as I mentioned, some of these things, I'm like, hey, this is over on learn.wordpress. Here are your resources so that you're like, oh, wow, I need to learn more about hosts and domains. Or I'd like to learn how to manage my comments in general. You have those resources so that you can use them as you start to build your blog. So you have that information when you need it. So yeah, so that's there for you. Yeah, so that was today's agenda. We talked about all of this. Here we go. Let's go ahead and get started. So the first things that you need to get started generally are what are known as a WordPress host and a domain name. And I'm actually going to do one quick thing here, slide show, present review. I gave myself notes this time. Yay. So that I can be a little less scattered. So when you first get started with WordPress, you need two things generally, a host, which is where you're, oh, bless you. This is where your writing, your images, your videos, your thoughts all live. So it's basically just a database where all of this lives together. And the second thing that you need is a domain name. So how people access your website, its address. So things like learn.wordpress.org, that is an example of a domain name. I have one of my blogs is I think it's birdie.blog. It's not meant to be like a plug, just an example of a domain name. It's how people access and find your website. So we had, I saw a lot of ones here. So I wanted to come prepared. Like what if you just want to experiment? Because hosts and domain names are essential for other people to be able to find and access your website. However, you may just want to play to get started and get familiar without spending any kind of money, right? And there are some resources for you as well. The first one that I'm going to show you is called WordPress Playground. So this is going to exist only in your browser. And everything that you do on it deletes when you close it. And this is a relatively new, this is a relatively new concept. Let me go ahead and drop this link for you in the chat. So this is in beta. But you'll notice that just right here, I have a simple website. It is running in my browser. And you can access the WordPress dashboard maybe for the first time by hovering your mouse over my WordPress website and clicking on dashboard. And that will take you to this fun, experimental WordPress that just runs in your browser. All of your changes are private. So this allows you to experiment and kind of see how things go. But if you make any changes here, it will be gone after a page refresh. So that's one way that you can experiment for free and decide, hey, is WordPress right for me as I'm learning and playing and discovering all that Learn.WordPress.org has to do. So you also have a couple of other options. Let's say that you want to experiment and keep your changes. There are several local WordPress installations. What local means are they are WordPress databases that just live on your computer. They're not connected to the web. Google can't find it. But it does allow you to set up a website and play with it and save and maintain your changes. There are ways to move your website to a live one from there. But some of the ones that we recommend are local WP by Flywheel. This is also free. They do ask for your name and your email. And there's also another beginning one known as WP Kinsta. And it allows you to just play with your website on your own computer. So again, they ask for a little bit here. They might send you some marketing emails. I don't actually know as much about WP Kinsta. But these are some ways that you can play with WordPress and get familiar with it in a way that doesn't require you to spend money on a host. So the host is just what allows your website to live on the internet. And oh my gosh, if you just Google WordPress hosts, WordPress hosts, if you scroll down to Google's results, you're going to find that, wow, there are a lot of places that you can host WordPress. And some of them are going to be for bigger websites. So think like your favorite news website. Think Facebook. Think like the big websites that have like, I don't know, a store that maybe you shop online. They might be managed with one that requires bigger space and those cost more money. But there are some like Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine, GoDaddy that are lower cost ones. And they're ideal, especially for people who are just starting to blog. So WordPress.org, if you're not sure where to get started, does recommend a few hosts. And you can find those links here. So here, let me have trouble with my chat again. Here we go. Let's try that again. So the two that are recommended here are Bluehost and DreamPost. I think SiteGround used to be on this page as well. But does anyone have a host that they've used in the past that they've liked, that they've really enjoyed with WordPress? Just to give some context, I know that I use SiteGround for my websites right now. I've also used Pressable. But basically, these will allow you to set up a WordPress website that looks just like this one online. So GreenGeeks is solar powered. Oh, my goodness. Oh, how cool is that? There is a great WordPress talk about how to make your WordPress website green. So take up less resources, use less power to make it more eco-friendly, which is a new and emerging science there. So that might be something to search if you're curious about stuff like that, WordPress.tv. Oh, my goodness. Why is it doing that? WordPress.tv. Let's try that again. You can definitely search for things like that here and other learning resources. But yeah, so you'll want to sign up for any one of these hosts that we've recommended. If you're not sure where to start, you can't really go wrong with either Bluehost or Dreamhost. But this is how you first create this dashboard where you can then go live. And just a heads up, some people are messaging me directly. You might want to double-check that it is sending the chat to everyone in the meeting. So hello, world creator. I'm happy that you are with us. But try and send it to everyone, not just me. If you want to be read by everyone. Okay. So those are the first two things that you need to start a real online live blog. Yeah. So one person asked, does my blog have to be about one thing? So the short answer to this is no. But there are some caveats that you should know about that. When I first started my blogging journey back in, I think it was 2016, I created a blog about anything that popped into my head. I talked about a health condition that I have. I gave unasked for advice about relationships. I talked about my birds. And that was very fun for me. But basically nobody knows about that blog. And unless I share it on social media with my friends, my family, people who care about, I don't know, my unasked for relationship advice, it's not going to be listed very highly in search results. Just because people who are interested in things about, say, my birds are not really interested in my relationship advice. So you can start a blog about everything under the sun if you want. But it was recommended that you pick one subject. Now that one subject can be broken up into smaller subjects that relate. But I would not have a relationship blog, like a relationship advice blog with a parrot blog. The audiences for that are completely different. So when you start thinking about your blog, really think about one topic. One example that I like to use is travel blogging. You could have a travel blog with certain sections. So it might be like packing best practices for airplanes or packing in your car versus, I don't know, the best places that you've ever traveled. They're both under that same topic, but people can figure out that they can find a little bit more of what they're looking for. And we'll talk about how to separate those ideas in a little bit when we talk about categories and tags. But in general, try and pick one topic to start. Now you can have multiple blogs in different WordPress installations. Some places such as WordPress.com, Siteground, Bluehost will allow you to create several websites under one host with the same payment plan. So just do keep that in mind. So yeah, that's one happy little answer. And if you have any questions about that, feel free to ask in the chat or aloud. Otherwise, let's talk about the first thing that you're going to want to do. So once you have your host and you picked a domain name, myawesomewebsite.com or sarah.blog or something like that, generally the first thing that people do is they pick a theme. So there are two main types of themes that are created by WordPress. So WordPress offers a wide range of themes that control the design and the layout of your blog. So how it looks. There are free themes and premium themes that cost a little bit of money based on your preferences. And each theme can be customized to some extent to match your branding and make your blogs stand out from all the other ones. So there are two types. One is known as a block theme and block themes are revolutionary. These are relatively new themes that came out in I think late 2021, early 2022. But they give you a lot of control. There is a lot you can do. But I would also say there's a steeper learning curve with these block themes. So you can take a block theme and make it look basically however you would like it to with a few clicks of a button. You don't need code for them. But that also means that it's evolving quickly. WordPress is changing all the time. So WordPress 6.3, the newest version of WordPress is coming out in early August. So some of the learning materials that are linked in that document that I gave you may show a slightly different screen than you're used to. Let's see here. So I'm going to answer your question in just a second. Someone said, hey, I'm writing a blog about merits. I think you mean horses and you can't find a suitable theme. So let's talk about that in a minute. But the other type of theme that you have are classic themes. And these make up the bulk of WordPress themes. They've been designed since WordPress was created over a decade ago. And they give you less control over your theme. But they are generally designed either by the community or by theme developers who use code to make things look very pretty, very professional. But they do often have limited options. But they do oftentimes allow for a faster setup. So yeah. And we'll talk about the differences between free and premium themes. So if you're in your WordPress dashboard, the first place that you'll go, generally, to find the way that your website looks is over here at this appearance and themes. So right now, every WordPress installation will come with a theme right out of the box. Generally speaking, if it's a brand new one, if you are setting up with a host for the first time, you'll be using the 2023 theme, which is a block theme. And you'll notice that there's a button up here that says add new. So if you're on a live host, generally speaking, you'll be able to find themes from the theme directory right here in the screen. Because this is a fun experimental WordPress website, you're going to want to actually go to WordPress.org to find your first theme. So from here, there's a button that says download at an extent. There's a beautiful themes button. And you can either search for something that is interesting to you, or you can say, hey, I want to stay on the cutting edge of WordPress, and you can select this block theme button here. So someone said, hey, I'm writing, or I want to write a blog about horses, about mares, how like I can't find a theme. So I might do something like write, and this is just an example, I might write something that says something about horses, or maybe animals, and see what I can find here. So I'm just searching for animal themes, and you're going to find a lot of different options here. And the thing that's really great about themes is that like, here's one for a vet clinic, veterinary pet care. There's one with chickens, right? You should be able to install a theme and then edit it to your heart's content. So one thing that I'm seeing, there's this one here, domination.blog, I'm going to download this theme. I've never heard of it before, but it looks like something where I might be able to put a picture of a horse here instead of a picture of my dog here. So to install this theme from this directory, let's go back to here. I'm going to click on upload theme, choose file, and here it is in my downloads, Dalmatian blog. Let's see what this looks like right out of the box. So I'm going to click install now, and it says, hey, it's installed successfully. The second thing that you need to do after you install a theme is go ahead and activate it. So you're going to click that button, and now I'm going to see what this looks like. I'm going to click on visit site. So the first thing that I noticed is that it changed the colors here. It's got a nice little sidebar over here on the right. It has my first blog post, so there's always a hello world blog post that comes right out of the box just to kind of show you where things are and where they live. And now we can edit this theme. So to do that, we're going to head to our dashboard. So my WordPress website, dashboard, I'm going to hover over appearance. So the but, there are two words that I'm looking for here. The first is customize. The second one will be editor. And that's how you tell the difference generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking between themes. So this customize button tells me that this is a classic theme. And apparently this classic theme, oh, there it went. Okay. So classic themes allow you to get started really, really quickly. You can, this gives you a lot of things that you can change right here. And you can just go down these options and kind of see what's available for you. So for example, the first thing I'd probably want to change is the title, right? So my blog about mayors. You can also give it a site tagline. So all about horses and the joy that they bring. So your tagline, this also shows on Google. So definitely make sure you take a minute to like really think about that. And you'll be able to do similar things with block themes as well. But you can just go down this list and decide, hey, do I want the site tagline to appear on my website? Or just on Google? Not all classic themes give you this option, but some do. It also allows you to pick different fonts depending on what is installed in your theme. And then you might have some color options. So for example, I have the ability to change, the background color of my website, but not a lot else. So that's one of the limitations that I was talking about with those classic themes. Some have more ability to change colors. Some have less. Whereas with block themes, you will be able to stylize your themes, colors, its fonts, where things are positioned in quite a big way. So I've changed this so it has this background here. And you can just go down this list here. The other thing to know about setting up classic themes is that if you click on a theme, you might be able to find suggestions for, like, you can find support. So if you have a problem with your theme, you're really stuck. Many of them have support forums. Not all of them are active. But like, for example, I don't think this one has any support forums, like threads right now. But you can definitely find support here as well. Sometimes there will also be directions on how to set up a block theme. So when you first install it, it may not look quite like what you see here on the screen. They will oftentimes have step-by-step instructions. So definitely recommend playing, experimenting, seeing what works. And from here, if I head to my dashboard, I can start writing about this. Okay, so that's the first thing to note. And if you're not sure that document, picking a theme, there's two tutorials here that I highly recommend. They're super short. One, it helps you to figure out what kind of theme do I have, classic or block. The other one is about choosing and installing a theme. So both of these are really good for you when you are ready to figure out what type of theme do you actually want. So the other type of theme I'm going to show you, just again, this is a high-level overview, but the other type of theme is a block theme. And so if I had to appearance, the 2023 theme I know is a block theme. And if you definitely want lots of control, make sure that when you're in your themes list, you search for block themes here. And this is going to give you a lot of control over your theme. So I'm going to show you a little bit of the difference before moving on. So I've activated the 2023 theme, and you'll notice that my options over here have changed. So here I've got my site editor rather than the customizer. So I'm going to click that button. And one thing to note, what you're seeing here today is probably going to change if you install something next week, 6.3 WordPress. This is changing quite a bit to try and make the user experience even better. It's one of the benefits of WordPress is that we are always evolving, always trying to keep up with the latest technology. But what I can do here is click into this, and I'm able to do a lot more. So this list view here shows you all of the building blocks that are made up of your theme. That's why they're called block themes. And they allow you to do things like change where something is. So for example, here I have a query loop. This is an advanced block that gives you different options for how to display your theme. But what I can do with it, let's say I want my title to be above my featured image. In the classic theme, I wouldn't be able to change that without code. But in the block theme, I can move that right on up, and there it is. The title is now above that featured image. And there are lots of different ways to do the same thing. So you can drag and drop like I did here in my list view. You can use arrows to play there. And there's a lot that you can do. We talked about the limitation of sometimes changing the colors, right? So you also have something known as global styles that will change every single page. It's colors, it's typographies, it's fonts, all of that with a few clicks of a button. So here, let me think about this. Sometimes you'll see something called a browse style. But what I can do is pick something that is closer to what I want it to look like. And you can see with the click of a button, I can find something that speaks much more to me very quickly. And then using this, I can do things like say, hey, I don't want this bright blue text. Let me change my text from bright blue to red. So I'm going to do that. And we're going to see, oh, yep, most of that text has changed across the website. So you can see that you have a lot more control here, which also means that there's a lot more to learn, but it's really fun to just play and explore and enjoy. So we have a question. Can I use another theme website other than just WordPress.org? The short answer to that is yes. If you wanted to, you could go to your favorite search engine and type in WordPress themes. One thing to note about that is that you are going, like your mileage may vary. And what I mean by that is that some themes such as from Theme Forest may not have support. Also, anyone, including your neighbor kid down the street, can design a theme, which might mean that it doesn't work very well, that you don't get very much support. Like if you get stuck on something or worst case scenario, it may actually break your WordPress website. And just rather than seeing your dashboard in here, it just says error. Your theme is not compatible. This doesn't work. So I highly recommend sticking to the WordPress.org theme repository, just because these themes all have one thing in common, or one thing in common. And that is that they were designed either by designers and developers or by the community. You know that they have passed accessibility checks. You know that they have passed safety checks. And that is a very strong way to get started. So while you can use another theme site, do know that it may break your WordPress website. Great question. I love it. So with that in mind, it is also possible to simply pick a WordPress theme or just use the one right out of the box where was I here. And it's possible to get started blogging. Like let's say that we really liked that Dalmatians theme, right? It was very simple, very streamlined, very much a blog. So I'm going to head back to appearance. I'm going to switch back to my Dalmatian blog over here. Now the bread and butter of blogs is in your post page. So these work kind of like social media, Facebook, Twitter, in that any new post you write, any new post will appear wherever it's designated to. So I can write all kinds of things here. And it's like this is obviously this is content of my blog posts. You have this beautiful tool here that is the block inserter. Whether you're using a classic theme or a block theme, your posts and pages will be using blocks. And you've got all kinds of stuff that you can do here. You can insert a single image. You can insert a gallery. You can put media and text side by side. And there's a lot to experiment here. But you also have the opportunity, and I'm going to use my list here to remove all of this really quick because there's a lot of visual clutter right now. They also come prebuilt with something known as patterns. So you can find lots of different patterns. And I think that this may not be working because of the experimental nature of this. So the other place that you can find this is WordPress.org. If you're just experimenting. There is also a patterns directory here, which are pre designed block layouts. So let's say that I really like this time for adventure one. All I have to do is click this copy button. And we're going to see if it works in this experimental playground, y'all. I'm going to close this and I'm going to press control V. And now you'll notice that, hey, there's some pretty waterfall pictures here. It's got text here that I can then edit. I can remove the sign up button or make a different one. Like you can really just modify to your heart's content here. So John asked, hey, will the classic editor plugin work with the block theme? So yes, there is a plugin. And I think it actually may be, there actually may be a block for it. Let's say that you've used WordPress before.  There is also a block known as the classic editor. And this classic editor looks a lot like a Microsoft Word or like a Google Docs document. And you are able to write in here rather than using blocks. So on posts and pages, yes, this is still going to work within block themes. What a great question. So if you prefer the more Microsoft Wordy, like Word document type editor, definitely consider using the classic block that can definitely get you started writing a little bit faster. So that, this is where you write the bulk of your posts. But I'm going to open up this settings button here because there are a couple of settings that I think are going to be really interesting to you that you may not know exist yet. So when I click my settings button, there are settings for every single block under the sun and they allow you to do different things depending on what block is selected. The classic theme doesn't have many, let me see if I can, I don't know, let's do a list one. Can I do anything with the list? Okay. So these settings, each block, depending on which one you select, which you can do either by clicking on them or by using the list view, list view makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for. But I can make a list of, I don't know, let's say that this was a recipe one, I could say flour and eggs and sugar. With this list block, I have the ability to do things like just here, change my text color. Now it's red. I can say, hey, I want the size to be enormous or maybe a little smaller. You might have some toggles on the side to experiment with that change things to different things. So there's a lot that you can do. And that's just block by block. But what I want you to be able to find is when you're working on your website and you're writing a blog post for the first time, you're going to click these settings and you're going to scooch over from the block individual block settings to the post settings. And this is where a lot of the blogging magic happens here. There's so much you can do here. So for example, this is my first blog post. I can choose to make this blog post public if I have a host. What that means is that anybody would be able to view this, but I also could make it private. So let's say that I'm making a family blog and I'm posting none of my family like social media, but we want to like share images. I can invite other people to be part of my website. And they'd have to log in, but only they would be allowed to see that website. There's also a password protection option here and you can give it a password like our family rocks. That could be the password for this one. So that way when you go and view it, this content is password protected. So that's one of the options that you have here. So that's something that I didn't know existed and that's so cool. As like a former teacher, I would have loved to have used this in my classroom. Other things that you can do. There are lots of options here, but I think that the most important ones that you should be aware of are you have things known as categories and tags and we'll get into that in just a minute, but these basically allow you to separate your content. So we had talked about a travel blog once upon a time. So traveling, we could do air travel, right? Maybe I'm telling people how to best travel by an airplane. I can add that category or let's say we're traveling by train, train travel. I can add this category and then depending on what this post is about, let's say the beauty of traveling by trains. I can say, hey, I don't want this to be under air travel. I just want this to be under train travel. Any posts that I write with this train travel here will appear in this category and WordPress does something really cool. It allows you to automatically have a category page here. So if I click on air travel, we haven't put anything in there yet. It's just going to be really blank, right? But if I'm looking for posts that are just about train travel, I can view this and you'll see, hey, the beauty of traveling by trains is here. So that's one way that you can separate categories so that people who aren't interested in air travel and just want to learn about trains can click on that link and find what they're looking for. The quick thing to remember is that categories separate. So when you first go to write your first blog post, I highly recommend you look at this, organizing your content with categories and tags. It's a super short tutorial. It helps you to differentiate between the two. Tags also do something really similar in that they create pages, but they allow people to find things that are similar. So let's say that in my travel blog, I travel over rivers and I travel over oceans and I travel over mountains. A lot of block themes and just themes in general will have tags at the bottom and someone could say, hey, I want to learn about like other mountainous regions and they can find things that are connected there. So John just asked a great question. He's like, okay, well, once I've assigned a category, how do I remove that? Great question. Let's see here. Where was I? Over here. So if I am in this post, you can edit it either by editing the post itself and I can remove it there. I can also remove tags in a similar place. The other dashboard that you may not know exists is over here under categories. So I can see every post by clicking on that one over there of what's in here. And from there, there's a button here that says quick edit and it allows me to in one or if I had multiples, I could select multiple posts here and either deselect or unselect it. And I can also delete things entirely. So delete categories and tags. We will talk about getting traffic towards the end of today's session. That's a great question though. And as far as how long a post should be for search engine optimization purposes, it should probably be at least 300 words. It can be anywhere from 300, 500, 1,000, but you definitely need to know your audience. So most people do not have the longest attention span these days. So keeping it concise and what they expect is probably the way to go there. Okay. As far as getting traffic goes, we'll talk about that in a minute. Let's go back. So we've talked about writing content. We talked about publishing now or in the future. That is one thing that I don't think I showed you. So let's say that I write a beautiful post, my new post. And I don't want it to go out now because one rule of thumb about blogging a great way to get traffic and to be listed in search engines is to write consistently. I try to aim for a blog post a week, sometimes two, sometimes fewer, but the more you post consistently, the better. It would be better to use this post setting over here. So rather than publish immediately, you can click that button. And I could say, hey, I want this blog post that I wrote to publish on August 4th or the 11th. And scheduling your posts here, it says, hey, your work will be published in the future. That's a really good way to bring more traffic to your website. So yeah, good question. We talked about private or password protected. The last feature in the post settings that I think is really important are featured images and excerpts. So your themes can display them in different ways. But okay, that's scheduled. Yes. Okay. I would like to edit this scheduled post that is not live yet. It will publish then. If you scroll down, you have this option to set a featured image. Now, I don't have any images on here yet. But if I did, I could select an image and it would appear on my blog. This is also what social media will choose to display for the most part on Facebook, Twitter, or I guess the social media website, formerly known as Twitter. Most social media websites will choose this to display. So if I have a big gallery of images and I want to make sure that the right image shows, I would do that in my post settings with that featured image. And the other thing is an excerpt. Now, your theme will show some excerpts here. Here is a post excerpt. And what I want you to notice, insert after, the post excerpt is going to be different than what I write here. I'm going to change this because I want to show you where this is. So going back to my post settings, it's supposed to publish later. I'm actually going to backdate it. Ho-ho. To July 14th, publish it. That'll change the date. So now if I go look at my website, you'll notice my new post, July 14th. Here is my post excerpt, right? That's not what I wrote in the actual post itself. The post excerpt was different than what I write here. That's the other thing that we'll share on social media and often is what appears in search engines in Google. So it's a good idea to write a brief post excerpt, one to two sentences, describing the post. It's basically your commercial. So that is something to be aware of when you first start blogging. So when you're writing your content, we talked about categories and tags. Categories again are for broad topic sections. They're used to separate, to help people not see things that they're not interested in. Tags are specific keywords that relate to your content. They find these, they use these to find similar content. And we showed you the categories and tags pages, where anytime I tag a post or add a category, they show up on those pages. The other thing that you can do is interact with your readers by managing comments. So readers can leave comments on your blog posts and you can manage those through the dashboard. You can approve, moderate them. You can mark them as spam and there is a lot of spam out there or reply. So if we view, just view our hello world post, you'll notice that there's a sample comment here. I can leave a reply as a logged in user. Let's see if it loads on our experimental one and it should post to that. I'm not sure that it's going to with this. But if you're really interested in comments, please make sure that you check out the managing comments section, how to do that in general. And then with block themes, there are ways to manage those as well. So those are really good learning resources for you. And the last thing that a lot of people like to explore are adding plugins. So these extend what WordPress can do. So for search engine optimization, for social media sharing, contact forms, analytics, buying and selling things, there are beautiful plugins. Let's see if it worked. Oh no, I broke it. All right. So I'm going to refresh this and because it's not saved anywhere, it's going to be a brand new installation. That's okay. We're just using this to experiment today. So WordPress by default can do quite a lot, but anyone can design a plugin to extend its functionality. And what that's going to do is it's going to add more buttons here. Let's say that on my blog, I want to have a page where my Instagram, whatever I post on Instagram or another social media, I want my Instagram pictures to appear here. And anytime I post, it'll automatically do it. I'm not going to have to do anything other than post like I normally would to Instagram. You can find a plugin for that by going to plugins and add new. And normally you can search for a plugin here. So I would search for something like social media or Instagram feed or, I don't know, a Facebook page. There's so much that you can do there. Darinda asked, can you change the WordPress logo to your own logo in the browser tab next to the URL? So I think you're referring to these little buttons up here and Assad is absolutely right. Yes, you can. And if you had to learn WordPress, there are all kinds of tutorials. So this is when I wrote about how to add and remove a logo inside Icon. Rather than show you how to do that here is a link you're welcome to. Oh, I think I just said that to one person. Here we go. You're welcome to watch this when you're ready to do that and it will get you set up step by step. Yeah, you're very welcome. So yeah, there's so much you can do with WordPress. You can also extend it and play with it and see if this is right for you. I love it. Okay. So adding plugins, there's also a, this choosing plugins I've included this last just because plugins from the repository tend to be pretty stable. They have been vetted for accessibility for safety purposes. They're required to be updated if something goes awry, if they discover a security vulnerability. So keep that in mind that from WordPress.org or in that dashboard. These plugins are generally vetted. However, not all plugins are created equally. So for example, on this block enabled plugins page, this one has 2098 people, this events calendar have said, Hey, yeah, this is really good four and a half stars, right? So this might be a really safe one. Whereas this one is in here as well, but it looks really new. Only five people have installed it. They've loved it so far. But knowing that it might be something that you may have to experiment with that may not have as much documentation. And that's not necessarily true for this one just in general. The link here on choosing plugins is going to teach you how to pick plugins that are going to go, that are going to work a lot better for your site. So that's just something to know that's a little bit more of an advanced thing. You don't need plugins to blog, but many people choose to install them for funsies and to experiment and explore. So definitely watch that video. And the last thing I'll say about choosing plugins is it's a good idea to install plugins one at a time, experiment with them one at a time. Not all plugins work well together and they can also break your website if you are not careful. So make sure that you are backing up your WordPress website. If you're not sure how to do that, I highly recommend looking for backing up. And you can find a lot of content here. So there's a lesson plan about teaching that. And there's another backup one on here somewhere. So let me see if I can find it. Managing updates. So there's just a lot to know. It's basically the short answer. But this high-level overview is taking longer than I wanted it to, but that's okay. You're asking such great questions. So let's talk about some blogging tips. That's probably where we're going to have to end today. Just for the sake of time, I should probably do a session on using AI. But the first thing that is recommended is that you identify your niche. So for example, travel blogs. Once upon a time, there weren't very many travel bloggers. Now there are thousands and thousands of people writing about travel. So you want to find something that's going to stand out. So for me, I have a travel blog that I'm starting and it's about traveling in an RV with birds. What it's like to do that, how to do that successfully. That is my niche. That makes me stand out from all the other travel bloggers that exist. So when you're thinking about it, like if you're writing a blog on mares or horses, what new things can you bring to the table there? And see if you can't specialize. Maybe it's a certain breed of mare that is fascinating. Or maybe, I don't know, it's about mare behavior. You want to specialize. The second thing is to create really high quality content. So good content is good search engine optimization. You want to produce valuable, well-researched content, accurate, true, that's engaging and addresses what your readers are interested in. So you really want to take some time to think, hey, someone who's reading this blog, what do they need to know that they can't necessarily find somewhere else. Quality content will keep visitors coming back and encourage them to share your posts on social media. So how to take a mare from getting pregnant to having the baby. Oh, wow, that's fascinating. Oh, I totally read that blog. Oh, I love it. So that could be a blog post or it could be your entire blog. The next one is to be consistent. You want to regularly update your blog with fresh content. So you don't want to say the same thing over and over again. And creating like a publishing schedule, saying, hey, I'm going to schedule blog posts to go out every Monday. I'm going to write a blog once a month. Being consistent is so important. That's how search engines find you. That's how readers know to come back. And it's how they share your posts. You also want to interact with your audience. So you want to engage with your readers. So through those comments, you can also engage readers through social media. You can use a plugin for a newsletter. You want to respond to comments. You want to answer reader questions and encourage discussions to build a community within and around that blog. So someone asked, can I write a weekly blog from start to finish? I think what you mean is like, could I sit down over the span of a day and write a lot of content to be scheduled at different points? Yeah, you could do that. It just kind of depends on how quickly you write. But the main thing is don't publish it all at once. Be consistent. Schedule those posts. Great question. It can take months. Yeah. So building a blog does take months because you are also interacting with your audience. You can't just necessarily set it and forget it. You want to respond to your audience. Write things that they say, hey, I'm curious about this one thing that you said. Could you write about that? So being reactive and responsive is an important way to do that as well. You definitely want to utilize SEO strategies. So this is a whole other topic, but there's a lot on Learn WordPress about this, about how to utilize SEO. So things like using relevant keywords, creating descriptive meta tags, and mostly just building high quality links on other websites that come back to yours. All of these are some strategies that you can use. You definitely want to promote your blog elsewhere. Don't just rely on organic traffic. Share it on social media. Share it on Twitter. If people ask a question somewhere, you can say, hey, I have an answer to that question and you can link to your website. So you definitely want to figure out a promotion strategy to bring more people in. But I think most importantly, you want to be authentic and genuine. Your personality should shine through and your writing should be yours. And it should sound like you and readers really connect more with bloggers who are genuine and relatable and transparent. Some other things that you can do, you can definitely look into an analytics plugin to see, hey, what's working? What's not? Which of your blog posts are most popular? Can you write more about those? Can you not? See what resonates with your audience to improve your blog accordingly. You can also network with other bloggers. So if I have a travel blog, I probably want to reach out to other travel bloggers and be active on their blogs so that they know that, one, I exist. And two, you can build that rapport with people. And then maybe they'll ask you to write on their blog and link back to yours. You never know. And the other thing is just to stay up to date. Prepare to evolve. Know that WordPress changes all the time. And the digital landscape is constantly changing. Who knows? Maybe we will have 3D blogs here in the next couple of years and that'll be a whole different thing. But just plan on staying current. Is there a site under construction page before you're ready to publish? So John says yes, there are patterns and ready-made pages for that. There are also plugins that you can install that are, I think they're called construction page plugins. And they will put a front page that says, hey, this is being built right now, like come back later. So yeah, there are ways to do that. It doesn't happen by default. But you can definitely do that. And then with our last few minutes, somebody asked me privately, how do you become successful in blogging in the presence of billions of websites? So all of these tips will get you so far. Having a good niche, great quality content, saying something fresh, spreading your word, being active, that that's all part of that story. So the last workshop that I did about finding blog ideas, I went into detail about my partner and how he and his then partner had set up a travel blog that was very successful, that they made money with. It's mostly about being visible and being authentic. And all of these tips help you to do that. But I'm gonna be honest, some of it does just take a little bit of luck being in the right place at the right time. My partner had a travel blog and they didn't have very many people viewing it very often. Like they just kind of were writing about what they were doing. They were rebuilding an Airstream RV, which is kind of like a metal tin can on wheels. And they rebuilt it from the ground up. But it was when they decided to sell that, that suddenly people were finding their blogs. Everybody linked to that post and it went viral before going viral was a thing. And suddenly they had thousands and thousands of viewers, which didn't allow them to monetize it. So yeah, that's a there's a little bit of luck, but these best practices can absolutely take you a very long way. Yeah, and you really just want to stand out because there are hundreds of thousands of websites out there and there are thousands and thousands of blogs out there. So really work on how you can stand out and promoting your blog and networking, like there's there's a lot to it. But as you get familiar with it, as you start writing, as you start to figure out what works for you and what doesn't, you will grow your audience over time. So don't expect it to to happen overnight. And definitely write what resonates both with you and with your audience. The last tip I will probably share is that if you're bored writing it, people are probably going to be bored reading it.  All right. I feel like there was one other question that I said, I would save till the end, find where it was, I think it was about like how to build a following. In between you have answered this is about deleting the category and tags. Oh, and deleted. I think we went over that a little bit. Yeah. So deleting categories and tags, I think we went over that. All right. So the last thing that I'll say about blogging is one of my co-workers or another, I'm sorry, contributor on the training team own your content and share it everywhere. Here it is. So I think there's some really good value, like value in here from Courtney, who's been a long time WordPress contributor, really knows her stuff. This talks about like why blogging with WordPress specifically allows you to keep your content in a way that most other blogging platforms do not. You write something on their platforms, they own it. If you write something on WordPress, that content is yours. And she talks a lot about how to share that everywhere. So highly recommend that. That's another one. But yeah, there's just a lot to know, but get set up and use those resources that we link to throughout here. And of course, always use learn.wordpress.org to stay current with content. These recent tutorials will teach you a lot as well, but a lot of this is learned by doing and have fun doing it. So if WordPress had a motto, that would be mine for it. All right. Thank you all so much for your time and your attention. And I really look forward to seeing what you blog about in the future. Thank you all so much. Cheers. And thank you Asad for being a wonderful co-host. Ah, okay. All right. Have a good one, y'all.


Great. So I want to spend a few minutes with you this afternoon talking about how Nimbus as the granddaddy of learning how to take measurements of precipitation and how far we've gone in the 40 years since Nimbus started doing precipitation measurements from space. So I will start by going to the next slide. So I have a little bit of an outline here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the Nimbus measurements and instrument launches for that data. I'll explain in as layman terms as I can how these radiometers work to measure precipitation. And then I'm going to talk about some of the science results that have happened in terms of precipitation from Nimbus all the way through the decades to the global precipitation measurement mission which I'm the project scientist of and we launched in February and I'll show you some of that data as well. And we'll talk about that. All right. So a little bit of a launch history here. So there were these and you probably already talked about this. I'm sorry I had to sneak out for another important event in the middle of the afternoon. But here's some of the history here. Really the scanning microwave spectrometer scams was the beginning of taking measurements of precipitation from space before then they weren't really looking at that type of data. And then so over the years you know microwave sounding units have been launched in 1997 the tropical rainfall measuring mission was launched which the whole focus was on precipitation and had a radar built by the Japanese. AMSUS, ATMS have come out of this and then as we just said the global precipitation measurement mission was just launched and it has great capabilities to be able to measure rain and snow from space. All right so this is the scams instrument. Some of the things I want to point out here 110 kilometer footprint that's gigantic. Think about trying to resolve a convective core a thunderstorm of the summer in 110 kilometers. It's going to be completely washed out so yes this was good and it got data but it was pretty big. It also had this set up this series of channels and 31 gigahertz was basically the only channel that was sensitive to precipitation. The falling part of precipitation the 22 was sensitive to or water vapor in the atmosphere but it really didn't see the precipitating stuff. The other channels were just for temperature at different altitudes so this would typically see around four kilometers 11 kilometers and 18 kilometers these different channels here. Okay so the next slide is GPM. So GPM launched just this year has 13 channels VNH that's two channels each so we have 13 channels we go from 10 gigahertz which is sensitive to very heavy rain rates up to 110 millimeters an hour and then we go all the way down to 183 gigahertz which is sensitive to the falling snow and down to 0.2 millimeters an hour. So we have a range from 0.2 millimeters an hour all the way up to 110 and then we also are able to detect and estimate falling snow with this device. We also have the dual frequency precipitation radar which has two frequencies KU which is about 35 gigahertz no 13 gigahertz and then KA which is 35 gigahertz and really what the other thing I want to point out is we get down to five kilometer footprints so now you can start seeing those little pop-up storms that hit one part of your neighborhood but not another you know when you drive through it's raining and then it's dry so this at that resolution we can start seeing the regional scale cloud effects. Now there's some parts of our scientific community that one is down at one kilometer or less so you can get more detail at the processes but this is pretty good. So I've already talked about the 0.2 to 110 millimeters an hour and snow let me talk a little bit more about here it was designed for a three-year life five years of fuel was put on it but based on our projections we might last a 10 to 15 years now trim launched in 1997 has just run out of fuel so 96 or like 16 or 17 years and we hope to last at least that long but you don't know what the solar cycles the solar cycles cause drag and it pulls the spacecraft down so you need fuel to boost it back up to keep it at its its altitude. All right the other really cool thing about this is this instrument the radiometer when I talked to high school students middle school students the radiometer is like taking an x-ray through the clouds you see where there's lots of rain and lots of ice with this radiometer with the radar that the Japanese provided you get layer by layer information about the particles within the cloud and I like to describe that kind of as a CAT scan and just like doctors use CAT scans and x-rays to understand what's happening within the human body and diagnose what's going on we use our information to understand the layers and levels within the cloud and we can use that information then to improve weather forecasting models and climate change models because those models have fairly simplistic representations of precipitating particles within the cloud. All right okay so how do passive microwave radiometers work I'm not going to talk about the radar the CAT scan one I don't have enough time to talk about that but let's talk about the passive radiometers because Nimbus really started this passive device thing here so really what they are they're instruments they see everything in their field of view all the way down to the surface and if you got the right frequency you can also see into the soil a little bit so what happens with ice is you tend to get scattering so cosmic background comes down there's ice particles they scatter reflects back up to the spacecraft and you see a cooling in your brightness temperatures that's the measurement there rain can cause scattering which causes the cooling but it also has a mission and absorption which would cause a warming so if you're looking at an ocean the ocean is really cold background very reflective of the cosmic background then you get a cloud over it you see a big spike of warming in the brightness temperatures so that's how you can tell you about a cloud and the temperatures change based on whether there's rain or if it's just liquid the surface also contributes you can have scattering from say snow packs or you can have a mission and absorption from you know asphalt or trees warmer bodies like that and so all of that contributes to the brightness temperature so what do you get so this is some work I did probably 15 years ago and what this plot is and I'm hopefully kind of make this simple is so I had a convective rain storm and so in the solid line there so this is frequency from 10 gigahertz to a thousand gigahertz and then this is the brightness temperature value and so like this is a convective rain in solid precipitating snow is in this dotted line right here and then anvil cloud so it's an anvil cloud no precipitation falling out is in this dashed line and then a shorter dashed line is high relative humidity and then low relative humidity with the dot dash so you can see that if you're here in this you know 180 or so gigahertz range you can see distinct patterns for all of these different cloud conditions but where you're down here there's really only two distinct patterns the rain or all the other cases so the idea is to try to get the channels that are sensitive to give you the most degrees of freedom so scams had these channels already mentioned the channels before so you can see that we're you know sensitive to high relative humidity so now you know you've got cloud water sensitive to the the rain which is the solid thing here and then this is kind of a all the other pieces so you could kind of learn a little bit of information and then you could use additional separation between this one and this one to get at the rain in the cloud I mean the rain yeah the rain in the cloud and then this provided additional information at at the 30 37 no these were the the temperature sounding channels so they're not you see them all coming together right here so you're not getting much information at all about the rain that's all about those those channels are for temperature sounding all right so typical precipitation radiometers today have channels from 10 through 89 gigahertz and you can see here when you add the 10 you get this very heavy rain when you add the 90 gigahertz you get a lot more separation there so you're basically getting two or three more degrees of freedom for being able to distinguish between convective rain falling snow high relative humidity low relative humidity and things like that so the gpm radiometer actually added three well added these additional frequencies up here at 166 183 plus or minus 3 and plus or minus 7 so we're getting a lot more information so that allows us to resolve between these different characteristics we don't have any radiometers way up here yet there are instruments that have those channels but not designed for this all right so let's go back to the science this is a science team meeting for the the scams instrument in 1977 anybody in this room in this picture just one all right i want to shake your hand you're right here yeah okay you want to stand up and see how you changed over the years love the hairstyles love the hairstyles i hope that uh there's no pictures of me that are floating around in about four years but no this is great this this is a great science team i you know these names here i've seen in papers my whole life um you know key papers for precipitation science so this is great um and this is some of the data that they they came up with this is the cover of science in 1977 where they were able to do the first global image images of the water vapor they separated water vapor from cloud liquid water and so this is the the results that they got and good enough to get on the cover of science at that time but the the lead author was uh dave stalin who actually happens to be my grand advisor does that make sense one of his graduate students was my advisor so i'm related to this work right and unfortunately he passed away several years ago um anyway uh so now here's the trim and gpm science team we're massive we had almost 200 people at our last science team meeting we have international representation we had um about 16 people from japan coming they are a partner so they do work carefully with us but we had 12 other um countries represented at this science team meeting and the reason is is because we can't rest on just measuring precipitation in the us or japan precipitation is a global phenomenon and we really need to know where it's precipitating how is that precipitating changing during climate change or other patterns we need to know both globally we need to know at the local scale at that five kilometer scale uh and we need to know it frequently and so one of the great things about gpm is that we um design the instrument so carefully that we're using it to basically intercalibrate all the other precipitation sensors out there no has given us data international satellites are giving us data and we will have rain rate estimates everywhere in the world every three hours and as you can imagine that's great for applications no for predicting floods for landslides for improving our our climate models and our um uh precipitation models so all right and i'll just note that um arthur how dr arthur howe who was the project scientist for the submission uh passed away about 11 months ago and we also had a very nice memorial symposium for him at that time so what have we learned from trim so this is trim this is climatology millimeters per day it's averaged over a whole year over uh about uh 11 nine years of data so you can see these patterns heavy precipitation um just north of the equator and the oceans and a little bit down here you know so and then this is the standard deviation among all the input so you can see that well maybe there's some problems measuring our rain here maybe a little bit in there there's some issues with the ways the different ways of um developing this data and then bob adler uh put this data set together another interesting thing is okay we know that el nino and la nina typically they measure that index based on the sea surface temperature and how that changes with the long record of trim they're actually can use an index of precipitation to see where the when the precipitation starts to change you can actually tie that to el nino and la nina so um so the red here is basically indicating an el nino effect and the blue is la nina and so what you can see here is basically when the precipitation and then okay so this is cut off but this is a plus one and a minus one once you get above and so these are averages over precipitate calm down all right so the average over precipitation over this long time period from uh 79 through 2014 this is using gpcp data which goes back and forth and time goes back in time as early as data as we got and then so this is an average over a lot of time and that's the zero line here and so these precipitation changes if it's one standard deviation above or one standard deviation below you could start telling what's happening so in el nino we have we tend to have more precipitation and these are boxes in the el nino la nino region so it's not global it's just a focused area so what you see is then you have an increase here and a very low decrease in precipitation um so this basically says there's no la nina we've got an el nino and so you can kind of see the up and down going back and forth between precipitation and el nino la nina so this is just a different way to look at predicting el nino la nina all right so from term to gpm term was launched in 97 as i said it just recently ran out of fuel the summer ran out of fuel it'll probably last into the spring maybe summer before we have to turn off all the instruments we can actually still take data even though it's slowly descending trim has shown the importance of having data for predicting floods and landslides and other things like that and we know that those operational users are already taken in gpm data for that i've already talked mostly about this information but one of the really interesting things is because trim had operational users gpm made it a requirement to get the data out to the public as soon as possible so one to three hours after an event the data is on our websites freely available to anybody that wants to get it and that's really great if you're a you know emergency management planner and you know that the last nine hours ago you had three inches an hour of rain and six hours ago it was four inches an hour rain and now it's two inches and you've got a flooding basin you can say let's get our people out of here you know let's evacuate and this can also be used by for hurricanes as well so the other thing to point out is trim only went from plus or minus 35 degrees latitude gpm goes higher so we can actually track things like hurricane sandy and look at it as it goes into the extra tropics and mid latitudes so this is this is really great for the state of the science in terms of precipitation so this is an event the march 17 snowstorm that was here in dc and if you were in the area they shut down a lot of things i got it was closed and this is some of the data that we are able to get this is actually only about two and a half weeks after we launched and this is the data it took us a lot longer to render this data than to actually take it so off the coast of the carolina as you can see this rain event the reds and the greens are rain and then over inland you have this very cold falling snow shown in blues and so you can see the x-ray that really long strip of data that goes from there to there that's just projected onto the surface in terms of of rain but also that the CAT scan like data from the radar and really interesting things to note you know the rain actually has a higher cloud top than the snow it's a much shallower cloud you can see that there's a melting layer here so above the melting layer you have all your ice and below it it's melting and raining and so this data gives us great insight and you know we can use this stuff to start measuring snowpack information to help us understand our water resources many areas of the world do use this data i need need to know how much is precipitating so that they can monitor their freshwater resources all right so i'm already talking about this so i've already talked about flood monitoring landslide hazard forecast we can use this in all in models um freshwater management crop forecasting so all of these instruments can tell you when it's raining and when it's not raining if it's not raining you've got drought conditions which affects your crop productions so some of the trim data has actually been used to send food to Africa early because they knew that they would they were having a drought and they would not be able to produce enough food in time other interesting things where it rains you get puddles where you have puddles you get mosquitoes and if you're in some parts of the world those mosquitoes might have malaria so we've actually done some really interesting stuff with the trim data and that's all i have so oh i'm sorry yes oh two more things there's a gpm model over here so you can actually come up and take a look at the spacecraft and then the other thing was um chuck gave me an email from some of the first people that were working on nimbus um garret cambell which i saw in the previous presentation is one of the names um they have new new scientific results based on some of the first observations from nimbus and this is uh dr garret cambell and david galleher they've recovered the first observations by the nimbus series of satellites august 31st 1964 they've used that image and many more to derive sea ice content in the 1960s around Antarctica and they're showing very large fluctuations um uh around 1964 to 1966 and they published this um and they um uh recently uh they published it along with some corroborating information that showed up in the ice core measurements from that um from the Antarctic so what they're saying is nimbus data is still being scientifically used and still producing new results so good good for the scientist out there now i'll stop talking