5 Tips for Better Open Source Communities

  • Chris Van Patten
  • Open Source, Technology
  • No Comments

At Van Patten Media, we release a lot of open source code. As a consequence, we receive a lot of suggestions and feedback, along with “pull requests” — submissions of code from other developers.

There are a lot of blog posts devoted to being better contributors to open source, but very few on being better leaders of open source projects (or, at least, better code reviewers).

Recently I’ve encountered several situations where people running open source projects haven’t handled pull requests in a way I thought was appropriate. Of course, to a degree this is all subjective, but I still think it’s worth sharing a few of the tips I use to make our open source projects more welcoming and leave developers happy.

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Stress management for solo entrepreneurs

  • Lindsay Doebler
  • Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Thoughts
  • 1 Comment

It always seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything I want done. As a freelance writer I tend to have many small projects going on at any given time. Thinking about all of those projects and all the things I need to do can lead to quite a bit of stress and anxiety.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how time management was a big way you could cut back your stress and now I want to give you some more ways to help with your stress. As a solo entrepreneur you probably have a million things going on like me. So here are some of the things I’ve been doing to alleviate stress…

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Why outsourcing is essential for small business owners

  • Lindsay Doebler
  • Business, Productivity, Technology
  • 1 Comment

Although I live in New Zealand, nearly all of my work comes from the United States and Canada. Technology is at a point where I can work from home here and get things done for people on the other side of the planet. It’s great because as a freelancer, I can find more work than I otherwise would in my small town.

The real winners though are small business owners. By outsourcing their work online, they can find just the right person for the job they need, no matter where they are. They also save on the costs of having long-term employees in a physical office. But besides these obvious bonuses to outsourcing, there’s even more important aspects of outsourcing that you as a small business owner should consider.

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4 reasons to manage your content marketing with CoSchedule (our review)

  • Lindsay Doebler
  • Reviews, Social Media, WordPress
  • 1 Comment

You just finished writing up your newest blog post. Now what? Time to make the social media rounds and set up your posts on Facebook. Then Google+. Then Twitter. Even if you use something like Buffer you might have to spend time tabbing back and forth between your post and Buffer to put in the right links and quotes. It may not seem like a lot but that time adds up.

You could be spending that time writing more content and social media posts. With CoSchedule, you can. CoSchedule is an amazing WordPress plugin that makes content marketing intuitive, smooth, and fast by bringing the social media and scheduling tools right to your WordPress dashboard.

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The Definitive Guide to Triggering Custom Google Analytics Events Using Google Tag Manager

  • Chris Van Patten
  • Technology, Tutorials
  • 4 Comments

As part of an effort to be more ‘data conscious’ at Van Patten Media, I decided to start tracking contact form submissions. A new contact form submission is essentially a new lead, and having information in Google Analytics will help me figure out how to increase form submissions (thus increasing our leads).

Google Analytics makes it easy to track custom events, but I ran into trouble while trying to send events via Google Tag Manager. After reading a number of unhelpful blog posts, a lot of trial and error, and several cups of coffee, I was able to figure out the solution.

It turns out that once you know how, it’s incredibly easy, but the documentation isn’t great. That’s why I’ve written this post:the complete guide to firing custom Google Analytics events with Google Tag Manager. (I’ll even show you how to trigger those events with Gravity Forms.)

Let’s go…

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