Monthly Roundup – September 2021

This is our second month using a new workflow for sending out our monthly newsletter. Earlier in August, we moved away from MailChimp and moved our subscriber lists over to Sendy– a self-hosted newsletter application you can use to send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Service (SES).

On the front end side, our publishing process includes simply writing the newsletter directly on our blog using Newsletter Glue, a great WordPress plugin that leverages Gutenberg blocks to craft and edit a newsletter and that works great with several newsletter application like Sendy.

This new setup allows us to stick to only using WordPress while crafting a newsletter. If you would like consulting on using such services, get in touch!

Insights

• Webninar on Al Jazeera Built Their Digital Experience Using Headless WordPress: We are grateful for a shoutout for our collaboration with Al Jazeera during a recent webinar. The virtual event covers how Al Jazeera navigated a large, complex project using varied infrastructure from WordPress VIP and a decoupled architecture. 
• LearnDash, a popular WordPress-based Learning Management System (LMS), was acquired by Liquid Web: This is the latest in a series of high-profile acquisitions by Liquid Web. Chris Lema from LiquidWeb now serves as General Manager of the LearnDash product. We’re particularly thrilled about this news at rtCamp, as we have worked with LearnDash as clients and love their product enough to have it power our training portal rtLearn. Chris Lema has also been a great source of inspiration and guidance to us as an agency. So we are very excited to see how things develop for LearnDash.   

News from Around the Web

• The Google News Initiative (GNI) for India has announced the GNI Advertising Lab which will support small and medium sized news organizations in India. Selected participants in the Lab will receive product training and technical implementation support to grow their digital ad revenue.
• AwesomeMotive has acquired Sandhills Development and its family of WordPress products including Pippin, AffiliateWP, Easy Digital Downloads and others. 
• Intuit has acquired MailChimp adding it to its impressive portfolio of financial software such as QuickBooks, Mint, TurboTax and others. At $12 billion (USD), this is the highest valued sale of a private bootstrapped company in acquisition history.

Water Cooler

Popular on our #watercooler Slack channel.

• Stephen Wolfram, of Wolfram Alpha fame, goes into depth about the habits and desk environment that help him maximise his productivity. He calls this his personal infrastructure. 
• Nathan Barry’s insightful Twitter thread about ConvertKit culture-building practices gave us a few ideas we can try out at rtCamp. You’ll pick up some interesting ones too.

Events

• WordCamp US 2021 took place as a virtual event and drew over 3600 attendees. It featured an outstanding speaker selection this year, and recordings will soon be up on WordPress.tv. This is the first WordCamp US to not feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word,” which is expected to be its own standalone event later in the year. 
• WordPress has started taking applications for in-person WordCamps again. Local communities that have hosted meetups before can apply, but they’ll have to pass the updated in-person safety checklist. 

That’s all, see you next month!

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