Scott Bolinger

Adventures in Software Engineering

  • Marketing: What Works and Doesn’t Work (For Me)

    Being a business owner who codes is an advantage in some ways, but also a major disadvantage. It’s great to be able to build your own products without paying someone else, and do it on your own timeline. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to pull yourself away from the code when it’s time…

  • Net Revenue Stats in Easy Digital Downloads

    One of the most important metrics for my business is net revenue, but it’s a harder number to find than you’d think. I use Easy Digital Downloads, and their reporting tool and app shows you a revenue total. For example, let’s say you see this in the EDD reports: Total earnings this month: $10,000 You…

  • 7 Figures

    Earlier this month my sales counter app for AppPresser ticked over to 7 figures. This is pretty exciting for me, it’s a major milestone for my career in selling products. It took us about 3 years to get to 1 million (not counting other revenue), and and it feels really good to reach this milestone.…

  • 2016 WordPress Business Review

    2016 brought a lot of change in the WordPress product space, and lots more is coming in 2017. Companies are getting bigger and more mature, hosts are pushing their weight around with acquisitions, and new players are entering the game. Established products are still doing well, but new products by old companies are gaining momentum.…

  • Some WP-API Tips for WordPress 4.7+

    Now that the WP-API is in core, here are some useful tips for you. Filtering Posts Filtering posts was a bit confusing for me at first, because the documentation seems to suggest you would visit an endpoint like /posts/category/40 to get posts from a certain category. Instead, you are supposed to use arguments in your…

  • EDD Metrics Plugin Released

    I’ve been working on a new plugin for Easy Digital Downloads called EDD Metrics, it’s now released on the WordPress plugin repository. This plugin gives you valuable metrics on your business with comparisons to previous periods. If you are familiar with Baremetrics, this is basically a copy of that.  I love Baremetrics, but it just doesn’t…

  • It would be better if your product didn’t exist

    It’s true. No one wants to use your product, and it would be better if they didn’t have to. This is not just about crappy products, it’s about great ones too. Using your product is a necessary evil, because a better way doesn’t exist yet. It would be better if I didn’t have to use…

  • My Javascript Tools and Workflow Tips

    It’s important for a modern front-end developer to have good tools and workflow that is going to survive the perpetually changing land of frameworks, ES specs, Typescript, and slightlybetterthanwhatyoudidyesterday.js craziness. I’ve been working with modern JavaScript tools and frameworks for long enough to have nailed down a pretty good workflow, which I’ll share today. The…

  • Javascript, APIs, and the Future of WordPress

    Automattic just announced Calypso, which is a radical new interface for WordPress.com. It replaces the old WordPress.com admin experience with a faster, more modern approach. It uses a Javascript framework called React, which was developed by Facebook. The main advantage of React is that it’s supposed to allow development of web and mobile apps using…

  • Dealing with Custom Taxonomies in the WP-API

    Update: this article focuses on the WP-API v1. Click here for an article on filtering with the WP-API v2 in WordPress 4.7+. I have recently started working on a mobile app for a WordPress site that relies heavily on custom taxonomies. The app needs to pull in posts from WordPress through the WP-API, and allow…