Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your hosts, David Waumsley. Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there, and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. This is episode number 171 entitled how emergency WP can protect your online legacy. It was published on Thursday, the 19th of March, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And before we begin, I've got a few extra bits of housekeeping. I've got the usual stuff, which I'll do first, and then I'll come on to something a little bit after that.
So the usual stuff is how to keep in touch with us at WP Builds, head over to WP Builds.com forward slash, subscribe. And over there you're going to be able to find all the different ways that we publish our content. So for example, there's a newsletter that you can sign up to, and we will tell you when we produce our podcast, which is this, and also a newsletter for when you.
We hear about WordPress related deals. As soon as they come out, we'll send you an email. So that's a separate newsletter. There's also our Facebook group of over 2,400 very friendly WordPress's. Honestly, it is a tremendously friendly environment, so you might want to join that. And also at the moment we also have, you know, the usual stuff like finding us on your favorite podcast player, our Twitter feed and all of that good stuff.
Another page would be WP Builds.com forward slash deals. That's a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week, coupon code, significant percentages off some quite popular WordPress products. So hosting and. Plugins and themes and so on. Go check that out. WP Builds.com forward slash deals and of course WP Builds.com forward slash advertise.
If you would like to have your product or service put in front of a WordPress specific audience, it is quite an effective way if you've got a WordPress product or service, because our audience is super, super WordPress focus. So yeah, WP Builds.com forward slash advertise. Okay. The next bit of housekeeping that I want to do is all about the actual content of today's podcast.
Now, I recorded this podcast episode quite a long time ago, certainly several months before Christmas, and at that point we didn't have the Cove in 19 the coronavirus problem that we do now, and this plugin is, is very timely. It's. All about the ways that you can kind of preserve your online legacy. Now I am kind of putting a bit of a caveat at the front of this episode.
It's a bit like a trigger warning, if you know what I mean. And what I'm saying is that if you are impacted by some of the, some of the things that we might be talking about. Then I don't know if this episode's going to be for you. If you are really suffering from the strain of the covert virus or there's people around you and you really feel that this particular episode and the topic that we're going to be discussing, if that's not for you, then maybe come back to this one in the future.
There's nothing particularly inflammatory or strange. It's just maybe I'm just letting you know that maybe the topics that we deal with might be a little bit tricky because we deal with how to preserve your legacy. Should you pass away? So the plugin is aimed at kind of creating a storage, a repository of all the things that you would like to hand over should you pass away.
So that could be the keys for your online password manager. It could be messages that you want to give to people. In fact, it could be just about anything. And so Albert Brückmann has written. Emergency WP plugin, which can do all of that. And we talk about how it works, how it might be best suited, what use cases there are for it, what the roadmap has.
And also, you know, how can it possibly know when to trigger these messages that are going to be sent out and deliver the payloads that you, you tell it, you want to be delivered to the people that you wish to receive them. So it's a really interesting episode. Now, it might be worth mentioning at this point that Albert has very kindly offered.
WP Builds the listeners a bit of a coupon code. So if you listen to this podcast episode and you like the sound of what you're hearing, then you can redeem 50% off the lifetime Bulletproof package. If you redeem it before the 26th of March and you're going to use the coupon code, WP Builds 2020 so that's all lower case.
No spaces. WP Builds 2020 if you fail to listen to this podcast and make use of that a week, then you can actually hold on until the 16th of April, 2020 and you've got a 20% discount. So just to recap, if you listen to this, and by the 26th of March, you can get 50% off and up until the 16th of March, you can get 20% off using offer code.
WP Builds 2020 right? I hope that you enjoy the podcast. Hello there, and welcome to the interview part of the EWP Builds podcast. I'm glad that you've stayed with us until this point today, all the way from Germany. I have, well, you know what? I was trying to say his name at the beginning. I'm going to say it and then hopefully he will say it correctly shortly afterwards.
Albert Brückmann.
Albert Brückmann: [00:05:06] Oh yes, that was quite correct. Absolutely not really. Albert Brückmann
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:11] yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. And, and Albert and I haven't known each other for very long, but the most peculiar of situations arose in the WP Builds Facebook group because a thread popped up where somebody basically said.
Listen, what, what should we do in the situation where, somebody passes away and they were meaning themselves? In other words, I am the person that's got all the keys to the website kingdom. imagine I was to pass away and. What would my client do in that eventuality? And, and I chimed in that I had cobbled together a really poor quality solution involving other third party services to, to solve this problem.
It was a, a modest solution at best. But anyway, then in pops Albert, to say, look, Oh, you have a, I have a WordPress plugin called emergency WP, which, which does all of this. So we're going to. We're going to dwell on his plugin today and talk about why he's built it and what it's for and how it might help you but first of all, Albert, hello, is there any how you want to do at the beginning to introduce yourself.
Albert Brückmann: [00:06:17] Yes. I first, of course, want to thank you to have this opportunity to talk to you and, maybe give some, information to our listeners on how to plan something like an incident, an accident. and, and I'm, I'm very happy to be here.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:32] Thank you. Very, very welcoming. Amazing. Coincidence. Bit of timing. That was really good. So we go back the journey of this whole idea of yours, which is now incidentally, do you want to drop the URL right at the beginning work? Where can we find emergency WP.
Albert Brückmann: [00:06:48] You can find it on emergency wp.net
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:52] right? So there you go.
If at any point during this interview, you find yourself thinking, what? What are they on about Paul's go and go and check your website out and you'll be able to see everything. So, but the, the history of this goes back to 2008 if I'm right where you, you first sort of this idea popped into your head. Do you want to run us through that?
The history from 2008 right up until 2019.
Albert Brückmann: [00:07:13] Yeah, let's have this very shortly said. 2008, I married my beautiful wife and I had some clients that I was, working with. and, also she had no clue. All of our bank accounts and stuff that I brought into this marriage. And, I had to go to work, like half an hour every day by car and on one of those, yeah, road drivings I just thought, how would she handle all the stuff that.
I have absolutely no problem with, because I know all of this. How would she handle is when I had to go earlier and I found out she couldn't, she had not all the passwords and it wasn't interesting to her in either way. So she. Had everything over to me, and I had to find a solution for that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:09] and so this didn't begin, if I'm correct as a WordPress plug in this idea was, I think you first built it on a, on some kind of PHP framework, possibly cake.
Is that right?
Albert Brückmann: [00:08:18] Yes, that's, that's right. the thing about WordPress was back in 2000 and, 12th when I, then, got this idea into a piece of software was that WordPress was not, known as it is now. Like even being more than a blogging system. now you can use it even as a framework for so many other things.
Right. But back then, it had security issues. It was not so well known. It had not that widespread over the internet. So, yeah. I tried it first with a standalone software somewhere in the internet.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:52] Yeah. So, fast forward to 20, 19, while we're actually in 2020 now. But, you, you, you've had a, a brand at that point, it used to be called mimic memento.
but you decided that. For obvious reasons. Emergency WP has a sort of more of a ring too. It's more identifiable and easy to understand. So that's where we're at now. We've got this plugin, but, I'll, I'll, Albert was very kind in that whenever I produce these podcasts episodes, I offer up some show notes and it's basically a blank document and some guests fill it in and others don't.
And Albert's helped me a great deal by filling in. Masses really large amounts. He's put a lot of thought into this, so I want to go through in the order that you've written things out, because the first thing that is in everybody's mind, I suppose, is what, what possible use case could there be for a plugin, which is going to do something after you've passed away.
Albert Brückmann: [00:09:45] Yeah, so emergency WP targets, several, groups of people like, let me, it's just a few. We have those freelances that managed a lot of client data and they know that when they pass away, many of their clients would be. In a, in an emergency case to in to say it like that because, they might not have all the passwords or S or data information that is the first group.
So freelances and solopreneurs who, are the only, target person for client. So, the second group
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:24] is, can I just pause you there before you go to the other groups? Is that, so I am a freelancer. I work, . People to build their websites. And this exact situation has happened to me in that I had a client contact me, and it was actually a friend.
So it was somebody that when it became, when it became difficult, I stuck with it rather than just sort of trying to drop the, the, you know, trying to drop the problem. But he came to me and he said, look, I'd like you to. Take a look at my website and rebuild it because the, the guy who previously designed it, and I don't know the circumstances, but he died.
He passed away being a trusting chap. He had entrusted absolutely everything to, to this designer, so the designer had bought the domain. The designer had organized all the DNS and he'd done it on his own user name and his own password and that all. That all passed with him. And in the end, the process too, to wrestle the domain and get that website back up and running was so extremely difficult.
You have to go through, in the UK, you have to go through this organization called Nominet and he gave up. After many, many months of trying to make it work, he just simply gave up and he said, I will let it expire, let the domain expire. I will hopefully grab it and use one of those services, which catches a domain the moment it expires.
And and, and that was his solution. I'll wait till it wait till it goes off the internet and then I'll try and buy it back again and we can start again. So this is real. It does affect people, right? Sorry, big interruption there. Sorry.
Albert Brückmann: [00:11:54] No, that's, that's very fair case because if you want to be ahead of the other freelancers, you can offer service to your clients saying that I have somebody in place.
If something happens to me, and if it's okay for you, I can share your information with you, of course. But also to the other freelancer that I'm. Working with very closely and he can help you. And that is a, for a freelancer, it's a very good backup, solution in case of an emergency.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:26] Yeah, yeah. Yup.
Okay. So freelancers just like me, there's a clear use case, but the, the plugin sort of tackles a whole variety of different situations as well. So let's run through those.
Albert Brückmann: [00:12:39] Yeah. So, Let's just speak about the possibilities. You can store like a last letters to your children or, or, or for your wife or the boss that you didn't like so much, whatever.
and you can send them to be sent immediately after the plugin detects that you're not here anymore. And it can do that. Special way. And we'll come to that. you can, schedule, messages to be sent in a month after you've on, you have a, something like a vault that is encrypted, like, the bank counts handwrote stats we have.
and yeah, it's, it's all built into that. Plugin, and he, like, I'm a parent, I have three sons. and something I dream of is if I do not, see my son get to be like 18, and I want to send him an an email or two, whatever. So I went and build up my own WordPress installation or this. Case, and I set up some messages that are directed to his email address in the case that I would not, yeah, experience his, his, his, well, Hey there.
And that's something that you can do as a parent. You can handle bank accounts, insurances, contracts, online accounts, whatever, and, store them encrypted in your WordPress database. So not even your holster will, See that, and you have to provide, of course, the password to the recipient, but they can only see it.
Once the process of emergency WP is finished, meaning that your debt or a, you can also decide to allow to see them, those information right now, so it can be a . Propose even now, it's not only after you've passed away.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:39] Mm. Mm. Okay. So, yeah. The, the idea of interacting, after the fact with, well, yeah, it could be, it could be parents communicating to children equally.
You know, it could be friends talking to other loved ones, you know, their close friends or, or partners or whatever it might be.
Albert Brückmann: [00:14:57] Do you know the, the. Movie P S I love you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:00] No,
Albert Brückmann: [00:15:01] no. You have to see that. That's a guy who ties exit Bentley, I think, or he has cancer. I'm not sure now. And he has led some letters to his lovely wife and they are being delivered by his mother-in-law.
And I always thought about, this. So what I've built is something like a PSI volume machine for, people that also could be very ill.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:26] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you see this, it's, it's quite a common thing in films, isn't it? as an example of it goes slightly slightly off message, but the latest Avengers film, Tony stark records himself doesn't, he only speaks to, speaks to his son after the event, after the fact.
And whilst it's going to sound absolutely ridiculous now it is quite an emotional moment. It's exactly, it's quite a nice thing to have done. Yeah. So, okay, so parents. Talking to children or you know, loved ones talking to other loved ones, but there are some more sort of utilitarian cases as well. And you move on to things like, well, business owners.
Albert Brückmann: [00:16:03] Yeah. Right. Like business owners, they, they can plan what should happen with their company, who has all the, law stuff that needs to be handled with. And you can, that's the beauty of emergency. WP, you know, in Germany, if you want to make Bulletproof, you have to go to the hotel and, or to your lawyer.
And so, but sometimes there are cases when we don't want to make it like that super official. And we just wanted. To be like quiet and, yeah, solidly. And that's how you can plan everything for your. Business, who will lead it after you're gone with some simple mails and information that you just eat at somewhere.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:48] Okay. Yep. Got it. Good idea. So, yeah, so figure out how your business ought to be run after the fact. In effect, it's like a, like a will for your business. Yes. Good idea. Yeah.
Albert Brückmann: [00:16:57] Right. And the next thing is we're planning about having, something like a phone. Eight way. that means that you can connect an add on to emergency, double your pay, and it will connect to a phone line and call your sail, your grandma and your grandma just has to pick up your phone and it will ask her, are you fine?
Something like that. And then she has to press a button and that will be like a daily routine. And if something happens to that, you can decide what you should do, of course, to visit her and see if everything's still fine.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:39] Sure. It's things. So like a monitoring service. Yeah. That's
Albert Brückmann: [00:17:42] like a monitoring service. Yeah. All right, so not for yourself, but as a service for some. Well, nails for needy people.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:49] Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's, yeah, that, that's remarkable. So that's the, that's the phone connection. So it makes its own call, plays a blazer recorded message, and it somehow connects to the WordPress plugin. It checks back and says, okay, we got the number three, they press the number three, everything's okay, right.
Reset. We'll do it all again tomorrow. And then if number three. Doesn't get pressed or the phone doesn't get answered, it triggers something to alert a trusted, loved ones to, to find out what's going on. Exactly.
Albert Brückmann: [00:18:19] And the cool thing about this is that it can work globally. So if you live in Canada and your grandma is somewhere else, you know, you can monitor her and, and see if everything's fine.
Like be it, if you're the technical guy in the family. you can help with that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:36] Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, I can see a, a major benefit of, of a system like that is the, is the sort of automated, you know, the automated nature of it with the best will in the world. if I had, let's say, a grandmother who I was concerned about and I did want on a daily basis to make sure that she was okay, my busy life might lead me to forget.
To make thoughts. Exactly. Yeah,
Albert Brückmann: [00:18:58] exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we have this point of maybe political refugees like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange who, had the problem that they have made something public that was very dangerous for them in the end and now they had to feel their life, although high F and, what they could do.
I'm sure Edward Snowden. May or might love this using a WordPress plugin, but, Because it's so easy and everyone now has access to it. You could, as a refugee, use a system like that to have a sensitive information that will be sent to a newspaper in case of ethical. yeah. If they catch him or whatever.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:44] Yes. Again, going back to films, this kind of idea comes up a lot, doesn't it? You know, I've, the, the notion of somebody appears in the film who fears for their life and, and has to go and meet an adversary. And when they meet, they've, they've put this kind of insurance plan. You know, if I'm, if I'm not.
If I don't phone off this telephone number in the next 10 minutes, then such and such is going to happen. So be careful. This is a bit like that, you know, it's protecting yourself, ordering something safely over there, out of sight of the person that, you know, that might cause you harm. In this case, I'm a political system.
Albert Brückmann: [00:20:17] Yeah. Interesting. Exactly. That is exactly like that. So it's covering all the emergencies that someone could have, but we are also have thought of something like a fun fact. So I could imagine many people would like the fact that even after the F day would be able to post something on Instagram or Facebook or whatever.
Yeah. How creepy. It sounds, it could be fun and you could use that for this purpose also.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:48] Yeah. Now I think a few people at this point who have been spared the, the, the pain of missing somebody, you know, a loved one dying or. a sudden, sudden calamity of that nature that they make. There may be sort of thinking this seems very edge case and, and what have you, but, but there was a, there was a real moment in time, wasn't there, which led you to sort of, to start mulling this over. you mentioned that you had a friend who. Mmm, yeah,
Albert Brückmann: [00:21:16] yeah. I had a friend and, he was, like a bit younger than me, I thought like 23 or so. He had a motorbike exit ends and his brother was driving behind him in the car and he saw him fall. He saw him crash and he, he stepped out of his car. He ran to his younger brother.
And, took him in his arms and they've talked some words, and the younger man said, it's too early. I wanted to do so many things. And then he. Hi. It is. So it was a very emotional moment. And that brought me to the, to, to these thoughts that it can happen to each of us at any time. And for one reason it will happen some times.
So there's the, the death rate is 800%. So, that. Made an important to me to have something in plan that I will be prepared for this case.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:18] Yeah. Interesting. So, we started out in 2008 with PHP frameworks and what have you, and then eventually you've settled on WordPress, which I, I think. Some people looking at this, they're going to be, they're going to be thinking, I can imagine the objections that are starting to form in their minds, which we'll deal with one at a time, largely based around encryption.
And, you know, the, the sensitivity of that kind of data. But why, why WordPress? Why did you opt to make this into a plugin on a CMS platform as opposed to, well, I don't know, for example, a SaaS service where you could, you could have it all on some kind of central. A database on whatnot.
Albert Brückmann: [00:22:55] You know, we've started with a SAS, so it was back in 2016 that was the first time I created it under the name of memento, and we started with a VP multi-site.
So the WP multi-site option that you have. Enabled me to have one WordPress installation, with many subsides. And that was how we gained 350 beta users. And they tried it, and they are trying it right now on, in another domain. And, we used that for, to, to, evolve the software, and come to that point now that we have, but why WordPress?
So I think, it is because of. For me, it's always like WordPress is like the windows of the web, so it's many hosts is offer a one click install Haitian. You can just go and, get a WordPress person solicitation. You can download the plugins, install it, and it's so easy. and of course you have to.
Rely on your hosting provider to be a good one. but the main thing is really because it's so easy that I wanted to have this on WordPress and not on a, PHP thing. That's hard to set up. You have to create it a basis and whatever. So, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:11] Yeah. Okay. I can understand that. I mean, WordPress now.
Powering one third of the, the, the top, I don't know, 10 million websites. It's, it's a good, it's a good bad, isn't it? It's going to be here for a long time. So, okay. So we've dealt with all the possible use cases. We've dealt with Y at WordPress. And, more broadly why you decided to build this at all.
But I can imagine at this point people are going to be starting to think, okay, how does it actually work? What do we actually do? What are the features that are available to us? So I'm in the basic plugin. The, the, the features are what, what's the, what, what's the, the sort of, the way that you interact with it, how can you enter data in there and so on and so forth.
Albert Brückmann: [00:24:52] So you start with emergency WP as the basic plugin, and then you can extend it by the add ons that we have. And in the basic plugin, you have a weekly life check that will send you an email with the. Confirmation link in it and everything you have to do is just click this email in a predefined timeframe, say like four days or two days.
It's up to you how often you check your mail box. you can have in the, in the, basic version, you can have up to three contacts, recipients that will get messages after the emergency cases happened. And you can write as many messages to them as you want, so that are the core features right away. and we made the start very cheap for that.
So I'm not sure. I won't, Tell any prices here because prices can change, but, just have a look on the website. Yeah, yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:51] yeah. Okay. So a weekly check, three contacts, plus an infinite round of messages. When you, when you say you can write as many messages as you like, does that mean there's some kind of drip capability there in other words?
Or does it all go out and you can write a load of messages, but they all go out at one time? Yeah.
Albert Brückmann: [00:26:07] If you, if you would step up to the first package, em, you could plan them, but in this basic version, they will go out all at the same time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:17] Yes. But you can write as much as you like.
Albert Brückmann: [00:26:18] You can write as much as you like.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:21] Yeah. Okay. So. The idea then would be that you, obviously, this is a huge amount of forethought. You, you've decided, today, for example, that you're going to set this up. You feel that this is important. You've got to spend that time doing it. There's, you know, there's no simple way of doing it. You got to log in.
And decide who your three contacts are. I would imagine, reach out to those contacts and tell them that this is going to be happening. Cause certainly I would, I would like to know that this email might be arriving, and then set up the checks. Can I ask, is there, is there a capability, God forbid, but is there a capability, should you miss the link in that email for some reason?
Like you're on holiday and you're not checking your emails. You can. Yes. Or can you have further up? Yeah, go on. You
Albert Brückmann: [00:27:03] tell us all. you will get a reminder after half of the days of your free frequency. So say if you selected seven days as your life check after three and a half days, you will get a reminder before everything starts.
but if you're on onto, more security, I would recommend. To get at least the all it proof package. Because in there there is a trustee add on that will enable emergency WP to connect to three real humans like friends or partner or your doctor. Whatever. And before anything starts, before your messages go out, whatever, they will have to confirm that something's not right with you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:48] So, Oh, that's ingenious. Okay.
Albert Brückmann: [00:27:50] This, this is a huge option that we recommend for someone who wants to be really safe. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:57] Okay. So the idea there is that there's, there's a higher. Plan, of the plugin and with that. So rather than you checking the emails and it being reliant upon you, you'll do, you'll go through that process.
But then prior to sending out the actual main body of the stuff that you've locked away in your vault, it will then go to people and say, look, we think that Nathan has passed away. he's told us that, you know, him, is the, this is in fact true.
Albert Brückmann: [00:28:23] Yes, this is, this is true. And before being a trustee, they have to confirm because, we don't want to, yeah.
Scare them, them to be informed that they have this responsibility role and they will, Oh, when they get an email that they just give a phone call and check on you. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:42] Yeah. Okay. That's ingenious. I've often, I've often pondered this problem. and I, it never occurred to me that that was a solution that's really clever.
I like that. Just get your mates who actually know you, to, to be the people to say, Oh yes, this is true. This is not, I'm in error. And he's, he's an he it is that he, he hasn't clicked his links because he's passed away, not because he's on holiday or anything like that. Okay. so. We, we described the, the basic plan, if you like, where you get the, the, the, the, the weekly email.
You get these three contacts and the messages, and then there's, there's some, there's the, the upgrade that you've just described, but there are more upgrades as well. Do you want to tell us about the, the other things that you can, you can do to modify the plugging and make it more complex.
Albert Brückmann: [00:29:27] Yes. Sure. So, we have these add on emergency WP pro that will enable like even more frequency.
So if you say that, weekly life checks are a bit too much for you, you can extend it to have it like monthly or, even six monthly. this is possible. Then of course, in the pro version, you will get a bit of features that are word press release. They did like dashboard widgets that you will see right away when you walk in.
You can see all your headings. And for some reason, I never found the WordPress eSports really helpful. So I always skip that and went to my work. But now it makes kind of more sense seeing when will my next live check be. and you also get, I have a confirmation log that you can see. when did I do my last confirmation?
Manulife check. yeah. And emerge. DWP pro is the, the ground, the basis for all other. Add ons. So for example, if you say, and that's bringing me to these AP or add on, if you say that, clicking a confirmation link is something that should be the last option. You can connect emergency double P probably to your Instagram routine.
So if you post an Instagram message. create a life check on emergency WP. So, because this is something, most oftenly is only done by one person. If you have a private Instagram account, but you know, you have like two, I think 1500 apps on CPR and you can create routines that will lead to your daily.
Behavioral, being, yeah, recorded in a way. And it will sound life checks.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:19] So just to confirm, cause I think I've understood that. So let's say for example, I connect Zapier to, I don't know, Trello or something like that. I can. Is what you're saying that I can make it so that if, if I interact with Trello, you know, in some way that then says to emergency WP, he's okay, he's just done something.
He's, he's going about his normal business.
Albert Brückmann: [00:31:41] exactly. Exactly. So. It will connect to your daily routines.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:46] Yeah. Yeah. So that could be a whole bunch of things. in my case, I suspect it could be like a Gmail has created an email, cause I do that every day, and if I'm creating emails and sending email, then that is proof positive because nobody, as far as I'm aware, has the, has my Gmail credentials.
So that's definitely me. Yeah. Yeah. That's ingenious as well.
Albert Brückmann: [00:32:11] It's working the other way around also. So, if, emergency WP detects that you're not here anymore, you can trigger actions that you connect through a peer.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:21] Right.
Albert Brückmann: [00:32:22] So that, that brings a bunch of thousands of new options so you could switch the light on and off every time.
Like whatever. Yeah. That's sounds funny. But, you have many, many opportunities through savior. Then I could not even think about all.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is, that's interesting as well. Good grief. That is really well thought out. I'm really enjoying this. so anything else, any other modifications that you can do, should you decide to like purchase additional add ons apart from what we've already described.
Yeah. let's talk shortly about the vault vault. So the vault is a very special add on that lets you store information from more than 15 categories, like your bank accounts, social accounts, insurances, and then assign special contacts to those vault items. So you could create a vault item like your bank account and assign it to your wife, and you can decide if you want her to know everything about it now.
So if she has questions, she can look in, in her, vault item that's stored in your WordPress account. And she has the access to it right now. But if you decide. For a revealing it only after your death. You can also, of course, postpone it to that. yeah. Time. yeah, that's, that's evolved and it brings a much value because, the encryption that we chose makes or hides all the information from, from the hosting providers eyes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:55] Yeah. So that brings up an interesting point at this point because, so there's this volt, which is like a premium upgrade, and that encrypts everything with two 56 AEs. And so it's, you know, it's, it's strongly secured. Basically it's a blob of pseudo random noise as far as the hosting companies aware. It's just ones and zeros, completely random.
And, but it, but you've, you've got the key to it and presumably it unlocks itself at the moment where it needs to distribute some content of it. I, I don't know how that works. But that is to say that if you don't have that, everything else is just in, in clear text in the database. So the emails on the, on the other plans, they're just text and you need to be mindful of that.
So maybe don't go writing down your, Oh, I don't know your bank account details or your. Last pass, login, username and password, and so on, in those ones, keep it in the exalts. Right, right,
Albert Brückmann: [00:34:48] exactly. The bold is just for those sensitive stuff. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:52] Yeah. And so when they receive, when they receive, let's say, for example, in this case, my wife, I'm on the, among the upgraded volt add on, and my wife, I've, I've.
Passed away, my wife receives notification that there's some, there's some information for her to read. How does she interact with that? Does she download a blob of data onto the computer or does it display on the WordPress website, on the screen for her to read? How does that all work?
Albert Brückmann: [00:35:18] So what you will first do is to, when you encrypt your, information, you will need a key or that.
So you will just enter a password and that's the only thing that you have to. How about give her the passwords on any. not digital way. I pose, maybe send it through WhatsApp or whatever. Just say to her, stall this for, for an emergency. She does not even need to know what it is for, but she has to get this passport because we do not store it on the server for security reasons.
Yeah. And then, after emergency, DWP detects that you're not here anymore. she will get an email saying there is something waiting for her. she can go on your website using the a hash code and things. So it's not a regular WordPress page that we use here. And there she needs to create an account and it will run all automatically.
She creates an account, she has a pre defined password, she logs in, and then she can see all the information, after entering the password that you have. Center in advanced.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:30] Okay. Got it. Okay. It's an interesting concept, doesn't it? And I'm sort of skirting around the problem of that password is perennial with the, with the current technologies that we've got with usernames and passwords, storing a password anywhere is fraught with difficulty.
But I do like this idea of literally handing over a piece of paper and saying, okay, this, this, at some point will become useful information. Please put it somewhere safe.
Albert Brückmann: [00:36:56] Yeah. You know how I handled it? when we married, my wife and I, we, got a book as a gift and it became our favorite book and I placed in the middle of the okay place paper and there I wrote down. Password and she knows it. If anything happens, she grabbed this book and no one else except your podcast listeners now. Know, I don't know where you live or which book it is, and she can have a look there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:27] Yeah. That's ingenious. I like it. Yeah. I remember listening to various security internet security podcast where the, this.
Perennial problem of usernames and passwords and the safe storage of passwords comes into that. That I think is interesting. I'll do like your idea of storing in a shed, in a, in a, in a place where there's a shared memory. and in this case, a simple one of book on our shelf that you and I both know, but we're not gonna tell anybody else what the book is, let alone why there's a post it note in the middle of it with some random characters on it. That's ingenious. now.
Albert Brückmann: [00:38:00] Cool. I have one last thing. what we developed the last three A's. I think it brings very much value also to emergency WP. It is the idea of an external trigger. So to say, if I need to accelerate my process or if someone else needs to accelerate the process and my check is set to 14 days or even 30 days, there might be a need to.
Get the trustees to approve that I'm not here anymore faster. So we came up with the idea of an external trigger URL that is known by the trust is, but you can also create a QR code out of it, sticking it, for example, on the back of your smartphone, writing that sticker. Other as I can think about it right now, if something happened to me, scan this QR.
Coat. When they scan this, they will be brought to a hidden page on the word pre-site. They can confirm that something happened to me, and the next thing that will happen, my trustees will get informed on how to fight right away. So we just skip the . The days or months, whatever, and bring it to the point where the trustees can say, Hey, Albert is not well anymore, whatever. And so, it, it, it an be a. Pushed even faster
yeah, that's ingenious as well. I have, I have something on my lock screen, which is basically in the UK, it's called, in case of emergency, I don't know how many people do it, but I went, wants to, talk about, I can't remember even what it was about, but th.
Strangely, a subject similar to this came up and somebody said that the fire service and the police are kind of one of the things that they check is the phone and they'll check your phone and see if they can get into it. And so scrolling on the front of my phone is the words ice, ice, and. at the end of it, you put an order, so you do ice one ice to an ice three and that's the order of which people should be contacted.
So all you do is write ice one and then a phone number. I used to and the police know. Okay. That phone number is, is is for me to, to phone. So a similar idea, but Don in a digital way. I like it. Now, one of the things that I think is going to crop up, one of the, one of the things that's going to be nagging our, our audience, they're going to be thinking, hang on a minute, this needs a WordPress install.
But I have in this situation, I have passed away, and by tragic lock, the, the, the domain that I purchased was, you know, the hosting by sheer bad coincidence, the hosting ran out six days after I passed away. So the WordPress installed disappears. And along with it goes everything that we've just described.
So any recommendations around that.
Yeah, of course. I would say, because I'm dealing with that problem. Also, I would say select a hosting provider or a hosting, offer where you can pay in advance, like at least five years. So if you do that, and your messages are in those five years, you should be fine.
But of course, anything can happen. Your WordPress can get hacked and whatever. So you should be on a, on a safe hosting provider. but what you also can do, I have a Synology NAS at home, and did you know that you can install WordPress there?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:34] So, yeah, I mean, it's amazing. Amazing. Yeah.
Albert Brückmann: [00:41:37] And, since it is connected to the internet as well, I can even let emergency WP run on there and I do not need to handle the, with hosting problems or whatever. It's just stored in my four walls. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:52] So, so you've got it on a little box, which is always on in your house in this case, and as and as box as we call them. And, Yeah. I suppose you could do the same with, with, an always on computer. You might have some kind of, I don't know, media server in your house or something like that, or perhaps a raspberry PI or something.
So there's other options, of course. Yeah, of course. You don't need a hosting company, but you do need something which is always switched on and, you know, make sure that if it does get switched off, it gets switched back on again.
Albert Brückmann: [00:42:21] Yeah. Right? So you should also care about the security of your WordPress installation.
and I would recommend using emergency double QP always with a, like a security plugins or, you know, what, friends, whatever. So to see if, if, if some files were changed. So you can do that in the free versions of those plugins. yeah. Or to also have an SMTP, connected for outgoing
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:47] mail. Yeah. That would be an absolute tragedy if you have these lovely confirmation emails were marked as spam and never caught red.
Yeah. Good point. Yeah.
Albert Brückmann: [00:42:55] So. In this way, we're coming to a, a thing where you could think, Oh, wow, that needs a bit more of, knowledge than I might have. But I don't think it's true for this WordPress podcast listeners, yes. But of course, we thought about that too. And the next thing that we plan now is to have something like a w a S a WordPress as a service solution for that.
Meaning that. Anyone who wants can use emergency doubly or P for a small yearly fee and can handle it without knowing all this stuff about a six 30 and so, and we can do that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:36] Yeah. Yeah. I get it. So essentially a SaaS model where you, exact you're paying, but the technology is exactly the same in the backend.
It's just a WordPress, multiple multi-site. but it takes the, takes the hassle off, and you bear that. And one hopes you have. you've used emergency WP. in the event that something happens to you so that other people can take that service over and keep it coming.
Albert Brückmann: [00:43:57] Yeah. I hope so.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:58] Yeah. it's just such an, it's such a different idea.
and not one that we've ever dealt with before. So I'm, I'm really pleased that we've had a chance to talk about this today. Now, one final thing that I did want to cover was w. I know that you said you weren't going to discuss the actual pricing. Maybe that's in flux at the moment, but you, you have very kindly offered our audience some kind of discount, which is really nice.
Do you want to describe what you've, you've offered?
Albert Brückmann: [00:44:23] Yeah, of course. we are in a very, very early moment of, emergency WP right now, so I thought it would be a cool way of, Giving it out with a 50%, discount on a for the lifetime. Bulletproof package saying you get everything, all future plugins, what you need in this Bulletproof a package, and you just pay half of the price that we have right now on the website, and you would just need to use the discount code.
A WP Builds 20, 20. and I will give out those 50% in the first week after the. Podcast airs, and for the following three weeks, we will have it at 20% then, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:10] Okay. That's really generous. So the, we never know quite when the, the date of the podcast is going to be, because some things just get in the way and other things happened, but from the moment this pop, this podcast is released, you have a window of seven days a week during which if you buy the lifetime Bulletproof, is that I've, I said that right?
Yeah. Right. Yes. The lifetime Bulletproof accounts, then you're going to get 50% off. So basically half you're going to pay half. Yes, exactly. Thereafter, it's going to drop down to 20% for the following three weeks. So there's a month window in which you can get a good discount, but if you want to, you want to make use of the big.
The big discount, then that would be in the first week and the code is WP Builds 2020 everything's lower case and there are no spaces, so. Wow, that's really nice. yeah. Before we finish, yeah, I'm going to say, you know, is there anything else that you feel that I failed to ask you? And if that's the case, you can ask yourself and then tell us.
Albert Brückmann: [00:46:09] Yeah. I would like to join all people who are thinking about these, this very sensible case, to join our Facebook community. If you just search for emergency WP, you will see there we are, at the moment, we're just quite a roof 40 members there, so feel free to join us and discuss all the things there. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:32] Okay. That's great. Thank you very much. And in terms of contacting, now we know that we have to go to emergency wp.net is there a Twitter handle or an email address that you feel you want to let us know about? Anything, any way of contacting you?
Albert Brückmann: [00:46:46] Yeah, we have a Twitter handle. You can search for emergency WP there, and we, we are happy to.
I'm right back there. Yeah, sure. Okay,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:55] great. Well Albert, thank you for coming on today and talking about something which we have never spoken about before. Really interesting, really unique and thanks for, thanks for taking time out your day to day speak soon.
Albert Brückmann: [00:47:06] Thank you, Nathan.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:07] Bye. Bye. Well, I hope that you found that particular episode of the podcast useful.
I realized that at this time, with everything that we're going through globally, it is a bit of a difficult subject to broach, but possibly an important one. And I did many times think I would pull this episode and put it till later in the roster, but in the end I felt it was probably a good public service to let you know that this particular plugin exists and you may find some use for it.
The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by WP and UP wanting. Four of us will be directly affected by mental health related illness, WP and UP supports and promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community. This is achieved through mentorship, events, training, and counseling. Please help enable WP and UP by visiting WP and UP.org forward slash give.
And just to add a little bit to that advertisement, WP and UP will be available head to the WP and UP.org website should you need them at this trying time. Okay. That's it for this week. I hopefully you'll join us on Monday when we put out the WP Builds, a weekly WordPress news, and we do a live episode as well, but if not, I'm going to fade in some cheesy music with a sort of bright feel to it too.
It's alive and as up a little bit as we. End of the podcast this week, so bye bye for now.
