This Week in WordPress #165

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for This Week in WordPress episode, number 165 recorded on Monday the 31st of May, 2021. Entitled you hoarded stickers. I'm joining this as I always am by my cohost, Paul Lacey, but also by Michelle Frechette and Remkus de Vries. We talk about the WordPress news for this week. We cover a little bit of ground this week.
There's a few stories that we cover. For example, we talk about the fact that WordPress has turned 18. This week. That's self is one story, but then there was another little story buried inside about the way that the co-founders of WordPress were actually presented towards the media. We also talk about the fact that you can now add a duo turn filters.
That's been added into WordPress core. We talk about the fact that WordCamp EU 2021 is just around the corner. WP Builds has been made. Yeah. A media partner for that. And luckily we've got the co-founder one of the co-founders of WordCamp Europe. Rimkus on the show. So there's a lot to say about work Europe.
We also talk with Michelle about the acquisition of. Give WP very recently and finally wrapping it up. We talk about Google's new flock initiative, what we think about it and what we think WordPress should do about it. It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress.
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Hello. Nice to have you with us once more. It's Monday, it's 2:00 PM. UK time. It is this weekend. WordPress. I don't know if you just call a glimpse, but there was just very briefly there was Michelle Frechette and I'm really hoping that oh no, she's wishing to come back. There's Michelle. Oh, come on Michelle.
I hope it works. But she's trying to join us today, but she has a very poor internet connection. I'm not entirely sure what's gone wrong, but hopefully she'll be joining us, but she has said it may come and go at the moment it's here. Um, I'd like to introduce you to Michelle for shit. How are you doing Michelle?
You're right. I think she's frozen. Oh,
Remkus de Vries: [00:03:30] dear.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:33] Yeah she's able to drink coffee. I can see that much, but I'll tell you what I'll do is I will hand over to Paul to do the introduction of Remco and then I'll do the introduction of Michelle properly in the vain. Hope that she'll be back by then. So I'll hand over to Paul to do rent.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:49] Yeah. Let's try that as well. nice to meet you after a long time, I've followed you online for a long time. And so to introduce you to the guests today, probably everybody knows who you are, but you're a WordPress veteran and a performance official though, a WordCamp organizer. In fact, the original co-founder of WordCamp EU in fact, an aspiring strong man, which I've checked out your Your Facebook videos, which are very interesting.
And Nathan told me that he reckons he will beat you in an arm wrestle if you ever meet some. So be careful, it's
Remkus de Vries: [00:04:24] a different discipline week.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:26] It's all in the technique maybe, but you're also a head of partners and customer relationship at servable, which you should tell us about that in a minute.
And you can find out more about Rimkus at REMCOs DeVries, D F R I. So that's REM K U S D E F D E V I E S dot F R I L and the hell isn't it. There's
Remkus de Vries: [00:04:52] a, there's a much easier way. I am the only one in the world with this name. So you just Google around and you cannot miss me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:58] There you go. Literally. REMCOs.
Remkus de Vries: [00:05:02] It's used as a surname in the UK sorry. In the United States. So you will see other occurrences, but there's only one with that name in there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:14] I thought you meant just Remco. So I was thinking, whoa, that's awesome. You're the only person with this name? That no. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:05:21] Well the thing is as well when I was researching more information about your biome, because it turns out that REMCOs, isn't your first name.
That's just the easier one for people to say a bit like veto color. Actually, he has another name that isn't veto.
Remkus de Vries: [00:05:38] Yeah. My, my name is and if I introduce myself in that fashion to go what can you say? What? Wait, what? So that quickly became, okay, what is. Recognizable turns out, is doable. And right now I think only the Spanish people find my name difficult because they don't have the following them.

Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:08] Okay. Wow.
Remkus de Vries: [00:06:11] Interesting. But it's, it's pronounceable and recognizable. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:15] yeah. Thank you for joining us today. Michelle, I'm going to, I'm going to try to introduce you properly. It says here on the thing that I'm reading out, it says, we know Michelle has been on dozens of times, but I'm going to do her justice just quick caveat.
If Michelle drops in and out, we're just going to cope with it. And every, even if she drops out, mid-sentence one of us is going to have to leap in and finish off what she was absolutely guaranteed to say. So it says, in addition to her work at gift or DUP, Michelle is the podcast, very strict WP coffee, talk.com.
I would urge you to go and check that out. It's fantastic. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech creator of WP career pages.com a volunteer for big orange hearts.org, author business, coach, and frequent speaker. At WordPress events, you can find out more at her website, works by michelle.com. That is a laundry list, Michelle.
Honestly, I like to be busy. Yeah. So it would seem, yeah. So it would seem, is there anything you you wanted to add at the top before we before we crack on Michelle, I'm
Michelle Frechette: [00:07:20] actually now a board member at big orange chart. Oh recently when we were in the process of moving things over where a U S charity now.
And so we have a us board.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:34] Thank you. Oh, she, until she is exactly at that moment or screen went away. We'll cope. We'll cope with whatever Michelle's internet throws at us today, as it says in the little thing, common thing at the bottom. If you are watching this in the Facebook group, you'll need to offer stream OPSM permissions.
You can do that by going into the comment [email protected] forward slash Facebook link. Otherwise you can go over to WP Builds.com/live. And if you're logged into Google, you'll be able to make a comment over there. Cause it's YouTube and got a few comments that have come in.
Oh look, whoa. He is strong, struck out, check out his IgG. Okay. I guess IgE stands for Instagram, right? Is that I'm just not cool. It does. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:08:19] it does.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:20] It's Paul, this week, he made a comment in, I don't know where he said that he'd been looking at your Instagram channel. So I actually clicked on the link and looked at your Instagram channel and you lift like absurdly heavy things and walk with them.
It's just whoa.
Remkus de Vries: [00:08:36] I, all I can say is I didn't start with the heavy ones. It just gradually happens if you continuously go for
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:45] more. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's something that like, is it almost how to describe this? I don't want to use the wrong words, but is this something that is just like soul food to you?
You just really enjoy that stuff.
Remkus de Vries: [00:09:00] Like many other people in this line of work. I sit on my butt all day. I, before I did this, I used to exercise different types of things. I play football tennis, uh, Wednesday thing you know, just always active a lot of biking because we are in the Netherlands.
And you know, when once work starts you become more sitting and the more I'm in my head, the more I need to, um, what's the word? Discharge.
Yeah. Yeah. Re recharge. Yeah.
Um, well we've been doing some sort of lifting of weights. I enjoy it. Just, it's a very physical thing to do.
I enjoy it. And then up two years ago, a buddy of mine who was like, wow, what is it? 10 kilometers away. That's that's, that's a six and a half miles, so you can metrically challenged people. Uh, and he said, I'm starting to do strong man stuff. And I seen you post some stuff on Instagram. You know, feel free to drop by any Saturday.
We'll be working out all Saturday afternoon, so feel free to drop by. And I was like, I don't think that's me, we'll see, I haven't spoken to him in years, so I dropped in and there's not been a Saturday. I haven't went back.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:27] Uh, I gotta say I was watching it and I was just absolutely shattered.
Just watching the videos, like completely in the knowledge that literally everything in which you were lifting up.
Remkus de Vries: [00:10:39] Yeah, so I wouldn't even get it this far off the
Paul Lacey: [00:10:42] ground.
Remkus de Vries: [00:10:44] So yeah, if you scroll back a whole like two years you'll find me do more moderate stuff, but one of the last lifts I did was very, I was very proud of you know, when you're working towards a certain way I lifted the we call it the frame and you're walking.
You're supposed to walk with it for 15
Paul Lacey: [00:11:02] meters
Remkus de Vries: [00:11:06] and the frame way 300 kilos or 662 pounds. And that's, I never thought I was going to do that. I just literally thought I was never going to do that. So when I did, I was like, how did I do that?
Wrapping your head around? Cause lifting it up is one thing. But walking with it, it's just. But yeah, I enjoy doing it. It's a great way to be in my body and and work on my health. And although I get a lot of comments like this will help me. And it is, but it's not, if you start at that way.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:45] There's hope there's only damage.
Remkus de Vries: [00:11:48] You just work yourself up there. Like anything else, it's a skill. And it requires training and it requires research and thinking and learning. And I have, uh, I'm I'm training with, uh, there's three people there who literally have been the strongest man of the Netherlands.
So any question I have, I can ask them and they'll help me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:09] Yeah, it's fun. It's great. Fun. I was really surprised by that, that this had been an ambition for a really long time. I was really surprised by like, how cool you were after you did it. It was like, you did this link, put it down. And we're like Yeah.
Nice. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:12:26] I don't think he could lift his arms up. Like I could see your hands were hurting. So it's kinda don't know if you're allowed to wear special gloves to have a padding or anything, or
Remkus de Vries: [00:12:40] no, a large portion of all of this is you do it as raw as possible. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:44] We have an acronym for the show. It's T w I w and I can feel it's going to become this week in weightlifting to discuss what he's done
Paul Lacey: [00:12:54] during the week.
It's about animals. Chickens this week. It's about strong lift. It is. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:00] we've got some, we've got some nice comments coming in. Michelle has been thought, it says, I guess Cameron knows something maybe. Okay. And thank you, Cameron, for joining us as always late night. He's on the east coast of Australia.
So it must be jolly lake for him and Jay great podcast. I guess he's mentioning the coffee talk podcast over there. And I don't know if Thomas REMCOs, but he obviously he's not, he doesn't believe it. It's CGI. CGI. Honestly, I feel that five years from now that statement could fully be true.
You could have a little app that you've done that just, okay.
Remkus de Vries: [00:13:41] So Thomas, uh, is that sort of goal as well? I think he, he's, he's actually trying to. Use my footage and put his head on it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:56] Um, it says here, Michelle, just before we get into the meat and the bones of it, what mug are you sporting today? So
Michelle Frechette: [00:14:05] I have my, oops, let's see. It's the give WP big orange heart mug. So right now, they actually today's the last day you can buy this and the gift WP swag store. So if you go to swagged, I give wp.com all of the profits from the sale of the big orange heart co-branded swag.
It goes right back to big orange hearts. So today's the last day to get it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:28] Thank you, Michelle. I don't know if this is possible and it doesn't really matter if it's not, but I think you're considerably quieter than the rest of us. And that may just be a constraint of what you're now having to use.
Yeah. That's probably going to work. But we'll, we're just going to, we're going to cope with what we've got, so that's fine. One last thing. If you got any questions, obviously you've many of you have seen the commenting on how it works. Just drop them in there and we'll try to answer things as we go a long
posted. I love these life things where people put silly comments. Yes, absolutely. Great. Thank you for anybody who bothers to turn up and makes the effort to type things into the, but I know that now there's a few people who just have it on a second screen, but those people that make the effort appreciate it.
Let's get the screen shared quickly, cause we're not here to,
Paul Lacey: [00:15:15] could I just ask a Rehnquist one quick thing about first of all, I'd said server bolt earlier and it's um, I don't know much about. Surf bowl. Where do they sit? Are they a WordPress specific host or anything host and like, where do they sit in between, all the, all the ones that we always hear after a P engine cloud ways and all these different hosting companies, they quite premium.
It seems like quite a custom setup, maybe.
Remkus de Vries: [00:15:44] We are. Um, um, we, uh, we pride ourselves in offering the the fastest, most scalable, PHP, my SQL hosting. We have a very strong focus on WordPress and WooCommerce, but because our focus is on PHP and SQL, Laerdal, we'll do just fine. just fine.
Craft CMS will do Japan. And any of the any of the hosting platforms that uses a PhD and most people will do just fine. How do we compare? I think we have one item on the, on the list for today where actually that question is being,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:31] do you know what let's do that now? Because Paul injected that one and it seems like this is the perfect place to put it on the screen.
So I'll just preface this. This is this is a website, which I confess I've not come across, but it's called WP hosting benchmarks.com. It's a new website. Okay. Okay. Yeah. WP hosting benchmarks.com. So you can check this one out. I'll maybe drop a link in the show notes after the show. But what what's this Rimkus why are we looking at this?
Remkus de Vries: [00:17:02] Kevin Ohashi is someone who is independently testing WordPress hosting. And you have to apply for it. And what he he does actually, uh, hosting the way you should test them. So it's not your random these are 10 great hosts type a list. And this one does a great support and that one does great, whatever.
This is actually looking at the metrics and calculating and stress-testing and doing all the things that you want to know. If you're looking for hosting that needs to handle whatever you want to throw at it. And it used to, and I think the site is still that I don't think he has gone the full redirect yet.
So review signal is what it used to be called and it's rebranded this year to WP hosting benchmarks. And, um, to answer your question if you look at the top two things, so the 51 or a hundred month and above you see, you will see that circle is is, uh, on top of that list. Ooh.
Paul Lacey: [00:18:10] Congratulations. That's a good achievement guess we'll probably hear a lot more about surf bowl in the next 12 to 24 months then in that.
Remkus de Vries: [00:18:19] Absolutely. So we've been growing very hard. I mentioned to Nathan earlier in the pre-meeting room we've doubled in size in the last 12 months and it's looking to go even further than that next next 12 months.
Uh, we're doing good. I'm going
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:40] to put up the I'm slightly disjointed today. Sorry about this guys. There's the, there's the homepage for the product itself serve bolt. So it's not server bolt, it's just serve bolt.
Remkus de Vries: [00:18:54] You can type in surfer, both.com
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:57] and you'll see what happens. You got that as well.
Did you? Okay? Yeah. Yeah. That would make sense. Cause that's such an obvious thing to, to do. So serv bolt.com. I'll be sure to put that in the show notes. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:19:10] This is all built in block editor as well. This website, I was checking it a super fast website as well. So it's definitely uh, written very medicine.
Yeah,
Remkus de Vries: [00:19:23] absolutely. Absolutely. So we have a more hardcore stance on performance. Like I know a lot of people say that and that's fine. But we like to back up everything that we do with with advice on how to do things smarter, faster, more scalable, and we proactively help clients achieving their fastest version of their site.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:45] So yeah, that's, I guess that's sets us apart, to answer
your question, it's curious as well that you were saying before we started recording that that you, maybe this isn't a policy, it's just the way it's worked out thus far, you've grown by word of mouth, which is an interesting approach.
Yeah. Yeah, it's nice. Okay. Thomas directly,
Remkus de Vries: [00:20:09] you can now.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:11] Oh, okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:20:12] Two places at once.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:14] But thank you. Thanks for mentioning that, Paul and yeah, so serve bolt.com. That's where Rimkus is now working. All right. Okay. Let's get on with the main. Main thing. Just quick pitch for Builds, WP Builds dot that's, where we put all of our bits and pieces.
REMCOs we're speaking a minute ago about WooCommerce. I spoke to a guy from peach PEI, David. For this week's episode, he's got an interesting one click solution, which I think will commerce have actually injected some money into over the last few weeks. So certainly a curious solution. The idea is that if you do everything on one browser, then you can just have this, you log in over there and you're always logged into, you can just do it like a one-click Amazon style checkout.
That's what we did this week, but that's not what we're going to talk about. We are in fact going to talk about WordPress in general. And this came along this week, 18 years ago, concentrate on the 18 years about everybody for a bit first. We're going to do that then we're gonna, yeah, until the politics surrounding the actual story, but 18 years ago, WordPress got started by who?
We'll find that out in a minute. But it got started 18 years ago and we're now at plus 40% of the web and which ever way you cut back, that is just remarkable. I picked the, I'm not going to say the wrong horse. I picked a different horse several times during the last 18 years, because I've always wanted to build websites with a CMS and I've went with all sorts.
I tried Joomla for a while and it worked out just great, but it didn't keep working out. I did Drupal. I worked out great. I did that for years and years, but it didn't keep working out and then eventually settled on WordPress. And it just immediately felt like home, the whole community, the whole ease of use the fact there's a plugin for everything.
There's a kind of marketplace that people can actually make a decent living off the back of it. It's an incredible thing. There's the, the community that are building it. I now my entire life is built around WordPress. So without this remarkable piece of software, I would probably have to be building things with Magento and let's be honest.
I don't want to do that. Yeah, cause faceplant no, no offense. If you're building things with Magento, I loved it.
Remkus de Vries: [00:22:32] I played with it as well for,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:36] yeah. And at that point, Michelle literally went away from the screen. It's no, we're not talking about with Jetta. But it's, it is remarkable. And 18 years is one thing, right?
I guess, many pieces of software I've got to this milestone, but to capture 40% of the web is. Utterly remarkable. And it would appear that that, that number just seems to keep going up. Why that is how it's done that I'm not 100% sure, but we're now approaching 41 42. And obviously it will keep going.
We'll get onto the politics in a minute. But if any of you three, want to just drop in and say what's your, what are your thoughts on getting to 18 years in anything significant 18 turns you from being another lesson we'd like teething.
Paul Lacey: [00:23:20] Yeah, they do. Now in different countries. WordPress can join the army, drink alcohol in the UK.
Yeah. That's the vote.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:28] Yeah. It's, there's no excuses now, anything that goes wrong, it's on you.
Remkus de Vries: [00:23:33] That's actually an interesting thing to like vote that 40% votes, that 40% votes in the direction of where a lot of things are going. What's happening online. So I, I started playing with workers seven and a half years ago.
I I was mostly doing Mambo at the time, which then had the fork of Joomla as well. Didn't like it hated upgrading. And then I, I found some, I forgot whose it was, but the very first theme I used I learned that I can use manipulate the menu and then I could have some sort of thing that looks like it's done in, I dunno, an hour instead of a day.
And I got hooked essentially never left.
Paul Lacey: [00:24:28] Yeah. Yeah, that is, I remember there was a website called open source, cms.com or.org or something. I used to go to this website all the time. At that time, when, we're all playing reviver Joomla or mumbo or Mondex or Drupal or whatever. And I was trying to find, the perfect CMS I've tried techs pattern.
That was pretty good. Actually text pattern was at the time. Pretty good. But I just remember there was so many open source projects you could try out and then it came to WordPress and yeah. I know Matt Mullenweg talks about he says, it's just software, it's just software. You know, when he's in a corner, so it's just software, but actually WordPress isn't just software is, the whole community and all the people.
And that's why, the four of us are sitting here talking about it today because not just because we're interested in the code and the software because of everything else around it. But yeah, so, so many happy memories like you, Nathan you know, a ton of my life revolves around WordPress now, and the opportunity is that it's created the people I've met and everything.
And there's a lot of, there's a lot of politics as well that, we'll come to in a minute. But overall, you know, 95% grateful for everything WordPress has done and. After it four years since the block editor is, Gothenburg project started, I would say I'm starting to feel optimistic about its future.
Again,
It's coming through now. It's coming through there. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:59] right. We've got full maturity.
What about you, Michelle? You like the rest of us, I'm sure you've got, great memories and community is everything to you, right?
Michelle Frechette: [00:26:10] It is everything to me. I think I proved that with all the different things that I throw all my time at, but the first thing I ever built on was just straight HTML as a project in my MBA.
And I had no clue what I was doing. So we were on a team and I let other people I like basically throw up a wireframe, not even knowing what a wireframe was, but like literally drew it on paper and they coded it. And I went from that to Dreamweaver. And from Dreamweaver, when I couldn't afford the subscription for Dreamweaver, I started something which is NVU and view, which was basically Dreamweaver but free and from there into WordPress.
But I, it was the weirdest thing. I have an undergrad in religion and philosophy and an MBA in marketing. Never thought I would have a career in technology. And yet here I am. Very great. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:26:59] Let's just pull you up on something though. Nobody paid for dream waiver.
That's what I observed. Other people. I know, allegedly pole piracy or anything like that back in the days before it, I remember the day when Adobe was like, so you have to sign in now I need to find another piece of software that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:26] you got stuck on. You got stuck on CSX or whatever Rick was at the time.
That was it. There was no upgrade pilots.
Paul Lacey: [00:27:35] It was free.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:37] Yeah, yeah. No. I don't know why
Paul Lacey: [00:27:46] you heard. Yeah, of course. None of us condone any of that kind of stuff. That was quite a long list
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:51] of hosts to block as well. He said, uh, allegedly, I heard that there was a big log list. But this was free. You didn't have to pay for it at that point. It was just absolutely wonderful. Yeah. Anything to add there, Michelle?
Or shall I move on to the. The elephant in the room. Just the,
Michelle Frechette: [00:28:11] the funniest thing. When I was working at a college, when the internet first became like a thing, where people were accessing the internet at work first, before we ever had it at home. And I didn't even know they're like, you have internet now on your computer.
And I was like, I don't didn't know what to visit. And I live in Rochester, New York. So I went to kodak.com because I figured they would have a website and I played and I clicked a link. And then I went back to the link before, and it had changed from yellow to purple. And I was like, oh my God.
They know where I bet I have to be so careful where I visit on the web. Like my very first lesson in internet was you are being tracked.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:49] We've we've got the story too, about all of that at the end with Google's flock technology. Michelle, again, I don't know if you have any capability to make it louder, but you, I reckon you're probably about.
Yeah, I think you'll probably about a fifth, maybe even less than the rest of us. So yeah, I'm struggling. It's okay. It is
Remkus de Vries: [00:29:15] we're on this side of the continent.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:18] Oh yes. She's got a really shower is a long way. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid. That. I've mentioned this from time to time, this thing that I'm holding in my hand this was what I really dreamt of, like a TV that you could hold in your hand and a tri-quarter and the idea that you could, phone somebody up and actually see them.
And it was just like star Trek. And now it's totally normal. Isn't it look at us. The four of us completely. W we are spread out throughout the world and we've got people commenting from, in Australia and from all over the place. And we're just piggybacking off all of the amazing stuff that the internet brought to us.
However we have to, we have to deal with the elephant in the room, and I know that REMCOs has a big thing about this. I'm just going to point out the fact that on the screen at the minute, I was scrolling down to all of the milestones that WordPress went through over the previous years. And then you get to this bit here.
It says WordPress is born. And currently it says after discussions with little Matt Mullenweg created a bridge, a new branch of B2 on sword force. And if you don't know, B2 was the software, which WordPress was based upon, it was a fork of that. And then it goes on, but Paul tells me that it didn't say this originally, is that right?
Paul.
That's right. So at the Paul Lacey: [00:30:43] beginning, my little here is the, 50% co-founder as such WordPress was left out of the article, which I think is almost certainly adminis administrative error. What he tweeted and lots of other people noticed it as well. And I think and then, and then this article was updated, but I think it's still not quite right, because now it's after a discussion, we've might little about what, I don't know, rugby football, they had a little chat I had, and then Mike Little went home.
Then Matt Mullenweg created a new branch of B2 on SourceForge called WordPress. So it's still not quite right. And I know, I know it's really probably just administrative error, but it does matter the Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded this software when it reaches 18 years old, imagine two parents on that kid's 18th birthday, and one of them gets completely discredited for anything to do with the child.
It's a kind of similar thing, and I know Remco saw you were, you were involved in the, um, in the thread as well. And I just wondered what the, the field, because people know Mike Little and they like him and everyone who meets my deal likes Mike. It's always the top guy. Yeah, he is.
He's
Remkus de Vries: [00:32:05] I met Mike a couple of times now. And the first time I met him uh, You know, wonderfully uh, wonderful person great conversation we had and we realized then that the Wikipedia page, it didn't say that Mike Liddell was the co-founder. So we actually changed the Wikipedia page at that time, on that day to reflect that fact.
And this is what where can Edinburgh? I think 2000, I don't know, long ago. Yeah. And, um, you I felt at that point that was an oversight and it can happen because maybe the person changing that or making that page didn't know, it's all good, but we're way past that. We've had, we've seen in the last year as we've seen Like, like marketing speak type stuff stating Matt being the founder of WordPress coming from publishing channels that are either automatic or close to or related to when I think they should know better.
And I can still get how that happens because marketing and they don't necessarily, aren't ingrained in the project the way I am or whatever. But if we're on the official public page for WordPress and we're saying uh, and then this is what we're seeing now here is uh, is already an edit because Mike was not even in the first paragraph, Mike wasn't even on the entire page.
And this is, uh, we can argue that Matt has done more for the growth of WordPress. That's fine. But give credit where credit is fully new and be extremely explicit on what his impact on the actual founding of workers was and has been cause that's that's pivotal. That's where the actual fork started.
That's a discussion between them on how to do that. Why to do that started on based on a comment on mass posts. Um, and from there they went into a discussion and from there they started maybe, you I suspect Matt was indeed the one that created the branch and that's all fine, but don't be like, I don't understand the reasoning behind having such language.
I don't understand to be 100% clear what it was, how it was. And in the next sentence you want to say, and then Matt molded work, took it to the moon. Fine. But that's not what it's. And I got pissed. I saw the tweet with the link. Didn't click on the first time I saw it in the morning, then I saw Mike's comment.
And I, I said, what I said, this is a disgrace and I'm sad to see this have happened. And I stand by that. I still think that no matter what.
Michelle Frechette: [00:35:17] Yeah. So there's a couple of things that come to mind about that too. So, um, absolutely. I think that to Paul's comment, I think that marketers don't always know because, maps the face of what we see today. And so without doing any research, I think it's easy to forget that part of it.
I don't think that's right. Of course. I also think that, Mike is, uh, as a diversity person, right? So he's a black man and we don't have enough. People in ours, in our society that we look up to as non white male creators when it comes to technology too. And I think that it's really important to remember that as well, for sure.
And then I do want to say though that every time I've had conversations with Matt, he only refers to himself in my podcast and other ways as co-founder and he credits Mike and our conversations. And, you can go back and look at the episode that we'd be coffee talking if you'd like.
But he really does bring that up. So I'm not saying that he doesn't, maybe he doesn't do that all the time. I'm certain when he's talking about WordPress, every single conversation cause it's, the founding of WordPress is, and always at the forefront. Not every conversation, but I did want to say that I just think it's others that are also you know, forgetting and whitewashing.
What has happened in the past,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:38] On the actual article. I'm just curious, Paul, you mentioned like the language that we've got at the minute and the language is interesting and maybe I've passed this wrong, but do you actually read the sentence? It really does sound like Mike didn't do much.
It says what is
Paul Lacey: [00:36:57] space that Matt is the person that pressed the button on fault or something. I think that's what they've tried to say, but okay. It's, it's true. And it's difficult to know exactly what to say other than thank you, Mike, little for co-founding WordPress, along with Matt Mullenweg, we're all very grateful for what you guys did.
And and I think that. I know it's been corrected, but maybe, hopefully it's been corrected with a memo to anyone who is in the marketing team whatsoever that this never happens again. And that Mike is credited in the same way. Matt does credit. I have you're right. Michelle. I noticed that if someone you know, Matt is always aware of everybody in the room and people who were being discussed, who aren't in the room and kind of advocates for them in a way I've seen him do that a number of times.
And I would agree, I think you know, when there's so much money involved in WordPress these days and automatic and all that sort of stuff, and, automatic and, by half of WordPress, probably if they wanted to, now they could literally take over by buying out what's left of the companies that haven't been bought out yet.
So I think the marketing team should just take note that it did upset people who care about the individuals who were important in the history of WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:24] There's a great book actually, which I read a couple of years ago. Great. You if you've really into WordPress, I can't remember what it's called, but it's like the story of the founding of WordPress writeup to, I don't know, maybe 2013 or something like that.
Possibly. I don't know. I don't know who wrote it to be honest, but it's free. It's on make.wordpress.org.
Remkus de Vries: [00:38:48] That's written by Shavano Kim.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:50] Okay. Okay. Thank you. Anyway, I read that and that obviously puts Mike in the picture in a, in a much more dramatic way than we get off this piece. Yeah, I'd just like to reiterate, I've not heard Matt use anything other than co-founder, so let's just.
Let's just put a line under it and say in the future, let's just make sure that the word co-founder is always used. Okay. From one revelation to another, this is, I think what we're about to announce is possibly the most important thing that has entered in WordPress core since probably two weeks ago.
But here it is. It's coming to WordPress core website near you. Do you own turn filters? Actually. Do you know what I was? I went in with my super skeptical um, this is not for me. I don't think I'll make use of any of this. And then the, you know what I looked at? I thought I quite like that.
So I really didn't bow face it. Wasn't the cat pitchers that sold it to me. It was when I got down to the video, that one. And I looked at the video and I felt actually quite nice. But if you don't know, geo tone is the ability to basically take images, which you've got high contrast. So don't put something, with like millions of colors and different shades.
It's something where there's one thing with. With a contrasting other color, and then it applies filters over the top. So your original image doesn't get in any way altered. It's just applying things over the top of it on the fly, and you can pick a starting color and an ending color. And here we go.
There's a cat, which is looking really unhealthy. There's a cat, which is looking as if it's from the 1930s. There's a cat, which looked as well. I don't know. It's more red anyway. Yeah, that's right. The rave cat, the slightly dour cat. Not very interested
Paul Lacey: [00:40:41] in Instagram cuts.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:43] That's right. Yeah. But the point is you can do this in WordPress.
It's totally in as David Walmsley, our good friend pointed out. I think he said something aligns of. That's, that's just 10 K that I don't need, but I quite like it. I'm not entirely sure this is what we needed, but here it is the
Michelle Frechette: [00:41:05] Warhol myself with those filters. You're going to my website.
There's going to be four Michelle's with different tones.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:13] So you're a fan Michelle.
Michelle Frechette: [00:41:15] Oh, I will be. I'm going to play with this for sure. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:18] Okay. I don't know if REMCOs or Paula got anything to add.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:22] My opinion changed actually. Broncos. Do you want to go first?
Remkus de Vries: [00:41:26] I'll I'll burn it down so you can perhaps build it back up again.
I think it's silly. If, if one of the metrics the workers project has is decisions, not options than what is this. This is a decision that everybody should have the option to fiddle around with images. To me, this is plugged in third territory to begin with But I think it's the F it's the focus on the wrong type of stuff to enhance the editor.
So, um, I think the focus in general should be fixed. What's broken period. I think the focus should be, make a performance like front end back end. There is still a large section of people not wanting to switch to Gutenberg from the classic editor, because it adds that one line of extra CSS.
Now there's ways around that and optimizing that we've done that with the site that you saw. So volt.com for instance but the whole focus on performance on the backend, on the front end, just to make the thing that we are constantly using, creating, it's not just this one site. It's how many sites are we having?
On WordPress, it's millions and millions of sites. Now the impact of having a slimmed down version of the editor, a more performance version is huge. If, if there's, there's calculators that tell you how much you, how much energy you have saved. If you slim down your page five, kilobytes, a one megabyte or whatever, and multiply that by those tens of millions of sites.
Now, when we're talking, that's the sort of direction I want to see. And that's, um, so performance is for me, the first thing that needs to be fixed. It's not that it's not performance. It's just not as performant as it should be. Secondly, fixed broken stuff, which is everything from accessibility to whatever you can find in the pull requests in the repo.
And there are quite a few pull requests. Like it's in the thousands. I don't get that direction. I don't, I genuinely don't get that direction. Other than this is some marketing gimmick.
Michelle Frechette: [00:43:55] Of course it's marketing. This is to come. This is to compete with things like Wix and Squarespace and other things so that you can, I know wordpress.com, especially right.
That people want to see things that they can get other places. And we're pressed that org and, and, and self hosted, people who are playing with that, but really don't know what they're doing. They're not developers. They want tools too. And so I think this is definitely in response to those kinds of things.
Remkus de Vries: [00:44:20] Yeah, and I know it is, but it's just wrong from my perspective.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:26] Um, so Paul, your turn to build it up again.
Paul Lacey: [00:44:31] I'm glad you went first. Aramco's cause there was some really good stuff that came out of that I'd want to build on. And first of all Michelle, you mentioned wordpress.com and yeah, to be honest, it's only just it's only just hit me why some of these features would be there and it's because wordpress.com can't install BeaverBuilder it can't install bricks.
It can't install element or so it, that product owned by automatic will look completely dated. If it doesn't have some kind of page builder type thing where you can have some kind of design control and yeah, that, isn't the right thing for the.org project though. That's a different. And and I think that's why this whole Gutenberg project gets so much criticism because it's so open to seeing a very obvious potential agenda that nobody can really prove, but it's kind there to, to, uh, to have theories to conspiracy theory about all day, if you wanted to, you could just, find conspiracy theories and everything.
In terms of the, the feature itself, I'll come back to that because I actually quite one aspect of it, but in terms of, fix the things that are broken. So I noticed like thousands of polar requests and for me, the thing that's broken is the interface as such. But I'm hoping that does get some more focus on, and I think it will, because there were.
People are doing the work for the core team sometimes in solving things like there's a plugging code. I think it's called block editor outline or something. And it makes it very much easier to see what's going on in the block editor. And you'd hope that would come back. I know they have challenges because they've got to create an editor that is as accessible as possible, but they started off.
They created, in, I don't want to criticize, but it is a critical kind of observation that they started with something difficult to put accessibility in into, and then they've now got to constantly move forward and move backwards at the same time on that front. So I would love to see in, in, in terms of the performance aspect of the block editor like what David warms, he said, that's another 10 K that we don't want.
And yeah, I would like to see anything that is put into the block editor project or the Gutenberg project be categorized. So this would be a fun add-on or something like that, or something just gimmicky design-y things. And you could turn that off. You could turn off all the gimmicky design things and you could say, do you know what I want?
I just want a grid builder. That's what I want to be. I want to add my own CSS or don't want, I don't want color selection for fonts. That's too much. I don't want this or that, whatever it is. I don't want any of those things. I just want the block, the end of the block grid builder. And I know what I'm working with, but some people who are maybe moving over from Wix or moving over from wordpress.com, they want the color changes and that sort of stuff, because what they want to do is see the thing and change it.
There's the thing and change it and they press different buttons and it changes and that's fine, then it's a different audience, but there is anyway that, that little run over, moving over to the feature itself at first, I was 100% like, oh, this is pointless. And I think the article doesn't do it any favors.
There's no way. And it's not a criticism of the article. It's just that the article presents it of in terms of here's a picture and you can add some kind of weird filter to it, which is basically useless. In most cases, it's not like it's an instant Grammy style filter that makes you look you know, your skin look nice.
Whatever it might be that people use Instagram filters for, to look cool. But what I did see further down the page, and it's what sort of, what you noticed as well, Nathan, is that it does say that this effect is applicable to the cover block, which is usually a background image with some text over the top or something over the top.
And. In 90% of cases, people create those banners, whether they're using a page builder or not, and they will apply an overlay of a color, which might have a gradient on or something like that. And it looks washed out and then they put their text over the top. Now sometimes when I've got the energy, I'll design a website and I'll take this background image that I was going to do that too.
And I'll add an actual Photoshop type overlay over the top. So there's no fading out of the background image. I've got the effect, but I've still got some contrast on there. So in a way there is a nice use of this that people will be able to have cover blocks, which is the background row. Have some editorial texts at the top with the image, still looking good, the conscience still coming through, but the text super readable over the top of it as well.
So there is a kind of use there. And I've got some, I've got some kind of, positive thing to say about it, but that was it. Mostly, I felt like Ramco. She said that this doesn't belong in the core and why are they focusing on it? And lastly, just to say, if that gets into core, it makes me think that the people who make the decisions on core are in a, quite a small room or a small box.
Because if you put that out to the whole community that will get voted out of WordPress core. And I know that people will say, be a guy who comes on the show. Sometimes we'll say you know, come and join the conversation in slack, but it's not the conversations happening in here today. This is where a bunch of people are talking about it on a live stream.
And some people are commenting and stuff like that. And four of us unanimously more or less think it's a bad idea, but in a different room, everyone unanimously seems to think it was a good idea. So just total disconnect. Yeah,
Remkus de Vries: [00:50:27] there's definitely a disconnect. And I'd like to say that I see the use case for the karma block.
I see it as well. I like the couple block. It solves a lot of how do I want to fancy up my my heroes? I totally get that. I just don't get the deviation from what their core idea was of what core should be lean and mean. And we lost that somewhere.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:58] Okay. I wondered if it was almost like a proof of concept.
Look, we can do this kind of thing for people who. I don't know that this kind of thing might be available in what I'm saying by that is I've seen a few little things come along. Most of them proprietary third party, not from core where it's like, Ooh, that's an unexpected use of a block. And this is obviously, you can apply this to blocks.
I just wonder if they're throwing a few things out there look, these are the kinds of things you'll be able to do in the block editor with a point click drag, select option. But I just can't see that this is in anything other than the territory of. An additional plugin. You want to go out and find this because you want it.
I got a feeling Michelle might disagree. She's
Michelle Frechette: [00:51:44] no, I just wondering why they don't put it in Jetpack. Like they do with everything else,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:48] what REMCOs was saying. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, we could go on about this for a long time.
Paul Lacey: [00:51:54] Could you pull something, pull a web link up for me if I just second.
Yeah. I can't really complain too much to be honest, but if I just send you that, yeah, that's correct. Pull up that link there. Oh, this
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:07] is, this is self promotional. Is there? It
Paul Lacey: [00:52:09] is. It is. Although not selling anything, so that's fine.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:12] I'm going to check on it. So this is Paul lacey.digital .
Paul Lacey: [00:52:17] I would have on this website for such a filter.
Remkus de Vries: [00:52:22] I saw your website. Did you
Paul Lacey: [00:52:24] launch it last week? No, I launched a while ago, but a few people noticed it last week.
Yeah, thanks. As you can see, I've got the filter going. It's not the filter. I did that myself in, um, some software, maybe they looked at my website. I just want to apologize if this is my fault. Yeah,
no, one's listening to you all at once. Let's go to his website and see what he does on his website. I look, he's got a photo with a pointless, a gradient on it. Let's give him that. And surely he'll give us some really good brownie points on the podcast.
Remkus de Vries: [00:53:12] I can decide if you're flexing or humble bragging or
Paul Lacey: [00:53:18] what I'm doing
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:21] and likes it though.
He's putting haha to the comments. Jetpack Jetpack should be banned according to Thomas. Sorry, Michelle, let me just make that view so that it doesn't cover up your face. So put it in Jetpack awesome idea. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's move it on. I'm really curious about this and I'm not, I'm not trying to put REMCOs on the spot here because I get the impression that he's maybe got a different opinion about what word camps are at the moment, but I do want to do, I want to just move it onto the fact that word, where are we?
I've lost it. There we go. I'll put this one up for, oh, for goodness sake. There we go. This is I'm going to keep prodding over the next few days in our Facebook group and things like that. That where's the screen. There's a screen that Word camp EDU, obviously we're into the second round of it being online.
It's starting very soon. I think we're about seven days away. I think it's starting this time next week. And they are at the point where, more or less, everything is locked down. Now you can go and get your tickets. You can go and see who's going to be speaking and all of that kind of stuff. And I'm this, this is not even a humble brag.
This is just
Paul Lacey: [00:54:32] flat out brag. Humble, bro. I'm so pleased.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:37] I got picked to be one of the media partners. Oh, we're going to say, oh, there it is. Look. After six years of doing online stuff finally got to be on somebody else's webpage. So I'm absolutely done. So yeah, there we are with talk magazine and WP mayor and Gothenburg times and devote press and WP.
I'm so chuffed,
Michelle Frechette: [00:55:06] they're just copying word fast because we had your first.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:09] Exactly. Yeah. But I've, I'm just really pleased. So I am going to be mentioning the fact that word camp Europe is coming around soon now by pure coincidence. Because we do book this thing many weeks in advance. We have Rimkus and REMCOs is.
Paul Lacey: [00:55:29] To say, I was going
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:30] to say,
Paul Lacey: [00:55:31] founder, you better mention who the other person wasn't
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:35] exactly much in the deathtrap. That would be he is one of the founders of WordCamp Europe going back to, can I just pluck a date out of my head, which is probably on, can I say 2012?
Remkus de Vries: [00:55:49] So we started the idea in 2010 and we played around with the idea for two years on the site.
And when I say us, it's a group of friends meeting each other at work camps throughout Europe. And some of us got invited to the inaugural work workforce, community summit. So in in Tybee island Georgia United States, and that's the first time I met Matt and many other. Very active at that time.
So this is 2012 October in the weapons project. And we had the idea to pitch it to Matt and see what he thought. And at the time work camps were going from city being city bay. Sorry, started being country-based to city-based. So we wanted to go the other direction. We wanted to go a region based in fact, uh, quite quite a large region.
And so over the course of a couple of days we, uh, we got the, okay, let's see what this does. Let's see what happens. And we kind went from there. And the very first one was in September of 2013 in, late in the Netherlands. Yeah, that's, that's how that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:26] came to be. Honestly, the only word camp Europe I've been to was the one in Berlin in 2019, just before a lot of fun.
I know Bart, but all I can say is having stepped into it. At that point, there was a re I didn't see the grow. I just saw what it had become. And that in a way it gives you a really interesting moment because when I walked in, I was whoa whoa. This is much, much bigger, much more professional, much more attended, and the amount of cogs and wheels and things that were going on.
We were in the day before it all started. And we saw you with your pink t-shirt on guiding all of the volunteers around and showing them what was needed. So it was all this stuff, all of these cogs going on in the background for months and months, and just a remarkable event. I think WordCamp Europe still to this day has the biggest attendee numbers of any well obviously thank you for setting this kind of stuff up, but I am curious.
If I may ask, how do you feel about the, like the online version that we've been forced into you, do you kind get something out of that or are you know I'll, I'll leave that and what are you, what do you mean? So the,
Remkus de Vries: [00:58:44] The thing that prompted us to aspire where camp Europe was that we saw a need for a better cohesion of what started to become learned slowly at the time, a larger a larger community in Europe and circumstances.
These were heavily underrepresented. Certain countries were quite active already at the time. And the, one of the goals was get those people together in the same room. Get to know each other better. And as you get to know each other, you start to build that community sense in in the larger sense in like in the physical form, as well as friendship starts to really kick off and or even start at all.
So the whole idea behind it was the unifying part. There were more ideas, but that's one of them. And, uh, you the first one in line and we had 832 in Berlin, we had close to 3000. So that's quite a big leap. And, and, we, we can argue that certain things as how they were in the beginning were not there in the last three, I would say.
But that's, that's inherent of growth of a community, of a project of impact and all of that. And if you now look at the online thing for me, that's only a portion of what working in Europe is like, and for me, it's the wrong portion for me personally. That's not to say that what's happening is that's not to say it's one valuable it's just to meet personally.
I don't thrive sitting at a computer, watching a presentation. That's not my thing. I don't, I don't do the same thing for you too. If I want to learn something, I don't go watch a YouTube. I may watch one, I'm done that. I get exhausted in that way. So for me personally, it's not the greatest way of having a online event.
And I, I can't stress this enough. This has nothing to do with the quality of what's being produced last year. And this year it's tremendous and helping out less active this year than previous years. It's just not for me personally. But what they're doing is there's there's a huge learning pop opportunity.
But I miss the one-on-one I missed talking. I, so for the last year is I would say I would mostly focused on the few talks that I really wanted to see. And the rest would be hallway track for me because I think that's where it's at. Yeah. Yeah. But that's my alone. That's where I learned more from people in one-on-ones than I do watching a big screen.
That's me personally. Again, I can't stress this enough. This has nothing to do with how the project's being run now. It's just that for me, it's a
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:01] different thing. Yeah. We, we don't need to dwell on this too much, but Paul, if you've got anything you wanna add or Michelle, maybe Michelle go first.
If you've got something. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: [01:02:12] I miss, I miss having a meal with people, sharing a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and seeing people and making the, the circle in in the swag pig, not just pick up swag, but talking to the people, who have this wagon, seeing people in person. I think it's unfortunate that everything is online right now, but it's the next best thing until we can all meet again in person, thank you, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [01:02:39] One of the most serious issues for me about the lack of a real physical WordCamps is the amount of laptops out there. New laptops. With no stickers on them. Imagine it's not
Remkus de Vries: [01:02:53] You're touching a very important point.
Paul Lacey: [01:02:56] But one of the things that WordPress is, what campus is all about getting stickers, putting them on your laptop.
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:02] But I have stickers send me your address.
Remkus de Vries: [01:03:06] Yeah. But need
He needs to
come off the table himself. That's
Paul Lacey: [01:03:18] like a limit on the stickers. It feels that I'm supposed to get, come back later and get a few more things.
Remkus de Vries: [01:03:26] Your whole scheme, like I can get two or three now. Around the corner,
Paul Lacey: [01:03:34] I can get some more.
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:35] I have a new laptop in the last year. And I had stickers that I have saved from over the years. I was able to sticker my new laptop, but nothing new that I've collected
Remkus de Vries: [01:03:48] that as well. For many, many, many laptops. It's
Paul Lacey: [01:03:53] not, it's not the same thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:56] I think we've, I think we've stumbled across, sorry, Michelle.
I think we've stumbled across the name of this episode. It's going to be called you hoarded stickers. That's I'm going to write that down in a moment
Paul Lacey: [01:04:10] here, though. It is for me the hallway track is the most important part of a word camp. It's the hallway track is where I've met some of my best friends in.
In, uh, in life. And and also, Michelle, I had some people go to work camps and they enjoy the whole Hawaii track so much that they all get tattoos together. Not there is. And I can't imagine just to you know, to say the difference between the online versus the real one. And again, and we've, REMCOs saying this isn't like a criticism of the online events, because they've, they're doing what they can with what they can work with, but I can't see that anyone's going to be going and getting tattoos with their body, that they met online word camp.
It's just not the same human connection that I think people go to work at London. And it was one of the first public events that they ever went to type guy and After that event, he was a different person. He was a different person, so these events and then not that introverts.
And they go and they gain a lot out of it on a human level as even if they don't attend any of the talks.
Michelle Frechette: [01:05:36] My job at give w a P is a direct result of the, how by track.
Paul Lacey: [01:05:42] Nice. And that is the story for so many people. The reason me and Nathan are, on the same podcast is because we met at work
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:53] and you'll never know the amount of times.
I wish I'd gone left instead of right. Just
Michelle Frechette: [01:06:02] there's a blog post there.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:04] We could call it that. Should I have gone left or right. I remember sitting, I remember seeing you for the first time. That was a nice moment. Wasn't it? Yeah. I'll forever cherish. It will come back. Let's just, let's focus on it. It'll come back each time, all
Remkus de Vries: [01:06:20] solve all problems, this included.
Yeah. But it also hurts me personally. And I know that those circumstances why we have what we have, but it's. A lot of people think I'm an extrovert. I'm not, I'm also not fully an introvert. So being at these things for me is a charge and a drain at the same time, but the charge lasts so much longer than the event.
It just, it literally charges me. I get a lot. I'm like, like anybody going to like that you recuperate the next week. That's just what it is. But the, the stuff that is rewarding after that essentially the day after already just continues to grow. I have friendships, I've got everything, everything from friends to work to new jobs, new opportunities, everything is connected to that whole in real life thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:31] Yeah, it's a really interesting point. You made there about the, so two sides of it, the recharge and the discharge is that's a really poor use of what the, but anyway, they you know, the fact that you get Boyd by it, and then equally at the same time, you get drained by it. Hasn't really occurred to me that, but you're right.
The week after I did WordCamp Europe, I was on like 50% of what I needed to be connected. I've really gone out of it, and had a really amazing time. And it was, I just needed to recharge in the following week.
Michelle Frechette: [01:08:04] It drains your energy, but it charges your inspiration. So it's not draining and charging the same things.
Remkus de Vries: [01:08:10] So I, I got a lot of enjoyment from the after parties because it's, it's a combination of organizing the event, having the events and then, woo have fun. And it's from those after parties that I have the fondest memories, it's just.
And that's just because of the drinking or whatever, although the very first one has has an interesting story I could share at some point, but
yes, I'm referring to the wool commerce shots, but yeah, the whole atmosphere of being in the same room with like-minded people and it's weird. I always found that an interesting thing to be very specific about the workers community. Cause I've been in other open source communities before June loving one the web community for some odd reason, the vast majority of people enjoying the work with WordPress turn out to be people I enjoy to be with, which is a weird thing to say, like, how does the prevalence for a piece of software.
And with S with a similar type group of people to interact with, that's a, that's an odd thing in my head.
Paul Lacey: [01:09:30] I think it's interact with the other people in the community. And that's the thing that is the joint.
Remkus de Vries: [01:09:39] I can answer parts of that question, but the coincidence of the hole is so large that it's just beyond the rationale of the separate things I can I can answer it.
I've always found that incredibly interesting, and that especially occurred to me cause I so, uh, the first work camp I went to was the one I organized or co-organized in the Netherlands where kind of metal was 2009. And from there I went pretty much anywhere where they wanted me, they would have me.
So from Spain, Norway to, Copland, uh, all of those different locations. And the funny thing is I kept seeing the same pattern happening again, wherever I went, same type of group, same type of people, same enjoyable type of people. I'm like, how does this happen? This is interesting.
Michelle Frechette: [01:10:35] It's because the people who attend word camps and are part of contributing to the community are just a subset of all the people using WordPress. Oh,
Remkus de Vries: [01:10:42] absolutely. But it's still just because I've been to Magento meetings, I've been to Joomla meetings and it's not that they were bad. It's just, there's no vibe like
Michelle Frechette: [01:10:52] that.
Interesting phenomenon for sure.
Oh one day let's all Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:00] just cross every finger, every toe that we've got. And and hope that the situation, which is preventing us from doing this is going to go away.
Michelle Frechette: [01:11:08] There's, it's not all bad though. That's why we have, if I can transition into word Fest for a
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:13] second, please, because I was going to try and do that, I failed.
Uh, let me put it on the screen quickly. Here we
Michelle Frechette: [01:11:19] go. So word fast is, it's part of big orange hurt. And they weren't as hard as about reducing the isolation that happens because we're remote workers and this last year, we're all remote workers for the most part. And so having online events like this actually have made our community even more tight knit.
We miss being in person, but we have opportunities to learn and to meet other people this year, this past year and a half, I've suffered the same as we all have. I want to have coffee with you. I want to shake your hand. I want to give hugs to huggers. I want to do all those things, but I've also grown my network exponentially because I'm meeting people online that I might not have otherwise by doing things like being able to speak at word camp India, I never would be able to travel to India otherwise.
You know, it's financially a burden. I don't move well. So being able to walk through a country where that's important, those things would have been cut off to me, but I've been able to really grow my network because I'm constantly meeting with people. Online that I might not have otherwise.
And although I I think we need to have both, so word fast, I think is something that does that really nicely for us. So 24 hours celebration. It isn't you know, a workshop Rochester where we have it, for seven hours in the Rochester time zone, it's a 24 hour event that literally spans the globe.
Time-wise where we try to get speakers within those different continents to be able to present in their own time zone in their own timeframe. And um, it's just a, it's an interesting take on what is like a word camp, but not an official word camp. Of course. It is a fundraiser for big orange heart because absolutely we need to continue to grow our funds to be able to provide the services and the areas that we do for remote workers.
But it's also just a heck of a lot of fun and this iteration of it we've built in even more things that we. Didn't have the first time because of the time constraints. So I'll stop talking. Y'all can give me
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:22] your phone. No, that was a really nice description of it. It's happening? 23rd of July.
So in your work at Europe happening first and then word first, and the page that I've got on at the moment is all about the fact that as with all of these events, if it's going to run smoothly, then they require some additional help in this case. They're looking for volunteers. So if you're curious about this one day in time, this 24 hour period running around the globe, and if you feel that you've got something to offer, that's what this page is about.
There's actually a whole, it's quite. Refreshing. I don't see it on this page, but I do remember seeing it when I clicked through there looking for a whole phalanx of different skillsets. So they're not just after that they would like people who are good with a V and they'd like people who are good at anyway, go and click on the link and you can see this there's five or six different categories
Michelle Frechette: [01:14:15] in the form itself.
It's the form itself.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:19] Was it that button there, the register now, does it explain it there? Okay. Let me just go to that. They're looking for MCs. So people to speak in the same way that I'm doing right now on the screen green room monitors, people who are willing to do the tech of the video, but don't want to be on the screen themselves.
They can get people in and make sure that the video is played at the right time. Chat, moderators, graphic designers, community moderators, comms, operations, Avi, producers go. Wow. Wow. So well organized the URL. For that is wordpress.live forward slash call dash four dash volunteers. Call for volunteer.
Okay. And you can go and get yourself signed up. And out of time, quickly on, I know we've got a couple of things, one of them actually, again, totally. Well, it wasn't organized this way. We've talked last week, Michelle, about the gift WP, acquisition. I don't know if you wanted to spend five minutes telling us about that.
Cause we didn't actually have you on last week when the news broke. So I was,
Michelle Frechette: [01:15:26] I just, I put it on the list because I just, I get a lot of personal questions. People have been DM-ing me saying, are you okay? Is this a good thing? And it is, it's a very good thing. Give WP continues to operate the way we always have.
We'd have the same team that we've always had. We have the same developers. We have the same customer success, the same support tech, and we continue to do everything the way that we have before. So I have a different boss. Now I report directly to Matt Cromwell. Now, still somebody I've been working with for the last three and a half years and give WP.
The only difference is we have an umbrella company now that we have a bigger network to work from. I, I no longer would have to pay Chris Lama for his ice, for example, cause he's in our company, and I have a bigger network in slack. I have a bigger network that I can talk to people in customer success in the other plugins.
So I'm working, I've been able to talk to people with the events calendar, for example and, and that, and then in our you know, liquid web and cadence blocks and all those kinds of different things that that are now part of the company I belong to. And we have standardized healthcare, that I haven't had, I've had to pay for, I had a stipend before to find and pay for my own healthcare, which was a blessing, but having standardized health care now with eye and dental and everything else is also even better than I have had for awhile.
Um, so for anybody that really is wondering, they're not paying me to say this, but I really do. I'm really excited about where we're going and how things are working, how we still have autonomy as a company within the company, but how we have even greater access to
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:08] resources. I was one of the people that pestered you and and I can absolutely say that you were over the moon.
We won't dwell on what was in that conversation, but it was all one way. Wasn't it? You were really, really, really pleased about the way
Michelle Frechette: [01:17:23] that you and everybody else who reached out. I really do appreciate that. Everybody was concerned about me in particular. I appreciate, I appreciate that so much and just want to, affirm to everybody that I'm really happy and things are going very
well.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:35] Yeah. So congratulations. I'm so pleased for you genuinely. That's really nice. We've only got 10 minutes left. So do you mind Paul, if we cut to this flock story or do you want to do something different? Yeah, there we go. Straight to the flat one. I will just say that over the last week.
I'll just say it just that's just to say it, the post status. That was one of the ones that we're just quickly gonna drop post status has been acquired. Bryan Cross guard has moved away. He's dropped his 50% share and he's given it all to Cory Miller. And we were going to talk about that. I feel the time got the better of us.
So we'll go to this one. This is a plugin from Jeff star. I really liked Jeff star. Perishable press and oh, Google, come on. The Google, I've got this new flock technology, the federated, something of cohorts. I can't remember what else stands for, but it's something else. Yeah, the federated learning of cohorts.
And we've talked about this the past, we talked about it when Tim Nash was on a few weeks ago and and a lot of people are slightly concerned about it. The idea is that you will be put into a cohort for a period of time, something around two weeks and you will be lumped. The idea is it's a push back against.
Target is advertising the idea that nobody really likes that every bit, literally everybody thinks that's creepy. So Google solution for this is to invent cohorts and they put you into this silo. And for this two week period, you are cohort one, three seven, two nine four, whatever that, whatever your number is.
And it means that you have this attribute, this attribute. If ever another two week period, you start to look for a different product range, or you're suddenly looking to go on holiday, you go into another cohort and they push adverts at you. What could possibly go wrong? So you know, people in the open source community are, I think rightly aghast that the sole arbiter of this technology by the looks of it will be Google.
So people like Jeff star have built a single line of code, basically just to disable this on websites to disallow this from being possible. If you don't want to be part of this stuff, stop using Chrome was, was one of his pieces of advice stop using Chrome? What was it? What was the other one?
Uh, or use a Chrome extension that disables flock anyway, the it just, it, it would seem that people this week are getting more and more cross with Google and I saw a piece and I can't even remember. I meant to put it in the show notes, but I saw a piece of this piece this week. Who was it? It was somebody on Twitter with about 15 different, those things, those stories in Twitter saying that even Google say it's basically impossible for them not to track you.
You have to, was it you? Yeah. Was it you? Oh, whoa. That's great. You know, you've got to try really, really, really, really hard. And even then they'll still be able to track.
Remkus de Vries: [01:20:45] Cause that was particularly on on the Google maps
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:48] thing. Yeah, the map side, right? The location data. Yeah.
Remkus de Vries: [01:20:52] Built-in and then a very privacy minded people at Google a didn't know they were still being tracked B didn't even know how to have them not be tracked from their own company.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:10] I'm so glad it was you though. That's such a great coincidence, but just the idea that Google employees, people really steeped in this camp, figure out how to switch off location-based tracking.
It's just slightly concerning. So I think initiatives like Jeff styles, perishable press plug-in to just switch that off. I don't wish to be a part of it. I don't, you whatever, I don't mind being put in a cohort, but it just, I don't want Google to have all of that.
Paul Lacey: [01:21:38] The plugin will help you advocate for your website, visitors, personally, which is going to be a tricky one for anyone who has an e-commerce store and wants to do re-targeted marketing with Google.
There'll be what do we do here? It's, I think back to Jeff star thank you, Jeff staff or another awesome plugin. He seems to be An expert in creating plugins that stop things. But he's
Remkus de Vries: [01:22:08] got an interesting niche. I remember him from when he would do anything like this, but for the last 10 years, I would say he's really good at putting stuff
Paul Lacey: [01:22:17] off work.
Exactly. Yeah. He's got a great, he's got a plugin that completely turns off Gutenberg. Yep. And it's, it's got a, quite funny a byline on the plugin it's and it won't be stopped when class, classic press or whatever it's called classic editor. Turns off this one, this plugin will last forever.
You can turn off cutting back forever with this plugin, but I know some of us are using that plugin if we're not using Gutenberg on a site and we're interested in performance and we want to re you know, get rid of any of the bloat that. The block editor is going to force upon the front end of our site that we're not using, then that's a fantastic plugin to use.
And then elsewhere he's created all sorts of plugins to stop bots or malware or these kinds of things say, it seems that he's really on the ball when it comes to knowing what WordPress users
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:10] it's the Cory Doctorow of WordPress's knees. So
Remkus de Vries: [01:23:16] how's the decision to include that yes or no into core has that been decided?
Because there
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:24] was a, there's an open that somebody opened a ticket about that didn't they about a week ago. And I don't know where that went. I haven't followed that up, but I'd be curious to know, cause it feels like the direction of travel would be off, but I could be completely wrong about it.
You know, we'll commerce sites, like Paul said, oh, it's such a difficult one. What do you do? So
Paul Lacey: [01:23:48] WooCommerce can
Remkus de Vries: [01:23:48] do whatever WooCommerce wants work, because I think, and this is what I when I, uh, in the introduction said with with 40 plus percent market share on the CMS with 18 plus years of experience, this is where voting starts to come in.
And then there's people arguing though, but shouldn't be political or whatever privacy is not political period. Privacy is privacy. Okay. I think we should I think we should include, this is one of those things where we need to take a positive stance and just not having that tracking sort of stuff going on.
Cause if we look at the state of the web and if we were to conclude like a top five things that are inherently wrong with it, I'd say Tracking is very high on that
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:41] list. One to five in five. So it's all right.
Remkus de Vries: [01:24:45] I wasn't going to go that far, but yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:49] Do you know, what's interesting though, is that, if we're at 41% of the web, if that was the default, would you, if you're Google and you figure out that 40% of the web is not alright, 40%, who knows how much traffic, those 40% of the websites drive, but you've
Remkus de Vries: [01:25:09] yeah, it's 40% of the top of what is it? 10,000
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:12] sites. I thought it was a bit more than that, but anyway, a lot. But you've got to feel that Google, you couldn't ignore that message right now. And it puts WordPress in an interesting position of leveraging, it, it can speak to people.
Remkus de Vries: [01:25:32] Yeah. I think the politics is here as Google is also one of the larger sponsors for working with us and working at bureau.
Paul Lacey: [01:25:38] Yeah, I was going to mention that as well. Yeah. There's conspiracy theories to be had there aren't there, if you take money from the,
What is the, what is he saying? Follow
the money.
Remkus de Vries: [01:25:54] I'm not implying anything, but it's an interesting construct to keep in mind as these things from the outside, looking in don't relate to each other, but there is a connect. Yeah. You
Paul Lacey: [01:26:07] would say that it's obvious that it should be like a piece of open-source software should have that blocked by default and having the website owner, having to make a moral decision for the users.
Vajra plugin probably to turn flock on and if, and if there's like a feeling of guilt associated with that, let's say you make 40 websites a year. And then you it's easier to say I didn't turn it off than it is to say I turned it on and I wanted people to be tracked. So I think it should be blocked and I think WordPress should make a stance on that.
I think some other CMS is, have made a stance on that. But yeah, Google does give money to WordPress bias, different sources. And I remember it was maybe two years ago, even on this show that we were talking about how Google was very involved in one of the big events. And it'd be easy to say, oh, it's just a coincidence that just but you know, it's right.
You follow the money and where there is huge amounts of money and the world influence happening, people will do anything to get what they need. Yeah, make the billions or trillions of dollars that are needed. So I think that if WordPress is true to what it's supposed to be about democratizing publishing and all this kind of thing, then.
Should be off. We shouldn't have something that allows people to be put in cohorts without knowing when we knew we could stop it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:47] Can I encourage anybody? Who's got anything to say on this topic, please. Log into Facebook and make a comment over on Facebook or log into Google. I can comment overall on the YouTube channel a week
Paul Lacey: [01:28:01] briefly, visit WP Builds.com a couple of the pages
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:07] here we are taking comments, all this stuff, the tracking, tracking so much tracking.
Yeah, I, I th I think you're right. I don't know if you saw that comment. I don't know who made that particular comment though. Rimkus but somebody did in your Facebook group, right? Privacy is not political period. Privacy is privacy. Put though see, like the, your sentiment there. And I agreed Michelle.
We are so close to being over time. Would you like to add anything to that before we round off? I
Michelle Frechette: [01:28:35] just, I think that we have the Kevin opt-out society and we need to become an opt in society.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:43] Wow. Michelle just nails it with one sentence. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. My feeling on all of that, just to ex one moment is that we didn't know this was going to happen. We just didn't see this stuff coming with technology, Jill.
Okay. Well, I'm not going to argue with you cause you lift weights at all. It's just,
Remkus de Vries: [01:29:09] I am, I do not hurt.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:13] That's disagree with me.
Michelle Frechette: [01:29:22] I thought David was going to say you lift weights and this is a heavy subject. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:29] I didn't hear that. What did Michelle say?
Paul Lacey: [01:29:31] Wow, that was great. She said, I thought you were going to say I lift weights and this is a heavy subject. Michelle one liner, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:45] there's going to be different than now. I'm sticking with you or you voted stickers. We have as always, I've enjoyed this very much. Thank you to Paul, obviously, who is the cohost re obviously, we'll be back next week doing it again, but first time Remco I hope that you enjoyed it and I'd love to have you back.
Thanks for having me. And I'd love to be, yeah, I'll send you a link when the show's over and Michelle as always realized Michelle's is a public yeah. Holiday. Just like it is in the UK. So extraordinary. Thanks for making the effort to come in early morning on your public holiday. Thank you so much.
Yeah. I'm just looking to see if there's any final comments that there isn't. So we have this awkward moment where we have to wave. Everybody's got away while I click and say, bye-bye see you next week. Oh,