This Week in WordPress #168

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Time for this week in WordPress episode, number 168, entitled sparkling while singing kumbaya. It was recorded on Monday the 21st of June, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by Paul Lacey, my cohost and this week by Bob Don and Robert Jacobi, as we talk about the WordPress news and there never fails to be lots of WordPress news.
What press 5.8 is just around the corner. And so we talk about how to get involved in the beta program. For that, I recorded a podcast episode over on WP Tavern with Dan, maybe we talk about Dan's contributions and how much of a legend he is. We also get Robert's take on the cloud ways and patch stack merger.
It's not a merger. It's more of a partnership. And Robert working for cloud wise is the expert to talk about that. Paul takes us through his thoughts on oxygen's recent update to 3.8. And we also talk about the fact that apparently the WordPress ecosystems combined worth is over half a trillion dollars phenomenon.
Paul also shows us a new plugin, which helps us take care of those pesky notifications in the WordPress admin. And finally, two new services have launched this week to help you. If you are trying to sell your WordPress business, it's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress, this week in WordPress was brought to you by AB split test.
Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is that it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor.
Go check it out and get a free [email protected].
Hello, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you may be in the world. It's very nice. To have you with us. I'm always nervous to say anything at this point. And Paul, because I don't know if you've noticed the audio for the first 10 seconds is diabolically bad when you replay it. And I've no idea what that is by now.
I'll sound completely normal, but for the first 10 seconds,
Paul Lacey: [00:02:30] go ahead. Don't beat yourself up so much, Nathan.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:33] It's not me. It's dream yard. It's definitely the tech anyway, this week in WordPress, I think we're on episode 168. Something like that. Very nice. If you've made the effort to join us, I appreciate it.
You will see a star studied panel. Apart from, me and Paul can probably step out of that, but we've got some absolutely lovely guests for you today. I'm going to. My good friend, Paul Lacey, who joins me each week as the cohost, introduce everybody today. So over to you, Paul,
Paul Lacey: [00:03:06] thanks, Nathan.
If you listen to WordPress and by that, listen to podcasts or live streams or anything like that, then you should have heard the voices of the two panelists we've got today. So because they are legends in podcasting and streaming and all that kind of stuff. And Bob, he's laughing as if he's not, but we all know you guys have been around during this and giving value to the community for a time.
And so we're very appreciative that you both come on the show at the same time as well, which is actually just a happy accident as well. So that's awesome. So to give you an actual introduction to who you are, we, first of all, we've got Bob Dunn who is a publisher, a podcaster, and a connector, do the wu.io and.
You have, you've got a number of podcasts, right? You've got your main podcast or an eval. So I got your do the woo podcast. And you've also, you also run some meetups now as well of which Robert is part of that one as well right. Yeah,

Bob Dunn: [00:04:10] Yeah. It's actually, it's, I'm always changing. So that's good.
You're you're bringing that up. I, yeah, I run the, do the loop podcast is primarily it for now. And then I have a news podcast for WooCommerce as well. And my live feed events are actually going to become part of the podcast because just for various reasons. So essentially I do two episodes a week of doing.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:37] Awesome. We've also got Robert GKB, who is now the director of WordPress at cloud ways. And Roberts also ran 3.5% of the internet with 20 years of experience as an open source executive entrepreneur and evangelist, and also works with SMBs to fortune 500 companies as a strategist, an analyst. He also reports news and provides opinions in daily newsletters on his new site.
Robert gkb.com. Robert what's this about 3.5% of the internet.
Robert Jacobi: [00:05:10] Oh. I was running Joomla at one point, the the baby sibling to WordPress these days. It's no longer at 3.5%, unfortunately, but it was my sort of gateway drug into the greater open source CMS,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:28] Nice. I did a podcast recording last week with David Walmsley and it was about numbers, just WordPress numbers of which there's a lot actually.
And not just the number of installs and things like that. But yeah, it was quite curious that whole Drupal Joomla. Thing came up and they do appear to be that the curve is slowly going down. Whereas the WordPress curve seems to be just ever on the ascendancy. I'm fully expecting that if you follow the trend by 2048, we'll have 160% of all internet uses will all be on WordPress.
More, more people will be using WordPress than there are people actually on the planet. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:06:08] The bots CMS of choice.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:12] That's right. Yeah. The robots will be installing WordPress. Yeah. That's a good point actually. Anyway, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. We've got about just over an hour and 20 minutes or so ahead of us.
We're going to talk about the WordPress news for this week, as we always do, just to let you know that if you want to follow the things that we do you can do that [email protected]. You can see right at the top, there is a way that you can subscribe to our newsletter or you can use the subscribe link just here.
And that will give you the opportunity to do. We do this show every Monday, if by any chance you miss it. Yeah. Comes out. It's repurposed as a audio podcast and we put the video out and in fact, there's just far too many wheels to do with when it's republished on Tuesday. But basically you don't worry if you missed it live, you can watch it again.
Tomorrow. And then I do an episode with my good friend, David Walmsley, interviewing people and so on and so forth that comes out on a Thursday, but bought enough of that. Let's get on with the WordPress news. I'm going to attempt to introduce a proportion of them, Paul, and introduce a proportion of them.
And then the idea really is that we just facilitate the conversation and allow our guests to to espouse their wisdom. So let's let's hope you guys have brought your wisdom with you this morning or this afternoon. First one, go and grab a coffee quickly, guys, if you got about 30 seconds WordPress 5.8 B to two has been released.
That's our first one. We always try to do the core stuff first. And there's not really a lot to say about this other than if you can. If you're watching live at the moment, you'll see that there are some highlights here, the block editor, they've done various things to that. So they've added a tight property to allow core, to identify the source of the editor styles and all really now that we're getting very close to things being released, most of this is fairly technical and we're getting in the weeds a bit.
Yeah. The main message here really is if you are an advocate of WordPress and you are keen to see the project go forward. They need testing at this point to make sure that when 5.8 comes down and it is released outside of release candidate, that it's as bug free as possible. So right at the top of this page, the link for everything by the way, will be in the show notes.
You can see right at the top, how you can get involved. So the more eyeballs that we can turn to that the better, but 5.8, I'm going to be a huge, big release and muted for the next few weeks. I am just going to throw that one out. And I don't know if I know that Paul and I follow it fairly closely. I don't know if Bob does or Robert does, but is there anything, if there's anything that you are keen to see coming out in 5.8, I'll just open the floor to the three of you.
Robert Jacobi: [00:08:55] Oh, I'm just any improvements in Gutenberg, obviously full site editing, how that plays out. I haven't had a chance to play with the beta. That we say beta not beta.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:08] Yeah. Yeah. The full site editing thing seems to be the big ticket item. That seems to be the thing most people are talking about.
Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [00:09:16] Yeah. So for me, it's my days of beta testing are over. I become a regular user. I did this with Gutenberg when it came out. So I. No longer spend a lot of time. I listen and read and hear people talk about and check it out that way and obviously talked on the podcast, but when it comes out, I deal with it.
And that's what I did with Gutenberg guy. I waited till he came out and dove into it and moved on and like Robert yeah. It's, it's moving ahead. So I'm looking forward to it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:51] Yeah. The full site editing thing is going to be absolutely massive, but I know there's loads of stuff under the cover.
Good, good place to go and check out. Anything to do with WordPress as always is WP Tavern. They seem to have a boatload of articles coming out all the time. Anything you're looking forward to Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:10:06] Yeah, I'm looking forward to the improvements to the block editor. I think for me, the block editor is just a replacement for tiny MCE editor.
So I've, I've tried, I mentioned this a few weeks ago, Nathan, I've tried a few sites building out. With the blocks for everything. And it hasn't worked out for me very well yet. So I'm sticking with my favorite kind of stack, which tends to be BeaverBuilder beaver, FEMA type approach, because it just.
It's just mature and works for me. And in all the scenarios, whether it's my own sites or client sites, are, I feel happy with that, but I'm looking forward to the the improvements to the user interface on the block editor, because I do think it's an improvement on the tiny MCE editor, but in terms of the big headline, the full site editing, it's getting merged into core.
But there is a good article on w Trevan, but I'm just in Tadlock who has tested this in terms of in terms of someone who's not actually probably in the Corps, he's probably tested this and released the results of his tests the most publicly out of probably anyone else that I'm aware of. And he's done, he's been involved in most of the different rounds of testing we're full site editing, and he does summarize in the end.
It is launching and isn't quite the in fact it's not there at all, actually was his summary that at the moment, it's really quite a good tool for building out full page landing pages. You know, destroy the head of destroy the photo, build everything within the, in theory, build out sites but there's a lot of things that aren't included in this version of full site editing.
So it's not really full site editing yet. It's, it's the first part of foresight editing in core. And one of the things that is a little bit troubling is some of the, some of his things he's found out in terms of a user easily, being able to get confused, whether they're editing structure or content, and then they got mixing the two.
So one minute they think they're editing the content of their page, but it's so similar to when they're editing the structure of the page. Like the header or the footer area or something that someone could easily forget what they're doing and start adding content into templates. So that's the kind of thing I can see them cleaning up over time, because it will become apparent.
There would just be so many users having that problem, but it's, it sounds like a really good launch whether you like Gutenberg or not it's there and they're making improvements to it. I'm not a huge fan, but I'm glad of the improvements you flip
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:55] flop, don't you one week it's next
Paul Lacey: [00:12:58] week. It's no, it is.
I'm really impressionable. Okay. So whoever I hang around, hang out with I, I always liked to listen to what people have got to say and. Try and help it form my opinions. And I think that we had an mccoffee on the show yeah, and also bigot who are really, involved in that side of things.
And I got to hear their opinions and what they were doing and their reasons for this and it pulled me towards getting in, looking a bit deeper and stuff. And so I can see all the good that they're doing and why they're doing it and why they think it's a great thing. But it's been a while since I've spoken to them.
So the other side of my influence is pulling me back to the, you know what I like it's all right. But it's not, for me, it's not for agency type people in my opinion yet. That's just my opinion. I'm
Robert Jacobi: [00:13:55] trying to get better. The light you block at or Gutenberg all the way.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:00] Yeah. Yeah.
It's you really are very bullish aren't you? You're very pleased
Robert Jacobi: [00:14:05] since I first saw it, whatever was three years.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:08] Is that what you're going to say? When I was three, I was thinking, crikey, beard has come on quickly.
Bob Dunn: [00:14:18] I was just going to add buzz real quick. Was I had Ann McCarthy on recently, not too long ago. Maybe. Episodes of three or four weeks back. And one of the things she didn't mention is that 5.8. Everybody's all excited about it, but from the user standpoint, there's very little, they will see it's more in the back end, what everybody else is seeing and how things work.
She said 5.9 is actually going to be a lot bigger. And that's where you're going to see more of the things merging.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:47] Yeah, the roadmap until I think it's, I think it's August and then December, possibly, I can't remember the exact dates, but certainly by the end of this year, by the time we get into 2022, the the intention from just Sephora down is that it's going to be really a very big change has been a, what does she call it?
She called it something like an aggressive roadmap or something like that. And I think she's sticking to it and most of what she wanted seems to be coming down the pipe anyway. So that's really nice. Everybody's take on I'm on 5.8. It's lovely, good rest. And thanks for bringing in that Justin Tableau piece as well.
You can find that over on the Tavern. Speaking of the Tavern, this is quite quite nice. It very unusual. We plug our own stuff. And this isn't really my own. In a sense, it's my own stuff. Cause I recorded a podcast episode with maybe, perhaps, you Dan, perhaps you don't, but Dan is he's from the UK and he's, he really, he runs a big orange heart.
I say he runs it. That's it's a, what do you call it? Robert in the U S we call it a charity. You call it a, is it a nonprofit?
Robert Jacobi: [00:15:56] Nonprofit. And Dan is the executive director of.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:00] Big orange card. Thank you. I didn't want to get the words wrong, but Dan started this charity in the UK and very recently for all sorts of reasons, it's become it's moved its credentials, it's where it's based over to the U S and, but he still continues to do his work in an, in and around positive mental health and all sorts of other things in the remote work community of which WordPress is a great big part, but he's also a really big advocate of media tops. And he was at one point this, when you say it, it doesn't sound like a lot, but he ran for meetups each month.
In different parts of the UK. And I know the UK is about the size of Rhode Island or something like that, but it's not, if you're going over to Liverpool and to Essex and to Soffer and in London, it was probably clocking up hundreds and hundreds of miles a week, not to mention the time that he was giving up.
And it didn't really make, blow his own trumpet or anything like that. Then when the whole COVID thing hit, he managed to get his team to do everything online. And I have to say the online stuff that they've put together, Robert can attest to this. I'm sure Paul could as well, the online platform that they've built to facilitate that event.
Is absolutely fabulous. It's gained maturity over the course of the year, and now I'm just love going to those WordPress London meetups. So anyway, sorry to blow your trumpet quite so much, Dan. I know you probably won't like that. You'll probably be blushing, but I just wanted to say thank you. So we did an, a podcast episode that you can see on the screen.
You can find it [email protected]. And it's you click the podcast link at the top and it's episode number four. So I'd really like for people to go and listen to that episode. And then can you do me a favor when you've listened to that episode? Will you just search Dan out and give him what, whatever feels like the right pat on the back, whether that's a tweet or an email or something, just you pat him on the back and he's been receiving a little bit of that this week and I think he's, I think he's been quite nice.
So anyway, there you go. I don't know if anybody wants to talk about that episode, but if you did go for it now,
Paul Lacey: [00:18:16] I can just say I know Dan as well, and I owe him a couple of drinks, actually. I, last time I saw him. Yeah, I was I did a talk at London meetup before COVID and he was buying everyone drinks and everything.
You know, I need to repay a couple of days, but he's a superhero in WordPress. I think that's all, I'll say he's just a super hero in WordPress and we all massively appreciate him. And if you've been to any of the London stuff, wherever it's online, then he's probably at a part in your enjoyment of that experience.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:53] Yeah, really nice. It's, it's curious because one of the things that came out of the episode that we recorded was although software you it's created by developers and volunteers and people succonded in and all of this kind of thing. It is interesting that it is about the people.
And during the last year, I think even Joe would have to admit that the. Isolation that everybody has been experiencing has impacted the development of the software because thing events like WordCamps, which Dan is part of are a key component in making the software move forward because you've got little breakout sessions and you get people meeting up for contributor day and you get people who just bump into each other in the corridor and come up with a, and all of a sudden, the six people having a round table discussion about something, which then actually turns into something six months later.
So yeah. Really interesting. Okay. So that was my first bit, the other bit that I wanted to mention. Oh, good grief, Paul. You've stuck another one and this is sorry. I don't know. Self promotion. Yeah. Don't like the old self promotion. Oh. But I was lucky enough to get these two people that you can see.
It looks like what you're looking at now. Doesn't, that's really weird.
Paul Lacey: [00:20:16] Probably you're consistent. You're
Bob Dunn: [00:20:17] consistent
screenshot of this.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:23] Totally got the same stuff on it.
Paul Lacey: [00:20:25] Sophia that's genius. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:29] embarrassing. But we spoke to obviously Roberts and all of our cells, all of our cells is the guy behind what is now patched stack formerly WebEx, which is a security platform, good like a SAS hybrid plugin for, well, I'm going to get that off the screen.
I can't cope with looking at that. And, and really Robert, I'm just dropping this in your lap. Tell us about the partnership, because it's not a merger, it's not an acquisition. This is just a straight up partnership between cloud ways and patch stack. So tell us more.
Robert Jacobi: [00:21:04] Yeah, one of those old school things, that people don't do anymore, but our goal was to, Help the WordPress ecosystem by contributing and partnering with patch stack for, open source, hooks and things into WCL.
So people can integrate with different kinds of security solutions, getting plugin, theme updates, all that fun stuff. We're obviously gonna incorporate that work into our cloud waste stack, but none of that's proprietary. That's going out to everyone because we believe that a more secure WordPress community is a better, healthier
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:43] WordPress community.
I, I, although we spoke a lot, did it take long to, I don't know, because you're recently to cloud. I'm curious. Did you step into the middle of that conversation or was that a conversation that you started with Oliver after you, you knew that you were taken on the role.
Robert Jacobi: [00:22:00] So the answer is yes.
So I had been talking with Alvar since actually before they did the rebrand from web barks to patch stack, just independently interested in what they were doing. And there, as I stepped into cloud ways, they had already had some very initial discussions, with the patch stack team.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:21] Nice. So it was just a perfect moment in time.
Ah, lovely. Anyway, if you're curious, you can click on the link in the show notes, which I'll drop. You can hear it all tomorrow and pick on the link and check out what's what Oliver and Robert had to say. Okay, Paul, you're up now, we're talking about
Robert Jacobi: [00:22:41] you totally missed as part of Dan.
That he's also putting together work
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:46] Fest, life USA right. Thank you. Yeah, that is actually written on my sort of like little notepad here and I've completely failed to do that. Let's go back. Let's rewind a little bit. And I mentioned, I've lost that, that I've closed that site, but we'll just talk, we're back to down.
Maybe a couple of minutes ago, word Fest live is coming around. We have actually done a fairly decent job of promoting it over the last few weeks. We talked about their, their call for speakers and sponsors and all that kind of stuff in a minute. I'll try and put the link on the page as well.
But a WordPress live is starting fairly soon. I've forgotten the exact dates. Can you, can anybody just off the top of their head, give me the dates. July 30. Yeah. So we've got about sort of four weeks away, fairly soon
Robert Jacobi: [00:23:31] adventure. So sometimes zones will start a little bit earlier. So I'm trying to remember, maybe in north America, she start from the 22nd
Bob Dunn: [00:23:39] word, WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:43] Everything. Let me go and put that up because it would be nice. Right? Word first live. There we go. Found it. And that will no doubt. Tell us what we need to know. So here we go. Dates are 23rd of July. I think you got that right. Nice. Let me just accept that one. They've got, I think six, I think he said 66 speakers.
And having run the summit that I run, which had I think 39 or something oh, whoa. So many speakers, but it's going on for 24 hours. So it begins if you if you're living in New Zealand, then it'll start in that part of the world and then the events will move on. If you wish you can just attend all 66 event.
You can't attend all 66 because you can't be in two places at once, but there's sort of two tracks, 66 events. And depending on which part of the world, you're awakened, there'll be events at that time. They've got a great team of volunteers and helpers and I S I think they are still looking for volunteers.
So if you go to the webpage, which is a word fest.live you'll be able to volunteer your services. And thank you, Robert, for rescuing me from myself. That was great. Paul, Bob, anything about that?
Paul Lacey: [00:24:57] Yeah. You were MC last year,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:00] I was one of them. Yeah. I actually wasn't anticipating that because I had a couple of other things on, but I think something, I think somebody maybe was poorly or something.
So I ended up stepping in and having a fabulous five hours or six hours with Wendy Hussan developed. And so butchered that I'm so sorry, Wendy. And we, we, we did the, exactly what we're doing now. We went on stream yard and introduced everybody and it was really fun. I really enjoyed it.
Paul Lacey: [00:25:27] I wasn't going to be involved in this.
Yes. But fast. But I am now I was invited to a small panel, which was nice. And Maya from GoDaddy messaged me to say, would I be interested in coming on this panel? And and tell me what it was about, probably your say what it's all about as yet. But she did say, and this is true, that Dan, she said, I said When will, I dates and times and stuff like that.
And she said, Dan, maybe we'll be in contact with you. And in my mind, I've had this joke all week, which was could he confirm if you will be in touch with me or not, but the rest of the story is true. I've been holding that in until I was with a group of people who have fought and might appreciate it.
And I know Dan would appreciate it. I'm sure he's heard that one a number of times. So he probably doesn't appreciate it actually. I'm looking forward to the panel anyways. Cause I was too, I was a bit tired to do a proper talk, but then I was invited on a panel. I was like, brilliant, fantastic.
I can be involved. That's great. So really looking forward to it actually, because I think brilliant last year, brilliant
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:41] level of the level of attention to detail is really, truly remarkable and you're watching. If you attend and you'll just think, oh, it's an online event. Just rest assured it's rarely really well put together.
And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you will never see that's going on in the background. And I won't bore you with the details, but it is remarkably well organized and every I has been dotted and T has been crossed. So yeah, let's hope that it's going to be a really fun event. So go and check it out.
Word fest.life. That'd be nice. Yeah. Paul. Now it's plugin
Paul Lacey: [00:27:25] news, a quick mention for a plugin strike theme. It's technically a plugin, but it operates like a theme and it's oxygen has just released version 3.8. We have spent a lot of time talking over the last six or so months about the block editor and full site editing and those kinds of things.
We know that there is another way. So there's obviously a kind of traditional way building out sites with things like Genesis and there's things like what do I do with BeaverBuilder beaver Thema? And then oxygen came along and oxygen is something much more close to the concept of full site editing.
Without a page builder, it's not technically a page builder, it's more of an entire theme builder in one product and a bit like full site editing when you activate it, it takes over. The whole thing. I'm not actually a user of oxygen, but I know a lot of people are on a lot of people really appreciate the level of detail they go in to make this an absolutely amazing product for all sorts of different people.
And you'll see in the kind of change log, there are things around content editing that they've improved the things around dynamic data that they're improving things around coding. And so you can have different kinds of tags and rappers and that kind of thing. Really good example of the other side of WordPress say the open source project has to work in the way it works.
It's open source. It has its processes and that's how it goes. They can't just have two people or five people listening to a few customers and then make huge change. Based on that, whereas a product like oxygen is constantly in touch with its direct customers. So this oxygen to me is what the future of foresight editing might end up being in WordPress eventually, if it can get that good.
But yeah, for anyone who is using oxygen or interested 3.98 has just come out. There's some new features in there, so it's worth taking a quick look. So it was just a quick mention that that's come, that's come out. And a lot of people like it,
Robert Jacobi: [00:29:29] it, oxygen I think is really cool and they focus so heavily on performance on the theme side.
So that's also one of their sort of claims to fame. It is certainly more technical than like a beaver builder or Elementor no argument.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:45] It seems to be gaining a devoted audience. The summit that I was part of a couple of years ago it wasn't a couple of years. It was almost a year ago.
We ran the first bomb and oxygen was mentioned far more than I anticipated much more actually. And then this time around, so we decided to put more oxygen content in and it went down really well. And it really does seem to have a tremendously devoted following adherence to of, and the other nice thing.
It doesn't seem to get criticism. It doesn't seem that it's makes people wary of it if you know what I mean. And that tends to be the case. Doesn't it. After a period of time and features go in, people start to, or it's bloated and all of this and all of that. And we don't seem to have that people who are using it seem to be entirely happy with it.
I
Robert Jacobi: [00:30:36] think part of that is just the appeal to a subset of, WordPress developers. It's not trying to, I don't think be everything to everyone. I don't think it'll ever try for that. Mark per se. It's it's how can we. Optimize, the geekiest kind of things into a more user-friendly experience.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:58] Yeah, yeah. The, the guy who does the videos Elijah, as well as writing the code, he's a really great exponent of the product. I don't know if you've ever seen the promotional video or indeed the update video, like we were just looking at. He's really great. He's one of those, I'm going to say annoying people who appears to get it first time, it just like, you just don't see the edit.
There is no edit. There's no moment where he's messed it up and he sets a song. You see him jump suddenly. And he does like a 10 minute monologue clearly making it all up as he goes along with a plan. But just manages to know this. I wish I could do that. Honestly, when I record my podcast, I sometimes have to go back and edit like the same thing four or five times, just because you mess it all up.
Yeah, totally unnatural.
Bob Dunn: [00:31:51] Yeah know, actually the only thing experience I have with oxygen is it keeps me alive. But other than that,
Paul Lacey: [00:32:01] it's
Bob Dunn: [00:32:02] Yeah. Yeah. It's very critical. It helps me go to day by day, but I haven't used it personally, but I just echo what everybody said that I see a mentioned a lot and it's, it is that people that are fans of it are huge fans of it.
And I see very little critiques are critical. If somebody drops it in somewhere, nobody comes in and says, oh, that sucks. It's, it's definitely made his name among the developers in the fads that he has. So he's obviously done things very well. And probably the fact that he. Can do the videos so well on like eighth and I he's he's yeah, that is a definite plus.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:45] yeah. Do the amount of time you could save bulb if you didn't have to repeat yourself 14 times. And I, I don't know, I just totally segwaying a minute. I don't know if any of you have keep kept whether I, on the fact that there's a other, another page builder, which has come around in the last couple of, let's say four or five months or something, there's one called bricks builder, which seems to be having a similar trajectory in that it's developed by a very small team, as far as I can work out.
It's just. Gala. Maybe they've got some support people now. I don't know, have they okay. But that seems to be getting the same level of attention. That oxygen was right at the beginning. Lots of people diving in having a bit of a play and seemingly enjoying and and Peter's obviously a big fan of oxygen.
He says dead dedicated oxygen user. Oh, dedicated oxygen users are very dedicated. Okay. Yep. Okay. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:33:42] Peter's our tool set and generate press user as far as I say, but it's true. I think a, the oxygen uses a pretty diehard. And a lot of them moved from elemental to, there are a lot of the diehard advocates, so does a lot of advocates for the product, vocal advocates.
That absolutely love it. A lot of those used to absolutely love elemental, but then oxygen, like we said, Came in with a performance first attitude and was able to see everything that has gone on in the past and address a lot of those things for what people were asking for, but for a tool like elemental or some of those corners can't be turned anymore.
So it doesn't matter for elemental. They've got a huge audience in lots of different spans, but like Robert said, this is like a subset of WordPress users that didn't have the perfect tool yet to use and then oxygen address that for them. So for that group of people, I think it will be around for the longterm.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:46] I think it's curious how these different companies market themselves as well. So for example, beaver builder, my experience of that is they just gently push out an email and, they don't shoot any video content to go around it. They just pop out an email and say, we've done this, here's the change log a look oxygen, slightly different.
They put together a video, a bit of a change log, but it just drops in an email somewhere. And then you've got the likes of element or who shoot, like in 4k on location. These amazing videos, it's just a really different kind of approach to doing it. They've got a different way of doing it,
Robert Jacobi: [00:35:24] As a crazy huge Facebook group.

Yes.
I want it. Like 20,000, you absolutely enormous.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:35] Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:35:37] Built and grown really quickly as well. I think bricks is a major sort of competitor, but most of the people who were the advocates of oxygen, like bricks as well, but they can see that it is actually, I don't know too much about bricks, but I know that it is a different target market.
It's slightly different. It's nuanced difference. But it's enough that the people who like oxygen will probably like stick oxygen and a new subset of people will probably be really into the bricks concept. And so lots of choice. That's the wonderful thing sometimes about WordPress is that you know, when you've got a tool that is powering 45, whatever percent of the web, even the smallest subset the space for a product and for a way to do things the way you want to do it, if you want to do it that way,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:25] Okay, duke.
I just curious, right? This is totally off topic. You were just mentioning Robert about Facebook groups. I've I love my Facebook group. I've really enjoy interacting with the Facebook group. That is part of the WP builds thing, but I've become a little bit more. Let's just say that I've not been.
Got the same level of interest in being an, all the other wide and disparate Facebook groups that are used to be involved in largely because I'd discovered that it was a time hog for me. And it was quite addicted to wasting time in that way. And so just by dropping out of them and concentrating on the one that I really want to be involved with that worked out for me.
So that's my first question. Is anybody like getting fatigued with Facebook? Yeah, take it from there, Bob. And I'll come back to me. No,
Bob Dunn: [00:37:17] you hit. Okay. I was just going to say you hit me at a really interesting time because I'm leaving Facebook this week. Totally. I'm sharing. I have a page that has 1500 people that don't pay attention to me, but other than that, I've just made and I'm not going to go into it.
Yeah, no reason behind this, but it's been a long time in coming and I'm just ready to blow out of there. So obviously I've yeah. Groups for me have I kind of burn out on them about, no, I don't know. A little while back, I used to go in there and try to follow trends and get a feel, especially when I was writing tutorials and stuff, it was good to pick up content from, cause it gave me a lot of good ideas, but I had to Wade through a lot of redundancy and same things and it really depends on the group.
There's, it going from one group to another, but essentially moving forward, I'm going to be the worst person to give any kind of answer to this because I will totally be out of this fear of the Facebook. And sure if it'll be different, but anyway, but I just thought I would throw that out there as a as a.
Sure stopper, no, I'm kidding. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:37] it. We're going to end
Robert Jacobi: [00:38:39] for me. I am. I've actually disappeared from Facebook for a while. Came back over the last year and a half, but I don't use it for anything. So any personal social stuff that's not ever happening. There are a couple of groups I quote unquote follow, but if I log in for serious into Facebook, that's maybe happening once a week, once every two weeks.
And I always joke people send me Facebook messages. I'm like, that's the surest way to never get ahold of me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:16] I'm really curious about whether we're at a point where people are just becoming a bit jaded with it. And what I mean by that is it was extremely interesting for a while. This great social experiment, the art, the iPhone comes along and so do mobile phones and suddenly it was always in your pocket and it was fascinating what you could do.
And suddenly you could be in touch with people all over the world at the same time. And then that kind of just wore on nothing, particularly new or imaginative as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, came. Along afterwards, it was just more of that. And then the advertisers came along and we've got the specter of perhaps being tracked a little bit more than we'd like and so on and so forth.
So I'm very keen on my own Facebook group, but just like you, Robert, I have no presence there. In fact, I'd be interested if I don't know what's on my timeline, but I never put anything on there. So anything that is on there is by accident. I just go in and interact with groups.
Robert Jacobi: [00:40:14] My timeline is just part of any kind of social, using sprout social, to just drop everything in all three platforms, but, w builds great, niche agency group by go WP.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:29] That's
Robert Jacobi: [00:40:29] a nice one. Yeah, that's great. There are some really good ones. Admin bar there's some great little neighborhoods, I would just love to go out and meet these people in person.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:42] There's not, it isn't that it, the, I was listening to there's a podcast network called Twitter.
I don't know if you follow it. It's Leo LaPorte. It's been going for the longest time long before podcasts were a thing. And he's got a show called this week in Google and I listened to that every single week. And it's really good. It's actually got almost nothing to do with Google. And it's basically about the wider web Facebook and all of that.
And he brought to my attention, this thing called Mastodon, which is a sort of an open source Twitter clone. And I've installed an instance of [email protected]. Actually funnily enough, because we mentioned it last week and I didn't delete it. I've still got the thing. And, and I'm experimented with that.
I don't minute suspect it will get any kind of traction, but there's about 35 people in there at the moment. I just liked the idea of. Trying something where no tracking pixel. If you put something in there, it's just between the 3 30, 5 of us that are going along. So if anybody's interested in that and they're just fed up and you want to talk just about WordPress in a Facebook lists environment and Twitter, this environment, it's that URL, which I didn't even know was a URL WP build stock, social.
I didn't, you could buy the.social domain, but it's pretty slow going at the moment, but if you want to join us, that would be nice. And I've enjoyed setting it up and playing with it and tinkering with it a bit, but it gets me out of. It gets me socializing with people that I know I probably would like to keep socializing with, which is nice.
Robert Jacobi: [00:42:21] But I came across actually this weekend, which I had not heard of before poly
Bob Dunn: [00:42:24] work. Yeah. I just joined that. Yeah. Yeah. I did it about, I got on there about two, three weeks ago. I don't know how I got on there and it's essentially, it's a little bit different, it, it's more of a. They say it's more of a creator's LinkedIn, not really LinkedIn.
Somebody saying maybe it's going to be the offshoot of that for creators. It just lets you put in projects, you're working on. It's not just, you don't have to put in just posts. It's like it's getting people to follow each other, maybe finding collaboration and partnership and and so in those, I don't usually jump in anything like that new, but it just was intriguing enough that I thought I'd go in there and cruise around.
So I think it's yeah. Interesting. And I got invites if anybody wants them, but it's, it's, if you want to explore it, but it's,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:21] A nice website, isn't it? Yeah. Really great. Yeah. You can
Paul Lacey: [00:43:27] just imagine your clients, if you're a web agency. Hey, can we have something like this? And you're just like, what's your budget.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:37] Can we have animated plasticine characters please?
Paul Lacey: [00:43:40] Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'll install the plugin for that name.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:43] Yeah, that's right. That's the animated plasticine character plugin. There's also a separate bowls moving along tubes plug-in as well. You can install that one
as balls, moving along tubes on the strap. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:43:58] I think Facebook, if you're new to WordPress and you actually want to get involved in the community, especially in these times, It's a good place to start to figure out what's going on and where things are going on and what things you can listen to or watch or attend.
But I think a lot of us probably get an, I know a lot of people in the comments using the YouTube link and rather than the Facebook on these days, I think it's just gets a bit fatiguing, sometimes Facebook and I almost completely left. And I know the Matthew Jackson is in the comments there and he's almost completely left.
And Bob, your leaving and me, and they had lots of conversations about this because I probably dropped out before he didn't. And then he was, he was asking me about it and was I disconnected from everything. And the fact is someone like you, Bob or Billy leaving, WordPress is once you get to the point where you are a creator and you've got an audience.
The only benefit that you were really missing, that you're really missing out on is dopamine hits from seeing people saying nice things about you on Facebook versus the negative side of things that the FOMO and all the other things that come with it. So it's just, yeah. The
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:12] people say nice things about you on Facebook.
I never get no,
Paul Lacey: [00:45:16] no, they'd say nice things about Bob and Lee.
So there's almost no benefit to me even on Facebook. Yeah, but I think I think if you've had any doubt about if it's the right thing to do or not, At any point you can come back. That's the crazy thing about it. So you can just leave safe. Life is better that way keep creating and people will people, especially now the people who want to listen to you will go into Facebook, hear about you, and then they'll come to you and you can communicate to them on the platform of your choice, whether that's Twitter or circles or whatever,
Robert Jacobi: [00:45:52] or your work, the big thing.
I think you S you kind of abdicate some of your content responsibility when you're so focused on the platforms. The best way to own and build up your brain is to, come to, you Paul's website, come to Nathan's website, come to WVU bell. That's the best way. I think
only saying are connecting,Paul Lacey: [00:46:19] if you want to connect, this is where I am.
And, in a years time it could all be different, but I think we need some in-person events back again so that we can expand how we all communicate, but there's just too much online. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:36] I made this exact same point on on actually oddly in that mustard on thing that I was talking about earlier.
One of the, one of the people. Chris, I will put your comment back on in a moment. One of the people that I was talking to over there came up with this plugin it's over at get hub. It's called friends. And it seems a bit like a sort of social network, a federated social network, which mustard on these.
So if you've got your little installation, it can combine with all the other ones and you can communicate. They're not little silos they can be, but they don't have to be. You can combine all the different networks that makes one big network. And somebody pointed out this it's a it's [email protected] forward slash a Kirk forward slash friends.
Can't say I played with it, but it looks like a kind of nice way of doing social networking on your own website. Do you know what I've got really into, which is a bit old school I've really got back into the RSS feed and comments on websites. Just good old fashioned writing comments at the bottom and seeing where that leaves and it's gross.
It's
Bob Dunn: [00:47:41] that's the only, I've never dropped RSS now. I've used it to keep track of everything and that's just. I've never found anything to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:53] replace it. Yep. Did you hear that the, the idea of when you subscribe to an RSS feed, it appears that Google, I think is Google is sort of trying to update the language on that.
So in the future, I think within Chrome, there's going to be a button in the main UI at this follow button. I think they're calling it. And so the RSS feed will be a bunch of follows, not subscriptions because it would appear that a lot of things like Spotify are starting to use that language. I don't care either way, but it's just interesting that will be part of the browser.
And I don't quite know how that'll even work, but presumably if there's an RSS feed tucked away, somewhere on a page, Google will surface it as a button in the Chrome UI. And you can then click a button and and give more data to Google. Lovely.
Bob Dunn: [00:48:43] I actually use a An open source app called net Newswire.
Oh, yes. And I love it. It's simple. It's its own little app. It does exactly what I want. And I can easily catch
Robert Jacobi: [00:48:56] up. So question is, I I've loved our assess probably for as long as Bob has and Google had such a great plan.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:06] Oh, that's so good. And they
Robert Jacobi: [00:49:08] flushed it down the toilet. Oh good. I realized that, oh yeah, we should probably still be doing it.
Duh, I'm sort so mad about it. I use Feedly as just sort
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:19] of, I do that's my go-to now as
Robert Jacobi: [00:49:21] well. Yeah, just my centralization. So I can pull up our assess on any device. I don't know if I'm ever going to go back to futz around with Google's implementations, berming wants that's plenty.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:31] Thank you. Do you know, I was thinking about this the other day, because I was looking for my wife, she wants a an app to do like a to-do list and she's got an Android phone and pre-installed on the Android phone is the Google keep app, which serves as a reasonable to do list. But that was the exact thought that went through my head was how can you possibly have any trust in this?
Because. Yeah. Fair enough. You might go on in perpetuity, but yeah, equally they could just shutter the whole thing and you've got all your, to do's forever more in the same way that Google photos, I was really beguiled by that and I really loved it. And then the free tier went away and yeah, it just suddenly occurred to me.
It didn't occur to me. Somebody said why do you think it's gone away? And I was like because I don't know. They've just decided. And he said, no, they've got all the data out of the photos you could possibly want. Now they've got every bit of AI intelligence they could want. They've had four or five years of untrammeled access to all of your pictures.
They now know what dogs look like. They know what every signpost on earth looks like, what every building looks like. And so on. It's well, we'll close that down now. We've got what we need from that. So I'm with you. I I'm using Feedly. I did use net Newswire, and I've tried a few other things as well, but Feedly works well.
I've got a great big list of RSS feeds, just WordPress RSS feeds, which helped me create the bits and pieces that I want. Yup. C and Robert Jacobi. I've got to say yours, come up quite a lot. You just got that big blue R it's just there's
Bob Dunn: [00:51:04] like, okay. There's oh, there's 10 new ones.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:08] Oh, it's wrong? Yeah. They come in clumps though. They Robins
Robert Jacobi: [00:51:13] my schedule has gotten so crazy that it's not on a daily basis anymore. Now. It's just oh my God, I have four hours smashes. Yeah. Yep. Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:21] that's nice. It's really nice. And so as always the case, there's going to be a contrary opinion.
And it's Chris Hughes. Chris has got the the opposite opinion of the Facebook thing. Sorry. We've totally gone off message here, but it's been fun. He's more involved than ever with Facebook made some amazing partnerships. The fact real names are generally required. Keeps it authentic compared to Twitter.
Yes. Yes. I'm sure. You're right. Obviously it's six of one, half a dozen. The other one doesn't work for me will probably work for you. Keep, stay tuned, Chris. I won't say why, but just stay tuned. To Chris's
Robert Jacobi: [00:51:56] point that's, for that kind of stuff. That's why I prefer LinkedIn.
I
just, as much it's enormous.
And I think just for the, I can actually focus more on actual work in LinkedIn and I prefer the experience overall compared to Facebook anyways, so yeah. The green. Yeah. That's yeah, hands down.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:20] There's Twitter ignorance on
LinkedIn, comparing Robert Jacobi: [00:52:24] Facebook, LinkedIn I'll take LinkedIn any
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:26] day of the week.
Do you know? It's fascinating. Cause I'm just like you, Paul, I can't make head nor tail of LinkedIn. And it really is because I haven't made any effort. I've made no effort to go in there. Think I've got a photo
Paul Lacey: [00:52:38] or anything like an old profile from a decade ago. People still say, congratulations, you still working for that arts organization, which I left 15 years ago.
Yeah. It's terrible. I need to update it, but it does nothing for me. Yeah. But it's. Not helped, but then again, I haven't applied for a job for 15 plus years. That's an ignorant thing to say, oh, I don't need it because of that. I've probably missed out on some things. So it is on the list to check out.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:04] I was, I was looking this week at LinkedIn again, just because I was trying to hook it up.
And apparently you can now push content like this video content through through platforms to Lee. So I went in and this is like the biggest slap down ever. It was lovely. I applied and they just said, you're just not important enough. I can't remember the wording of the email back was no, we declined your request to have video access because nobody cares about what you say is basically what I got, but I don't put any time into LinkedIn.
So whilst content goes in, I've curated nothing. I've made no efforts there at all and I don't get it, but I was listening to the element. Summit, which was last week. And I think it was called create, what was it called? Creators 2021. I think it was. And they had Gary Vaynerchuk on and he is, I think at the end of his monologue he was asked what's the best bit of advice.
And he was just work, work on LinkedIn, just really concentrate on LinkedIn. And I just thought, okay, I've missed that one. That's why Gary's dead famous. Cause he's worked on it.
Paul Lacey: [00:54:08] I looked at his LinkedIn profile while we're on trust and Facebook and WordPress and mix them all together.
So obviously w you know, we as a customer. For for, um, hosting this WordPress, Bob, I don't know if that's what you use as well, but but basically, Facebook just announced that releasing a podcasting platform and it's, while we've got everyone just shaking it, it's just worth this is, this is the thing, like RSS is like something that hasn't really been a corrupt.
As such. And one of the terms of service that people need to know about, if they're thinking about using Facebook as a podcasting platform, is that Facebook reserves the right to, I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:02] know,
Paul Lacey: [00:55:03] take your content. I know, mash it up with other things. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine the political you know, to the left or to the right of mashing up people's words were combined with their ability to detect audio to text and basically go, we need a bunch of famous podcasts to say this message and let's make a montage episode. And if you, I don't think any serious creators will use the Facebook platform apart from the ones that probably get paid to be brand ambassadors of the podcast platform itself, but it's I just, I just think podcasts, I actually think podcasts will survive that.
And I don't think that it will, it will have a big effect on the true content that people want to speak about. But if you want, if you have a podcast and you want to keep it to, to be your content in your place, WordPress and your own podcast host is the way to go keep your freedom of speech on manipulated.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:11] I read that piece over the weekend because it was over the weekend. It didn't make it into this week, so I'll probably make it into next week news, but I was really curious about it. And I just saw that as another AI grab. I just saw that as another great way of Facebook getting, because it'll probably go along with transcripts and so there'll be able to mine everybody's voices to, you know, figure out what word I'm sure they're pretty good at that already, but uh, as another way of doing that, but I guess in a sense they've got.
They've got this maturity, haven't they? Facebook where everybody by default is on it. And there just seemed to be a F a few of us. Who've got you know, Beard's growing and stuff to do with that. And but I, it does worry me. And then you see people like Spotify. I actually had to download the Spotify.
I'm not Spotify subscriber because there was a podcast that I really wanted to listen to. And it was walled insight. It wasn't paywall. It was just walled inside of Spotify because they paid to have it made. And by Spotify, Putting notifications on my phone. I must've had seven or eight this week, just trying to get me to upgrade and offer me this sort of three, three months free tier.
And I've hovered over it a few times thinking there's quite a lot of good content in there's quite a few. I wouldn't, I've got a different thing, so I didn't in the end, but it just worries me that podcasts are becoming a bit of a commodity in the same way that lots of other things I've done over the years.
Yeah. I was just
Bob Dunn: [00:57:36] reading, there was a scathing review of an, I can't remember a famous comedian that started a podcast. Cause all the actors and comedians that are doing it, and this person basically said, this comedian broke every rule of podcasting. He rambled. It was a worthless show. It was, I mean they, they think because of who they are, they can do it.
And so it just, yeah it's growing out and as Paul was saying, yeah, I on Twitter, somebody had shared highlighting all the terms of service. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what Paul and I said, of course I won't do it. Until hell freezes over. But if you're thinking about this, at least look at these terms before you do this, because yeah, sure.
People will jump on the bandwagon, especially since they think, oh, podcasting, I've been wanting to do it and now, Ooh, Facebook's doing it. Oh, this is cool. I could just be in here with all my friends. I can do a podcast and everybody will listen to me. So yeah, they're rolling with the punches there, which is unfortunate, but, and that's, it's not surprising either.
It was like when I saw it, I shuttered for a moment. And then I got up off the ground and did my stuff, I was like, okay, I'll just say this. And you make your decision.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:48] Yeah. I put the way that I use the Facebook group that we have is that I just put the. The link back to the website.
So if new content is produced, we just post the link and say, come and listen to it. And obviously you've got the RSS feed. So the audio can be consumed directly into your phone and downloaded onto your phone, but it sits inside of the WordPress. Sorry. The WP builds account. If you like, there's a whole list of all the episodes we produce and it feels like the RSS system isn't trying to take anything, but I did once or twice put the entire podcast episode in our face, in our Facebook group.
And I thought this is silly. What's the point of that? So we stopped doing that. I stopped doing what's, what's the difference? Oh, sorry. I want to come back to Chris, cause he had a different opinion about that as well. He can't cope with LinkedIn the inbox spam on LinkedIn. Okay. Okay. That's fair.
Robert Jacobi: [00:59:46] There there's a lot, but it's actually pretty easily ignorable span.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:55] Yep. And Andrew Palmer. Hi, Andrew. Nice to have you with us. He says, what's the difference between Facebook live and Facebook podcast? I think the podcast is going to be an audio only thing. And I think you send it directly to them as opposed to doing it live.
So you pre-record your podcast and then you send it over to Facebook and they take on the job of promoting it across Facebook as part of the normal feed, but then they. Ownership. I don't think they take ownership of it, but they take ownership to the extent that they can do whatever they want with it, so they can chop it up and use this sentence against that sentence.
And presumably mix it up with other people's work as well. So it might get, in enrichment chemistry,
Paul Lacey: [01:00:35] like a fashion, like a, a fashion thing, it might be like, oh, let's summarize what the influencers are saying about, the best baseball cap to wear in the WordPress space or something like that.
And they could combine, different people saying this or saying that, and it would make sense to someone who just wants to kind of summary of like different voices from podcasts. But I think the. I think the ability to misuse it, which, these big companies they do. So is the, is the big worry.
And the worry is at some point maybe they'll change the terms and conditions to say, if you want to stream live to Facebook platform, then you lose that as well. And then that will be a big problem. But I think some of these established things, it's harder for them to change, bring in something new audience.
Everyone wants to start a podcast sort of thing. Then they will go near a lot of customers for that. But yeah. And you'll be stuck on there.
Yeah. You'll
Bob Dunn: [01:01:33] be stuck, you'll be like, if you're going to start it and you think, oh, this would be great to that on my site. And you know, It's where it started.
It's going to stay there at least up to that point.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:48] So I, I've not been a big user of Twitter at all. And in fact, to the point where I had to get done, maybe we were talking about earlier and Paul on various occasions to actually show me how it works. Cause I genuinely don't get it. I just get frustrated, but I don't understand still don't poll.
I'm really sorry. I know you tried your best, but my head is too thick. I still don't understand if I see it. And I know that there's context. Somebody wrote something before that, which led to it. I still can't figure out how to play it all backwards. I have no idea how that works. And I've tried.
I've really tried. I'll make
Bob Dunn: [01:02:25] a
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:25] video Nathan, instead, honestly, Bob, here's my promise. And it will be, this is a sincere promise. It, no matter how good your video is, I still won't get it. There's just some block. There's a channel but isn't there. Because it can't always be a straight line.
Can it can't always be this person started it and then it just went straight down. Doesn't it? Some I know it bifurcate and go off in.
Robert Jacobi: [01:02:52] Yeah, exactly. You could have a weird thread tree coming off of it. So maybe you might wind up inside of a tweet thread and then you got to go back up and then look for the other replies and yeah,
they're more
or useful threading functionality.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:11] See, this is why I like the whole WordPress thing. It's just dare. It is just it's criminological. Just the further down you go. The older it is. That's all there is to it. There's nothing like, oh, of course. It's nested comments. Shut up Wrigley. It's time to move on about WordPress. When you get
Paul Lacey: [01:03:28] to let's come back to the business one in a minute, just a quick mention of this.
This plug, a new plugin been announced and launched by Ben Gill banks, who is his website is binary moon.co.uk. And he's created a plugin. It says, Hey, it takes control of the WordPress plugin and theme notification. So if you scroll down a little bit, Nathan, you'll see the it's all these crazy notifications that, this, oh, it's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:56] not an actual screenshot.
Paul Lacey: [01:04:01] let's look like that when I haven't done enough to spend, using managed WP updates or something like that, and log in and oh, wow. Um, so anyway, this he was, Ben seems to be a bit perturbed that this wasn't really getting dealt with by the core team, but it was very important.
And so it was created, and this is another thing I love about WordPress has created a really creative way to do this. And what he's actually done is using JavaScript to Hoover up like vacuum cleaner up all the all the notifications and move. Within the document object model into this little button where all the notes notifications are, which is exactly what it makes sense where the notifications should be.
So he's also argues in the article. First of all, well done Ben amazing plugin. I'm looking forward to trying it out. And a lot of people get annoyed with those notifications. Second, he also addresses why he hasn't just tried to contribute to the core. And what he basically said was he doesn't really have time to do that.
He's got more time to have the discussion about doing it with the core contributors. It's better use of his time to just do it and releases it as plugin. But he was, he's hoping that the core team will see what is done. See if it gets good traction. And then, maybe this concept of an idea will work where that's, where the notifications they've, I'm interested to see.
If it's Yoast and jet pack proof can Yoast and jet pack get past his plugin. And so you get all of the useful, all the useful ones end up in the notification bar, but ghosts, a black Friday deal will still make it through. Probably we'll see.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:46] I think Ben ought to also introduce another plugin called notifications plus or pro and it just literally fills your WordPress website with notifications, just tons and tons of notifications.
This is so sensible. I absolutely love this. I love the implementation. I didn't know what you just described that it's actually not rewriting things. It's just a PHP.
Paul Lacey: [01:06:10] There is some PSP, obviously the concept is that the page loads is JavaScript knows what the rappers look like for all the notifications.
It grabs them all and moves them. Over here, behind the little thing we've done, this is the way
to do it. A little bell,Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:28] just ding, ding. You know it for weeks and weeks. It's just there. That's the only negative we've been talking about this for month seven. We pull yes.
Robert Jacobi: [01:06:37] Every other application in the world.
Does it?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I also think, and we've mentioned this in the past. What you could have, like tears in there, you could have an area where, so admin core things go, that could be a second for advertising. You could permit certain plugins to send adverts your way and they just live in the advert pain.
You know, you want the pro version for a 50 person. Consumer adverts, but they go up there. And guys have got a good
solution. You can, you you can decidePaul Lacey: [01:07:11] which ones you're interested in is your database going slow or whatever, you can do that. And you can hook it up to an, a third party thing like slack so that you can get those notifications there.
So I think if you combine something like Ben's idea there of where it would live within the WordPress admin and then some useful kind of API ideas, which his concept of just using JavaScript to move them wouldn't work that would need to be some kind of API that hooked into them or something.
It would be great to see that in the future at some point. And but if not, we have plugins, we can just install this and don't need to worry about it.
Robert Jacobi: [01:07:48] I know on like post status, they've talked a lot about a notification plug-in but it's open source so you can always get around it. Of course, if you want to it'll be curious if a notification.
API notifications API is created whether the plugin repository would mandate its use to be allowed, onto WPS.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:16] Sorry. I was just trying to put the the, the URL east made it part of his tool belt plugin. It looks like which is a suite of other similar level of sensible
tools.
Yeah.
Sensible stuff. But you can see it. It's a, this is what it looks like on wordpress.org tool belts. Oh, look at that hex again with with a wrench in it. It's a good idea for a logo. It's an awesome yellow as well. Isn't it? What kind of great taste? Not sure about that hammer though. Ben. Honestly, you're really overdoing it with the hammer,
Paul Lacey: [01:08:51] the knife, and you're covering up Robert's face.
No,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:53] I just realize that I'm so sorry, Robin. Let's
Paul Lacey: [01:08:56] move on to the yeah, let's do it. Unless you've got anything you wanna say about the the, the nature cations we've got a really nice article.
Robert Jacobi: [01:09:05] I would just love to see it,
Paul Lacey: [01:09:07] push some direction in court. Yeah. Okay. So next up we have a article and a a huge research project that WP engine has done.
And it where's my glasses. I need those on to read this, but so they've done a huge report. There was some important people Dr. Chris Brower and Vanson Bourne, which both sound um, some kind of superheroes from Philips actually combined. So you know, they know what they're talking about clearly um, they've, Dave together with European engine and over a hundred individuals and organizations come up with what they feel the value of the WordPress economy is.
And they've put a figure on it to be estimated in 2020, around 596 billion and likely to grow to 635 billion by the end of 2021. I don't think it includes for instance, revenue that goes through a product like WooCommerce. I think this is just talking about the value of the hosting companies, the agencies, the plugins, the themes, everything, what everything is potentially capitalized us.
So clearly a huge A huge economy. We all know it's big, a couple of highlights from the report. There's an infographic. You can check out if you go to their their post scalability, 41% of the internet is built on WordPress. It's probably more than that already. More than 82 million WordPress sites, 35% of the top 10,000 sites are built on WordPress 635 billion by the end of 21, that's 6.5 year increase, 89% of user survey.
Believe that WordPress community will continue to grow over the next five years. It's just numbers after numbers of, Big stuff. Getting bigger, you know, it's just getting bigger and we have on the show today. Some people who I think understand this better than myself and Nathan Bob, first of all you have your, your WooCommerce podcast and, the value of this particular product where your commerce.
And I don't know if you've seen this report yet, or if you've got any comments on it at all. And Robert, from your own point of view, you've been involved in the business side of WordPress forever. You know, so we're really interested to hear your opinions on this one.
Bob Dunn: [01:11:43] Yeah I did. Yeah, pretty darn cool.
I actually downloaded the ebook, but have yet to really dive into that. I guess to me, is it's nice to put it in perspective? I think we all knew it was big. But putting numbers and putting this data in front of us, obviously prove that point. Yeah. And it's yeah. It's not exclusive of who commerce it's who commerce of course has getting that whole space in the last year and a half has just skyrocketed and it's, it's insane.
I can, you it could go on and on and just from having people on the podcast and my own experiences and what people are doing as far as setting up sites it's yeah. There's, there's, obviously continued growth that's going to be happening there. Yeah. It's overall, I don't really have any deep insight to it.
It's one of those things that I read through and there was just like I was nodding. Yeah. That makes sense. I can see, it wasn't, it didn't surprise me. And I think, I mean, all of us have been in this space long enough and seen it grows. So it's just to me, it was refreshing to see it actually down in numbers versus, and just, this is how much of the web we capture and so on and so forth.
It gives a bit deeper that yeah, word press is still on its way to maturity. So I think it's good stuff, obviously.
Robert Jacobi: [01:13:19] If we think about what I'm going to take a slight tack to this for just a second if we think that WordPress will also be Gutenberg and how will Gutenberg and block editor transform other experiences, w w we're going to get, but, tumbler coming into play, as, how will that evolve?
Will that become a much more pleasant alternative to Facebook? Will, you You know, things like day one, we'll probably hit some exact what you just laid out on the show, those are all going to become WordPress defied too. So it's not just your traditional WordPress site that is now being included in all of this.
That number is going to grow it to some degrees exponentially, as other tool sets, start taking advantage of some really cool stuff. Again, that's why I love Gutenberg because that can be transformational for a lot of projects. But back to the more interesting question and which completely struck me as, huge number of this is interesting WP engine, put it out.
Why did WP engine spend all this time and money to.
For that I said last year that they're going to file to go public in 2021. And this only lends more credence. I wish I had some more fun to info on you know, scoops on that. Like this to define the marketplace it just screams and we're the, we're going to be the big guys in this marketplace.
You
Paul Lacey: [01:14:57] know, they actually say that in the article then if she's noticed, like they said, it's about 15 times mentioned Topia engine, the world's most trusted WordPress technology company announced the results of it. And that the world's most trusted WordPress technology company is mentioned so many times in the ebook and the PR I think, I, I don't know how they validated that.
I dunno how you self validate something like that, but it seems to be like a slogan as such that they're keen to use. And you're, you're obviously right. It's um, I think every time, one of them I can give another percent on the you know, the use that the share price of automatic would go up a little bit as well.
But I'll tell you what I had. I was on Adobe tonic panel show a few weeks ago, Spencer forum, footnote forum for Mormon had this really crazy. I've always crazy. But it was funny and I don't know, maybe scary and realistic prediction. He was like, and Jonathan, Walt was on it as well. And Spencer predicted that we, you got automatic, which apparently capitalized at something like 3 billion.
I don't know where these numbers come from, but I'm just gonna just go with what he said. Anyway, Andy weeks is capitalized at 15 billion, so it's five times bigger than automatic and automatic. It's flagship is WordPress obviously. And. And the Spencer was, was predicting and he was like willing to put money down with Jonathan Wald that Wix would buy elemental and fork it and create that own fork of WordPress just to, as he would say stick the thumb in your eye.
I think that's how he says it to automatic and And if you are a company that in technically as, five times the amount of billions of dollars of the, the main company behind WordPress, then it's not an impossible thing that could happen to come to actually go, okay, these are reports that are great, but watch this boom.
I thought it was fairy tale, but who knows these days,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:09] do you remember a couple of weeks ago, Paul? It was more than a couple of weeks. It was more like six weeks ago that the falling out somewhat publicly of Matt Mullenweg again. And I forgive people out there that the man behind Wix. Yeah. And and yeah, you never know some sort of tit for tat billion dollar acquisition, just to,
Paul Lacey: [01:17:30] If they've got that much money they could afford to buy our element or probably who clearly are going in direction of forking WordPress at some point probably is what most people
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:40] think.
I think.
Robert Jacobi: [01:17:42] Okay. So I think thanks for that heads up Paul, because I don't think that's crazy in the slightest. In fact, I'll double down and say, I'd be surprised if it didn't happen. There's a reason element and Torres building element or cloud. That is going to be the Wix suffocation of WordPress and WordPress wants to, you know, have its cake and eat it too.
I think that's a no brainer. And here's the other thing, they're both local companies, they're both Israeli companies, so I'm sure there's a lot of, of that local networking that happens. So again, I would be shocked if it did not. At some point,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:25] I think the best thing about this article is we all get to just put our fingers in our little fingers and I'm asking go half a trillion dollars.
Oh. So much money. Got it. It's as much as I can manage to buy a bowl of cereal, half a trillion dollars number. There must be European countries whose GDP doesn't really, yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:18:49] In the report it says that would be something like the 39th richest country in the world. If and I can't remember something like that.
Yeah. It's a, it's worth it. It's worth a good look. Obviously they've got two smart people and, talk to a lot of organizations about this. And it's all paper, money, a lot of it. But still, I think it's just reflective of the overall situation that it's huge and growing very quickly.
Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [01:19:22] For me, the whole thing is what I, when I look at this, I always joked about before I got into WordPress 13, 14 years ago, I was in the real business world. That's how I say it. And it's a sarcastic thing, with everything that's going on, that we're talking about here with the acquisitions, everybody's saying, Ooh, our little community what's happening to it.
And I just think it's business as usual. If you lived in the business world, this is constantly happening and WordPress is getting to the size where, yeah, it's just, it's open source. It has its unique community, but it's also part of business overall, globally. It's, you none of this surprises me.
It's in fact sometimes. Tickled by it. I think, wow. People are acting like. Other businesses now they're, they're looking at it and acquiring other businesses and yeah, we moan and groan about, and people have attitudes about it, if you built a huge business and you've been successful at it and somebody 10 times larger than you says, I want to acquire you, that's an accomplishment.
That's not a failure or a, I've given up type thing. That's huge. So I think we're just becoming more, a little bit more mainstream and it freaks out, especially the core community. Cause He used to stand around, hold our hands and sing kumbaya. And now it's okay, now now we're Wu.
We're entering the real business world here. And so it's yeah, it's just an interesting
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:56] perspective. I want to just say, pull, remember the words standing around singing kumbaya. That's gotta be the title of this episode. That's so good. Sorry, Robert, carry on.
Robert Jacobi: [01:21:10] I remember one of my points now. I totally lost the other one.
I will probably remember. So just back to the Wix thing, just to, so people have names the CEO, founder of Wix is of a shy but a hommie. So just for reference, but I think where WordPress is today is where Linux was, 15, 20 years ago. You have, you, you had the Susie's, uh, red hats IBM's, all these companies that were, you know, had this mature.
Know, operating system in this case that you know, create a businesses out of a huge businesses, billion dollar businesses. And this is exactly what's happening with WordPress and, that's awesome, that because it's open source it, the beauty of it, it doesn't actually kick out anything from the community and you can still actually do, if you want to have intro to WordPress, commuting, folk, and little meetups and things like that.
That's great. And yes, business will take over the much larger events, but that's okay. Whereas you compare it to something like Microsoft events. You really gotta you gotta get to that before. You can actually really take part in something like ignite and maybe overselling that, that point.
You really have to have already been paid for the partnerships paid for this, all this kind of. There's I would say there's a bit more friction to get into those kinds of communities versus again, open source or Linux or,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:44] yup. Yeah. That's a good point. That Linux comparison is excellent.
I hadn't thought about that, but that's a really good one. It fast running out of time. So I'm just going to quickly pull us. I'll do this one very quickly. Very quickly. If I can find it. Yep. Here it is. It's a piece on WP Tavern, speaking of acquisitions. And what have you automatic, as we've just been mentioning has acquired a basically it's an iPhone and Mac app.
It does have a an Android app, but it's a poor relation to the, the iPhone app journaling app. And by journaling, you really, this is content that you create just like you would a blog. The, the audiences you the intention is that this isn't published online. Although I think automatic have plans to allow this to, at some point you could maybe make a blog out of this and publish things.
And what have you, but I just thought this is a really curious acquisition because it's right in Automatic's wheelhouse, content creation, there's an editor, upload images, upload a in this case, audio and video and things like that. And it's goes into a feed your own public feed, sorry, private feed by date.
I just thought this was a really great acquisition. Everything about it. Yeah, the UI is lovely,
Paul Lacey: [01:24:06] but you can imagine, cause I know that he's just a theory. I wonder if they're interested in going, okay, let's buy this app and let's migrate something like the block editor into it at some point.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:18] I know exactly how that goes. Yeah. Yeah. He's used this as a test
Robert Jacobi: [01:24:21] case. Same thing is occurring for a Gutenberg and the block editor.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:26] Yeah. And it's uh, it's uh, a service which they on top of every aspect of this, but it's $24 a year, so it's a minimal amount of money, but it's a fantastic revenue stream.
Paul Lacey: [01:24:39] Yeah. Yeah. It's almost prime for saying, let's see if we can make the mobile app version of Gutenberg work for this and, yup. Yup. Because we're interested in people who've made like chat apps haven't they I've got some bag blocks and yeah, it's early days, but
Robert Jacobi: [01:24:56] I'm trying to think of how this will all be connected.
So we have let's start from the day. Portion, you have day one as your mobile, quick, easy interface to publish content. I do use the WordPress app, but this but day, one's just got that look and feel and easily. And then of course, maybe I'm publishing it to tumbler all of a sudden, which is actually now a WordPress site, which is accessible not only on tumbler, but also accessible via private domain or you know, a top level domain.
And all this stuff is all going to be interconnected. Don't worry. I I'm genuinely impressed with the thinking behind the sort of the content ecosystem that's growing up because I love it. And then, at some point, who's going to be hosting all this well in the case of if you're publishing the Tumblr and to your wordpress.com, it's great money for automatic.
Yup. Yup. And I would imagineNathan Wrigley: [01:26:01] that there'll be at some point in the future, there'll be, some kind of API hook to your WordPress website, whether that's dot com or.org, and you'll be able to just push it off and it's a bit of an upsale, isn't it? And you can publish it onto your platform.
There was definitely mentioned in Sarah Gooding's article about the public nature of it, but it is just curious, the idea that the intention of a WordPress website is always to produce stuff and it be visible. This is exactly the opposite. You produce stuff, and it's completely invisible because much of it is private it's pictures of your children.
It might even be things that you know, you really don't want to share. They're very personal and it allows you to do that. And Chris Hughes in the comments can things, Christopher, oh, sorry. Robert blocking you out again. It says he's been a paid customer for many years. It's absolutely fine. I started using it this week and even though the Android app is, like I said, a poor relation, it's still good enough for me.
And and I signed up I just
Robert Jacobi: [01:26:52] want to make sure that this great content model that. Third parties aren't excluded and that's, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, automatic bot it's their option. But I think for, kind of those things like with patch stack and cloud ways, how can we make sure that some of this is still connected to the greater ecosystem?
And while I believe Matt has that in mind, there's other forces that might take over. Let's say, no, this is all going to be within our silo.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:21] What was curious as well as the, in the comments over on the day, one side of things. Cause obviously they've got their customer base. A lot of people over that side of things perceive automatic to be the dark enemy.
They see them as this big giant corporation, which is really not how I see them because of where I'm seeing them from and the heritage that I've got. But obviously 1500 employees they've got this and they own this and they own this and they own this and they've come in and they're going to ruin our app.
And a lot of people literally bolt runaway canceled their subscription. Whereas I'm exactly the opposite. I'd never heard of them. Now I'm a subscriber,
Robert Jacobi: [01:27:58] Every acquisition there's going to be a minority for the most part. They're like, I just don't want to be part of this. That's fine.
Okay. Yep. And, on the whole, the other thing, don't forget automatic has a significant sum from Salesforce ventures. Talk about your dark enemy. I'll take automatic over Salesforce. Yeah. Easier to use on the Salesforce calls. Sorry.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:22] Yeah. Um, anything that bulb
Bob Dunn: [01:28:25] you know, I haven't, I think it's cool.
Yeah. I love it. I haven't checked it out. I just, looked out through the article. Last time I journaled it was when I was a teenager and I would never want a public anyway, but you know, and that journaling back then it was a pencil and a notebook, of course, at that point. Cause there was no, not these kinds of options, but yeah.
I, I just think it's, it's a, no-brainer when I saw it, it's one of those things. I just like Robert was saying it just echo it's like automatic about this. Wow. That makes total sense content, and, and what the future of it holds. Um, yeah, for the users, I think it's like. Great
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:06] integration.
The problem is it's gonna, it's gonna either force me to get an iPhone or hope that they come out with a better app. So for example, on the Android side, you can't do things like you can't shoot video and you can't include audio. You can just put pictures in and what have you, but even on that basis, it's worth doing.
I really like it. Right. We're onto the final home stretch and it's. To introduce. I hope Chris Hughes is still here because we're we're going to mention, have I missed something out? No, I haven't. Let's go. Let's do Chris's first. Let's do it in this order. We've got two pieces this week. All really doing the same kind of thing.
Big shout out to Chris Hughes. He's been a long time listener of this and he, this week has launched a well to say that he's launched it. It's not quite true. This is he's asking you to join his founder's list and you can see on the screen WP broker, it's a WP broker.com and they're describing themselves as the WordPress acquisition marketplace.
And you can go and join. It says it's going to be launching in mid 2021. This is quite interesting, no commission fees or platform lock-ins, we're going to make buying and selling the buying and selling process. Easy for all parties. We've been going on about the. So many mergers and acquisitions going on in the WordPress space.
And so Chris has decided that he wants to act as a sort of conduit somebody that's going to facilitate those kinds of transactions to take place. So I want you to give a big shout out to Chris for that. So that's WP, broker.com and I'm sure Chris wouldn't mind me also mentioning that this week by I'm sure it's pure coincidence.
Arrival came out at the same time called a flip WP at flipped wp.co seemingly doing more or less the same thing as far as I can read it anyway, perhaps Chris, you could come on the show one day. That'd be nice and talk all about it. I'm doing the same thing. This one is in Polson and. Alex and thank you Alex standing behind this as well and proporting to do the same thing, connect businesses.
I don't know if there's a different fee structure or a different way that they're going to communicate with one another and what have you. But whereas as far as I could work out yet last week, you didn't have any choices for this. You had to go and find these people or yourself and do the negotiations yourselves.
Now you've got potentially two choices looks to me like the flip WP one might be already up and running. And the the WP broker one is the waitlist starting later in the air. But yeah, I just thought I'd like to give Chris a bit of a shout-out and I'd mentioned the rival as well. Oh, there we go.
He's made a comment. Sorry, Robin. All comp. So Chris has made a comment. Thanks, Nathan. All competition is healthy. How many form plugins do we have? Good. Good point. So there we go. If anybody's got anything to say,
growing market, when you're,Robert Jacobi: [01:32:06] when you have enough players in the action with enough money.
This pops up, no matter what I mean, there are hosting brokers that have been around for ages even longer. There have been franchise brokers. If you want to get your buy and sell your McDonalds, those have been around for 50 years. So these are just signs of a growing mature market. And that's fantastic for everyone involved.
Bob Dunn: [01:32:27] Yeah. And that's what I, but I look at it when I looked at it, I never had different stuff from different comments on Twitter about it and not really care what, people saying, this kind of model would work. This kind of model blown. This is the way I do it or whatever. I've never sold or bought a business.
So I don't really focus on the actual workings of it. Both of them people know what they're doing, they're going to work it out. They're going to work out the kinks, however, to get the business working. But I look at it as Robert said, yeah, It's again, it's a maturity of WordPress. And I look at it from a different perspective where I think of people that are outside looking in now, and even people within WordPress, this kind of reconfirms everybody.
Wow. There's actually a site where people can buy and sell WordPress businesses that aren't aware that the dynamics are there and there's incredible businesses out there that others do want to get their hands on. And that brings the whole ecosystem to another level. Just like I was saying, going into the real world of business, it's Hey, you know, this is impressive, A WordPress business.
Now you can go specifically there. It's just not going on whatever it's like flipper or something like that. And scouring through everything. This is again, showing that we've got some, meeting the game here and things are happening and there's a lot of potential exciting businesses out there that, you know, people that want to buy them, people that want to sell them.
Yeah.
Robert Jacobi: [01:34:00] So go back. This is nothing new. It's just new for WordPress. Private and there's, some of these WordPress, just anecdotally some of the, some of these buy sell deals are really inexpensive, at some who's put their time and they don't know how to push it forward.
They're done. They just want to get rid of it. I've seen things come across the wire less than, $50,000, which is, a steal, if you want to put some effort into it and do something with it. You know, Those doctors and lawyers with some sort of play investment money that they have around now are hearing WordPress more and more, in the business news.
And you know, are like, okay, let me try something for 10 or $20,000. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:34:49] Yeah. Speaking of which I've decided to put WP builds up for sale for the, for the 8, 8, 8 pounds 50, maybe that's a bit much, we'll go for eight, $8 25, to be honest,
Paul Lacey: [01:35:03] Chris lemma did do an article. The expectations of what people value them.
So you might
Nathan Wrigley: [01:35:10] want to just check, I think I've aimed a bit higher and I've gone a bit blue sky there. Okay. 2 52. You done? All right. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. No only actual coin. There is a couple of things that we want to mention. Bob's put something in the show notes for this, Bob. I am literally going to hand it over to you if that's all right.
I'm going to put on the screen, the piece that you've you've brought to our attention this week, it's called summit 2021. Tell us about.
Bob Dunn: [01:35:41] Yeah, I'm actually I'm I brought it up because it's a little shameless self promotion, but that's perfectly. Yeah, but it is I, I understand, I didn't attend the last year's one, but it was very successful.
It's more around the digital content space quite a wide array of speakers. It's not, all WordPress and yeah, I'm going to be talking more around you know, expanding your site or using WooCommerce and ways to help you. Monetize your content, but it's yeah. It's I would definitely check it out.
I've I haven't spoke there, done a presentation in person or whatever for a long time. So this was very stressful for me. So be kind when you see me be a talking head for 30 minutes, because it was like freaking me out. Nobody else to talk to. So it, yeah, I would definitely yeah, yeah. Check it out. It's free.
It's one day. It's not going to take, consume your life forever and some interesting stuff there.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:36:47] This is great. Look at this. There's a whole laundry list of people shooting across our screen. I should say the URL that I'm seeing on the page is impossible for me to give to you. It's just a string of pseudo random noise, but basically if you go to events dot WP, engine.com and you search for summit 2021, the date is Ooh.
It's like starting at the end of this week, June 24th. So in a few days,
Robert Jacobi: [01:37:11] time, just the.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:37:14] Thank you and you
Bob Dunn: [01:37:14] can join it and that'll be there in the chat during my presentation. And you can tell me how badly I did or how if I did. Okay. I appreciate
Nathan Wrigley: [01:37:23] it. Oh, that's lovely. I have just got one quick one.
We got time for this. I don't think, yeah, we'll do the, we'll just do one. If you're watching this on the screen, your fine, but if you're not watching this on the screen, you can't watch it. It's just a robot. Check this little robot out, look at it, go. I'm describing it. It's like this. It's like a little trolley with two wheels.
I don't know where this is made, but it's got two wheels and it can jump. It jumps by creating this spring action and then it flips itself over and I've saw this and I just can't get enough of watching it. I've watched it on repeat about 15 times thinking, how would you make that?
How would that, how is that even possible? I'm terrified about robots and things like that. Is this
Robert Jacobi: [01:38:10] one of the competitors in the Tokyo Olympics for the,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:38:16] we should have an Olympics for robots. That'd be great. That'd be really fun, but anyway, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Where literally you tried to get a robot to run as a human, across a hundred meters and do pole vaulting and all that kind of stuff. That'd be quite entertaining.
Paul Lacey: [01:38:35] Robots, axing, each other is and growing each other is more interesting than that
Nathan Wrigley: [01:38:40] you ever see years ago.
And it's probably still going on. There are the there's this competition, this big international competition where you can bring your robot and you don't know the task, but it's got to do a human related task. It might be get here's the robot. And the robots all have to look like humans. That is to say two arms, two legs and a head, something like that.
And they put them in a scenario and you don't know what it is. So it might be as simple as getting out the car. So they just put the robot in a cart. Now you program the robot to go. It is so funny because 99.9% of the time, the robots. Parallettes Stickley drunk, you're sort trying, ever so hard and then they just fall sideways and then sometimes it's just reaching out and opening a door handle or something, and that, they get quite close and miss and then miss again, and then miss again and fall over all, not have a car.
It's so good. Anyway, that's it. That's all we got time for. That was a really 10 cent robotics. Is that what it's. Robert, sorry, covered your face up again. They own half of epic games. Ooh. Okay. That's where it came from, right? That's it. We've got no more time for anything this week. I would just like to say a sincere thanks.
That was a really enjoyable episode. Thanks to Bob, Don.
Bob Dunn: [01:39:56] Yep. Thank you for having me. Can I just mention one quick thing real quick. I've got to share this. I learned a new words. I've been struggling lately.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:40:04] What is ?
Bob Dunn: [01:40:06] It's a 17th century term to work ineffectively to be extremely busy while achieving absolutely nothing that has become my favorite word now because I find myself struggling here and there.
So I just had to share that
Nathan Wrigley: [01:40:20] modeling is the ability to what protect basically to pretend to work.
Bob Dunn: [01:40:24] Yeah, it's just being extremely busy and achieving nothing. And I found myself doing that sometimes. So as Allie
Paul Lacey: [01:40:33] did not find that a problem for our title of the show this week. Now we've got two serious
episodes
Nathan Wrigley: [01:40:45] it's already winning. Thank you so much. I forgot about that. I confess I missed it in the show notes. Thanks for dropping that in. And thank you, Robert pleasure, having you on the show. We'd like to have you both back. I'm sure. Paul, we've got the awkward bit coming up. You put Bob and Robert, you don't know this bit yet, but we don't know how long it takes for streaming out to cut the stream.
When I click and broadcast, it's an indeterminate amount of time. I'm giving it the I'm giving it the concert. J it's J amount of seconds, but I don't know what J is. It's the indeterminate constant. And here it comes. So we're going to wave say goodbye for now. Bye everybody. Thank you. Bye-bye.