This Week in WordPress #172

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 172. I look like I'm a skateboarder in my late forties. It was published on Monday, the 19th of July, 2021. I'm Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by my cohost Paul Lacey, and this week also by Joe Casabona. Unfortunately Tim Nash, wasn't able to join us this week, but we'll have him back on another day.
There's plenty to talk about as always WordPress 5.8 is coming down the line very soon. And we talk about some updates to the media library. Astra have launched some new templates for BeaverBuilder and Ella mentor. I've got a new color picker tool and the ability to save entire websites in version 3.0.
There's a critical vulnerability in WooCommerce, which needs updating and cloud ways. I've got a way for you to re-install and back up anything that you've deleted, which is a really nice update. There's also quite a long conversation that we have about a WP Tavern article entitled, contributing to open source is better than any college degree.
And we also get into the subject of podcasting because automatic half bought pocket costs. One of the most popular podcasting apps. There's a couple of other things towards the end, but that's mainly it. I hope that you enjoy it. This weekend. WordPress was brought to you by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split test in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress.
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test.com. Hello? Hello. Hello. How are we all doing nice to, uh, nice to see ya, Paul and Joe. How's it going?
Joe Casabona: [00:02:08] Doing very well. Thank you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:09] Nice,
Paul Lacey: [00:02:10] Paul. Likewise doing good. Hot
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:13] play. Playing that game. We're playing that game. Like we've just, haven't spoken two minutes ago. Like
Paul Lacey: [00:02:20] what's going on in your license two minutes ago?
Joe Casabona: [00:02:23] Yeah. I think people should do that at bars. Like they should all meet before they walk into the bar. Talk for a little bit and then walk in, in front of the bartender and be like, Hey, how's it going? Like, it's just a big old show. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:36] That awkward, exact opposite thing as well. Where you say goodbye to someone.
And then you walk in the same direction that happens
Joe Casabona: [00:02:43] to me. 90% of the time I was taking the medicine.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:46] It's such a weird social direction. Anyway, here we are. WP Builds this week in WordPress. We were supposed to be joined today by Tim Nash as well. He sent through his apologies. Um, I won't go into the details, but he's unable to make it.
And, uh, so it's just the three of us today. So we'll be able to, each of us have a little bit of, a little bit of a, more of a chat, which would be quite nice. We, um, we as always are on WP Builds.com forward slash live, um, 2:00 PM UK time every single week, or you might have found us in the Facebook group, WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook.
If you're in the Facebook group and you wish to make a comment, then we won't know who you are, unless you go to the trouble of looking in the original thread. And at the bottom of the original thread will be our link that you need to click to allow. Restream the platform that we're using, right? Uh, to say who your names are.
And it's got this clever feature where it actually works. There's some kind of robot going on and it can post cross posts, all the comments from the different social networks, which is really nice. Anyway, if you want any, you want to put a comment in, please feel free to do so. We'll try to get to as many of them as we possibly can.
Although we've had a brief introduction poll, I feel you should properly introduce our guest.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:01] Yeah. Can I just clarify one thing there, Nathan. Now we've only got one guest today. Do I still get paid full price or. You know, for doing it for doing only one intro.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:10] Oh yeah. You can get a hundred percent of nothing again.
W w you know,
Paul Lacey: [00:04:13] totally. Yeah. The main thing, I just didn't want you to shortchange me on that. So that's cool. All right. Well, we are very lucky to have Joe Casabona back as a guest again, uh, one of my favorite people and friends in WordPress, and there's just too many facets to, uh, what you do, Joe. So I'm going to go from what you've written as your actual injuries.
So Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which was sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course, and being a course creator to help creators freelancers and business owners. And if you want to find more about.
And all the different things he does, you can find him, uh, casabona.org. And also recently I discovered that you are the author of the legendary book, HTML and CSS, Quickstart visual Quickstart guide, which was for any of us back in the late nineties of the book. Have you got one there?
Joe Casabona: [00:05:11] I do. I need to, I need to clarify, uh, I don't just have this as a prop.
I'm working on it. I'm working on a course and I'm referencing my own book because I like the way I teach things the best. Um, I wrote the ninth edition of this book. Uh, so, uh, Liz Castro, uh, wrote most of them. Yeah. Uh, and she, uh, she, and gosh, I'm, I'm awful because I, I forget the name of the person who wrote the eighth edition.
Um, but they decided to, uh, pass the torch because. Pearson and peach pit wanted to do a video course along with the book. So I wrote the book from scratch. If you have, if you have like the older ones, you'll probably notice that this is like a lot thinner. Um, and that's because there is a multiple hours of video content as well, which I think works best for things like CSS, animations and things like that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:14] Yeah. Chuck's flatten them on like 17 pictures. It moves over here and then it goes,
Joe Casabona: [00:06:21] I mean, the pictures are in color, but like imagine a black and white book where it's like the red ball has turned to a blue ball. So, yeah, that's really
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:29] cool. Did you like it, was there any part of you, like for you rewind like 10 years or something, was there any part of you that really desired to write a book?
Has that been an ambition?
Joe Casabona: [00:06:39] Yes. Uh, actually 10 years, uh, November, I guess it will be so 10 years in November. Uh, is when I, uh, got my first book deal, uh, which was building WordPress themes from scratch, published by a little publisher called rackable owned by Envato. Um, and so I'd been writing tutorials for them and they reached out and they said, Hey, do you want to write a book?
Like we're going to pay you a flat fee. It'll basically be like 10 tutorials, how to build a WordPress site. We'll give you a PSD, a Photoshop PSD. Um, and you would create a WordPress theme from that. And I'm like, yes. And the reason I agreed to that is because every publisher I had spoken to before this.
Required that basically you have already published a book for them to publish a book. Um, yeah. And like, it's, you know, it's not like I was going for like small indie publishers. I was going for like the publishers of the books that I learned on. And so they want an experienced author. So I use that book as like a stepping stone about, uh, so after that book was published, probably like a year later, I pitched to peach pit, uh, responsive design with WordPress, a book all about how to make respond to it was pretty new in 2013, um, about everything you need to think about when creating a responsive theme for WordPress and how you can take advantage of WordPress for things like multiple image sizes and things like that.
So, um, yeah, I guess I got the itch. It would have been 2019 that I talked to my publisher and then things got delayed. Of, uh, this big global pandemic, I guess. Uh, but I basically said, I want to do a second version of this book. And they said, nobody in the WordPress space buys books. And I said that tracks for the people I talked to.
Um, I shouldn't say that tracks cause like a lot of people I know where like your book is like what got me into WordPress development and I'm like, that's really nice. Uh, but they said that they want to do a ninth edition of HTML and CSS, a visual quick start guide. Uh, can you do that? And I was like, yes, I can do that.
So, uh, great. It was amazing. Um, it was a, it was a kind of a different book from what I've written in the past, but, um, I'm really glad it's out on bookshelves now. And. Trying to promote it as best I can. I think I'm going to start a podcast. I haven't said this publicly, but I'll probably start a podcast.
You have now about the book. Yeah. Quick start
Paul Lacey: [00:09:17] guide to the book. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:19] I'm just looking on my shelf here. Cause I, I had the like the second day.
Paul Lacey: [00:09:24] All right. The first or second edition. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:27] Green square. Mine was
Paul Lacey: [00:09:28] purple
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:30] that I've got rid of it. I purged quite a few things recently, but that's.
Joe Casabona: [00:09:34] I was wondering what you were looking at.
Yeah. I'm like this guy falling
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:42] of all the technical books, just above that. And it's not there anymore, but it should be, so it's gone. It's been purged, but man alive, I cannot imagine the size of that project. I've never done anything which would require that level of discipline over that.
Paul Lacey: [00:09:57] You have to know everything.
Joe Casabona: [00:09:59] Yeah. Yeah. It was really hard and like shout out to, cause I mean like I'm, self-taught mostly for HTML and CSS, you know, I have my masters in software engineering, so I learned like how to program, but I never took a formal HTML and CSS course. Uh, and so I was writing the book, using things, colloquially, um, you know, kind of interchanging like tag and whatever, um, an element and, and you, you want to get that language right for a beginner.
This is for a beginner. Um, and so like shout out to my editor, uh, Vic, who has experience writing books like this, um, cause like my books are mostly like, here's a concept, here's some sample code and this is more like here's a concept. And then here's like step by step, exactly how to make something. Um, so shout out to, to Vic, my editor who helped me like get the format down.
Right. Um, and then shout out to my tech editor who apparently has all of MDN memorized. Um, so, uh, he, uh, he checked on, you know, and we had some disagreements in some places. Right. I said, like never use the important tag in CSS. Uh, he was like, well, like maybe you should. And I'm like, no, you really shouldn't like, this is really strongly worded.
And I'm like, I have a very strong accent this, um, so, but I mean, he, you know, he made sure I was using the right terminology. And, and like, for example, I didn't realize that definition list changed, like the name of the name of that element. DL changed from definition list to description
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:47] list. Oh, now you're schooling me.
I
Joe Casabona: [00:11:49] didn't know that. I didn't know that because I mean, cause like, oh, well DL are at you to term and then a definition or whatever, but like most people weren't using it for dictionary term. They were using it for like listing other things. So they changed it to description. Uh, in some version of HTML
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:05] five.
Wow, great. Start to the podcast. Well, it's super beginning. That's brilliant. Just give us the title one more time so that we can go out and I'll buy it.
Joe Casabona: [00:12:14] Uh I'll do you want better? You can go to HTML, VQ s.com.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:19] Perfect. HTML vqs.com. I will try to put that in the show notes. Stick it in the private chat. Well, yeah, I'll definitely
Joe Casabona: [00:12:28] remember, um, around my website too, probably.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:31] Yeah, but thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Um, we were, we were supposed to talk about WordPress and so probably yeah. Thrive, you know, get, get into the nuts and bolts of that just before we do, let me make sure the screens are on correctly. There we go. There's the WP Builds.com website. That's where we push all of our content.
I could go into more about that, but let's crack on. Shall we got a fair few articles, actually, a few of them this week, touching on the education space. So hopefully right up your street, uh, Joe, because quite an interesting story came out this week, but let's start with, um, let's start with the sort of core WordPress stuff.
I can't really, whether I'm doing this one or you're doing it. Paul, can you, uh,
Paul Lacey: [00:13:11] yeah, I think I'm going to do the first three, which are quite brief. We don't necessarily, unless somebody wants to go into detail about them. They're just some, some cool things happening in the space. So the first one is on Derby Tavern and it's an article entitled WordPress 5.8 media library changes you should know about.
The main ones. It's just some basically nice upgrades to how the media, how you can interact with the media library. Uh, there's infinite scroll as all the images come in as been replaced with a button that you can press to load more, which is useful. I think I'll particularly find that useful when I'm searching for an image.
And I don't want it to also complete before I'm ready. Uh, but my favorite one really, it was just this tiny little, uh, I don't know what you call it. I kind of, uh, like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:59] a little lady feature. Isn't it? Tiny
Paul Lacey: [00:14:01] little feature. Well, when do you uploaded an image or a document? It straightaway. It gives you the button to copy the URL of that document.
And I can't tell you how many times I've made loom videos or tutorial videos for clients and had to show them this backwards way of, okay, so you upload a document, then you go back out, then you come back in, then you can get the URL, then you can paste it into this page or whatever, but now you upload it and straight away, it gives you that really super useful copy URL to clipboard button.
So you can copy it right there. There's some other stuff like web P um, added, which personally. I'm not fully bought into as yet, but it's showing that there's little things going on in the background outside of Gutenberg and the block editor that are making life better for us who are using WordPress there.
So that was the first one. I don't know if anyone's got anything they want to add to that, or we can move to the next one. It's a blocker
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:56] on webpages. It's safari. I think so. Is it safari on iOS or something? There's a, there's a real legitimate reason not to start using it, or at least there was, but I can't remember what it was.
I do like the, um, I do like the initial thing with the lazy load though. I really like interacting with the lazy load of images and the infinite scroller should say, but having read this article, obviously from a technical point of view, from an accessibility point of view, uh, apparently a lot of those images are just on find-able.
Uh, if you're on a screen reader that they simply don't exist for you. So obviously that's a step in the right direction,
Paul Lacey: [00:15:33] which is. The web page thing, by the way, anecdotally, where I've come across problems with web is where I'm combining web P and caching. And for instance, I've had situations regularly.
So I've stopped using web P uh, whereby a caching. The caching plugin has cashed a non safari version of the page and then delivered a safari version of the page to a non safari version of the page to a safari user. And, and then it can't load the image. So it might all be sorted now. Um, but those are, you know, just whenever I've dipped into web P I've not really had a fantastic experience with it.
And it also from a performance point of view, I know that they perform better, but the current method that the majority of web pea users leverage is that they use a caching plugin that looks at the dock. And does a quick replacement of all the images with web P if the caching plugin or the, the web, uh, plugin figures out that the browser that has been used is able to serve web P.
And what I found in the past is that the delay for that to happen, if you're doing websites in a, in a relatively decent way is bigger than the delay of the images loading well, optimized, JPEG. That's why I'm just not quite there yet. So I think, um, B is just one of the things that at the right time, it's going to be the thing everybody uses.
But for me, it's just not quite there yet.
Joe Casabona: [00:16:59] That's all I know that a web P is recently supported in safari. And I know this because I was just checking. The book we just referenced and I state in it that at the time of this writing web P is not supported by safari. Okay,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:14] good. Okay. Well, we've got no blockers poll Kate let's let's get on it.
Joe Casabona: [00:17:20] Yeah. Also say the great philosopher. Brian Richards taught me a saying about cash. That cash ruins everything around me. Uh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:31] it's a different Cotter cash. Yeah. In Australia they call it cash, I think. Or at least I'll have an Australian friend. Who's a web developer who always calls it cash. So the two can't be confused. I've also
Joe Casabona: [00:17:42] heard cache, which cachet is another thing as well. Right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:48] Was like Q dos. Isn't it. Cool. You are kind of, uh, interesting.
Um, okay. That's that one done? Number two up today. Is this one Astra?
Paul Lacey: [00:18:00] Yeah. So dopey, Astra. I think it is still the most. Um, premium theme out there as far as I'm aware, in terms of installs of the premium version. Um, generally they've been a little bit quiet over the last year or two while some other things.
Come out, you know, um, Blocksi and cadence and a few others that are kind of taking the limelight for a while, especially with the marketers out there in terms of, you know, um, marketing, something new that, that comes out there. So we haven't heard too much from Astro, but they have been bubbling over in the background.
And it's just, it's just, uh, an interesting article for anyone who, who uses BeaverBuilder like me and happens to use Astra as well, that they've set they've, they've created another set of templates for, um, BeaverBuilder users who use Astra. So there's five new templates out there, mostly targeted at things like solo, preneurs and, uh, influencers in terms of what the templates, uh, reference.
I found it interesting because it's just been all blocks for the last year or so, you know, no one has kind of been like, Hey, we're releasing a new set of this for this page builder or that page builder. So I just found it interesting that a theme that. Is, um, has made a video about it made a bunch of templates for it, and he's still pushing, pushing away at what perhaps its customers still like to use.
So, um, I'm probably, I've probably got a slight agenda as to why I think that's good news, but, um, but yeah, why what's that dark night? Yeah. Um, so yeah, that, that was pretty cool news. Um, from my perspective, just to see BeaverBuilder, um, as a page builder, getting some headlines against the, um, the ongoing kind of flow of news about block editor templates that we're constantly, uh, reading about all the time, but really nice as well.
Yeah, they are honestly, I think, um, the next, the next post as well is, um, about elemental actually, they've just done an update. So yeah, you can see that today. I was really just trying to give a bit of a balance across the different ways that people can do things. And there's obviously elemental. You know, where you got Astro is the most popular premium theme.
Elemental is probably the most popular, or at least it's the fastest growing page builder. And also we kind of discovered recently probably accounts for a lot of the growth of WordPress in the last year or so, if you look at the stats now element or this, this particular update from element. It's mainly again about templates and performance.
So they're doing some things to try and help with performance because element was taking a lot of, um, criticism from the inner circle. They're the real hardcore element or users, and it's become, you know, it's taken a bit of a beating in the community at times for its, uh, its problems with performance, which, which are not just its own problems.
It's obviously how you use the tool. But I did hear a CEO from a hosting company the other day, talking about some of their users who used to use traditional page builders like beaver better, and Elementor who had switched to the block editor. And he said that they were accidental Lee, creating more performance sites.
So very loud vehicle just went past, sorry. So it seems that elemental are trying to adjust the performance, but if you do go to their latest posts, which is on their site, and I think it is. Introducing elemental 3.3, revolutionizing. The way you create websites, what you will see is an experience that has been created with elemental.
That is mostly codeless as far as I can probably tell and would be near impossible to recreate with the block editor. So I think one of the things about this is the block editor has got a long way to go. If it wants to enable people to create experiences, like what we're looking at on the screen at the moment, we've all this parallax kind of stuff.
It's not my cup of tea. I'm not really into this kind of everything moves everywhere as you, as you go down. But the fact is you can do it with. So congratulations to, uh, Elementor on their 3.3 launch, um, and making it again easier for their users to create cool websites and to try and constantly help them to make them less heavy on the browser.
So all going in the right direction.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:19] I mean, like, I don't know about the whole animation thing. I preference would be just nice clean text that works for me, but boatload of stuff going on on this page, there really is. And the idea that you can basically, I presume if you're fairly proficient with the tool elemental and not necessarily CSS, transitions and whatnot.
This stuff you can actually do just in a, a gooey is really incredible. It's pretty impressive. Isn't it? It really is impressive. Yeah. There's an awful lot going on. It does take a considerable length of time to scroll to the bottom of this page. Because every time you get to an element, you have to keep scrolling to make the interactions happen.
So for example, at the moment, we're watching all these UI elements appear on the page and then they scroll. And the more that you scroll, the more they move until everything's finally in its place. But that took me about five scrolls on the Mac track pad thing. So there's, there's quite a, you know, it does take quite a lot of time to get through, but boy, is it, is it
Paul Lacey: [00:23:17] blog post?
Well,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:22] yeah, what's in it. They've got, um, they've got these new website kits. Haven't they? Where you can like do the full entire website in a click.
Paul Lacey: [00:23:33] I don't think that they, I think they're reframing from calling it full site editing after getting in a bit of an argument with the core team about that on Twitter, I think.
Um, but essentially they are, you know, offering the same kind of functionality, that ability that we've element, or you can do your photo, your, your head, your archives, your Singapore's templates, connect things to dynamic content, and then save the whole thing as an EMP, as a template that you can then import in one or few clicks to import as a kit that you could deliver as a productized website service.
So they're, they're showing what the future is, whether or not the block editor gets there. This is if the block editor does whatever it wants it to, you will eventually be able to do this with the block editor as well through third parties or for the core itself. But you can kind of see they're really leading the way on that.
So hold on to them.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:26] I am, I watched the video, Ben Pines made a video walkthrough and actually all the CSS transitions and the website kits and all that. Weren't the thing of which I was most impressed with. It was this on the screen at the minute. This is such a great little tool. So it's, it's a color picker.
It's the kind of thing that you've probably got as a Chrome extension. You know, you don't want to know what the color is on this particular part of the site, but it doesn't behave in the way that you might expect. So for example, if you want to color in a button in element, or now you can go to the button element and pick the color picker and just go to some random part of the site where, you know, that's the color I want and click it and your button will instantly become that color.
And that's a really cool little time-saver. I like it. I think that's a really neat, neat little thing.
Paul Lacey: [00:25:11] If you're doing micro sites, you know, there's one page landing pages and stuff like that, and you're using imagery and you want your elements on the page to being naturally tied to the imagery. So. You know, so you break out of your brand.
So elemental is brand colors. I can't remember what they are now, but they used to be pink. And, um, and on a page, like what we're looking at here does kind of like a, uh, uh, sort of, um, beigey purple color. And let's say that was an ad. Then you could use the color picker and make sure that the buttons that you creating worked well with the design that you haven't said, it's stuff that their users want.
And, um, they're, they're always addressing it. Not everyone will be happy. Some people will move to other platforms. Some people go to oxygen, beaver, builder, uh, block editor, but, uh, some of them will stay and, uh, we'll get these new tools to.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:00] I have a nice little Chrome extension. I spent you've all got it.
As well as called hover. I think that's how you pronounce it, um, to do the picking. It's really nice because you can you click the one button and it not only will it do the color picker thing, but it will, you know, it'll show you all the elements as you click on them and what all the CSS is that makes them up on the fonts and what have you, but there's this great feature where it just gives you every single image or video on the screen and you just click one button and it just downloads them all in one zip.
So that's a really nice little feature hover if I, if you never super cool, it is, it's really, it's a real time-saver. Um, I believe it's called hover. If I, let me just click on it in my browser. Uh, yeah, hover, if I put license code in, cause I've only just updated the process, but that's what it's called anyway.
Um, Joe, anything on that? Or should we.
Joe Casabona: [00:26:53] Uh, I mean, I think, uh, no, I don't really have anything good to add, you know, I think between this and BeaverBuilder and the block editor, I think we all have a choice for the, for our preference. Right. For, for at least less, less code. Right. Um, I would be curious to dig into the markup of this and the actual performance.
I mean, this page obviously, uh, is probably a little over the top, then pages should be to show off everything the elements are can do, but, uh, I'd be curious to see, you know, page speed time and, and the markup. Cause I know BeaverBuilder suffers from that a little bit too many embedded data. Um, but I, you know, I think this is really cool.
I think if this is what, uh, Elementor users want. Um, I'm happy to see a company listening to their users instead of just pressing on with whatever roadmap they wanna, they wanna implement.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:48] Hello, Peter, in the comments, he says his fast scrolling mouse often ends up with blank parts of the page. Yeah. That, that is the danger.
Isn't it? You scroll to a point where, you know, it just so happens that it finishes the scroll that you've just initiated on a totally blank thing. Cause it's about to go between two different things. Yeah. That's a, that's a really good point. Um, okay. Let's move on in that case and go to this one. I'm guessing.
That every single person that is connected with WordPress probably picked up this story. At some point this week, it was massive news for a really short amount of time because it got patched. And my understanding correct me if I'm wrong guys. But my understanding is that the critical vulnerability which was detected in WooCommerce was automatically pushed as an update.
So hopefully everybody just by having their website online, got it automatically pushed. I don't really know a great deal about what the, what the problem was or if anybody was affected. I confess, I read this. Uh, six days ago or whenever it first came out and I've forgotten since then, but I've put this one in, just to say if for some reason you have got a word, a WooCommerce site where you haven't been updating or you've somehow managed to stop it from updating, then go and get it checked out.
There's a there's links to, um, what it's all about and what you need to do to mitigate this problem. But it was severe enough, the automatic stepped in and, and pushed an update to, to absolutely everybody. And I guess if they're doing that, they mean business there must've been something pretty nasty in there.
Did you read it Paul or Joe? Did you get into the bottom of the weeds here?
Joe Casabona: [00:29:24] I didn't, I didn't dig into exactly what happened. I have on my reading list. Uh, I'll share this in the private chat. Um, Tony Perez, uh, the, I think the former CEO of security, I don't, I don't think he is the CEO of secure anymore.
Uh, has a good write-up about what exactly happened and it, it had to do with, um, SQL injections, um, which is big, bad, right? That's uh, there's, there's a whole comic by XKCD about how important sanitizing your inputs are. So, um, you know, Tony has a really good writeup and he's very knowledgeable about this, but yeah, it was a forced update.
Um, my personal coverage of it on the WP review was about how I have a very good hosting that patched it. Like I was sitting on the couch with my wife, we were watching Brooklyn nine, nine, um, which I'm just getting into late, late to the party. Um, and I saw the email come in and I was like, ah, my host probably has it, um, covered.
And I just kept watching and they did, they patched it immediately. Or they put like a block in place immediately and then patched it as soon as they could. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:38] Um, Yeah, 90 plus. Wow. It's got the patch fixes 90 plus releases go in all the way back is a great long list here. Back to 3.36, it would appear.
So it was a long, long time ago. Anyway, needless to say, if like Joe, you are on good hosting, managed WordPress hosting, presumably it's been dealt with, even if you're on cheap hosting, it should have been dealt with. But, um, anyway, go and check and make sure you're on the latest version because this stuff matters.
Um, speaking of hosting, we had, we had this piece of news from cloud ways this week. I. I don't have any cloud ways, um, infrastructure in my setup. So I'm sure Paul, I think Paul at various times, yeah, you may be more knowledgeable about this, but they've introduced a, a new, a new system whereby you can recover loss servers and applications in their UI.
Apparently in the past, if something went catastrophically wrong, let's say you deleted something inadvertently. So you took the whole server down, deleted everything and so on. You then had to contact their support. Their support would add it to a queue of similar people in similar situations and having a large customer base.
They reckon that list could take about 24 hours to clear in the, during that time. Of course, your incredibly valuable e-commerce property could have been losing boatloads of money, but now apparently it can be done in the interface and they reckon in less time than it takes you to eat a meal. You'll be back up and running.
I don't know if there's another service. When you go through that, are you sure you want to delete? Are you really sure you want to delete? Are you really, really short? Yes. And then they've still got your back. That seems pretty extraordinary to me. I'm presuming the cloud ways warn you not to delete things, but even on the other side of making that error, they've got your back takes less than an hour to restore.
Everything was kind of a nice thing to have good insurance policy.
Paul Lacey: [00:32:34] It is. And I'm sure it's based on some things going wrong for some users. And obviously if you are, you know, you were looking after all the sites yourselves, you would have multiple backups of things anyway, historically, but not everyone has that.
And not everybody here inherits a website from another client. For instance, if you're a freelancer or an agency has that history, I got to, um, hope I can remember them. Two use cases that come to mind. Uh, one this, this coming Thursday, uh, we're launching a website for someone who is already on cloud ways, but we're taking it over.
And we will launch this new site for them. We didn't do their old site. We don't have any of their old backups, nothing. So at some point the new site will go live and we've had all the conversations around. Have you got everything that you need from your old site? Have you got your backups? Yes. Yes. Yes.
But sometimes the answer is yes, yes, yes. And then it turns out was actually no, and it was just, we didn't quite understand the question, Paul, you're asking us, but we need our old site and we don't have our backups. And this just means that you've got a couple of weeks to figure out that something that you deleted because you wanted to stop the billing happening.
So that's what I mean. I get that a lot. When people change, change over from a hosting company, sometimes the launch date of a website is to do with their billing cycle and they desperately want to finish that and not pay for things twice, even if it's only a small amount of money. So just to have that forum.
So that when the person who was before you has gone and is like signed, you know, assign, assigned thing, saying I'm nothing to do with you anymore, client. And you're the new person doesn't matter what the situation is. You're still gonna have to try and clean up the mess. So this to me is, is, uh, is a core thing.
Uh, really the other scenario that I think that I just remembered that is kind of useful. It's rare, but I've come across websites when we've taken them on the, the, the actual DNS is so convoluted. Like it's going through multiple different grocery names over then it's going through this and it's going through that, that you're not even 100% sure if the website really is where you think it is, you you're 99% sure being like, I want to turn this off.
And I just would like to be able to turn it back on again, if it's not really there in a couple of days, if something, you know, if you know, or if like a, an entire folder of images that, that didn't come across in an import or export, um, turned out that all the galleries, you know, in some deep blog posts, somewhere on this site were missing all the images and you didn't have any history of backups.
You can go back to that person and say, Hey, um, because often you don't get the ability to say, can I go and get the backup? Because an old client, an old agency or freelancer, won't let you do it. They've, they've been, you know, awkward. And they've been trying to offload and possibly even create a problem for you.
So it's useful. It's just a, it's just a quality of life thing for a cloud-based users for scenarios. They might not realize they have, but the day that they do, they'll be so glad it's there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:37] Yeah. Yeah. Joe,
Joe Casabona: [00:35:39] anything on that, uh, strong advice for people who are freelancing, especially like WordPress freelancers, uh, your client should own the hosting and the domain.
You can register it for them if you want, but, uh, they, it should be their account and their credit card information for reasons like this. Um, cause I've, I can't ex I mean, like I resell hosting too, so I can't, you know, but I can't fully take this advice I guess, but I've run into a lot of issues where, oh, my guy just disappeared and I don't know how to get the website or the domain.
They should especially own the domain. I'll just say that. Right. I can say that with a certain amount of, uh, confidence email. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I've, I've done it where I've set it up. Um, For them with my info. And then I said, here's how you log in. Here's how you change the credit card info. Uh, if you don't do it by the next time I'm billed, you're going to get like an extra, a hundred dollars bill or whatever, uh, an extra, a hundred dollars billed to you.
Um, so like, it's just, that's just really important. And I will say like, I mean, especially now, cause you just kind of assume backups happen. Like I've got time machine, I've got Backblaze. Uh, I could just kind of delete things with reckless abandon. Assuming I have a backup. Uh, the other day I deleted nearly my whole Gmail archive on purpose because, uh, I switched to the mail app and accidentally marked everything is unread.
Uh, and I couldn't mark them and seeing a badge of more than one. 11 gives me agida like, I just can't. Um, so I was like, you know what, like, there's probably nothing important in these emails. And then like that night, I was like, well, I needed some information from somewhere. And luckily there was like an old copy of it from an iMac copy on one of my machines that hadn't fully sinked, but nice.
Yeah. I was about to go like back place, belonging, like looking for, uh, cause I'm sure there, I'm sure, like there are copies of those emails somewhere in back lays, but I'm glad I didn't have to.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:02] I use a service called spider Oak for desktop backup and one of the nice features I got a deal and they run it periodically.
It's kind of like a black Friday thing. I think they've run it twice. You were at, you were able to purchase an unlimited. Uh, backup solution and they, they measure the, the, the cost of your account is based upon how much data is stored, not how much transfers and what have you. And, uh, one of the nice features about that is they delete nothing.
They just stick it into the recycle bin. And the recycle bin has the exact same folder structure as the PC or the Mac would have done. And it just contributes to your overall cost. If you've got a recycle bin, just full of stuff, but it's because I'm on this unlimited count account for the last 10 years, nothing that I've created.
It's gone, it's all there. And I had to test it out about six months ago, something that I needed. It was a family thing. They'll sort of birth certificate type of thing there. It was just sitting there. Cold storage, absolutely fabulous. Highly recommended. It's a bit of a. They have a funky Java UI, but it's, it's nice, nice here.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:14] And you've been pushing that spider thing. Literally the first day I met you. You're like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:23] it's um, it's like, um, it's zero knowledge. So everything's encrypted before it aggresses. And that was, it was one of the first ones to do it, you know, in the, in the era of Dropbox and everything, where all that was becoming really popular, they took the opposite approach. So it takes longer to back up because it has to encrypt everything, but they don't know it.
But the other downside is if you lose your master password, you are totally hosed. There is no way back, but don't lose your master password. I
Joe Casabona: [00:39:49] use my first name from my master password on everything.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:53] I just use 1, 2, 3, 4, simple. Right. Just like in Spaceballs. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [00:40:00] Changed the cut on my luggage.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:04] I just want to quickly go back to the WooCommerce story.
Cause Paul Hughes, my sorry, not Paul Hughes, Christopher Hughes, Mexico. And you just want to say all of that. All of that updating happened him late in the evening. And I did hear that this caused a few problems. I think it was Hughes in our little private Facebook group, Paul, who he was up like one in the morning or something.
And he had things to fix Christopher Hughes. So no, no. Yeah. Yeah. So if you look at the comments on the piece, I should probably put it on the screen. One second. This is the, this is the actual piece. Any time that you get a comment thread, you know, how, how look at it? And a lot of it is just people saying things are brown.
It's all we'd look at. It just goes on and on
Paul Lacey: [00:40:49] something like this happened, there was a side discussion about whether they should even be allowed to do it or not. Or was that a different, that was, that was just,
Joe Casabona: [00:40:57] oh yeah. Or security update for like the carousel module, which like, this is, this is something like they say on the Tavern, like this is rarely used.
And I'm like, it's been used like twice in the last two months. Um, which I think for WooCommerce, it should have been right, like, cause storing orders and information like that. Um, I just, I ordered cigars off of a website two weeks ago, right before their website got taken down by hackers. Uh, and it was down for over a week.
Like, and they are a big seller here in the United States, at least. So like, I can't imagine how much I canceled my order. I was like, I can't trust you guys. Um, uh, I'll buy it from my local shop, but, um, so like, I think it's really important. And unfortunately, like things are going to break and you'll be mad, but if you're doing e-commerce, I would, I would caution again, like single freelancers, like, like one man shops, one woman shops.
If you're going to do e-commerce then you, you need to be prepared for something like this to happen. Right. Because if you're doing a shop for, um, a website and, and their car goes down and they're losing money, this is why I try not to do e-commerce shops. Like, um, Um, or you can go with, uh, you know, there are two companies that come to mind.
I don't know if you want me to name them on the show, but, uh, both go WP and WP buffs offer like white label, 24 7 support for like very cheap. I mean, cheap, you know, based on volume of clients, right. They do white labeling. Um, and so having a service like that would have probably saved a lot of people a lot of time.
I'm sure they were very busy. Um, but you know, they, they have the infrastructure in place to support your clients in a way that maybe you can't as, as a solo business owner. Uh, again, this is not, I, I host one client e-commerce site and he just sells like one-off art pieces. Uh, so I knew that nothing too crazy was happening.
Yeah. Nothing too crazy was happening. My e-commerce site was safe. Thanks to my hosting costs. Um, so yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:43:22] personally I would never. Never wish on anyone hosting a mission critical. I mean, it's different between like a website that has like a t-shirt shop on the side for swag versus a website that the e-commerce is the business.
So the website is secondary. It's the functionality of the e-commerce that makes the business. And for every moment that is down, like the cigar website that you talked about, they're losing money and reputation quickly, and someone somewhere is having a really bad day, um, about that. And so, I mean, if you, if any of you, anyone is watching or listening to this and is new and is happens to be watching or recently watching a YouTube video along the lines of how to set up your digital agency from scratch to sell WooCommerce websites and make a fortune stop watching that video.
I just go and watch them fail stuff instead, and start somewhere, start somewhere a bit lower down the chain because you're going to have some bad times. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [00:44:22] And I should say I didn't with the w you know, it's not like a website went down and that's why I canceled my order. They just completely biffed the communication.
Um, and, and, and the whole handling of, they didn't tell anybody until like 6:00 PM Eastern, which is the time zone they're in on Friday. Oh. So the site had already been down for like two and a half days. Uh, something happened really sorry, your credit card information wasn't stolen, but data could have been nothing about pending orders.
I emailed them and tweeted them, and I just got canned responses. Like, we can't do anything cause our whole system is down. So we can't handle your order. And I'm like, I want to cancel it. And they're like, same canned email, just I to talk to somebody on the phone. Uh, and so. When something like this does happen again, communication is key.
But if you're going to take on, especially Michigan critical e-commerce sites, you, I think you need to have an infrastructure in place to handle. If a site goes down at 3:00 AM your time and you don't want to handle it
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:26] because we're nobody, nobody wants to go through that. It's interesting as well. You mentioned the fact that you, you went off and you bought them at your local store and you also mentioned reputational damage.
You imagine if it was a mission critical site, it really doesn't take long for you to become embedded in another commerce site that does the same thing. Like your, your cigar store, a. It's very quickly going to be replaced by cigar store B that sells the exact same product. Maybe there's like 20 cent different or something.
And now you're like, well, that's my, that's my new one. I go there and it all millions of customers just shop over there in one fell swoop
Joe Casabona: [00:46:03] and, and competent. I mean, speaking specifically about cigars competition in Pennsylvania is pretty stiff. Cause we have no tobacco tax here, uh, like state level tobacco tax.
So, uh, there are two or three major cigar distributors in the state. Um, and that's why like, there are also like a lot of local shops. Like there's like probably five within driving distance of my house. Um, yeah, just cause like it's a good, you know, it's in, in New York where I grew up, it's like a 75% tobacco tax in California.
It's like 125% tobacco tax. Um, uh, same thing in Boston. So like, it was, it was, I like supporting my local shop, but when I do bulk orders, this one website, I have a really good discount code for it, from like a private Facebook group I'm in. So I would just do that. And, and as the 17%, uh, on top of their normal discounts, like, is that worth it?
I was happy to support the local shop. Um, I just did it because, uh, you know, they had a few cigars that wasn't, weren't at my local shop. I just found replacements.
Paul Lacey: [00:47:09] So I noticed on your social media, you found some yes. Yes. I have to say, I don't know much about cigars, but it looked pretty cool.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:19] Yeah. Really not a thing in this country.
Are they? I mean, honestly, I reckon I could go an entire year, probably more like two and never see anybody smoking a cigar. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [00:47:30] Interestingly, when we honeymooned in Italy, I, I expected to see a couple of lounges. But there weren't, there were these like, uh, tobacco areas, I guess they're called like smoke shops.
Um, that happened to sell cigars and the one in Florence. Um, I got to talking to the guy and he was like, oh, so you like actually smoke cigars. And I'm like, yeah. And then he like showed me the secret stash with the good stuff. Um, or he was just playing me cause I was a tourist, but like he has some cigars in there that I had never seen before.
Uh, I never seen in a shop before that I knew about, so like, it sounded pretty good, but, um, I, I kind of expected them to be a bigger thing in Italy as well. Uh, and they weren't, I dunno. It is tobacco tax heavily in Europe.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:14] I think, I think certainly, um, regular cigarettes are exceedingly expensive. I don't, I don't smoke, but, um, not only are they taxed heavily, but they're also, they're not allowed to brand anything.
So it sets us a, basically a white packet with, with fairly, um,
Joe Casabona: [00:48:33] I've seen the strong language and the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:36] images as well. So there's lots of imagery as well. And that, that all happened in the last sort of 10 years or so, but even as a kid, when there were, you know, when I could go to my school's staff room and just about all the teachers were, you know, smoking well, that whole, it's just all moved into a different direction over here.
And I don't know what it's like in the states, but you're not allowed to, to smoke in a public spot.
Joe Casabona: [00:49:00] That's becoming increasingly the case. I think when in like 2003 is when. Most places banned smoking indoors. Yup. Um, and, and now it's like a lot of places don't let you smoke outside, like close to a building either.
Um, so, you know, I think that's increasingly the case. I mean, and our S our surgeons general warning is not nearly as in your face as the ones I've seen on, on European cigarette packs, but, um, it's, it's still there and, you know, a big change from like, uh, I was a thing to like an old Abbott and Costello a bit from like the thirties.
And it was like four out of five doctors recommend cigarettes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:45] Well, we straight into a totally different subject. We haven't done tobacco or cigars before, so that was
Paul Lacey: [00:49:51] nice. Nice. Ticked it off the list now. Yeah, that's done one more thing. Um, when you buy cigarettes in the UK, Joe, uh, then now not even allowed to have them on display, so you have to ask for them, and then they have to.
Pull the shutter across with the hidden cigarettes behind so that people don't go, you know, where the, where all the sugary sweets are on the front to try and get you to buy those, the, uh, the, the cigarettes, uh, uh, uh, hidden away. Wow. So even, even, and they have to close it after every thing as well. So even if they see, they know the people who are like that person wants cigarettes, that person, they have to keep opening and closing the thing.
Wow. Um, so yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:36] Yeah. Okay. So we did, we just went back to WooCommerce. Sorry about that. I just wanted to drag you back into this. I think this next one might be really up Joe's street. Um, this is just in tablet, over on WP Tavern. And he wrote a piece called contributing to open source is better than any college degree.
So, um, I went to college. We, we don't really call it college over here. We tend to call it university. Um, and I went to university and my degree has got nothing to do with technology. And so I kind of followed a similar story to Justin in a way in that. I mean, I don't make themes or anything like that, but, you know, I went, did a degree and then realized that there wasn't really an avenue that would, that would be a direct career from that, and then dropped into web development.
Did. And, um, and so I, I share his thoughts on this and what I mean by that is I could totally see why at the age of 17 or 18, when people go to college or university in this country, you may go and do something. And at the end of it kind of thing, um, don't really know what to do now, even though I've got this degree, not really sure it's pointing me in the, in a direction that's obvious.
And so he's just sort of saying he learned an awful lot just by digging out WordPress and getting stuck into it. And I can kind of subscribe to that. Obviously, Joe you're in the you're in the business, very often of making courses to enable people who perhaps have no experience of college that just looking for a different way to make some money, to, to up their skills and get good at something which could be a career for them.
So it was an interesting, an interesting article.
Joe Casabona: [00:52:16] Yeah, absolutely. And so I will not take anything away from Justin's personal story. Uh, I think that this is a lot of people, right? When Justin and I are about the same age and when I went to college, like there wasn't even, they didn't really even teach web development.
Like they taught Java programming. Um, there was a 2d animation course that taught flash. Um, and it's just in, in, you know, maybe like halfway through my degree, we started getting like an actual, like good HTML and CSS course. Well, it was probably really good after I graduated cause I taught it. But, um, uh, but you know, I have my master's in software engineering.
I learned all of the important things I know about programming. Thanks to my degree, including how to learn. New languages and things like that. So, yeah, I don't, I don't want to take anything away from anybody who's like self. I know a lot of people who are self-taught, I'm mostly, self-taught my rub with the, uh, with the quote is that it wasn't from Justin.
It was from Matt Mullenweg. Uh, who said, I think contributing to open source is better than any college degree, which is a really nice UBC thing to say for somebody who created one of the biggest open source projects on the planet. Um, I, so I don't think that vast generalization of everything and everyone is, I think it takes away from the hard work that goes into a college.
Um, and I think it takes away from the other stuff you learn from getting a college degree. Now, Matt obviously much more successful than me. He, uh, did not complete his college degree. Right. He dropped out of college and got a job at, uh, C CNET and then went on to found again, a very, an extremely successful, uh, company supporting open source.
But, um, you know, I, I think that generalizations like this, uh, take away from everything that you could get from college. I learned how to be more assertive in college. I learned how to be more sociable in college. Uh, on top of everything I learned about programming. And I think that you can see, uh, where lack of formal education.
Again, I don't want to take away from anybody, but I think you can see where lack of formal education has hurt the WordPress project. If we look at the database design of WordPress, because it is. Especially now that it's expanded to support a whole bunch of things. It's a pretty poorly designed database.
I don't think I'm saying anything groundbreaking here, throwing everything into an options or a meditational is not great database design. Um, perhaps someone who was someone who is, uh, more familiar with database design could have created something more efficient. Uh, and I, I know that the project is working on improving things and making them as fast as possible, but the database probably at this point needs a complete overhaul.
Like just again, just throwing everything into the options table, um, uh, is not good database design.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:47] Um, Cameron makes I think a point that cropped up elsewhere, I agree with the premise of the article, but it Spanx of privilege. What's your thoughts on this, Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:55:57] Oh, there's so many different. It's a really thought provoking article and yeah, I mean, I don't know if they're they adjusted the title at some point because the title does have quote in it.
So it is a straightaway sort of saying that this isn't a statement. It is a commentary on what someone else said and happens to be obviously Matt Mullenweg. Um, so this there's so many different ways you can just react to this article. I mean, I'm just going to, first of all, my own sort of just in Tagalog version is that, you know, I've got two kids and when I went to university, I did go to university and it was.
I didn't have to pay anything. I was the last, I was the last year that didn't have to pay anything in England. You can still get free education at university in Scotland, I think yes, where I was in there, but in England. Uh, and when I started, you know, the year after me had to pay 5,000 pounds a year, so it wasn't even, it wasn't like what it is now.
I think the average, the average debt for someone in the U S after the after university or college is something like $40,000. And I'm sure that that's, that's just the, and I imagine that there's all sorts of other kind of contributing, you know, various parents paying things and stuff like that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:17] So he's here now nine and a half thousand pounds around them.
It's about $12,000, uh, no matter where you go
Paul Lacey: [00:57:27] when your debt, but that was my own fault. You know, I just blew him off.
Joe Casabona: [00:57:32] My Alma mater is probably around $40,000 a year. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:37] A really, a really different experience. I think when it comes to higher education, because that's a government cap, the, the, no matter who you are or what university you represent that figure cannot be, cannot exceed that.
And some of the, some of the more let's call them prestigious universities, the one that you make, the ones that you may have heard of, uh, kind of often, um, and constantly trying to say, look, can we go a little bit higher? And the answer is no. So we've got this really peculiar system where there's a cap. I think if you go to do some degrees where there's a body of actual stuff, which needs to be put in front of you, so let's say science or medicine where, you know, there's a, there's a commodities that needs to be bought as opposed to lectures and pencils and paper and all that, that the figure might be a little bit higher, but I think we come out subtled with less debt typically.
Then than a north American would look like quite a lot less.
Joe Casabona: [00:58:32] Yeah. I, I suspect and I mean, like, you know, there are state universities, right? Um, incentives to go to a university in your state. There's the state universities of New York. So maybe you've heard of like SUNY Albany, uh, or SUNY Binghamton, um, that are dramatically cheaper.
There's no, as far as I know, there's no cap on tuition, but you know, I went to a private Jesuit college outside my state, um, because I got in there and I liked the program. And so when I went in, it was like $36,000 per year. Um, grad school was free for me because I got an assistantship. Uh, so you know, it was like a, a scholarship and I taught, but it, I mean, it is expensive and I don't want to, I don't want to discount that at all.
It's expensive here in the United States. Um, but again, I think. I mean, Paul, we just like waylaid your story. I'm really sorry, but, uh, sorry, sorry. I think there are other benefits, other benefits to college. I think that having the guidance of in a good program of experienced teachers, um, who can mentor you?
My teacher, my, I mean, my, my advisor for my master's thesis is extremely smart. Um, and, uh, I think there are a lot of benefits to, to college than just learning how to code, right? It's about, you can take like a PHP course on LinkedIn learning taught by somebody on this call, if you just want to learn PHP, but there are a lot of other benefits.
Paul Lacey: [01:00:05] Hmm,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:06] sorry, carry on from where we are super
Paul Lacey: [01:00:09] important. Brian, uh, Lee Jackson, I think it is says he really likes Jay's lamp. Um, agreed. We all do. We were talking about it before the show as well. Um, in terms of the, uh, the university thing, what I was saying was that there's a couple of things I won't say.
So I've got a couple of kids and I think, oh, what are they going to go do? Do they want to go to university? What is university these days? Is it the same kind of relevance? Cause you know, the internet changed everything. Um, and you know, generally I always thought, well maybe entrepreneurial sort of route is better for my kids or to at least give them the narrative that there isn't just the one that you're going to get told through the school system.
The, the way to be successful is to go to university, which was Nathan. I'm pretty sure you say the same was the narrative when we were growing up, that that was the route. Um, there was even like a board game called the game of life and you over chose university or you chose a vocational option. I think they've updated the game now to some more things.
Like you can be a celebrity influencer and stuff like this or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seriously. It's not very good game anymore. Um, but the, so it helped me sort of just add another option of, okay. There must be sorry.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:27] No, no, don't worry. Keep going. Regardless of the dog.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:31] Yeah. So there's multiple options.
Two routes people can take through to kickstart their career and it just started another one to me in terms of, um, Cameron's comment about the privilege. Like absolutely. You can, you can definitely read into that. Can you hear the dog barking still? It's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:51] totally fine.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:51] Pulled out. So is it okay? Yeah, you can totally see where, where that point comes on.
And there's a lot of discussion about that on Twitter actually. And it's in certain places it's not gone down well, this article that's all, um, because of the whole privilege, um, angle to the discussion and, you know, there was there's I saw counter arguments to that saying, well, hang on a minute university, if it costs like $40,000, then surely open-source route would be a less pro you know, uh, would be a cheaper route.
But then I saw some great counselors to that saying, well, if you are from a particular group of people that gets, um, you know, uh, the, the really rough end of the stick constantly, then, then basically having a degree. Whereas, you know, some of us might think that's kind of just a piece of paper because that's what a lot of people say, oh, it's just a piece of paper.
Having that degree is something that some groups of people need just to be on the same level of the exact same person who doesn't have the degree, the degree. I don't know too much about this because I'm relatively ignorant about it all. But if you go and search on Twitter, there is some, you know, such as the name of this article on Twitter, you can see so many different angles that people are taking from this.
Um, one thing though, if you do go and, you know, look into this in more detail, is that the article was probably written in yeah, good faith obviously, and quotes apart of what Matt Mullenweg said in an interview, which was just part of a discussion with Josepha Hayden and Sean posts. And there is a fault that the quote isn't quoted in.
And, and so I think it's easy to make some assumptions from the choir as a result. So they're talking about something and then the full quote is much more than where it says, yeah, it's also a new technology stack. So let's say you want to be involved in WordPress, but your expertise is more on the Python side or elastic search or something like that.
We now have a project where people who are into that or want to learn about it can get involved. Then we get the rest of the quote because of course, you know, contributing and being involved in open source is probably the best way to learn a technology, but there any con college degree. So if you put it in the context of that, first of all, you can say, well, we're not assuming now that this is a brand new learner.
Every time this isn't like an 18 year old or a 16 year old, it can be somebody, it could be Joe, you could be you with your master's degree. But that basically, you know, you, you obviously wrote the book about WordPress at certain points, but let's say you didn't. And now after all that education, you're like, well, now I'd like to get involved in WordPress.
Do I need to take another degree? Cause you've already, you know, so it's kind of like this, first of all, the full quote, I think you've got to take the full quote for what it is and the context that it was set in. And secondly, um, we can't make too many assumptions about who the exact individual is, who is faced with this zero sum choice when it's not there isn't a zero sum choice.
We don't know how old they are, what other things have been educated in and what their options are. And it's really, to me, this is just an anecdotal comment, have an anecdotal take on what they thought about it, but it started a great discussion online and raised some important points of things. So I've seen.
I
Joe Casabona: [01:05:15] think, I think that, I mean, probably the quote creates a false dichotomy. Right. I I'm obviously in, in both camps, for example, um, I also, I just wanna, uh, address Lee's comment about my accent. Thank you. So, um, but, uh, this is, uh, so I think it does create a little bit of a false dichotomy. And I have been saying for years, right?
Because in the United States, when your kid's born, you can open a, it's called a 5 29 account, uh, which is basically a college fund and it's an interest accruing, uh, investment fund. So you could put some money in there each month. And by the time the kid's 18 or 17, they can, they have a college fund. I have told my wife multiple times.
I don't want to do that because by the time my kids are college age, I assume. Uh, based on this, on this very, uh, Facebook comment that just came up, um, that there's going to be a college bubble burst, right? Uh, college is increasingly expensive. People are learning more online. Um, I still think that there is an important aspect of college, as I said before.
But, um, there are, I guess, I guess my point is people learn lots of ways. I was involved in WordPress very early on in college, both have affected my, my path. Um, but I think that I, yeah, I guess it creates a false dichotomy. You can, you can be both. I, you, you, I don't think one is better than the other. And I understand what Matt is doing in this interview.
Right? He's saying, look, we, we run a very successful open source project. We need more contributors. This is a great way to learn. And again, Justin's take us his personal take. My take is my personal take. Um, so I, you know, I do what's best for you, I guess. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:16] I had such a nice time at university. I absolutely loved it.
And it was like you were saying, there are so many skills, which I've got nothing to do with the name of my degree, right? Like the ability to learn the ability to research the, the, the, the application that I probably didn't have as a 17 year old that I gained. Cause it was, you know, the first point in my life where I was kind of out on my own and I had to figure it all out myself, all of those wonderful things.
And it's really only with the benefit of hindsight in looking back from this point, uh, what did I end up doing? Oh, okay. Maybe there was a different route, which would have got me here. And I think it might, it might be Lee in the comment. I can't see if it's Lee or not, but this comment was sort of saying a similar thing.
You know, he, um, he did his own thing. He didn't go to university again. Sorry if this isn't Lee, whoever it is, I can't see your name. They didn't go to university. Didn't get that kind of a qualification. So I went the vocational route. Um, it's still very employable. But the, the, the wonder for this person is, would that have been speeded up?
Would there have been an accelerated path? Had the university option been open? So, yeah, I think you're right, Joe, the opportunities to learn online are just so incredible these days. It does, it does throw into question which way you want to go and which suits you better and how you want to take your own life.
Yes, that was Lee. Thank you, Lee. Um, yeah, and
Joe Casabona: [01:08:37] the, I mean, the only thing I worry about, uh, and it's probably like one of these, I'm like an elder millennial now, and I'm worried about the world changing and it's not what I was like, but, um, or what I've experienced, but like, I, you know, I wonder how my, my kids are going to get that interpersonal interaction.
Right. I was very involved in extracurricular activities, both in high school and college. And those are the things that shaped me the most. That's where I made the most friends. Uh, I met my wife through my teaching assistantship. So, um, you know, those are, I, I firmly believe, uh, that college, my ex experience at an in-person college sent me on the path.
I wouldn't be where I am today without it, uh, for, uh, for a bevy of reasons. And I wonder as we switched to more of an online approach, which I suspect we will, right? Because college is, is too expensive, it's maybe criminally expensive. Um, but I do think about that. I did a TEDx talk a few years ago about like these co-learning spaces, very similar to coworking spaces, except you have a bunch of college students taking online courses in a shared space, so they can all kind of interact with each other.
Even though they're going to different colleges. So you get that kind of peer to peer network that you wouldn't get just straight up learning online, but
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:59] oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's really, I didn't even know that kind of thing occurred. That's fascinating.
Joe Casabona: [01:10:05] I don't know if it does yet, but this is like a, a future.
I did the talk just as co-working spaces were starting to get big in Northeastern, Pennsylvania, at least I'm sure there were like huge and like San Francisco, like 10 years before that. But, um, yeah, it's just something I was thinking about. Like, you know, we have coworking for remote workers soon. We're going to have remote learners.
I think we probably should have something similar to that so that like kids know how to interact with other people their age or older. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:35] There's so much to debate here. I think, I think we've probably
Paul Lacey: [01:10:38] can, I can add one thing just to agree with Joe really? That my, I mean, I was brought up in a small village and it wasn't until I went to university.
Which I am, you know, obviously I'm privileged to do so, and especially privileged as it didn't cost me anything. Apart from the junk that I bought there, and money that I wasted on. Other things extracurricular, you might call them. But the, my whole understanding of population and who's in, it changed when I went to university because my entire world was the village and the local town next to it.
I was, you know, and I don't think you would really get that experience elsewhere unless you're actively doing other things that replaced. That experience. I was extremely immature. I still am. I mean, look, look, I look like a skateboarder and I'm in my early forties.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:35] This is the quote, this is what the episode's called,
Paul Lacey: [01:11:38] but I did mature somewhat over the years while I was there.
And at least had a better understanding of the world at large and, and where I might sit within it. So, so yeah, I think a good balanced by, I honestly don't know, be tough being a young person these days for whatever background you're from knowing what the right choices are and the right narratives.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:04] I'm just writing down.
I'm a skateboarder in my late forties. Cause it's not really episode title.
Joe Casabona: [01:12:10] Tony Hawk was like ripping it up at the X games. Wasn't he? He was like still going,
Paul Lacey: [01:12:15] man.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should get him on the show. Tony hos a short episode. Okay. Let's pivot slightly. This is honestly, podcasting is hot and it's quite interesting cause Lee's, I guess it's Lee still just saying he needs to pick up his podcasting again.
Here we are talking about podcasting a couple of weeks ago, Joe, we got into the, we got really into the weeds about podcasting when. Cast AOS were acquired. No, there weren't. That was complete rubbish cost us got a bunch of money from automatic and people at Yoast. And now this is just another interesting piece in using the sort of WordPress podcasting space.
Let me just get the right piece. Here we go. Because. Uh, automatic have acquired. So this isn't donating money for, you know, R and D purposes or anything. They've bought out one of the most popular podcasting apps. If like me, you consume a lot of podcasts, you really need a dedicated podcast player. And that, um, that podcast player enables you to, you know, have multiple and download things automatically so that if you're out of range of a signal it'll it'll work and it'll show you, what's still to be listened to.
And all of that good stuff. And my favorite one for years now has been PocketCasts. It's the one that I've used for years and years and years. They've got a web version, which is great for me because I can listen to it while sitting on the computer and it sinks everything backwards and forwards. And they've now been bought, taken over the same message that you get every time there's a takeover where everything's going to be the same, don't worry, all is going to be fine.
And I have no reason not to believe that, but I am curious, especially. Joe with your deep interest in podcasting or what have you, what you make about this? It feels to me as if automatic are really taking podcasting extremely seriously in a way that just six weeks ago, I didn't really think they were going to.
Joe Casabona: [01:14:16] Yeah. Uh, so I shared my immediately thoughts on my blog, uh, like Friday, like news jacking style. Um, and then I, I went a little bit deeper in my newsletter today, but automatic has been making several moves. Um, within the last year, I would say they quietly launched. Uh, I think it's on wordpress.com. They quietly launched a how to podcast.
Um, course, um, like learn how to podcast course. Uh, I don't know how many people know about that. I don't know how many people are taking it, but, uh, they launched that alongside their, like how to launch your blog. Uh, and the, you know, the deal that they worked out with anchor and Spotify back in February, that if you want to have a, uh, a podcast, you know, I guess anchor will like read the text for you.
Um, which I penned pretty hard. Cause that's not a podcast. That's just like an audio version of a blog post. Yeah. Um, I agree. But the last two moves they made are very good, uh, because pocket casts, beloved app that, um, I think what's frankly, neglected by NPR and the media group that bought it. What was it?
Six, seven years ago now. Yeah, it was the independent
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:36] Australian developer. I feel wasn't it. And it was doing great things, but it doesn't really done a lot recently, but it was so good that you kind of fail. It's still as good as anything else it's still,
Joe Casabona: [01:15:48] yeah. Yeah. Still a really good app. The web interface, I use overcast myself, but the web interface for PocketCasts is so good.
That's what attracted me to it. Right. Cause I was like living the cross platform, Android and iPhone life for awhile. But, um, NPR announced in, you know, the group that bought it, put it up for sale, uh, in January because it was a loss generator for them, which is just completely baffling to me because it's, I mean, it was like the only real Android app for a long time.
Right. Cause Google kind of ignored podcasting for a long time. And pocket cast was like the leader. Um, In, in podcasting apps for a while. So I think automatic, you know, I, I, um, it may be very hard on automatic and Matt in general, but I, I am excited for automatics a direction that they're going. I think that there'll be able to democracy democratize podcasting the same way that WordPress has been able to democratize publishing, um, because, um, they're investing in cast dos, which is a great company for podcasting.
Uh, they've purchased what is essentially a podcast directory, which will help with discoverability, especially if there's a good web based option, right? Because even like apple podcasts, like the people who invented popularized podcasting, like that's not a good app. Um, and with, with automatic throwing their weight behind this new content avenue for them, I think it's going to be very good.
Both for people who want. Discover podcasting or maybe who haven't, who've heard about it. And they're like, yeah, it's that purple icon on my phone. Um, but also for podcasters to get discovered, because the hard thing about podcasting, that's maybe harder than YouTube, but also better is we're not at the mercy of some algorithm.
Yeah. Um, which is a double-edged sword, right. Because you can get discovered and blow up on YouTube. But if YouTube doesn't like the content you're putting out, you know, you can, you can fall faster than you rose. So podcasting is not like that. I think it's a good fit for automatic. I feel
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:00] like with, with podcasting, anybody who's going into podcasting has an expectation of spending money that you're not going to start a podcast and think this is all going to be free.
Yeah, every single bit of this I can do on the cheap, there's going to be bits where you can, are you going to need to dig, dig into your pockets? And it was interesting when we did the page builder summit for the second time back in may, autumn automatic were a sponsor. Actually it was wordpress.com that ended up being the sponsor.
And what did they pick as their subject? How to do a podcast, how to set up a podcast on wordpress.com. And I didn't really know how easy it was, but they've got it. They've got it sauced on their side, you know? And now that they've got the player who knows what they're going to do with that player, I just feel why wouldn't they be involved in this?
It's a whole different side of the web that they've gotten until recently. They didn't have, uh, any, any skin in the game and it's growing and growing and growing. And, uh, they've now presumably going to be a fairly big challenge of going forward. I wonder if we'll see it rebranded to something like more, more that we used to on the automatic side, don't know, Paul, sorry.
We've neglected.
Paul Lacey: [01:19:11] Maybe they'll just start to tease after the yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I've got nothing really to add. Uh, I just enjoyed listening, um, Joe, to your take on it, to be honest, it was just, um, nice to listen to that live, actually. And uh, I wonder if they'll, um, go for video at some point in the same way.
I know that there's been like video that automatic has dipped into video and stuff before, but in terms of like something legitimately alternative to the YouTube thing, where, like you said, things like shadow banning exists, whether you think you are getting downgraded or not, people can be. So, you know, that whole democratizing things and not being owned on the platform is a good way.
Yep. This is Todd,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:00] uh, Todd Jones. He seems to say that he can remember the podcasting that Joe was talking about there. And, uh, Lee, thanks for, thanks for putting your name at the beginning of each comment and that's pretty
Paul Lacey: [01:20:12] quickly figured out a way around
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:13] this. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Um, the apple podcast is awful.
I, I don't know about that, cause I don't own any iOS devices, but I can tell you that the Google podcast app is, is about as bad as it gets if you were, uh, if you were looking for a really slimmed down app that does almost nothing that you want, then go for Google podcasts. It just, I don't know.
Paul Lacey: [01:20:35] Um, surely we'll know it used to be quite good.
And then they changed something about six months ago. Just difficult to know what you had listened to and hadn't, but good is coming
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:44] pets are PocketCasts it never was. No, it was never a fully featured, um, app and I haven't used overcast that Joe's on, but, um, yeah, just really exciting times if you're into podcasting.
I just feel that like more and more of this stuff is fabulous. Um, what's this job I shared your link about
Joe Casabona: [01:21:02] your, yeah, that's just, um, if you want to basically read my, take on showing newsletter yeah. From my newsletter. Um, I get a little bit more descriptive in there, um, about what I hope, uh, for what could happen, you know, maybe things like integrated hosting and, um, maybe partnering with, uh, you know, with cast dos to do direct uploads or something like that, just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, friction,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:30] right? Yeah. Log in. Upload log out English. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just looking at that CASAA is, uh, is, uh, you can buy Cassa domain. Ah,
Joe Casabona: [01:21:41] yeah, I tried, I tried to buy bona dot CASAA, uh, but that's apparently a brand and I couldn't
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:50] because it means house
Joe Casabona: [01:21:51] doesn't it or something. Yes. Yes. My last name roughly in Italian translates to good house people.
Yeah. People would call me Joey Goodhouse and in
college.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:01] Yeah. That's great though. Joe Casa forward slash pocket cast is what we're directing you to and you'll get Joe's taken on all of that good stuff. We're faster in and out of time, Paul, we were going to talk about a couple of acquisitions. Should we literally just mention them because
Paul Lacey: [01:22:15] you mentioned them.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:18] Yeah. You go for it. We'll do them in this order. By the way, 10 web. If you're going to put an email out at least have a web version of it. Not don't make me create an Evernote that's publicly shareable so that this article can be surfaced again,
Joe Casabona: [01:22:33] notion page or whatever. Right.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:36] I couldn't find it. So there you go with my email address and stuff, hopefully stripped out and my, uh, on subscribed text as well, but you never know, right.
Sorry, Paul, go
Paul Lacey: [01:22:45] for it. Yeah. So, right. So the article, we're talking about 10 web as I received 2 million, I think dollars funding from the AI fund and Sierra ventures. And all I remember about 10 Webb was that they were on AppSumo about a year ago or something with some kind of AI based website builder that I think leveraged elemental.
And I remember trying it and being. Kind of unimpressed, but you know, it met the expectations that I thought it would. And it's very, I mean, I just, I just, I'm a designer and a site builder say I'm going to come at this from an a point of view that I feel threatened by it to a certain extent. So yeah. So Dave, Dave, um, Dave attracted $2 million funding to, to help with that AI builder as far as I can see.
And I don't know if it will mean some really cool stuff will happen or is this just, you know, Hey, we're doing stuff in AI, nobody else has give us a load of money. And so I'm slightly cynical about it, but who knows they might nail it, you know? So we've seen Jarvis and stuff at the moment and other things, which is a AI based, um, content writer.
I'm seeing people writing books in seven days and I'm still completely skeptical. I really want to read content or look at websites that a bot made, but I'm sure that bots like to read content that bots have made. So
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:19] you talked about this last week didn't we ever do JCP content being written by bots so that the Google bot can scrape it.
And it's a self-perpetuating cycle of stuff. That's probably unreadable.
Paul Lacey: [01:24:30] Yeah, exactly. So, so there we go. 10 web got $2 million of funding and AI funder venture, so well done to them. You know, work went into that, uh, search and repair plugin has joined the awesome motive family. So I think that's the website that iron's WP beginner.
Is that the same company? W beginning of
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:52] so much stuff. Yeah. Like, look, look at them all here. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:25:01] Yeah, I think it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a well-respected plugin from what I can gather. I think it's the same plugin that I see sometimes sponsor the Matt report as far as, as far as I know. And. And it, and it improves the possibilities of search within WordPress in a simple way. There's other options like relevancy, which are quite difficult to use quite, you know, there's a million options in there, but I think this search dog people again, has a nice balance of simplicity and power it's been bought by also motive.
Um, it probably means the plugin will live on if it had any kind of problems going forward. And then you see obviously a lot of comments in this way saying that, um, we're waiting to see the big upsell adverts in the door. If you admin area. I don't really know. I've not really seen that. I'd, haven't used a lot of the awesome native plugins, but that seems to be a cheap shot that people were leveling at this particular, um, acquisition,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:53] very successful theme though.
Aren't they, they've got an awful lot of acquisitions under that.
Joe Casabona: [01:25:57] Yeah. I mean, obviously they're doing something right, but, and that is, that is an accurate assessment. Uh, what's interesting is that search WP does not have a freemium option. Um, interesting. Whereas all of it seemingly all of the other automotive offerings do WP forms certainly does I think smashed balloon.
Um, does monster insights does, um, the, I mean, I I'm sure. I think, uh, Christopher in the, in the chat points out, you know, there'll probably be lots of cross promotional stuff. Um,
Paul Lacey: [01:26:40] uh, the latest one, but it's what I was kind of referring to. I'd seen a lot of people commenting to this effect. Uh, Christopher Hughes says I use search to repeat on lots of clients sites going to be loads of dopey forms, adverts now.
Joe Casabona: [01:26:54] Yep. WP toolkit, tool belt, WP tool belt. Yeah. Um, has a nice, a little addition to get rid of. Uh, WordPress notifications.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:08] Yes. We mentioned that, I think last week it's like a little tiny thing, isn't it? But come up with
Paul Lacey: [01:27:13] JavaScript.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:14] That was what it was when the page is loaded. It just sucks them out.
Paul Lacey: [01:27:18] Just puts them in a different place, which I think that particular plugin, um, they've actually said the creators of that plugin said, I think it's a guy called Ben.
Yeah. Um, yeah, so I think he said it's not the perfect solution. Uh, but if you don't own the ads here is how it probably could be displayed in the future if the core team decided to do this. And so it's a fantastic plugin. It's what I love about WordPress that people do this.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:43] Okay. Yeah. Very quickly. Two more things.
Um, I did a, um, copying, uh, Joe horribly here. I did a, a webinar with, uh, Leslie SIM from newsletter glue only about two months after Joe did it. So, uh, you know, probably.
Joe Casabona: [01:28:02] There are newer and cooler features. Now that's true.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:04] We have a new, um, little social widget with the little social icons and things.
Anyway, if you're interested in sending newsletters from your WordPress install connected to something like active campaign, they've got this fabulous plugin. I can heartedly recommend it. It's what we use. It's fabulous. She just demos it. She just shows you what it can do. And within about 50 minutes or so she shapes what it can do.
So I'm just, I think
Paul Lacey: [01:28:28] you mentioned a killer, a killer feature of this just very briefly is that it's not just sending newsletters from WordPress. This is one of the killer features is published once in one place and then have the content on your blog and parts of it, the parts you decide you want to be in it, going off to your newsletter list.
Yeah. So yeah, it's different. It's. It's a, it's got more than what you've probably undersold your own webinar there. Nathan, there's some quite cool stuff. There's some quite cool stuff going on with this software that you wouldn't know about unless you watched Joe's Joe's webinar or your webinar or mine is coming out next week.
Actually,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:12] I really, really like this plugin, it fits absolutely squarely with the things that I want to do. So that's why I'm very excited about it, but it is you're right. You can say send it out in the newsletter, but not on the blog post, put it in the blog post, but on the news. We'll do both. Um, and there was a car or something, again, I don't know,
Joe Casabona: [01:29:32] or coming
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:32] back, I guess he's just having a good old time.
Just one last one. And I'm just going to mention it. It would appear that Google are according to the WP Tavern article, at least anyway, it would appear that Google are sort of putting the flock initiative, this federated learning of cohorts idea of grouping people so that we worried less about cookies seems that that might be hitting the back burner.
I would imagine largely to do with the fact that almost nobody seemed to have anything good to say about it. Um, so anyway, there we go. We're out of time, it's more than half past. I don't want to keep anybody longer than absolutely necessary. So there we go. W P builds news one small finish. This was episode.
What was this? One? Seven two. Um, I'd just like to say thanks to Paul as always for being here. Thanks to Joe for being here. My pleasure. Very, very nice, Joe. Just before we go, let us know. What's the best place. Find all your good stuff. You can go
Joe Casabona: [01:30:29] to casabona.org. That'll have links to everything I'm doing at the moment.
Uh, and I I'll just quick plug cause 5.8 comes out this week as I am working feverishly on my block editor and full site editing course to have it done, hopefully by like the first week of August.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:30:48] Um, and at the same URL you just mentioned, we'll be able to find it there. Yes. Very nice. Very, very cool.
Indeed. Yeah. By the end of this week, we should all be rockin 5.8 let's hope. Okay. So thank you. We don't have to do the awkward wave so much anymore because if you click this end stream button in, in stream, whatever this is called, restream it actually appears to stop it right on time. So I'm just going to say Bob Bollinger.
Thanks everybody. Take it easy.