244 – ‘R’ is for Resources

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, david Walmsley, Nathan wrigley.

Hello there. And welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you've reached episode number 244. Entitled R is for resources. It was published on Thursday, the 26th of August, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And in a few moments, I will be joined by my good friend, David Wamsley, so that we can have our bi-weekly or fortnightly chats about something to do with WordPress.

Each week we do a podcast episode, it comes out on a Thursday and we alternate one week I do an interview and then the following week, I have a chat with David Wamsley at the minute. We're going through the, a to Z out of WordPress and we've reached the letter R and so next week you can expect an interview from a WordPress professional.

You never know, it might be to do with plugins themes, hosting the community who knows. You'll have to wait until next Thursday for that. If you would like to be kept up to date with all the content that we produce, the easiest way to do that is go to WP builds.com forward slash subscribe. That's WP builds.com forward slash subscribe.

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I will authorize your account as soon as I possibly. A couple of other things. If you're in the market this week for something WordPress, it could be a theme plugin who knows. Then we've got a deals page for you. I keep saying it's a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week. And that's because it is loaded coupon codes over there that never seemed to go away.

I would highly encourage that you bookmark that page. WP builds.com forward slash deals and avail yourself of a significant amount off some products or service. And the last one, WP builds.com forward slash advertise. If you would like to have your product or service, the thing that you're taking care of or building, if you'd like to put that in front of a WordPress specific audience we can certainly help you with that.

Go over to the page forward slash advertise and fill out the form and we'll get you on the site just as soon as we can, speaking of which somebody that's done that AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record? The new AB split test plugin for WordPress, we'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes.

You can use your existing pages and you can test anything against anything else that could be buttons, images, headers, was anything. And the best part is it works with element or a builder and the WordPress block editor, AKA Gutenberg, check it out. Get a free demo. AB split test doc. Okey-dokey let's get into the main event.

Shall we R is for resources. We're on to episode number 244. This is David Walmsley. And I going through what transpires to be a really long list of all of the different things that we may use. If we were building WordPress websites, all of the resources, we have to pay a huge debt of thanks to the people in our Facebook group.

We mentioned them as we go through for suggesting some of the things that they are using, but this is, this could be, to do with graphics. It could be to do with hosting. It could be to do with support. It could be to do with anything really there's loads and loads going on. And yeah. And hopefully some of the stuff that we mentioned, you may never have come across before and you might be able to make use of it as always.

If you've got any thoughts, maybe we miss something out, stick something in the comments, go search for 244 on WP builds.com. Stick something in the Facebook group. I hope that you enjoy the podcast.

[00:04:23] David Waumsley: Hello, it's another eight. Is that of word, the series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintain these sites with WordPress today is our four resources, which is an episode, which has caused us a lot of problems because we asked the WP, builds Facebook group members to tell us what their web press website making resources are, and just got completely overwhelmed with the stuff that they provided us with.

We've had to have a

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: nice bunch. They are.

[00:04:54] David Waumsley: I know. Clever as

[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: well. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice. So yeah, I guess the first thing to say is thank you to anybody who contributed to that threat. Yes. Yeah. Just read out a few names of the

[00:05:05] David Waumsley: people of why not Devindra sin. Calm. I hope I said that. Peter Ingersoll, Jane Brechner, Brenda Malone, David clock-in, Todd E Jones and Diane

Also there was Lee Jackson in there, but he's not going to get a mention, no promotion for him for offering to ticket.

Question was we asking the question? We said, we'd be tickled pink to provide it. Yeah. So we offered just to tickle us.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: So anyways,

[00:05:37] David Waumsley: look real big. Thanks to them because really we were wondering what's going to happen when we finished our series here. When we get to said, where did we go from there? Or do we just close up?

But actually they've just made us realize that we know so very little. About the tools that are out there and about the approaches that there are to build insights. So this is going to be, the work is going to be the basis of the next series. Isn't

[00:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: it, which is a really cool, unexpected consequence of you posting that threat.

That's really great. Yeah.

[00:06:08] David Waumsley: Yeah, so we just mentioned quickly what we're going to do for that.

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: We're still a way off, but why not? Yeah. Okay.

[00:06:15] David Waumsley: Just in the, the basic idea is now that we're going to challenge ourselves, we've been building websites for a long time and we think we know stuff and we know our limitations.

We've always talked about those, but also we're probably stuck in our way. So what we're going to try and do is in the next series, we're going to start right from the beginning, right? From the planning stages of making it. Getting our brief together, go through all of those processes, rethinking them again as if we know nothing which is properly.

Yeah. Yeah. So it might be useful for anyone, it's just rethinking how they do the processes, because that's exactly what we're going to do. Isn't it with it.

[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Nice idea. Yeah. So revisiting the whole, I think you might even have named it bootcamp challenge or something like that.

Yeah.

[00:07:02] David Waumsley: Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Okay. So we're indeed to talk about resources. So we'll make this one a quick one, because we'll just talk a little bit about the fact that there is so much online and whether that's a problem and whether there's still stuff that's missing, but you made a comment that was something that someone's shared.

So this is Brenda Malone, swamp. There's a website isn't there called now the addresses 1 0, 0 1 5 dot I O. So how you say that is either 115. That's how I've got to say it, but yeah, just, you could probably turn this podcast off now, go there. And that's your day gone?

[00:07:41] Nathan Wrigley: This is the most sublimely amazing website.

I'd never heard of it. I don't know if you've had already. Never heard of it. And it describes itself as the best online tools, all tools you need in one box. And honestly, that's not really that much of an exaggeration there is that there's a list of, I'm going to say about 40 maybe more, maybe 50.

I don't know, but tools to achieve almost anything that you might like to achieve. In the building process of your website. So for example, or I dunno if there's a case converter, if you wanted to title case or lower case or something like that, there's a text handwriting converter.

There's an image Cropper. There's an SVG pattern generator. There's a CSS background generator. And each time I'm saying one of these tools, I'm skipping about 10, basically there's a tool for everything over at this website built, but for free, it would just. By a Turkish gentlemen, and I'm just going to try and find his name.

He's called Fati, Telus, F a T I H T E L I S. And he's done it as a side project. Honestly, this guy, his side project is probably more useful than most people. Not side projects.

[00:09:00] David Waumsley: Yeah, it is stunning. Isn't it? That one person could do this. I, we would just say, we'll live the shot of him outside because we just think this guy could have never been outside.

If he's done all this work. That's

[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: right. There's no way that's a real picture of him in like in a jungle or generators. And he's got a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension so that all of these tools are available. Without you actually having to come to the page. I haven't installed it, but I'm guessing it would literally just take you to the URL of that, of the tool in question, I don't know, maybe it's more sophisticated than that but imagine some tasks that you needed to do with CSS or images or what have you, you can more or less bank on the fact that it's going to be in here.

So Bravo to him, what a result.

[00:09:42] David Waumsley: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, really all we learned from this is that there is an insane amount of free stuff or cheap stuff that we can get, particularly with the kind of graphics, image, editing, and inspiration type stuff that we might need to design our pages. Not necessarily just in a specific to WordPress.

I mean, we know about all the ma major. Photo sharing things that there are out there with the creative commons, zero licenses on them, like Unsplash and they've just grown, but you mentioned something about that that. Are they changing some of the licensed in terms for some of the photos on their sites.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: Now I'm not going to claim to be an expert in any of this, but there is some concern that some of the websites that we're familiar with, and I don't want to name any, but because I don't know which ones, but some of the websites that you've probably been accustomed to going to in order to get your free images.

So I believe it's C, C zero, I think is the is the correct terminology there. The. The licenses in the future might change my understanding. Is that anything that you've already got? You're fine with, and again, this is an anecdotal understanding. Please do your own due diligence here, but there is concern that in the future that they might change and whilst I'm sure they'll make it entirely obvious what the new licensing terms are.

It may just be that because you're accustomed to going to that site. Yeah. Bothering to read the terms because you know that the terms up until now have been completely free. You've had, there's been no, nothing incumbent upon you to, you'd have to mention the name of the author or anything, then that might trip you up.

And so automatic actually have launched a project to, to save your bacon, which is really nice. It's called open vote. A lot of link to it in the show notes, but if you just Google open verse, you'll get to make.wordpress.org forward slash open verse. And you can see that, that they've, they're going to begin this project to, to make it so that anything that you search for in open verse will be guaranteed to not have any of the the, the legal requirements that you might want to avoid.

Yeah.

[00:11:53] David Waumsley: If the sticking with the creative commons. License, which is, it's left copy, isn't it. Or copy left

[00:12:04] Nathan Wrigley: help you though. Yeah.

[00:12:06] David Waumsley: Yeah. It's but I, you it really, all you've got in that they are free to use on those. It's just whether it's. Do you need to attribute the attribution?

That's right. Yeah. That's uh, so I don't, yeah, I hope that doesn't go away. That's the scary thing. One thing when you look through the stuff, there's so much there. I keep finding lots of different libraries, so we know about font. Awesome. Kind of font icon library. That's free to use as well with the commercial side to it as well, but there's lots more of those around as well.

And now as we move to the SVG versions of those as even more of those and just appearing almost daily, I see those when I'm. Yeah,

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: it is incredible, especially in the image side of things. Actually just on tech, CSS generation tools and what have you, and tools that will create, they'll show you how to do box shadows and what all of the appropriate CSS is for that.

And, the sliders to make it blur more and all of that, the there's, there's a T there's one forever. There's literally a tool for just about everything, which is why this 100 fifteen.io website is so cool because it just puts it all, everything into one handy spot. But I think you could more or less get away without even things like Photoshop these days, because there's some really capable stuff on there.

[00:13:26] David Waumsley: No, I mean, that was another one of the resources that stood out for me. And that was Peter Ingersoll taught me about this one. Never seen it before photo P all one word as in P E a P. And it literally looks like Photoshop to me. I haven't been in Photoshop for some time, but it's just it's online and it's there.

It's all just got, it's a bit of advertising on the right hand

side.

[00:13:50] Nathan Wrigley: I've just loaded it up for the first time. I didn't click on the link, boy. Oh, and it can do things like masks and cropping and magic tool and, the, the magic tool that you've got in Photoshop. Yeah. Great. I can't say that I've played with it, but the day was coming when this was going to be the case.

So what you just go to photo p.com and that's it. It's there, that's the tool. That's not a photo. That's the actual tool. Yeah. Good grief that it didn't even take any time to load.

[00:14:22] David Waumsley: That's the thing, isn't it. If you actually do load up Photoshop, you've got a bit of a weight. It puts you off.

[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: There are some caveats here.

I've just learned. There's an account button at the top, but honestly, I think you might be fine here. The free version has all the features, no ads, sorry, has ads. And you mentioned that they were fairly on, in, on , but you've got a history of only 30 steps. So if you wanted to undo things, it looks like you're going to have to, you gonna have to catch it before your 30th step.

I think for most people that probably be all right, and that's in the free tier, but if you want to go to premium. Which is paid for, then you get no ads. So they remove the ads and you get 60 steps. There. Isn't an infinite regression there, but 60 is a lot. Isn't it. You utopian discover before the 60th step that you'd made a mistake and it's $9 a month.

Oh, wow. Check this out. This is cool pricing. $9 a month. Or 10 or $10 for three months. So they increase it by $1 for the extra month or $40 for a year. So the jump between nine and $10 is really quite generous. $1 extra for two more months. And that's for a single user. And then you can pay more for site licenses, but there it is.

That's cool.

[00:15:47] David Waumsley: Yeah. I just don't know where to start with those because there were so many other tools, ones that we use, I think free picks teller as well, allows you to do quite a lot. That's one we both use isn't

[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: it does everything that I need. It's not as capable as this photo for sure. But it's it's got everything that I need to, the only problem is it can't do things like you can't erase bits from current images.

You just have to, if you want to make a bit become erased, you either have to put something over it or go to Photoshop and fiddle with it over there. But it's still, it's perfectly capable for things like blog posts thumbnails and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:16:26] David Waumsley: And this there's a whole area. I haven't looked into I'm in another stand.

That one for me was one brain, uh, Jane Brenneker on this one where it was a Miller note and I've never seen this one before.

[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: It's pronounced Milan notes, like. The city, I think it is, but it could be wrong. Maybe it is Mila. No, but I've heard really great things about this loads of people seem to be, I don't know, it's just got that sort of social buzz about it.

I've never ever used it because I'm entirely happy with Evernote, which is what I use. But I believe it does also. You can present it in fun ways. There's, there's ways of presenting it in tables, Kanban boards and all that kind of stuff, but I've never used it, but it's very popular.

Yeah.

[00:17:13] David Waumsley: I mean, some of these review says about it being the Evernote for creatives, but I think, it's, I think it's designed for organizing your. Projects isn't it. Those for your bills. So I'm to look into this,

[00:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: it's like an art board table. You can just present, you can lay anything down in any configuration.

It would seem so, whereas Evernote is you put one thing on top of another, text follows, image follows, text follows, PDF follows, whatever. It's just a way of chucking information. And this appears to be. Here's an app, here's a board and you can present those different boards in different ways.

And it looks, it does look really nice, but I've never used it. Actually. Speaking of Evernote, they've gone through quite a nice overhaul recently where they've really fiddled with the year. For the mobile and the desktop. And you can now sync things like your Google calendars will sync to it and so on.

And they've also introduced tasks into it. And it's a really capable repository for tasks now. So you can set tasks and a bit like in Google calendar, you can set multiple notifications and reminders and all of that kind of stuff. So whilst melanoma looks like a nice alternative, I think I'm too embedded into Evernote.

Now I've got too much stuff in there, too much history. Really that bothered about about presents in a fun way. It's only me, that's looking at it. So I just need it to be like a Google doc, essentially, which is what it feels like.

[00:18:39] David Waumsley: Yeah. I was like, I can't even remember the name of it. There's another one of those platforms where you can lay out your art boards, if you like, and actually put in all your pages of your website, I forgot what it's called.

We've mentioned it before. That was so annoying. But I only today, I think it was due to an email. I went to their site and I realized they got a whole community again, where they're giving away loads and loads of artwork, particularly icons SVGs, those kinds of things. And I just think, yeah.

Everywhere you go. Now you can get the resources you need fonts. Color palette schemes as well. Plenty of tools that do that was it was that the one, but that's one of them obviously Canva that's well known for those kind of, they, I guess they were targeted at the people who needed artwork for their social media.

Wasn't they, people like Canva , and they've grown beyond. Because they're very useful for also for print runs as well. But no, I, it was one half forgot what you said. We're not is it? Oh

[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I use that in collaboration with other people. I don't have a license, but I've seen what it can do.

It's a really great big software. Yeah. And

[00:19:51] David Waumsley: it's kind basic stuff is free be on it. So I was only in there only today just by kind of accident. I realized, I didn't know this before that they've got this kind of community stuff where people share stuff. So you can just bring those into your projects.

Yeah. Free to use. And I just think, I think just everywhere you go, it's overwhelming now. I think

[00:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: it's a, there's another tool that I've used called whimsical don't. And if you've come across, this is more of a kind of like wire framing kind of tool where you just let's say you're building a website and you.

Chart the customer journey. It's that kind of thing. You can just put a basic ton of things on, so you can put here's what here's, where the form would be. And this is what happens, we'll link to over here and you can draw lines and make over those kinds of connections. Yeah, it's quite good.

I got that one from Paul Lacey who uses it and I've used it over on the the podcast, the plus side of things, just as thrash out some ideas. And it's really good. It's ready to go. And again, free, really nice free tier that will give you more or less everything that you want. I would have imagined, oh, if you want, if you, excuse me, if you were just doing one project at a time, if you were trying to run as an agency, you'd probably need to pay up because you'd run out of the limitations.

[00:21:04] David Waumsley: Yeah. And, there's also, amongst the things that people presented to worse, I guess there's a whole other range of free tools. The code generators out there and working examples. Co I'm in code pen quite a lot. And my go-to is always w three schools, which just become. Such a brilliant resource these days, because you've got a working example of kind of code you might want.

So if you need to make some accordions or tabs or something for your website, even if you've got page builder and you just want a really lightweight version of it, you can find something and. Only the other day in one of the groups that I run for BeaverBuilder someone was asking, how do I get a magnifying glass that will, magnify an image underneath, but I don't want to put an extra image on top.

And there it was until 33 schools, just the code you needed work in it. Yeah.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, those sites are absolutely fabulous. Aren't they, it explains what it is that you're trying to achieve. It has the code on the the left typically, and the output on the right. And, you can instantly see what it will look like if you alter anything.

Yeah. It's really remarkable. Yeah. It's just magical that stuff is not only that it works, but it's completely free. And also because of the way the sites are set up, there's just this legacy of people solving problems, typically that you might have yourself, like the one you just described as somebody, somebody cracked that knot and left the code up for everybody to share.

Is that a

[00:22:31] David Waumsley: clear coat pen has been used to make some generators there as well. It's really handy. With that, there's a tool that I bought quite recently, I think you did as well, hover if I wear it loving that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Chrome extension, so you can inspect it. So an all in one tool. So there's lots of things you could do, but one of the things on there is that you can take the code off the site and have it automatically go to code pen.

Didn't know. Yeah, you can just, yeah. One of the options when you're inspecting it, so you can grab the whole page if you wanted, but you can just go and say, I don't know, you're working with a form and you just want to see that, how that forms work in it. Copy it over to cope pen, and then you can start to play around with the CSS and then if it gets exposed,

[00:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: That's absolutely brilliant.

And that's just theirs as an option. They have been updating a lot. One of the things that I like just really like about it is that there's a, there's an option to just display everything on the site, every image on the site. You know, right down to the little tiny pixel that you didn't realize was even there, but literally every image is there for you to grab it and any videos?

Obviously there's, what is it called? Sorry. What's the technology DRM. That's right. Yeah, digital rights management. I think obviously it, it probably can't download stuff that you're not supposed to download, but I think if this video and the source code is the sources available, I think it will even do that kind of stuff.

It's literally remarkable. Unfortunately, I can't do it cause I've just got a new computer and I haven't entered my license key. So I can't see what it's capable of at the moment. Cause as soon as I tried to launch it, it says, give me your license key first, before it's useful, but it's. It w when I bolted it was a really great deal.

I don't know if it's still on the fairly cheer lifetime plan. No, no. They've moved

[00:24:18] David Waumsley: just yeah. To an annual license, but it's, it's growing. I, one of the nice things I saw in it, which I've not been able to do with the normal inspector, it was at that accident. I found it, it was, you could actually grab hold of the SVG or a path in an SVG.

So if you actually wanted sh. Cause here's a, I'll talk about that later, actually, because one of the things that I'm absolutely useless with is a Bezier pen or tool or whatever can not work those. So if someone's got a shape I'm looking for, and I can grab, oh, I see

[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I get it.

Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:56] David Waumsley: I know they're getting a bit of promotion here, but yeah, I just, honestly,

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: we thought this was going to be a short episode and here we are going to every single tool that we mentioned. We're just describing it and crate, we shouldn't hurry up. So go on. Sorry. Carry on. We're still on code generators, but there's more.

Oh

[00:25:12] David Waumsley: I was just going to say that Koch Penn has been very useful as generators themselves. I've been using that to convert SVGs into, that's a converge there for almost everything. So into a base 64 that makes them really faster. You can turn pings into that and also data URLs really getting into that side.

So Koch pen, isn't just the examples that I thought was once was it's now turned into a place where you can get loads of generators.

[00:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: So you're able to turn like a PNG, a ping, as you say into an SVG. Yeah. And it does a pretty good job. Does

[00:25:46] David Waumsley: it? Yeah. Oh, more with a ping, like that little button, probably be more useful to turn that into a base 64.

So you could use it if they good for quick load in background images, should you want to do it? It's more. Then you would have in terms of your, what's going in your CSS file, but it'll go fade quickly. Yeah,

[00:26:05] Nathan Wrigley: no, that's right. No, that's good. That's really useful. We've also got generate wp.com, which I confess I've come across, but not really used before, but I am beguiled by the amount.

Yeah.

[00:26:16] David Waumsley: Yeah, I really haven't explored as much as I should. I did a video ages back because I use that to make my own custom post type plugin and I couldn't have done it without that. Cause it just, I just put in what I want it to be called and what the menu items need to be called. And it does all of that stuff.

And I just grab it for me.

[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Plugin. Brilliant. And so it can do so if you go to generate wp.com all as one word, it can basically. With a UI you point and click and tell it what you want to be in the let's say query, and it will design that for you. So it's got a short code generator, postdoc generator, a metal box generator, which is actually they say premium.

I don't know what that means. There must be a tariff for that taxonomy generator and a post status generator. But the one of interest to me there is the, like the one that everybody would understand is the post type generator. Click boxes and tell it, okay, I want it to have this capability and this capability, but not this.

And it just updates the code that you need to that you need to upload to your WordPress website. And it's right there in front of you. Great. Because you actually get to see what's going on as opposed to doing it through a plugin like custom postdocs UI, which obviously does all lists, but it's completely hidden in the back.

Yeah.

[00:27:36] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. I mean, some of the things that were mentioned at Devinder mentioned a couple of plugins as well, I'm in the mouse tools, small little plugins made by people who really don't make any money out of stuff that are there. He mentioned a couple of. Throw these in because so was there one that I didn't know that existed, but so an edit the author slug by Brandon Allen, and that just allows you.

So if you wanted to change your sluggers author to WP, stop doc WP builds.com. Author for slash Nathan Wrigley could easily become WP bills.com. Journalist, if you wanted anything

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: else. I like it. Yeah. I like the example on the wordpress.org repo for this. And I think I should do this because it says well, I'll use example.

WP builds.com forward slash ninja. Forward slash nascent.

[00:28:32] David Waumsley: Yeah. How about that one finger typist.

[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, nobody's, that's just does one thing, but it does it author probably, probably does want to be changed actually. That's yeah, that's cool. That's a nice.

[00:28:48] David Waumsley: Yeah. And also you throw in another one, which would be useful if you're trying to work with Gutenberg without any of the kind of add on extension.

You know, you're a simple CSS, one by Tom of the generate press and blocks fame. That's a little in, or that's not been updated recently, but I guess it doesn't need it.

[00:29:07] Nathan Wrigley: No, it says, yeah, it's got the little nag warning that it says it hasn't been updated, but honestly I'm sure it probably didn't need to be updated.

I think Tom's on top of all this sort of stuff. And it just allows you to make changes to your CSS, which is really nice.

[00:29:22] David Waumsley: Yeah. Puts a little metal box. So you can put it in, on your individual posts and pages, which is, yeah. You can't really easily do that. Yeah. So there's, I mean, you could go.

Endlessly couldn't you with all the kind of free stuff, page builders, of course, themselves. So a way of making this more efficient with WordPress, and there was a whole bunch, a whole slew of people who kept throwing in ways to spin up a WordPress install for free. Ooh.

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I basically I'm really happy now with my local install.

The, the, the app for your Mac or windows, our desk dare I say, possibly Linux. I don't know. I love that. I really like it. And if I want to just test something quickly, It takes five, maybe 10 seconds to spin something up. That could be an exaggeration, maybe it's 20, but it's certainly in less time than it takes me to type the name of the website.

It's basically ready to go.

[00:30:20] David Waumsley: Yeah, absolutely. There's one other thing I'll just mention. Cause we, we really have to just skim over these don't we, there was one other standout thing for me and this, I was gobsmacked by this one. This was a fun Diane commend us and it was something she said there's another one similar to it.

Something called skip D and. Dot link. That's the address for it? And what it does is it allows you to preview a website that you've got before you sent the DNS the domain name to it. Go on. Nice. Yeah I'd probably visit, I quite understand how it works, but I needed this only last week and I put what happened is I add a site.

So the client hadn't changed the domain to words and I wanted it to be ready when they did. So I had to use him migrate guru, another great tool from moving that I moved it to the address, but I couldn't see it. I had to wait until they pointed their domain name at it because there wasn't a way for me to see what moved.

Okay. Because I changed all the database and everything, so it's ready to receive this DNS. And I think what this does is it allows you to do that. It allows you to put in the domain that you want to sit through, and it will preview that based on the domain that you want to show and your IP address for.

That

[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: I'm having a, I'm having a thick moment, David. I don't understand. So if you'd uploaded this site yeah. You knew what it looked like following it. Yeah,

[00:31:54] David Waumsley: sure. I did, but I have to assume that my migrate guru, which it did the job properly. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yeah. So I have to wait.

Right.

[00:32:05] David Waumsley: Exactly. I couldn't find a way of previewing with the tools I had. So what I can do is obviously on my side of things, I can say. This is my server. I know it's IP address, and this is the name I'm going to associate with this folder. But until the client that she put that address on there, because I changed the database, I couldn't really see it.

And I think this is what this tool will do. And that there's a couple and I was gobsmacked by this. Cause I just didn't know there were tools like

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: this. Yeah, yeah. That seems like some sort of mystic voodoo that nobody knew existed. Yeah. That's great. So that's skip DNS dot. Yeah,

[00:32:41] David Waumsley: that's cool. She says there's another one out there as well.

That does it, but she can't remember the name.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, I think we only need one. That's fine, but that's a cool one. She's also mentioning that she needs uptime monitoring and all of that kind of stuff. And I think you and I both hopped on an AppSumo deal a little while ago. Didn't we? What's it called better bang.

I think time happy with it.

[00:33:01] David Waumsley: Uptime robot served as well for the free foot before that. Yeah. Um, yeah, we need to skip over this. Do we want to just have a bit of a chat about with these free resources is the kind of problems with it?

[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: There's loads of problems. Aren't there really the the first one is when they go away and you faithfully go to that URL and it's got you saying, oh, Yeah I have to go and find another one now.

Yeah, so you, you know, the problem is that what if you, basically, we just rely on all of these things. You go to this 100 fifteen.io website, and as a result of it, you have no understanding of anything at any point ever. So you've basically become de-skilled or. Maybe that's empowering people. You don't need the skills, somebody bothered to build the stuff for you.

What's the point. Yeah.

[00:33:56] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think a lot of these I'm particularly generators there. The big thing that I get very excited about. But I do find ultimately that I have to use those as a learning tool themselves. So then it's fine. Cause it just speeds me. Doing something. So if I wanted to change an SVG into a data URL, I know there's a format that is needed to change some of the characters in there.

If a tool can do that for me quickly, that's fine. But yeah, there are some things where I think they could be discontent.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know what you mean. Here's a, here's a good example of where I literally don't want to know the skill. So I had to create an animal. I did gift the other day and basically it had four logos in it and each of those logos was gonna come up.

Kind of makes it GIF, stay there for 10 seconds, fade away and the next one would come on and it would recycle all, forever and and ever that would just keep going. And there's no way I want to learn how to do that in. I don't even know if you can do that in things like Photoshop, but there's a website for that.

You upload four images. Tell how many seconds 10. Do you want it to fade? Yes. Do you want to keep going infinitely? Yes. Download. Yes. Dom, I don't want to learn that. That's so good.

[00:35:12] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. It could be some downsides to this. Um, I don't know. I'm just thinking about a tool that I use to make SVGs, which is free.

Again, another resource Inkscape opens up, you can do it, but when you save those SVGs out, but this could be me. Of course. It also saves a load of metadata you don't want. So unless you know that, and you uploaded this to a site, you end up with kind of heavy, you defeated the object of turning things into SVGs often.

Yeah.

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's a really good point. There's probably a load of stuff that's brought along for the ride. I guess the same with your gifts. Yeah. I'm sure you're right. Yeah. I am more or less. Yeah. There's probably some sort of ad buried in the metadata or something that I didn't know about. Get your free animated gifts from animated gifts.com.

It's just there sitting on every site I've ever used, maybe you're right. And we are de-skilled in that sense. For me very often. It's just the amount of time I could. It's like the teacher man to fish thing, isn't it. I couldn't teach myself to fish and then I wouldn't ever have to go and mess around with these websites and I'd know how to do it properly and do it correctly.

But honestly, the amount of times that I do it in a year is probably. And, maybe even not make it just so happens that I needed to do it. So learning the skill would actually probably have taken me a couple of hours, a few YouTube tutorial, dead ends that I've watched and didn't actually help me.

And so having the tool online for one specific purpose, I'm okay with that. That's fine. That's all. We'll get these skills.

[00:36:45] David Waumsley: Yeah. Long done. Find that these tools are taking a much more of my time. I don't know if it's because I've started to research as I'm trying to, I don't know. I'm trying to up my skills in some ways or change my design skills.

So things look a little bit better, which has taken me into new territory, particularly with it kind of vector stuff, which I'm not very good at, but I'm in there is something about learning one skill. Isn't the, uh, learning. The basics. Cause we're strange people. We find these tools and like that one, we could just lose whole days in there.

And I'm sure other people who are skilled in something like a brick layer, they're not going to spend that much time checking out all the different trials that are out there. They just get on with doing

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: yes, that's a good analogy, but excuse me, if you're a brick layer, I'm sorry. If I'm about to say something, I'm going to put that.

My foot deeply in my mouth and embarrass myself. But I'm guessing that once you've learned how to lay bricks, you probably know how to lay bricks and the whole building a wall thing doesn't really change much over time. Whereas ours is changing. Every year, there's a new thing to learn. And so being able to put some of it to one side and say to yourself, I don't need to be an expert in everything.

I remember back probably 20 years ago when I was beginning my website building journey, you could basically know most of what you needed to know and be confident that you knew it fast forward to today. I know less than half of 1% of what I could. I could be learning all about react and Laravel and JavaScript deeply and keep up with every trend in CSS and server technology and caching and all of these kinds of things.

Oh. And throw design and Photoshop and all of that into the mix. You just can't keep up with it. And so I guess it's good to be able to say to yourself, look, I'm going to concentrate on this thing over here. I'm going to get quite good at that and everything else. That's the domain of tools.

[00:38:55] David Waumsley: Yeah.

You know that you're definitely a WordPress person. And when you can't see JavaScript without seeing the word deeply afterwards,

[00:39:02] Nathan Wrigley: did I do that?

[00:39:04] David Waumsley: It's like JavaScript deeply

[00:39:06] Nathan Wrigley: and I thought, oh no, I need Gordon's hats now. Yeah, that's that, but it's true. W you we are in an industry where you'll give yourself a heart attack.

If you believe that you've got to keep up with everything you can't. You just come up. There's nobody capable of doing that. And I guess, work on the thing that you enjoy most and for everything else, find a tool. Oh, I was

[00:39:31] David Waumsley: just thinking about me because I mentioned that I'm useless me and Beza tools don't go together.

My brain doesn't work like that to be able to create my own shapes in a vector style. And I would be so much better if I could even, I just want simple blobs. So I would go to a block maker and then I will find another blob maker that's online that will make this SVG. It would have probably been just so much better with the Matt tells about being routed.

To create these kind of patterns with SVGs and blobs, just to have learned how to use the tool better. Yeah,

[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there comes a point where the amount of times that you've done it. There must be a tipping point. And I don't know what that number is, but let's say if you find yourself doing the same thing three times, or basically the same thing, maybe it is time to put the tools to one side and say, look, it turns out this is something I'm doing a lot now.

So in your case, making blobs, there you go. Who knew that making blogs would be a thing, but you're making blobs a lot. And if you are doing that every week, you're doing it, then yes, I would totally agree. But if you're just doing it once in a while, I think using the tool, but the trick is finding the good tool.

Isn't it? It's finding the one and not wasting time on trying to find the perfect one.

[00:40:40] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I think that's where the time goes on also. What does concern me with, we mentioned you alluded to it, how these people are gonna keep surviving with all these free resources that keep putting on a note, nothing coming back because there's more free resources and it does seem like we're maybe seeing the first signs of how that's happening.

People to change in the. Down the line with images.

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But I suppose a lot of these tools. So for example, this 10, 15, 1, you've got to imagine that at some point he must be thinking that there is money to be made in this, I could be completely wrong. Maybe he's philanthropic right through and through with a tool.

That's that good? It seems that there could be a premium layer and some of those bits and pieces could be pay walled off some of those tools. But yeah, it is a problem. If you rely on that one and it goes out of existence because the developer just gets fed up or goes on to other things you're in a bit of yeah.

[00:41:38] David Waumsley: Okay. Let's say you, you want to build a site with WordPress for free, and you've got, design skills, like the best. Do you think there's all the tools that would be out there to build a good website now without paying any money?

[00:41:52] Nathan Wrigley: Ooh. Yes, but it would be awful. I mean the design thing straight off the.

I think that's hard getting designed right. Is really difficult. So long as you're happy with the website looking plain, that's one thing. Yeah, you could totally do that. You could download it. You know what I'm being really unfair on. I'm just talking about myself there already because my design skills are that.

But I think if you. If you just wanted a site and you wanted something to be up there and available and you weren't too bothered. Yes. I think you could do that. But as soon as you start to get into the design and the, the functionality of it, time is your best friend. If you're willing to spend time, you can achieve anything in WordPress, but you've got to spend the time.

If you want it to be free, otherwise you're going to pay. Yeah, exactly. Are you sharing that?

[00:42:49] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think there's everything now. All the tools I keep thinking about, photocopy was another one to add to the things I could tell clients to do. If they want to sort out their images online for them.

Before it was difficult. You know, not many years ago, there really wasn't anything out there and they would need to have a graphics program they installed on the computer no longer the case. So yeah, I think there's everything there. I think for me, in terms of all these generators, which are fantastic for the more developer side of things, being able to create WordPress plugins with generators and things like that.

Guilt stuff, but there's still some gaps. I feel in an easy tools. There's no simple way for me to improve my website's performance at the moment.

[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There are still areas which are walled off and the tools are available, but they're not, they haven't trickled down to the free side of things yet. And probably because they're difficult to do when there's a high barrier to understanding that.

So there's few people that do understand let's say cashing and what have you really understand it and know what they're on. They yeah, they're going to have to spend a significant amount of their week doing that. Hence. Get paid. So they have a business in this case, a plug-in business and they're selling a caching plugin and they should be paid.

And the that's the great thing about WordPress. There is a complete route to getting paid for your expertise and the knowledge that you bring. But there's also the option to just go the free route, but you are going to have to cope with community support or. Studying by yourself or figuring things out via Google, but you can, I would imagine you could do almost anything.

The thing is, I think technology shows that give it, give something enough time. If something is needed, it will be. In the end available freely, but it might take years and years to get there. So the example that you've just used photo P, which is you know, it does a lot of what Photoshop does. That's now.

And available online to anybody, but it took time. It took years and years in this case, maybe 20 years or so, but it comes around in the end. So all the difficult stuff now, which you have to pay for, I would imagine at some point there'll be a free solution. Problem is everything will have moved on at that point.

He'll have, he'll be looking for another solution for another new problem, which doesn't exist yet.

[00:45:18] David Waumsley: Do you know, I think performance is one way. I think this is where technology so it's now easy for us to build our sites. As free page builders, we can get all the resources we want, but it can't necessarily speed up our performance.

And there's some downsides of page builders that they tend to include in WordPress itself. Output more than is absolutely required to deliver what is on that page. So you end up with performance issues and it's going to be so interested to see, because you could see the hidden. Of what may come up next or whether it will be solved.

So there's too much stuff being outputted onto our pages. I've seen already with WP rocket or experimenting with the stuff that Google is able to pick up on that this CSS is unused and it tells you, and they're experimenting with automatically removing what isn't needed. It doesn't work too well at the moment.

So I'm, I'll be intrigued to see whether technology on something like that will make up for the shortfalls. Some of that bad practices for building websites are done for our convenience, because there's easy tools that do it for us page builders, whether technology then we'll take the place and then remove the downside of that.

The too much bloat. Yeah.

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: That of course probably we should wrap it up fairly soon, but that leads to the whole AI discussion as to whether a lot of a lots of this stuff. Not in the purview of a human at some point, will we be able to create images which are okay just by talking to some interface, I want a picture of a cat in front of a bicycle and UNH know.

Does it for you. And I want my button to be 10 pixels to the right. And it just does it for you. And, I just wonder if those kinds of things also are going to impact. And and, and of course at that point, we'll have to stop making the podcast cause of no purpose because the only audience will be some kind of AI bot, which doesn't care.

Yeah, which we've got

[00:47:17] David Waumsley: AI making for AI.

[00:47:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. I'm going to start the AI for AI podcast. And it's going to be, it's going to be a robot voice talking in ones and zeros. I think

[00:47:30] David Waumsley: that's it. That's going to be the new wave. Cause you've got all of these tools now, but you still have to use your skills to put it together.

So if you want to start with a website and there's lots of tools out there and you want to get some brand identity, that's consistent. So it looks good. Got the tools for the color schemes. You've got the tools to get all the images you want and the fonts you just don't have a way to say, okay, I'm going for my example, was this rustic countryside fail that I want as my brand for my website.

Bring all those in together and say, these are the colors you want. These are the images you want, but not these ones. These are the fonts that will fit with that kind of Brandon. That's not.

[00:48:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what I think that really is in the domain of AI in the not too distant future. I think if you said to it I would like my website to be rustic looking.

I would like there to be yellows and autumnal colors, whatever. I think in the near future, that kind of thing will be available. Give you a pallet selection of pallets and you just pick, do you want the buttons to be this color or this? Got it. Okay. I'll go for that one. I really think this is common around.

And, and we just have to wait and see as with everything though, the sort of the panic probably won't bear out the reality because there will still be. It will still go wrong things won't work. There will still be the need for something which doesn't look like it was created by AI. And we, you want to stand out from the crowd and have something which has got some joy out of Eve that only a designer can make.

That's the first time I've spoken in French on this podcast. I'd like us all to acknowledge

[00:49:09] David Waumsley: show raise on Detra. Yes,

[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: we both have done it, but they'll always be at, they'll always be worked for us. But it might not be the same work. We'll have to be adaptable. And there's no way that if AI can do that and speed things up, there's no way I'm not going to use it.

Just be, let's be some kind of Luddite to say, I don't want to build sites in an easy and quick way. I want to go the hard way where I've got to do everything manually. No way I'm going to cut every corner. That's possible. So long as the output's good.

[00:49:39] David Waumsley: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing with free resources though, isn't it?

I think what, we'll never, because it's always, we are creating for human beings and those, I don't think, AI can ever overtake us so it can always produce something. It can cause simulate what we've already done. It can't create something. Yeah. It's that this tell war comedy. Yeah,

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: we are.

Yeah. We're not going to get into the AI debate too much, but I'm not sure that will, that sentence will hold out for much longer. I think it we'll be able to create artwork and it will be able to great music and it will do all of these things. And the reason I think that is because of some things that I've seen recently, It I've seen music or I should have listened to music created by AI.

And I have seen in inverted commerce paintings created by AI and they are unbelievably good in the, I would not have known it basically they've passed the, not the during tests they've passed the Wrigley test, the barrier to that is considerably lower than the Turing test. But but they, they were great and they were really.

Authentically human looking. And I just don't think it's going to be that long. So you know, we're, what are we at now? We're in 2021. I'm predicting that by 2031. We're all run by robots. David. There's no hope for us done it. He's coming to it. And

[00:51:11] David Waumsley: the sky is falling. Oh God. The way to end this one, actually, we didn't really talk.

It's supposed to be resources. We didn't even get to touch on all the kinds. Wonderful resources, Facebook groups that we've got out there, blogs that are out there, you can learn anything you want can't you these days. Yeah. And talk to people. People. Yeah.

[00:51:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's that is a big resource.

It's a resource that I've relied on. Massively is the, the sort of outsourcing of technology to things like Facebook groups in the hopes that there's people dwelling in those places that are willing to help you out. I must admit go going back a long time ago, I was much more into things like stack overflow and what have you.

I had different places that I'd go for this different thing. More recently, Facebook seems to have taken the mantle on of all of that kind of stuff. For me, I know the things like stack overflow is still incredibly popular and Reddit and so on. I'm trying to step away from the whole Facebook thing though.

So maybe those domains will become more important to me in the future. I don't. I think

[00:52:16] David Waumsley: it has a downside because you become lazy. If you're in a group, you go and join a group that you expect that they're experts there. They seem nice people and you ask them, kind of the shortcut way to what you want to learn.

What's the best, whatever for this. And I don't know if you always get the best results from that kind of dialogue, really? You you know, the old days where you might need it to do your own research and stuff, rather than just take the kind of popular boon groups where they become their own echo chamber.

So there is a downside, I think, to that.

[00:52:49] Nathan Wrigley: It is amazing though. Because we work on the internet itself provides us with the answers for so many things. And I think sometimes I forget how utterly remarkable the internet is. I remember as a kid, if I wanted to, when I was a child, there was this competition on the television.

And you had to identify a butterfly that, that was there was about nine different things that you had to do. One of the questions was. You have to write the name of this Spotify. So they showed it on the screen and they encourage you to take a photo, which you would then get developed of the butterfly so that you could remember it because obviously the minute it went off the screen, we didn't have a video recorder or anything like that.

You would forget what it looked like. So I did that. I went and got a cat. Took a picture of the screen waited a week, it got printed, it got sent back through the post. I had the thing I had to go to the library then, I really want it to win this thing, by the way I didn't sadly. And, and I went through encyclopedias, just looking for one that matched.

And I think I got the right one, but it took me days and days of endeavor. Now that would take one second. Yeah. To, to figure out, you, um, I know there's a tool on Google where you can say, show me a photo, which is just like this one and it will do it and it will figure it all out. And so the whole getting on my bike, going to the library, flicking through pages of stuff that is irrelevant, all of that has been taken out of our lives.

And sometimes I think we forget what an amazing resource the internet is. And when you put the humans into that, so in Facebook or Reddit or wherever. It is truly breathtaking. What's at our disposal and we just, we just don't realize how amazing it is while we do, but we forget and become blahzay about it.

[00:54:40] David Waumsley: You've saved it. You've ended on the puzzle.

[00:54:43] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. I've totally nailed it. Yeah. But yeah, the death comes to us all. David we'll end it. Yeah.

[00:54:52] David Waumsley: Okay. I think we probably better. And I'm really looking forward to this next series. I'm keen now to get to the . Yeah.

[00:54:59] Nathan Wrigley: You let us at the alphabet.

[00:55:01] David Waumsley: We'll just pretend that

[00:55:03] Nathan Wrigley: anything after this. Everything else that are doesn't exist or we'll just get on with the next one. No, it's good. I'm glad that you're excited, but that's a few weeks away. So next stop. We're doing S and we reckon that'll be for SEO. Makes sense. Yeah,

[00:55:19] David Waumsley: which we know nothing about, but

[00:55:21] Nathan Wrigley: it's fine.

We know nothing about any of it. So it's perfect. All right. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. I'll get a cheers. I hope that you enjoyed that. Always fun chatting to David Walmsley about these things. And honestly, I'm quite amazed at the amount of resources that we need or we could use, or we've come across in the past to build our WordPress websites.

As I said, at the beginning, if we've missed anything out, or if you think that there's something that we ought to included, please drop a comment. Go to WP builds.com. Search for episode 244. Stick a comment there or go to the Facebook group. WP builds.com forward slash Facebook and perhaps something that we would most appreciate.

Anything that we have missed. The WP build's podcast is brought to you today 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. You can use your existing pages and test anything against anything else that could be buttons, images, headers, rows, anything.

And the best part is it works with elements or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. So why not check it out? Get a free demo AB split test.com. Okay. We will be back next week, but because it was a discussion with David this week, next week, of course will be an interview. I can't tell you what that is yet, but hopefully you'll join us and enjoy that episode.

Also come back on Monday, our, this week in WordPress show, where we sum up the weekly WordPress news, we do that live every Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time. WP Builds.com forward slash. Oh, you could just get it on a Tuesday. It will come through your inbox. If you subscribe [email protected] forward slash subscribe, that's all I've got for you this week.

Hopefully you've enjoyed it. We'll see you next. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, bye-bye for now.