This Week in WordPress #178

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 178 entitled no fish. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of 70. 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And I'm joined this week by my co-host Paul Lacey, as well as Joe Casabona as always. There's a lot of news to talk about each week. And this week is no different.

We briefly discuss WordPress's new release 5.8 0.1 before going on very briefly to talk about 5.9 and some proposed changes, we then get into why automatic has acquired the social image generator plugin. And then we talk about an exciting initiative, which you can link to your easy digital downloads checkout system to plant some trees.

When people buy your products. We also talk about page builders, speeding up their sites, specifically bricks and divvy have announced new updates to the way that they display pages and hopefully less bloat in any pages you make with them. And we also talk about cookies and whether cookie banners are all getting a bit much and then.

Picks of the week. Most notably a fabulous service uncovered by Joe called zip message. It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress, this week in WordPress was brought to you by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record? Then you AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes.

Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is that it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Go check it out and get a free demo at AB split. test.com. Hello? Hello. Hello. Welcome Joe. Casabona welcome.

Paul Lacey, number 1 7 8 of the, this weekend word pressure. Do this every Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time. Paula, are you going to do the introductions today? We're supposed to have, I should say we're supposed to have another. But Matt Cromwell isn't here just yet, but fingers crossed that at some point in the next hour or so he'll it'll drop in.

And if he does, we'll just dump him right into the conversation. But as always, Paul Lacey's here, how are you doing? Do you have a nice weekend, Paul?

[00:02:31] Paul Lacey: Oh, it's rubbish. Actually. That's a total waste of time. Friend of mine, Nathan Wrigley booked a weekend away for he and I, and some of our friends from big orange heart.

And it's actually, no, it's really good. And we had a lot of us, hadn't seen each other for a long time and we, you know, took advantage of the fact that the UK is relative. Unlocked as such. And we're able to go to the coast, but no, often it was really cool. And we had a great time beers.

We watched the uh, new, British tennis champion win the us open, which was absolutely amazing in the pub. We watched that in the pub. And also, should we just bring it up now we're going to go, we're all going to go fishing on. Was it the Saturday?

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: I should say Saturday, the 11th Saturday an am

[00:03:26] Paul Lacey: booked.

Yeah. So it, but Nathan accidentally booked it for November 11th. So we just did what we did for the rest of the weekend and just went to the pub and then, Nathan felt very bad about it, but honestly, none of us minded, we all had a bit of a hangover to be quite fair from the previous night and going out on the waves, catching slimy fish, I don't think any of us were too worried about it might say don't worry, but we all had a great weekend and thank you very much, Nathan, for organizing it and hope to do it again.

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Before I, before we get onto Joe, it's one of those moments where you really wished the ground would swallow you up because we were all sitting, having some food and we were supposed to within about five minutes, go to the place where the fishing boat was, that was going to take us on. And I just thought I'll just open up the email and just check, just to make sure that we're in the right place and so on.

And I ended up, and the first thing I saw was the word November. That's gotta be a mistake that has please make that a mistake. And it wasn't like booked it three months since of the future, but

[00:04:34] Paul Lacey: My favorite part was your excuse though. Apparently when he was typing the word October, it must have also completed to November.

Even though it was whatever, even if you've got it in your mind, we still wouldn't have been there for another month, but it was great. And we did a lot of walking along the beach and and, um, found a crab didn't we? Yes. And some fossils. It was cool.

[00:05:01] Nathan Wrigley: It was really nice. Just connecting with people in the real world.

It's the first chance that I've had to do anything. I missed it. Apparently word camp Bristol is coming back fairly soon as are a couple of other events, um, in the near future. So maybe that'll just be the first of many this year, but do you want to introduce. Oh, fabulous guests. Yeah.

[00:05:20] Paul Lacey: I certainly, so welcome back, Joe and Joe here started his career almost 20 years ago.

When I guess he must've been about three years old. Cause look how young he looks as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge, which he does have about website development, podcasting and online courses. And today his main focus is helping people make money with podcasting.

And what's your, what's the best web address for you these days, Joe?

[00:05:49] Joe Casabona: Well, casabona.org is where all of my stuff is, but the podcast specific stuff is at podcast liftoff dot.

[00:05:57] Paul Lacey: I've done that course. And it actually helped me launch a podcast which I,

[00:06:04] Joe Casabona: Paul Lacey's wonderful face on, on the homepage as a testimony.

[00:06:09] Paul Lacey: Yeah, it's a great course. And I'm a co-host of this. I don't know what Nathan did to set it up at the beginning. And I didn't

[00:06:21] Nathan Wrigley: know a lot of honestly, a lot of messing around and a lot of blind alleys and a lot of mistakes and a lot of things that I wish I'd done differently because I just didn't have the bandwidth.

So going here, Joe, Scott's going to do Joe's course to just don't waste your time.

[00:06:37] Paul Lacey: It's just gaps of knowledge that you might know 50% of the stuff, and it's just okay, that two minute video that just saved me three days of getting it wrong. So yeah. Check it out. It's a good course. Great course.

Yeah.

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's cool. You honestly, Joe, and I'm not trying to be like some kind of sycophant. You do look. A lot younger than you are.

Thank

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: you. I I'm all wrinkly by the time I was your age, I was like wrinkly and you're not, maybe you've got a dead good filter on your camera. That's

[00:07:10] Joe Casabona: really good. So it's just perfect lighting in here.

I'll I I'll attribute that to I dunno, probably my like greasy Italian skin. Maybe that's keeping the wrinkles. I'm about to have a third kid in December, so that'll

[00:07:31] Paul Lacey: no, yeah,

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: actually strangely enough, the third kid was what made this, so we'll we'll see how that goes. I'll just very quickly.

If you feel the sort of captioning type things, if you are wishing to comment then, and you're in the Facebook group, then you have to click on where you don't click on the URL. I don't know if it's a clickable link, but go to chat.restream.io forward slash F B. If you want to be D anonymized, otherwise you will be anonymous and we won't know who you are.

And if you've got any questions or just general commentary then please just add it as a comment and we'll throw it on the screen at an appropriate time. If there is. Unappropriate time, like I said, we're hoping to get Macron well on, but who knows maybe that'll happen. No,

[00:08:14] Paul Lacey: he's he sent me a message.

So basically if we can wish Matt Cromwell to get well, soon he sends his apologies to everyone and you know, if you're watching Matt okay, well get, soon

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: I hope he's feeling better soon. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll carry on. We'll put the screen up and just say, this is the WP builds a website. We do this every week on a Monday.

And we put out on a Tuesday and we've got a podcast which comes out on a Thursday and you can always catch the latest episode at the top here. And if you fancy keeping in touch with what we do, click on our little subscribe link there and fill out one of these forms or follow us on Facebook by clicking these links and all of that kind of good stuff.

Let's cut to the news. I think we're going to rip through a fair amount of this pretty quickly. Cause a lot of it's just, it's a coup it's a question of news. I feel I've got a cover off, but it does not really. Stuff to say. So we'll just quickly dive through a bit of this WordPress 5.8 0.1 rolled over during the course of the last week.

Hopefully all of your sites, you sent you emails to say, this has all happened automatically. You didn't need to do anything, but it was basically a little security update. I don't know if you've switched all of this kind of automatic updating off, but it's probably a good idea because there are, I think I counted six 60 bug.

Yeah. There is 60 bugs. In addition to three security fixes and because it sucks security release, it is recommended that you fix things immediately because obviously the bad guys now know what those problems were. And presumably we'll be looking to exploit them. I am almost certain that both Joe and bill have nothing to say about this.

I'll just pause for a second in case they do, but they don't. That's probably to be expected. Great. Okay. In which case, we'll go on to this one, which is a 5.9. It's an article on WP Tavern by Sarah. And it's all about the roadmap of the near future. I know for a fact, Paul, you're getting a bit sick of talking about 5.9 and updates and full site editing and all of that kind of stuff, but it is just, oh

[00:10:16] Paul Lacey: yeah, I get triggered, but I still love doing it.

I watch, I like to watch horror films as well, but yeah, on you,

[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: You, you carry on going.

[00:10:29] Paul Lacey: I was just gonna say I, I really think they've probably figured out that they need to get this full site editing thing out there. So that, so that there's not a, just a reliance on something like toolset that, which is currently one of the only ways you can, there's probably some others that I don't know about, but it's more or less the only way that I'm aware of to do.

Proper full site development, where you've got things like archive views, and single posts templates, so that, you can design one template for all your blog posts. You can design a template for your search results, you foray for et cetera, and and get that done. And I'm sure that it won't be perfect when it comes out more than surely.

It won't be perfect, but I think they need to get that that over the line. And then I think that's something that's probably been pushing a lot of the development that to some people feels like, why are they focusing on that? And I think it comes down to, they need to get this particular thing out.

And then perhaps, I don't know, what do we ever have to 5.9.

[00:11:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think six, but,

[00:11:42] Paul Lacey: Yeah, I mean, I imagine then we might start seeing the focus on back filling some of the sort of things that aren't working quite as well as they could or performance and stuff like that. Um, I, I'm going to be relieved when they get this one done and then I'm really interested to see what they do next.

But I do get a sense that they're on the whenever I hear just or read yourself a write in about, their sort of deadlines are for, and I feel that there is like an urgency to it now, for sure, wherever that comes from. But I think that they're going to bring it out and then third parties can start iterating.

And there's a bunch of other things coming out in 5.9 as well, that I think theme developers really need, and they're desperate to get their hands on as well. Uh, yeah, we'll see. Get past this one and then see what next version looks like is my thought on it. I imagine Joe, you've probably delved into this a lot deeper than I have, cause I know you follow the the full site editing stuff.

You think you've got a course about it as well? As far as I remember

[00:12:48] Joe Casabona: yeah. A master of full site editing. It's again, it's pretty early, I rolled it out at the same time of 5.8, which is when the first full site editing features came to core, but I've been working with it. It is it's it's buggy right now.

I've participated in the full site editing kind of team chats when I could those are run by I'll say friend of the show and McCarthy, um, this is where I met her. And and so, you they've been really open about it. You know, getting things fixed and things like that. And so this'll be a big push they're doing something similar to 5.8, right?

Where I think about two months before the release date they're going to do a go no-go on specific features, and then they'll do a feature freeze a month later. This is appropriate development, right? I think in the past with WordPress releases, we haven't had what I would as a software developer, myself consider appropriate feature releases where features should be frozen in the beta period.

The beta period is not a time for adding new features. This is the beta is for bug fixes or should be for bug fixes only. And then the release candidate should be pretty polished. In the past, we haven't seen that with WordPress. We've had new features added to release candidates. I think that this path that Josepha has laid out is much more appropriate and I think it's necessary considering the major changes that we're going to see with full site editing.

[00:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: One of the, um, one of the things that I'm curious about is that we've seem to have a new role that's been invented as well, because it seems like the, the release lead is going to be Matt Mullenweg. That's been the case for quite a few releases of late and Josepha is going to be marketing lead and Jonathan Boston Jer.

He's not, he's not been on this particular show, but he's been on our podcast. He's been invited to take on the new role. I think it's a new role called technical writer. And the job of that is to create sorry to get the technical details of the new releases translated into accessible and actionable information for other contributed teams, which seems like quite a curious step.

I'm presuming it's because there's so much complexity coming out in this one, that it would be good that everybody knew exactly. The page was that we were all on. But anyways, the goal is to get this out by the end of this year. And you can have a little look. It's the usual stuff that we've been banging on about over the last few months.

[00:15:34] Joe Casabona: Yeah, I will add, I think that this new role is probably a good and important one. Jonathan works for a Casto. So if I'm not

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: mistaken, right? No, he did work for he's now at I'm gonna get it wrong. It's totally escaped me. I want to say, please say

[00:15:53] Paul Lacey: brains thingy, brains, what they call it. It's delicious brains.

So delicious brains, liquid

brains to be,

[00:16:06] Joe Casabona: I think, I think this role is a good one, right? Cause I I think a really valuable skill to have. Is, this is the skill of being able to translate developer, speak into normal person speak. Um, and because there are so many contributor teams now and Nathan, like you said it's really complex.

I th I feel like maybe this is another evolution in the WordPress open source environment, where I think for a long time, people thought contributing was just about writing code. And it's not really like that anymore, but it's still very developer centric. And uh, hopefully Jonathan's role.

Make it less developer centric. I don't want to use react in any of his documentation.

[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Hey he actually came on our podcast, like I said, a long time ago, probably like three or four years ago because he noticed that David and I had made an absolute pig's ear of explaining the GPL. And so he wrote to me and said, look, can we just do a show where I just tell you how it actually is?

And so that's what we did. And he did, he managed in 40 minutes to explain how the GPL actually works, which is really difficult to understand. He did a really good job of it. So he's. Yeah.

[00:17:29] Joe Casabona: Even more right. Cause that hasn't been challenged in the courts. No.

[00:17:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no. He made that very point, but it's a hope that it's down that has water tight in us, but there you go have a read of that.

That's Sarah Gooding, WP Tavern. I thought this one was quite interesting. We've seen a whole bunch of things being acquired of oh, sorry. Before I go onto the next one. Thanks Jo. Jo put the version numbering for WordPress. There's a link on the page. I'll put it in the show notes if I remember, and it looks like it does go to 0.9 and then the next point release, 4.1, 5.1.

And so yeah, it looks like we're heading for six after 5.9. Okay. Next one. Back on WP Tavern again, Sarah Gooding, we mentioned this poll. Do you remember having this on the show a little while ago and thinking this was a really good idea. Quite unusually. It got out of the gate and I think it was premium only.

There was no way of getting this from the repo. Yes, but it's in fact, Joe, you might've been on the show talking about this. I have a memory that we talked about it anyway. And it's an image generator where you can take an image, and make it into a featured image, but put memes on it, put text over the top, move the text left, put fonts on, put different capacities and things.

Basically, it just makes social sharing cards inside of your WordPress installation. I would never have put this as an automatic acquire, but there you go. They bought it for an undisclosed amount. And the theory that Sarah is putting forward here is that it's going to be rolled up into Jetpack. And, and I love it.

I don't buy it cause I've got a bit of software that I'm happy to open up just in another tab and use, but I've figured that for 39 bucks a year, this is a pretty solid plugin, but I'm just, it's an odd one, I think for WordPress. For automatic to have acquired this one.

[00:19:19] Paul Lacey: I, first of all, just really like this plugin of what to say.

I like it. I just like the idea of it. I've never used it. But the seeing, end user clients struggling with social sharing on regular basis on websites and trying to get them to understand, oh, uh, you guys, the feature image, it'll fall back to that. And if you don't have that, you can customize what image you upload in there.

And whenever I, as soon as this plugin came out, I recalled all of those conversations with clients and then felt, wow, we're in a, we're in the 2020s now and such a restriction on what you can do on such a super important marketing aspect. Visualizing your sort of snippet of your webpage when you're sharing it on any of these different social platforms.

And yeah, it came out, I think it was $39 per site per year, which is totally totally affordable price for anyone who's got any kind of marketing goal, but I have the feeling, I don't have any numbers on this, but I just have the feeling that sort of plugin is the kind of plugin that would get lost and, and just wouldn't be making the sales that it probably deserved what it did.

Um, kind of, on, on that basis and that assumption, I'm really happy that it's been acquired and in a place where it's going to get some serious use out of it, did the cynical part of me is oh, I see it's going to be in Jetpack but quite honestly if Jetpack is going to bring a feature like that to all its premium customers, It's just, it's a real win for WordPress.

I don't know if Squarespace and Wix has that kind of thing. I don't think they do. I just, I, I just don't think, I think we've sort seen some really good sort of Twitter and Facebook shares from websites if they did, because people would be using that. I assume it's going to go into wordpress.com as well, because that just completely makes sense.

So if they bought it for Jetpack to not put that kind of feature in wordpress.com would be a real fail. So congratulations to jet pack, congratulations to Daniel and and, uh, millions of users will be using this at some point in the near future. Even if I'm a little bit cynical about, Jetpack in general, but Jetpack just got a whole lot better.

[00:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Apparently they were introduced automatic and Daniel post or introduced the creator of the plugin. Apparently they were introduced by Chris. Which is a name that every time I hear the word, I'm like, I must go and read that right away. I really Crisco stuff. He's just amazing. He's got Frisco is one of those people that I wish I was him.

[00:22:10] Joe Casabona: He's really. And can I just, I'll just say he's like super generous. He was guest number six on my podcast before I had any audience or anything. I was just like, Hey Chris do you want to like, come on my show and talk about how you built code pen and he's yeah. Wow, nice. Super nice. I couldn't believe it.

So really generous dude with his time. Super cool. But, uh, I, I think that this is Jetpack, like Paul was saying a jet pack has a lot of baggage and I think there are maybe too many features in Jetpack, but jet packs, social sharing tools are very. Yes, the buttons the, the ability to publicize, I think, are some of the tightest features of Jetpack and this is going to fit in really well.

I think. So I'm, I'm excited. Great because I, I can hear a lot of naysayers saying I can just do this in Canva and I'm like, I could just do it in Canva too, but I'm not going to make your camera kind of crap. Like, so if it's something and I'm like, oh man, I need to share image right now.

I go to Unsplash, which is, I think a bad word in the WordPress space. Now I think there is a

[00:23:34] Nathan Wrigley: reason for why that is, but I've forgotten what,

[00:23:36] Joe Casabona: yeah, I think I think it had something to do with like

their licensing

[00:23:42] Joe Casabona: licensing and you know, and when WordPress gets that integration, that was announced a little while ago, I'll happily use that.

Right now I, I have to, I go out to Unsplash I find an image and I just upload it. I don't even add the text or anything like that because but having a tool like this, it's going to save me a ton of time, I think.

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Especially if it did things like automatically overlay the post title and maybe, I don't know, some of you the first 20 words of your excerpt or something, have you guys ever used stencil?

[00:24:11] Paul Lacey: Yeah. No. You reconciled it to me in early parts of our friendship. In fact, what's that you recommend it to me recommended to me early days of our friends. Oh, and you're still using

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. It is a good, it's an online tool. It's a get stencil dot something. Imagine it's dot com. I can't remember.

And they've got a really neat WordPress plugin, which in the media library, it just adds another tab. You know, you've got media and you've got the upload tab. They had another one, which has stensul. So you. Inside there. You I'm guessing it's an I-frame or something. You create your featured image inside the UI, and then you just click export to WordPress and it just chucks it in the media library.

It doesn't bring in the feature, sorry, the the post title or anything like that, which I'm guessing this will do, but it's right there inside of WordPress. And if you've got the appropriate line license, I think you can install this in client sites as well. I'm

[00:25:09] Paul Lacey: not a hundred percent you can.

Yeah. It it's been like that for a couple of years. And and this plugin mimics the kind of thing that this does, but without needing the third-party SAS tool as well. And yeah, that is a super, even just the things like simple cropping and, just changing the lighting a little bit on a photo or make giving it that kind of Instagram filter look, that's what that kind of plugging does.

I wonder if this if this one does that, I assume it probably does, the ability to sort of Instagram, any sort of filters onto the phone. Yeah.

[00:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not entirely sure. Just from the logos that we've got. Sorry, that little thumbnails we've got here, it looks like you can fiddle with fonts, a pasty dragging images.

It looks like you can add your logo there. Just adding the logos. Nice. If you don't have to do that. And that's all automatic, that's fun. Um, anyway, nice and

[00:26:00] Paul Lacey: acute. Last thing I'd say really is you know, when it comes to Jetpack, we're, we're all like the snobby nerds when it comes to WordPress, we, we care about the what's going on in the pit lane and everything.

And that's why we you know, complained about Jetpack because they put ads in the naughty places and stuff like that. And but as an end user, like Joe said, some of the tools that are in there, if you don't care about a bit of bloat and stuff like that, because you're just not aware that's even a bad thing, then it's only going to get better thing.

[00:26:34] Joe Casabona: Can I just talk about how confused I'm looking at jetpacks pricing page right now? And it's very confusing.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Let me put it up. Let's go on. We're going to get into this. What's the I can never remember the URL. Yeah.

[00:26:48] Joe Casabona: I'll yeah, it's there jetpack.com. I'll drop in a private chat here, but I got it.

I was like, how much could it cost? And then if you go to pricing. Oh, you're going to see localized pricing. That's cool.

[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: But yeah, pounds, I knew it's the same in pounds as it is in dollars, which always annoys us over on this side of the pond.

[00:27:11] Joe Casabona: What's interesting is it is not it's 99 bucks a month for the complete so it looks like I wonder what they're using for that.

Cause I want to,

[00:27:21] Nathan Wrigley: but that feels like about the market, right? Actually that feels like the dollar to the pound translation, 99 to 77 here. Is that what you mean? Yeah. But very often we will see products where, and if you go to the, if you go to the pricing and you put a VPN on and it comes out in dollars, it's the exact same number.

And it's

[00:27:40] Joe Casabona: he just stopped whopping the currency

[00:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: symbol. Yeah. Yeah. So 38 pounds and 25 Pence for the complete nine pounds, 55 for the daily.

[00:27:58] Joe Casabona: It's like unclear a little so like backup security, and then it's complete both backup and security, but then it says you also get the CRM and mark, and then if you scroll down, there's more pricing tables.

[00:28:16] Paul Lacey: Oh the top, the top one, the complete one doesn't seem like fantastic value compared to, and that's

[00:28:24] Joe Casabona: exactly what I almost like 99 bucks a month for what am I getting?

[00:28:29] Paul Lacey: The same, the CRM is included in that, but that, but the CRM later on, like you said, is,

[00:28:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[00:28:39] Joe Casabona: Add up all of this.

Does it add up to 77 bucks a month? Or

[00:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: for me, I'm not going to do that, but no, it doesn't. All this stuff down here is cheaper. Cheaper.

Yeah,

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. I'm going to write a letter. I'm going to get this figured

[00:28:55] Joe Casabona: out. I'm yeah. This is, I hear a lot of times that WordPress has a pricing problem and here is that right?

I don't really know what I'm getting. And then roll up to the very top. It should say something like 40%.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: But you got a 40%, 14 day money back guarantee though. And they should put a big batch here, same price to us, citizens as it is to people in Europe. Yeah. They should do that. Yeah. That's interesting.

I'm going to delve deeper into this is just something I've never bothered with. When I joined WordPress every, like there were real knives out about Jetpack at the time when I joined and it would just appear that all the people that I was meeting with and taking advice from were just like, just don't.

So I never did. I have no ax to grind, but I just never have gotten there.

[00:29:46] Joe Casabona: So yeah, I, I would just rather use one-off plugins for the things. Now, if you look at the comparison table, the value is clear. Yeah.

[00:29:58] Paul Lacey: It's the real time aspect on the top one. That's different.

[00:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: So they scan in real time. And so on the real time

[00:30:07] Paul Lacey: it's

[00:30:08] Joe Casabona: for activity log.

Yeah, the search. Yeah. It's uh, yeah, the value is a lot clearer. If you look at the comparison page, but yeah, like the compare all bundles there, but

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: you're right though. As far as I can see, that does not add up to 20. What's that $47 $51 $55 57, 50 a month. Really? If you just get them all separately.

Oh, is it priced on this though? Say 50% off for the first year? Maybe? I don't know. Cause it says, I don't know. None of it

[00:30:42] Paul Lacey: Giorgio content though.

[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Let's look at a pricing table.

[00:30:49] Joe Casabona: The TLD, if you want to edit all that out, the TLDR is there's seven. Different price boxes on the jet pack pricing page.

Yes.

[00:30:57] Paul Lacey: The three of us can't figure out what's going on

[00:31:00] Joe Casabona: there. I would really just say get jet pack pro big, get jet pack pro I guess I'm rebranding Jetpack for them. Get jet pack pro for 40 bucks a month or whatever it is. You get all of these things or all a cart, get these things, right? So present the one you want them to get, or then give them the options below.

But what do I know?

[00:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: A fair amount. I'd say, okay. Complete change of direction. This is introduced to me this week by the guy who I did a podcast recording with. I recorded a podcast, which did it come out. Let me just have a quick look on my homepage. I think I'll put it out. It's uh, Alex Kirk, from the friends plugin, by the way, if you haven't come across the friends plugin.

Interested in the possibilities of doing so networking inside a WordPress where you can connect, you can basically create a federated WordPress interconnected exchange, go and check that plugin out. It's really cool. And I noticed on his pricing table and I was, I just said to him, where's, what's this all about on his pricing table.

It told you that if you bought his product, he would plant some trees. And I was like, what's that about? And he said I've just hooked into this API. I've written a plugin so that if you've got an EDD product, it, you can show on the checkout page, how many trees you're going to plant? And I just thought, oh, that's so cool.

This stuff's right on my street. I don't do anywhere near enough. I'm, I'm a typical person. I'm sure many of us could be guilty of the same thing. I talk the talk, but don't necessarily do the right thing. And I just thought this was a really nice way of. Offsetting some of that. So if you buy his product, you can link it into EDD.

And every time you get a sale, a proportion of that sale will be sucked out and given to what is the organization called? Ecology, E C O L O G I E. Ecology partners globally with local projects that are implementing the best climate crisis solutions for offsetting CO2. So basically they'll go plant trees if you give them a little amount of money.

And obviously if you're selling a boatload of stuff through EDD, all of that will be added up. It's one of those win-wins you get to feel good, but you don't actually have to go out and plant the tree yourself. You actually, somebody else goes and does that. So I just thought that was just such a nice little initiative and it's at responsible wp.com.

Go check it out. What do you reckon, guys? Yeah.

[00:33:48] Joe Casabona: This looks super cool. So this is a separate service that connects EDD with ecology. This is not like an EDD.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: It's like an EDD, Adam. Okay. Oh, no, go ahead. I was just going to say, we didn't talk about this on the podcast I recorded. I just said, why have you got the number of trees you're going to plant on your checkout for the friend's plugin?

And he said, oh, it's this thing that I've built. And it bolts on to EDD. And I just thought that's fascinating. And I said, I'll share that because I like it. So here I am sharing it. So I think that's how it works. It says the current version of responsible WP does require some coding skills by way of a standard WordPress filter.

You will define the number of trees and the amount of CO2 to be offset per purchase or renewal. These amounts can be customized according to the purchase and renewal amounts, responsible WP hooks into all the new purchases and all new existing subscriptions and renewals. When any purchase renewal is processed on your site, responsible WP sends an API request to ecology impact API in order to plant any number of requested trees and or offset any amount of CO2.

How cool is that? It's

[00:35:05] Joe Casabona: really cool. It isn't, if this existed for WooCommerce, I would install it. My brother my brother Phil is. More conscious about this than I am. I'm kind of ah, the economy will catch up to it sort of thing. But he, uh, he has been really pushing me to, to do the right thing.

You know, we stopped buying like plastic water bottles and I have the, a reusable one and a reusable filter for Christmas. One year, he got me reusable shopping bags as like a, as like a gag gift, but now we try to use them. And but this, this is a cool, it's, it's no effort for site owners, right?

If you're selling stuff on your site and you're using EDD and maybe I'll put in the request for WooCommerce it's no skin off your back, you get to you get to say you're doing a good thing and yeah. And.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: On the bottom of their site, this little plugin, which I don't believe he's done any marketing on.

And what have you, they've the impact of the responsible wp.com licenses? It's 225 trees. And if you actually think about that's like a football fields worth of trees. And the, the message right at the top of the website is pretty much the best. And I don't know the science of this, so you'll have to forgive me.

I'm just reading what it says. It says the trees on our planet on planet earth are one of the best ways to clean our air. I'm sure that's true. And if he's managed to put 225 off this little plug, you imagine what the likes of some of the big guys and you don't have to do it's not like you have to do 10% of your profit.

It could be, if I sell a hundred licenses, we'll do five trees. Yeah.

[00:36:54] Joe Casabona: I think Stripe is, you know what I think Stripe is offering the same sort of thing where you can choose to. Donate 1% of revenue to climate change.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: We, um, both Paul and I listened to a podcast by a guy called Sam Harris and this guy, Sam Harris, can you remember the name of the thing that he sort of, he ties, leaves if you like.

So every time he ends a thousand dollars, he gives a proportion of it to this organization. And it's basically this one hit for everything that he wants to donate to. And he just says, I'll give you the money because I trust that you're going to do the best possible thing with it in terms of climate change you know, tackling infectious diseases and all this kind of stuff.

And I can't remember what the organization is, but he had a guy on the podcast and he's basically saying, there are people who know what needs to be done better than you do. You know, sure you get your local charities, but on a global level, there's better ways of spending your money than, um, necessarily going out and finding one charity at a time.

[00:38:06] Paul Lacey: I don't. But, yeah. Thanks that link, James, just put in the private chat, the link to the Stripe thing that they're doing, hopefully striped as the same as what this plugin allows. Isn't that when you are, you do have a user on the checkout that they can actually see what what what's going on there.

And obviously you could put a what'd, you call it a cart, abandonment messaging to make them feel really guilty if they didn't go through. You killed 25 trees by my plugin. Yeah. And then, then you'll be all right again, but it's lovely that you can sort show him. And I think I said this every day, actually, and I don't even know if Elon Musk really did say this, but I heard that Elon Musk did a talk recently and was saying that the way that, to get the mainstream to start understanding and tackling climate change, when it's such a slow, moving, slow burning sort of problem that we don't suddenly panic about on a day-to-day basis is to stop trying to persuade people, to get scared about it and start making.

Cool and fun to save the environment. So for example, you take the Tesla. So one minute everyone's buying eight liter V8, V12 cars. Who's got the money for that. The next minute, the same people. I don't want that anymore. I want a Tesla. And if the, the, in the future, somehow the products that you buy can help that or that.

And you feel proud about that. And there's a kind of badging on I've honest situation, especially with things like social media, everyone wants to virtual signal signal these days. And it's just super easy. One that every time you buy a product from anywhere, you can just share what that did or that something on.

You're fine. It's just, it seems to be that it's a good answer to getting people excited, because Nathan, you were visibly excited about this just then when you were talking about it. Cause it was like, this is a cool idea. I want to buy something that saves trees and I'll be proud about it. And I'll tell all my friends about it sort of thing.

Yeah,

[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: that was, if there was two things that were, that had feature parity and were basically the same price, I would 100 times out of 100 buy the one with the credentials of planting trees or something equal. Yeah. And the younger

[00:40:37] Paul Lacey: generations care about this more than, us old farts as well, because, we're, we're um, we, haven't got a w we, haven't got to grow up for as many years with this, we're older now and it's.

And, and,

[00:40:54] Joe Casabona: and the science was a bit not mixed, but the messaging certainly was right. It was like global warming, global cooling, global warming climate change. And so there

[00:41:04] Paul Lacey: was, everyone wants to be cool. And everyone wants to be nice and warm. That's, it's not exactly a scary language, is it really?

[00:41:10] Joe Casabona: Yeah. Or, you know, what most people would say on a, if it snowed a lot here, I would know people who'd be like, oh, so much for global

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: warming. Well, yeah, that, I seem to be hearing the phrase, understanding global heating more now in the, in our news, everybody seems to like on the BBC and what have you, they seem to have dropped global warming and they're talking about global heating.

I don't know why that is, but yeah, it's just such a great initiative, Alex. Kirk, if you want to get in touch with them Joe, and have him on a podcast. He's really? Yeah, for sure.

[00:41:44] Joe Casabona: And it looks, I'll just highlight in the chat over here. Marcus. Said that it looks like ecology has a Zapier integration.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you could

[00:41:59] Joe Casabona: do that with, so now I guess I have to walk the walk, right? I'll have to set up that tapping integration today.

[00:42:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What else did we go? Hey uh, uh, Joe Vander, which who recorded last week as well. Hi Joe. Hi, Joshua. Sorry. I don't know why I just called you Jeff.

I have in mind to build something out for WooCommerce or something to more generally hooking to any WP action. I don't use WooCommerce myself at the moment though. Yeah. Okay. Thanks Josh. It looks like Zapier might be taking the heavy lifting and Chris, oops, sorry, Chris. Your comment came and then went again.

Chris Hughes. Nice to have you back. Chris climate Stripe climate is great. It gives, I give 1% automatically. From all my sales across my brands. That's great. Okay.

[00:42:45] Joe Casabona: I just added, I just, as we were talking, I did that to my account, so

[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Yeah. Who can complain? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. Okay. So that's responsible actually.

Is it me, or does that logo just ever so slightly with the tree there? Does it look a little bite? Like irresponsible, double you've pay the way that looks a bit like an art it's responsible wp.com and there you go. I was expecting that to be like a 32nd piece, but it turned into 10

[00:43:14] Paul Lacey: minutes more thing, Nathan, I don't know if I missed it when I was reading through the Stripe website just then, but Joshua Vander car is the creator.

[00:43:24] Nathan Wrigley: So the, no. Have I got Alec? Joshua, if it's you, I am so sorry. Just

[00:43:29] Paul Lacey: checking website. Hello, Joshua. Well done. Good job here. It was amazing. Joshua.

[00:43:35] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know how to say this. I'm going to say this in my defense. Joshua. Firstly, I apologize. Secondly, I am feeling remarkably unwell at the moment. Yeah.

And and I apologize for messing your name. It was somebody else. I interviewed two people last week and I've also really dropped the ball on that. I can only apologize if I was you Joshua. I would be furious at me for making such an error, but I hope you forgive me. I didn't mean to do that

[00:44:01] Paul Lacey: on the weekend.

You know, it's just, it's becoming a thing

[00:44:05] Nathan Wrigley: now. No, but don't oh, paul, will you carry on for a minute? I'm going to go. I'm going to go and beat myself up in another room for a five minute silly one. Joshua. Sorry. God, what's a donkey for want of a better word. I am. Let's move on before I put anything.

Feet in my mouth. There's a couple of pieces this week on page builders that I thought were quite interested in both. I'm not going to go into the detail on both of them, but I just thought this was quite curious. The bricks page builder re had a new release this week, 1.3 0.4, in which they went into great detail about how they had made their page builder quicker, faster and stripped out a load of the assets that they were loading and the way that they were loading them.

This is a YouTube video. I confess, I probably watched about eight of the fifth, 16 minutes. I watched a bit about all of the speed optimization stuff. And then when it got to the features, because I don't use it, I stopped watching at that point. And then David Walmsley put me onto Devi, who, again, I'm not a user of, but I actually watched their video.

Same sort of thing. They've gone. Absolutely. To town, it would appear almost like a bit of a rewrite meaning that they've dropped their, the amount of assets that they're loading. I think in one case that got the CSS from 800 kilobytes down to something like 56, if memory served, I don't know if that means it was incredibly badly performance prior to that.

But apparently now it really does depend on what's on the page. If it ain't on the page, it's not loading anything to do with it. Whereas in the past, I think it loaded an awful lot. So that's my bit about those two bits about page builders, speeding things up, and I'm sure that the the other guys will be doing exactly the same thing.

But did you, did either, you see any of that curious about any.

[00:45:55] Paul Lacey: The bricks one I didn't really take too much interesting cause I didn't really use bricks and don't ever plan any plans to, I think it's already quite performance, but you can see that most of the major page builders making this kind of move at the moment, as well as other moves that they're probably making in the background in an answer to knowing that, automatic are pushing, a user user thing rather than than the page builders, because, they put out a video kind of poo-pooing the the page builders as such.

It definitely had that feel to it. But I think the it's, like I said about earlier about, the Gutenberg project needs to push out this full site editing things so they can get past that milestone. And then at least some of their team can probably turn towards the performance things. Now Gutenberg already does amazing performance anyway.

Right now, but it, with each release, it does become more bloated. And you can see on the dopey Tavern, some people often, bring up a comment about, is someone gonna focus on performance and right now they get away with it because it's already fast. But as it grows, it, it will slow down a bit.

But I think Devi has done some really cool stuff here. And I just you know, the fact is is that some of us more nerdy people would Get wound up by too many devs in page builders and stuff like that. I think the guy Lewis from oxygen, the creator of oxygen even create a phrase called deception that you'd was infamous for on some of his infamous YouTube videos, which are hilarious.

Yeah. They were ripped to pieces all the other page builders and compared to oxygen. You actually

[00:47:47] Nathan Wrigley: see the video riff, it got about halfway through, and then he just said I'm just not even gonna use Devy than the rest. And he just started

[00:47:57] Paul Lacey: and said, I'm not giving the insight. And but, um, the thing is that the, the page builders are aware that, core vitals, these are now there's this big thing that people are interested in how important it is in how people are interpreting.

What it is totally up for debate, but. In terms of people being able to take one tool and then compare it to another, ignore the feature, the power team features, and then say this product is better than that one because it scores better on the on the Google scores is ridiculous, scenario.

So I think what these page builder tools are doing is that they're saying, okay, let's just get rid of this being a comparative problem. Let's get it to the point where someone can say good Sunburg is better for these people for this reason. And this reason it has no hype around it. It's just, it's a better tool for those people.

Whereas divvy is a better tool for those people without seeing a bunch of YouTube videos, promoting a particular product that then just have a bunch of performance scores and use that as a basis to make a purchasing decision for an end user who really should be focusing on the features and the other benefits that they get out of it.

So I think Divya. Sterling job because people used to say about DV, they're too old. As in, you they've been around for too long, they've got too much legacy code in there. How would they, how could they ever solve this problem? They're never will be able to, and they've just turned up, rocked up and proved everybody wrong.

And if these are the, if these are the metrics that Google say are important on their test, and DV has answered those without giving a substandard user experience for the end user, then they've ticked all the boxes and you can only just congratulate them for that. And I think all the Devi users will be super happy

[00:49:53] Nathan Wrigley: about this, the point, right?

[00:49:55] Joe Casabona: It's just free betterness.

Free betterness

[00:50:01] Nathan Wrigley: LA. Right. So in a, in an attempt to, to not feel quite as bad as this podcast goes on, I'm just going to say a few things. Firstly, Joshua, he says all love from mine. Thank you so much. I beg your forgiveness. Secondly, Joshua is, I mentioned about the. Plugin, I feel at this point, I'm going to just mention what Joshua was on the podcast, talking about he's from rocket genius.

So he works with the team over at gravity forms. And the podcast that I was recording with him was all about his gravity hopper plugin. So that'll be coming out next. So hopefully I've rewound many of my mistakes. I'm just going to keep them all in. I'm not going to edit them out because I have to edit out about half of this.

But anyway, there we go. Sorry, Joshua. Okay. Moving on. I'm going to miss out the one from WP builds. Cause I think we mentioned that the friends plugin that we just did it anyway. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we'll go to this one. This is, I don't know what this, what everybody thinks about this.

This is on the BBC website. We very rarely mentioned the BBC website, but it's not specifically WordPress, but here we are. Increasingly, it feels to me like the whole cookie saga is just getting worse and more dramatic. I'm now at the point where I go to websites and I basically just agree to everything because I can't be bothered to not agree to things or go and check out what it is that I'm supposed to agree.

In many cases, the website won't let me use any of the website until I've agreed to something or other. Usually it's two options. You can manage cookies and only choose essential ones and switch all the other ones off, but that's okay. 25 second process. So it's just quicker for me to get to the content by clicking.

Yes. I feel that the EU in particular was a part of this. The reason this all happened. I don't know if this was a thing coming out of north America or if it was coming out of the year, but it felt like it was an EU, a big push. It would appear that the, the UK in particular is going to be trying to rewind a lot of history and get to the point where we can reconsider the dire situation that we're in with cookies.

And I just thought it was interesting. One of the representatives from the UK this week is going to try and urge the world. So the G well, via the G seven and then presumably push it out across the rest of the world. Just take this into hand and say, actually, as this all gone too far who, who didn't see this coming, who works in tech this at the time, I remember everybody who was on our side of the fence was saying, this is stupid.

This should never be, this is exactly what's going to happen. We'll get these great big banners. It'll get in the way. But the politicians drove it through and now we got this. So hopefully we'll get to the point where. I dunno, maybe this is the, then maybe this is the terrain of the browsers or something where you could have a feature built into the browser web prior to going to any website.

When you first log into your brand new, fresh install of Chrome or whatever it might be, you can say actually, these, this type of thing, I'm happy with this type of thing I'm happy with, but not this, this, and this. And then somehow that gets passed through from the browser to the website when you go there.

But I think it's fair to say that nobody wants to be tracked. Probably that's a good default, but anyway, so here we are, the ICO um, are having to deal with all of this in the UK.

[00:53:44] Paul Lacey: I can't see it happening actually. Unfortunately, I'm going

[00:53:50] Joe Casabona: to anymore. We're seeing that with with safari.

I think part of, so part of this right, is politicians are making law based on nothing they know about, right? Like they don't consider this one applications and how this is going to be implemented. But also, you know, apple started with privacy mode in some, I think it was iOS 14. With safari now it's coming out across all of iOS, right?

Where you can ask apps or maybe this is all, I was 14. You can ask apps, not to track.

[00:54:27] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's, I think it's, don't track by default, isn't it? No yeah,

[00:54:32] Joe Casabona: yeah. And then on apple TV, it's not by default. Because I've had to answer that question multiple times recently. But, uh, yeah, so I think that we're seeing we're seeing one company who's not making money off of other people's data, more or less apple pushing this privacy stuff.

Google is maybe reacting a little bit. Cause they were going to fold that. What was that called? I think we talked about it. Yeah. They were pushing

[00:55:04] Nathan Wrigley: it around their learning of cohorts. Yeah.

[00:55:07] Joe Casabona: Yes. Exactly. So, you know, I think that the tech companies, or at least certain software is reacting to an increasing realization that consumers understand right.

That they want to stay. And this, the GDPR stuff, which is probably what kicked a whole lot of this off, but California is getting similar. California is getting similar laws. I'm sure the United States is if there's one thing, Republicans and Democrats agree on it's that big tech is the bad guy.

So I'm, I'm sure that, laws are coming, at a federal level here. And I mean, someone needs to think about it. I have a hard time thinking that Google will do anything too detrimental to their main revenue model, which is ads. And so they need to track people. But I don't know, will I'm hesitant to, to pass this problem off to the biggest government in the world.

Because I don't think that they'll effectively solve this problem in any short amount of time, but I don't know really who else would handle it in a more objective way maybe.

[00:56:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What are your thoughts on it? You were saying, Paul, that you just don't think it's going to happen. You just mean the cat's out of the bag.

It's too late. Well,

[00:56:41] Paul Lacey: Joe's, sort of open my mind a little bit on how I was thinking about that, because at this point, the obvious solution is it goes inside the browser or the device. So apple already on board with that. Anyway, they want to do that. And then Google are probably not not up for it because they have a major browser in their whole business model is effected.

Yeah. If it was done via law and it had to be put in, into browsers, they would probably find a way to make the UX. Slightly in favor of not blocking all the Google based stuff. And at this point, Facebook is like, why don't we have devices and web browser? If Facebook is, screwed again thing.

But, yeah, I mean, you, I just don't think that, Google Chrome will be, the people who in Chrome will be like, yeah, that's a brilliant idea. Let's put that in now. Whereas you see this sort of feature and you just switched Nathan to Firefox, then you just last week, yeah, last week because of a privacy setting that they had done, where can you explain it?

Where they, they bought it off privacy.

[00:57:55] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not actually everything that you're looking at on the screen now is in brave with their shields up enabled. I think it's called shield top, the little lion logo at the end of the Omni Omnibox or whatever it's called these days. So I have that, but I went to I went to Firefox because there's an extension that you can get an add on.

I think it's called on the Firefox side and it containerizes your tabs. So basically you say, okay, if I ever opened Facebook. Open it in this tab and all the cookies sit in that tab and they can't get out. So if I accidentally type in Facebook or I click on a link, which takes me to Facebook, it opens it in the same container.

So the cookies can't escape. And I, for me, that's great because I really want that to be the case, but I don't suppose most people are going to go out and find that Firefox extension. And of course you could do the same for any website. It could be Google or what have you, but it's just because I'm curious about that.

I've

[00:58:55] Paul Lacey: done it. I've tried it. I think it will happen actually. Now come to think about it after a little discussion, but I think, you know, the use end users are becoming more mindful. They will make consumer choices. You can see that, one minute a particular web browser is the king. And then the next minute, it's not very quickly.

So things change really quick. And if users may, if users start making the decisions that force of a browsers to, say for instance, you might use Chrome and then you get popups all the time. But if you use Firefox, you don't get popups because the pop, all the producers of the popup plugins, just do a quick check.

We don't need to do it. Decision's already made, whereas Chrome might prefer people to, Cookies settings on a particular website, but as it happens that ignores anything, it might not, that gives them a better chance of not getting blocked themselves. And I think it's the, one of the UK representatives that suggested this to the EU, it would have probably been better if they'd had a little whisper to one of our European friends and said, will you suggest this?

Because if I say it, no, one's going to listen because the European politicians don't like the UK ones these days, I think post-Brexit,

[01:00:10] Nathan Wrigley: this is I'll just quickly put it on the screen. This is the add on that I was talking about. It's a, it's called multi account containers by Mozilla. And you get a lovely little confirmation in, at the end of the URL bar.

You color code what you want that container to be and you call it something. So in my case I've made it Facebook blue and I've made it Google red. So if I'm in it, I can just see directly that that I'm in that tab. I don't, I'm guessing this isn't new because it's got a bunch of reviews, nearly 6,000 reviews.

Most of them by the looks of it, five star. And the only thing I haven't worked out so far, but the promise was that it would, if I straight into Facebook, that it would load in that container. And I haven't yet figured out how to enable that I'm having to manually open Facebook inside of that container.

I think it's worth checking out. It's ad-ons dot mozilla.org.

[01:01:13] Paul Lacey: Some really nicely, all hard on things like this climate change helper and this privacy helper and stuff. Yeah.

[01:01:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that's what it's called. Right. Okay. Should we move on? I'm conscious. I don't see all the browsers. Where are we back to this?

Okay. Let's move back. So did any, did you guys get a chance to play this? This is hysterical. This has got nothing to do with WordPress. Apparently, like a parrot. If you say something often enough, a parrot can mimic it. Apparently doc's cam. And this doc, as of this recording has been rediscovered after many years of a doc saying, okay, bear in mind.

This doc came from Australia. It says you bloody fool. You bloody fool and go and listen to it. It's over at Bebe. So just Google audio of ripper, the talking Australian doc rediscovered. You tell me, is that doc saying you bloody fool or not? I think it is. I just thought I was such a weird story that I thought would surface it.

So then you're going to go and check.

[01:02:28] Paul Lacey: Did any of you ever see the I think it was a BBC David Attenborough thing with this particular bird that can, was literally like a Dictaphone. It could record any noise. Like a car going past or something like that. So it was in like the middle of this rain forest or something like that.

And it, if there was a monkey making a noise, it would make a noise, like a monkey immediately. And it was absolutely amazing. It was all part of the mating rituals and the sort of those sort of things. But then, and so everyone's watching the TV show just that is so cool. And then they cut to it, making chainsaw noises.

So basically this, this bird is starting to basically mimic the noises of its own environment getting destroyed. It was absolutely, it was heartbreaking. It was just terrible. Yeah. My

[01:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: friend had three parrots. She had a parrot room and you had to walk through the parent room. If you want to go from the front door to her kitchen, you had to walk through the parrot room and it that they live a long time.

Parrots, you've got them for 80. They live the length of a human life. They don't get to 70, 80 years old. So if you're into parrots, you are basically committing yourself to having this pet for the rest of your life. And it mimicked perfectly the telephone. And so you could never ever know that the tab, because the telephone was at the back of the house only had one.

So you had to walk through and it was only at the point where you got into the parrot room that you were like, it's not the phone. It's yeah. Again,

I think you might be muted, Joe or

[01:04:02] Joe Casabona: I mouth. Wow. We're very quiet.

[01:04:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's weird. Uh, what are you reckon? Matt says he just listened to it. Yeah, it could be that I think it's saying it, but it's a. It's not a para. I didn't expect a doc to be able to eat like vaguely, get closer. Anyway,

[01:04:20] Joe Casabona: that was my, it looks like a duck.

And sounds like a duck. It could be saying you bloody fool.

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: It's why didn't I think of that,

[01:04:28] Paul Lacey: God. Donna ducks have always been able to almost talk, Donald duck is you can't talk that well, but he's quite good. Isn't it?

[01:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: Matt saying he really likes the story a few months ago with a guy who had a para out in his cage, in his back yard.

And it was screaming and shouting, let me out his neighbors called the police and he had an awkward conversation to conversation with them. They laughed and left. I'm not going to go into a dark place, how that story could have ended.

[01:04:57] Paul Lacey: I'm just going to say as well. With his long comments that are covering up my face.

[01:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's been months since we've added a comment. He always

[01:05:05] Paul Lacey: ma

[01:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: that's it. Come on, Mike, give us another huge, common and cover up his face. This came from Joe. We'd ask people to put in their picks of the week and Joe's put in this one, this Joe is sublimely cool. I have no idea why this didn't exist. Like why didn't somebody invent this?

It's called zip message. Tell us what it does.

[01:05:28] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So zip message created by the venerable, Brian. It is a way to do asynchronous video conversations. So imagine you're doing, let's say a coaching call, and instead of picking a time between you and your coaching client or your, or your web design client, uh, you can leave a message, send them this link, and then they can respond in kind. And so I have been, I've been beta test. I almost wore the t-shirt today, but I didn't want to recommend and also wear the t-shirt that felt like a very uh, wearing the t-shirt of the concert you're going to see.

And so, uh, but I've been using it for all sorts of stuff. I've been using it for coaching calls. I've been using. To get testimonials from students. Paul, I think you used this right to commit your testimony.

[01:06:26] Paul Lacey: Yeah. You instigated the conversation on zip message and it was great.

[01:06:30] Joe Casabona: I've been using it to get like listener feedback.

So there's, I have, you can create different mailboxes. So I have a separate mailbox for people who want to submit questions to how I built it. And then I have a support mailbox. So if you go to if you want to see it in action, you can go to podcast, liftoff.com

[01:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: and yeah. It's all right. You mind me putting that on the screen?

Absolutely.

[01:06:59] Paul Lacey: Can I ask you a question about how the pricing not exactly how much it costs, but let's say, you have an account that you pay for. What is there any point where the person that you've reached out to for zip messages? Can no longer send you any messages back unless they get a premium account

[01:07:19] Joe Casabona: or no.

So if you initiate the message on your account, anybody, so you can do it so that like only a specific person can respond or you can make it so that anybody can respond even anonymous people. Quote unquote, they're all feature limitations. First of all. The the, the basic account versus the premium account limits.

Let's say the number of mailboxes, you can have two to one versus unlimited or like, I think Zapier integration in certain teams, things are only for the premium account, but yeah, so there's no, it's not um, like Zencaster or restream, or what, or not restream stream yard or whatever where, like you can only record X amount of hours per month or something like that.

[01:08:08] Paul Lacey: Yup. Yup.

[01:08:09] Joe Casabona: No that's maybe streaming are, doesn't have that limitation, but some of the others,

[01:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, some kind of constraints usually. So we were saying it's podcast, liftoff.com forward slash

[01:08:20] Joe Casabona: Just podcast lift off.com. If you go there you'll see a little anchor in the bottom right-hand corner. And if you click on that anchor have a question about the core, send me a message.

That'll take you to a zip message and this is my support or presale mailbox. And so I have a template here where I prerecorded a video saying, Hey, thanks for your interest in my offerings, you can leave a video, text, or audio message below, and I will get back to you. And then it'll create a separate conversation there called where I can have this with a support person.

And so I see there's a question in the chat from Matt. Can you ask a series of questions at once or is it one video at a time you can do, you can format it however you want. There's no limit on the length of the video. And then could you use it for video interview? I think, yes. So, uh, you can go back and forth.

If you go to, I think Brian Castle's website, I'll try to find it, but he conducted a podcast interview, an asynchronous podcast interview with Chris, lemme doing this back and forth.

[01:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: Best answers you get the thoughtful

[01:09:37] Joe Casabona: that's exactly right. And at first I was like, I don't know how I feel about this because something like, part of a good interview is the spontaneity.

But if I catch someone off guard right now, I don't have to edit out part of it. They can sit and think about it for a minute. And so, uh, yeah, so you could see how Brian did it. You can see the raw videos and then he stitched it all together for an actual podcast episode, too.

[01:10:09] Paul Lacey: That is awesome.

I had no thought about some of these creative ways. You've just highlighted amazing.

[01:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: Literally have, this is one of those ideas that the moment somebody invented it. W what how did we not have that? Because it makes perfect sense. We've got text messages and they just work. You just drop it in. And when anybody wants to reply, they reply, we've got email.

You just send it off whenever they're ready to see it and read it and reply. And it comes, this is exactly the same thing, but it's with video. And I'm guessing that this falls into a hierarchy of a conversation in the UI. So if I, if I begin a conversation with you in here, Chris, my video, like maybe your video will come first followed by mine in a sort of threaded way.

And then you'll reply in my reply. So you can just go back and walk back through all the steps, like an email thread. Yeah.

[01:11:02] Joe Casabona: That is that's exactly right. It's, it's super cool. Well done. You can download each of the videos or again, the audio, right? So if I want to have a listener feedback show, I can say, Hey, send me your audio here.

I can just download those and then drop them into the editing track. Or I can put it on. My soundboard so I can play it. Like during the show, it's really a neat tool. When when he rolled out the premium, where, when they rolled out the premium pricing, I signed up almost immediately. I was like, this is going to replace loom for me.

This is, this could replace SpeakPipe for me. And then I can, I have async office hours for my students too. Um, they have a private link that kind of gets priority with me. So it's, it's super worth it for me. And it starts at 15 bucks a month.

[01:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you go for yearly pricing, it's 15, 15 a month. And if you go for the.

The premium. That's interesting. Look at the way they've added extra padding around the premium on the the, uh, I'm curious about that. What

a good I,

[01:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We'll make it look, make it, just look a little bit like, they're all like, there's way more, but maybe there's just not way more. But anyway, there you go.

This here's my prediction. Mostly anything I predict turns out to be absolute dust, but nevermind either this is going to get bought out by someone like Facebook or Google or something like that, or one of the big messaging platforms, or there'll be a billion dollar company within a couple of years, unless somebody does it.

And does it better? What a genius idea. It's one of those. Why didn't I think

[01:12:45] Paul Lacey: of, this as well is from the WordPress space, if I'm right. Yeah. Restaurant.

[01:12:52] Joe Casabona: Yes. That's exactly right. Yeah, so he sold that off a while ago and he does, he has ADI audience ops now as well. He talks a lot about product high services, and this is his latest thing.

And this is um, this is something that I this is, I think it's his first product that I was like, yes, I need this in

[01:13:19] Paul Lacey: my life. Yeah. Completely sold on it until today. And just the way you framed it today. It was just just really opened my eyes to the power of this thing. Um, I'm going in there and buying this later.

Do you know what on your website,

[01:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: give us your special link joke. No affiliate. Let's the

[01:13:38] Joe Casabona: other special. I know that I sent

[01:13:39] Nathan Wrigley: you, they, the other thing as well is if this product to come out like a year and a half, two years ago, I don't think the world was already ready for it, but now everybody's got the webcam and they know how to make it work.

And they've sat through those meetings and they're probably a proportion of them are sick of having to do everything in real time. And common sit down at 9:00 AM. Exactly 9:00 AM to be in that call at the exact moment. It starts now you can achieve the exact same thing, 20 past nine, because that's when it seems to me, this is brilliant work.

Nice catch. Any more comments just before we finish? Oh, Peter says going back to the dark Ravens and crows apparently can also be great at mimicking. He says I'm a big fan of amazingly intelligent corvids, but I guessing COVID is a classification of animal. I've never come across that word, but there we go.

[01:14:37] Joe Casabona: It sounds like a folk band.

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, that's right. Yeah. They played there. They were in the Lord of the rings. I'm sure. Uh, maps back with a short comment this time. Yeah, the kind of thing I was imagining it for. That's awesome. I guess he was talking about some of the things that you were mentioning. And then he's thinking about using it for testimonials as well too.

We're looking at Bundoora or other platforms, but this looks lovely. Yeah. With that . You reach out as a first point. Don't you go to somebody like somebody signed up for your service, you then go straight away. Can I reach out to people now? Of course I can't. No, it has to be initiated by them to start the zip message does it?

No, you can reach out.

[01:15:19] Joe Casabona: Yeah, so you can start it or they can start it. Okay, cool. Um, yeah, so the way works is you can see, you can attach it to like your WooCommerce shop. And then when you have a new order that person's info is added to bond zero, and then not send it added as like a to-do list.

Zap, uh, zip message has a slack integration. So you can get the notification that way. I suspect they're working on Zapier integration because one of the things that I would love to do is Send like like a canned message, a mailbox when somebody signs up for let's say my coaching, right? Yeah. Hey thanks so much for sending out for the coaching, blah, blah, blah.

Here, a few initial questions. If you just want to send a video and then that kind of gets them into the habit of doing it asynchronously instead of grabbing a time. Cause that's ultimately that's ultimately the thing that's totally worth. Even if I use this once a month it's like totally worth the 19 or whatever, 38 bucks that I'm paying for it because it saves me the dance.

It saves me the. Slot right. The hour long slot on my calendar. And I use it for a minute.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. Honestly. Brilliant catch I'm so glad just for that reason alone. That was, that was brilliant. Thank you so much. I've got nothing else. There's no more comments. As far as I can say that a particular week, have you, the one you just put the link in for

[01:16:51] Paul Lacey: might be, but first I just wanna say our friend, my, a long car, send me a message on email this morning and sent me this catalog where I could choose some GoDaddy swag go, daddy pro swag.

So I've got a new a new backpack and some other cool stuff. Coming along in the place from GoDaddy pro. But I just want to say this if GoDaddy pro think that they can buy me and have me announce their stuff on my friend's podcast by just giving me some swag, then they are absolutely right.

Because my pick of the week, if you could bring up the link, Nathan, if you could bring your, sorry to do that. Here's the thing. You know, we talk a lot about acquisitions at the moment and they have a one of their meetups this evening. I think it is, yeah, September 13th six this evening, a UK time.

I think it's 6:00 PM UK time. And I don't know the the person I've not heard of the person before. Marcel's Sobieski but this talk is called from ideas to multiple sellable WP businesses. So the whole talk is about if you've got an idea, how you can launch that as a business, within the WordPress space, we have a view that you want to exit that business at some point and perhaps sell it in the current climate that we have.

Um, it's the kind of thing that you know, our friend, Chris Chris Hughes might be interested in watching Chris and I was a serial solo and entrepreneur. And you know, has businesses in the WordPress space and this is a talk from somebody who's done it four times apparently. So of exited for WordPress brands successfully.

So that's the thing this evening at 6:00 PM UK time. And I guess that I'm not sure what time it is in different places, but check it out. If you go to the easiest way to find it, it's just go to events.godaddy.com and you'll find it. You'll find all the different yeah. I've

[01:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: just put it on the screen from ideas to multiple resellable WP businesses.

Thank you, Paul. I'll, uh, I'll have half of that backpack, please. When it arrived, could I have the bottom half? And you can just have the top end, everybody, everything falls out of

[01:19:10] Paul Lacey: a quick question as well. I know, I see

[01:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: that. And I was just saying, we've got six minutes left, so I'd like to use it up with Matt Davis, his final question, which is unlike we've ever had before.

Cause it's all about, Course, which is great. So I was going to question about Joe scores. He says, Joe re your, sorry. Yeah, go on Matt. Keep the comments long. If I have an existing podcast, so we're talking about Joe's podcast course. If I had an existing podcast that was put on hold while we were busy and I'm looking to restart again, would your course be good, even if I'm not specifically looking to monetize it and, sorry, sorry.

If that obliterates polls for,

[01:19:50] Paul Lacey: and then he says they cut off half a bit of his message, but the rest of his message said, thank you. He's trying to get into being consistent with it and hopefully streamlined processes. So stuff about places,

[01:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: if I put that whole comment up your entire face would have been covered.

Isn't it, Joe, over to you? Yeah.

[01:20:11] Joe Casabona: So Matt, thanks so much for the question. Yes. So the full podcast, liftoff. Include, so the light version, like the $79 version is kind of just getting started, right from like idea to publish or launch. But the additional modules in the 1 99 version include, my process for staying consistent.

So how to come up with content and batch content and things like that. It talks a little bit about automation and, and some of my automation processes, because I'm a one man band here. Well, the, as the show runner, I'm the one man band. And then I can automate out to a couple of other people to do a few other things.

And then there is a monetization part, and it's not just about sponsorships. It's about a few other ways. Generate income that includes like selling your services and between between us just here on the podcast over the next quarter I've come up with a, a new framework to to apply to this course it's called the clean framework.

Um, create launch, earn, automate, and network. And so I'll be adding some new content to that over the next couple of months that focuses more on deeply on automation and, and money-making, but yeah, there's a whole set of videos there. That's just staying consistent. And, and then the automation stuff that streamlines the process.

Cause honestly, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. If, uh, if I didn't at least automate some of this stuff,

[01:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, great. Long answer. That was lovely. So hopefully Matt you've you've managed to get everything you need to know that where's the, if I'm guessing Matt probably wants to take this conversation elsewhere.

Best, best channel for you,

[01:22:05] Joe Casabona: Joe. You can, uh, head over to zip message.com.

[01:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, we saw. Oh, so you got, you just got Joe, did you?

[01:22:17] Joe Casabona: Yeah I, uh, got to be a beta tester. And then he said, when they rolled out custom URLs, I grabbed slash Joe and then Brian was like, we were going to put a little. Um, a minimum limit of four characters on you snuck in.

And I S I snuck in there. I'm pretty psyched on it.

[01:22:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That is good. The I, it sounds like you've. Oh, yay.

So result. Can we just keep that comment on it? The very end? That sounds fantastic. Thanks, Joe. We have digital politics, education business that the podcast bits around, hence why I'm not looking to monetize or anything, but new customer is always good, much appreciated by Paul.

[01:23:06] Paul Lacey: I was reading that comment.

I was like, why is he so bipolar? That's why

[01:23:12] Nathan Wrigley: the previous one

[01:23:16] Joe Casabona: lever

[01:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: spacing. I wonder if he's carriage or tones and things like that. Anyway, we've used up enough of everybody's time today. This show is over. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back next week. Probably got some interesting news for you next week. About the way

[01:23:29] Paul Lacey: back next week.

[01:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: No, no. You're right though.

I've got to go and do something elsewhere. You're absolutely right. Thank you, Paul. This is not a fishing expedition.

[01:23:41] Paul Lacey: You're going to laugh at me when my face gets covered up, then bring it up over

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: and over again. I must say you were very good about not absolutely ripping me to bits about that during the show this week.

Thank you. From Cisco. Thank you. We appreciate that very much. He says, well done and uh, at that time. Okay. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Please share if you've got any, if you've had any thoughts on this, please share it with your friends, colleagues, Romans, countrymen, whoever, and we'll be back and we'll have some interesting news about it.

Can I get all of us to wave so that I can use it as the album art? We're not going to have to fade out this time, but if we can just hold it like that's brilliant. And I'll use that and we'll say, bye-bye see you later.

[01:24:28] Joe Casabona: Thank you.