This Week in WordPress #182

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this weekend. WordPress episode number 182 entitled Herchel duckling. It was recorded on Monday, the 11th of October, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And I'm joined as always by some fabulous guests this week. We've got Dan maybe, and Bob done. There's a load of stuff to talk about as there always is.

The first thing is the brand new hero press network. There's loads of new stuff happening over there. They've got their podcasts initiative, they've got the find WP initiative and we're here to discuss all about that. Then we move on to a bit of a flame war piece, a sponsored hit. If you like over on the next web, nice to get into some politics.

Once in a while, we talk about word camp us, which was online over the last week and then the release cycle for the default theme in WordPress is going to be. Probably quicker. The page builder summit is coming up. I'm hosting it with ancient Maru. So we have a little bit of a discussion about that. And I look at the schedule, a new block injector plugin has come around from Jamie Marsland and it could help you.

If you wish to put the blocks inside your content all over your website, we then talk about a new activity log plugin, as well as ghost inspector, which enables you to perform tests on your WordPress website. And then towards the end project huddle has been bought by brainstorm force and loads of problems over on the Facebook side of things.

Should we give up our Facebook accounts? And finally let's finish it off with a discussion about a new federated publishing platform called. And last, but by no means least CloudFlare making things an awful lot cheaper on the web and Herchel duckling find out what that means. It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress, this weekend, WordPress was brought to you by AB split test.

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Go check it out and get a free demo at AB split. test.com. Hello. Hello, good evening. And good afternoon. Good morning. In the case of Bob WP Bell's episode number one. Oh, I think it says 181. I think it's 182. If it says 181 and it's actually 182, I will certainly correct it. I'm joined as always by a couple of guests here comes to my I no longer Paul Lacey each and every week, but I've I've found very high quality replacements this week.

I'm joined first of all by Dan, maybe you've probably heard of done maybe in various places, but how are you doing. Yeah. Very good.

[00:03:04] Dan Maby: Very good. Thank you. I appreciate it. So obviously it's come to have a chat with

[00:03:06] Nathan Wrigley: you here, but yeah, it was great. Dan, I'm going to do the official reading out the the things that Paul Lacey used to do.

Dan is the founder of big orange charts and word face live. You can see it over his forehead. He's an agency owner, WP LDN lead and he's also passionate about community events with 15 years focusing on WordPress. I would I'm going to add some more to that done, but you might want to plug your ears.

Dan does more for the WordPress community than just about anybody I know. And most of it, he doesn't announce particularly. And so Bravo, thank you very much for all that you do. That was a very that was a very pithy version of everything. WP L D N. What does that stand for? The

[00:03:45] Dan Maby: WordPress London meetup.

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. This week, along with the ever so early riser, it's Bob dot all the way from California. Is it California? Washington. Okay. Washington, same side, but different states demand. Bob's problems gone super pithy on the introduction. Bob says he's a podcast and connector. Do the woo. It, give us more.

What's do the world is all about

[00:04:11] Bob Dunn: it. Yeah. It's something I've been it's actually just turned a year and I'm in the middle of a rebuild and rebrand on it, which I was hoping to have by this episode, but I don't, but it's a it's a site built to elevate the WooCommerce builder community. So I get a lot of smart people on their toes.

Be opposed podcasts. And my job is to help support them, educate them, get them connected and yeah, kind a little bit of an issue of the WordPress community, but really it's, it's kind all good because it's just sits on top of WordPress. So the community sits on top of the WordPress community.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Why did you, why all the years ago that you made it just woo commerce? Why

[00:05:00] Bob Dunn: the pivotal point probably was when I was doing Bob WP and I was doing tutorials for a gazillion years. It, I decided to start doing focus on WooCommerce because it was becoming more, it's something I had done myself, so I decided, okay, why don't I start writing more tutorials on WooCommerce?

Because actually I was monetizing my site to a lot of affiliates and stuff like that, and people were more willing to pay money and it just, okay. I'll just focus on that more and more. And it. Organically evolved over a period of time where I, okay. I'm writing all will commerce stuff. I'm sick of writing tutorials.

If I have to do it again, put my head in advice and squeeze a please and just tell me no more tutorials. So I was done with that and I said, I've got to get back into some kind of community type thing. I've always been involved, but I never really, the site never reflected that community connection.

So I just, yeah, I just thought you know, I've got this podcast I've been doing for a few years where I'm woo commerce. Why don't I just take from that and build out? And of course that's when I tell myself to do that, it's like a gazillion ideas come and that's how it matured to where it is now.

It's

[00:06:17] Dan Maby: I've got to say, probably has been, it's been wonderful actually to watch your transition from, from those tutorials at the end of the they started to where it's near to where this is going in with. Yeah.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. The well, thank you. Both of you for coming on today is really appreciate, especially as it's six o'clock in the morning where all these here, it's the, it's there, it's two o'clock in the afternoon.

We didn't have to do anything special for me and Dan, but Bob's managed to get up particularly early. So I really appreciate that. We

[00:06:50] Bob Dunn: catch me at the best time. My boys is dues. Ah, yes. Yeah. By the end of the day,

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: You have a particularly good voice as well. As I'm sure many people comment on your voice and it's I don't anyway, it's nice to have you with us.

The the first for reasons, I can't quite understand the Facebook comments, sorry, the YouTube comments over at the website weren't working. So I've just whilst Bob was talking, I just went in and did a little bit of a fix. So if you were just want to refresh the page, it might bring it back live.

But if you're over in the Facebook group, come and say hi, it was like it. If you make any comments, if you're on the Facebook side of things, then you do need to let them know that that you're willing to be an de-anonymize. Otherwise Facebook won't know. And every single week we get people dropping in and it just says, Facebook user, that's fine if you want to do it that way.

But if you would like to give us your avatar and your name, then you'll need to go. As it says, on the screen chat.restream.io forward slash FB and click, I guess it's a blue confirm button or something like that. And it will allow that to happen. Feels, feel free to drop any questions in or comments, usually not questions, but we'll, we'll kick off today.

We got a load of loads and loads of stuff happening this week as there is pretty much every week. So I'll share my screen. Just first thing to say. Don't we all, that's not the right sign up form. Crikey, on the on the website, there is a great big blue rectangle that shouldn't be there. There you go.

That's something I've got to fix when this call's finished, but this is our website. WP builds.com where we produce a podcast on a Thursday, and then we push this episode. We repurpose it, make it into our sort of podcast episode that comes out on a Tuesday, but where that great blue form is, hopefully you don't see the blue form.

You see something a little bit more streamlined than that, but if you want to keep in touch with what we do, go and fill that out, and then we'll send you an email twice a week just to let you know when we've made new content, but that's not the point of today. This is the point of today. Let's crack on with the WordPress.

Friend of the podcast and somebody who I've been in touch with a little bit lately tofa Rosea and Kate Rosea. They've got a new initiative. In fact, they've got a whole multitude of initiatives going on at the moment, and this is the most recent one you may or may not have heard of hero press before, but hero press is a website which has been going, I think I read six years.

It was either five or six years. It was something around that amount of time. And tofa and Kate have been producing pieces featuring members of the WordPress community and writing up their stories. And it's really a cool thing, but they're straying into other territory. Slide down a little bit.

You might be able to see what it is that they're hoping to do. Yeah, here we go. So they've got hero press. They've got the podcast hallway chats. Very recently. They launched WP podcasts, which Bob I'm sure is on. And I am on, it's like an, a, an amalgamated. If you're basically, if you're into WordPress and you like listening to podcasts, then go to WP podcast and it will serialize all the podcasts from all the people as they come out.

It's really nice, but they're also going into to produce something soon called find it WP and it, that they because now they've got all these distinct properties, they've decided they're going to hook it into this one place. And so the thing to bookmark is hero, press network.com. I'll say it again.

Hero, press network.com. And that will keep you up to date on all the things. Previously tofa and Kate ran hero press as a not-for-profit I believe, but this time around because of the workload involved and what have you, they are actually on the lookout for sponsorships to offset some of the costs in time and energy and, general tooling that they need to buy socio for development costs, operating costs salary, and also in the future, hopefully to be able to travel to WordPress events and so on.

Um, raising the awareness of this, because I want you to know about it, but equally I want you, if you've got a, if you've got your hand on the purse strings of some sponsorship money, this might be a, an absolutely fabulous place to make it land. Any thoughts on this? Should we start with.

[00:11:12] Dan Maby: Yeah. I, I've got a bucket loads of love and respect for the full diversity of family.

Kate's tougher. Just across the board. They've been absolutely wonderful people to have within our community, but I just want to highlight on that page. They are they're what Kate goes into the Watts of the hero press network. The hero press network is a system of resources that work together to help like global WordPress community build relationships and advance their skills by creating simpler, more equitable ways to access information and resources.

I think just what a wonderful mission, a wonderful thing that they're doing here. So a big shout out to them. I believe it's the 24th of October. They're opening up the opportunities to uh, work with.

[00:11:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it says here. One last note, the hairpiece network is being run as a for-profit, to do this.

We'll be opening fund funding from 24th. You're right. 24th of October, 2021. Yep. What about you, Bob?

[00:12:10] Bob Dunn: I can echo everything Dan said basically. Yeah, I, I know the toper family or the rodeo family, I should say very well. I've been on numerous calls with Kate over the last 12 months talking about this.

We, we shared a lot of battle scars and ideas and stuff, and yeah, it's an amazing thing. It's I kinda knew it was coming, but I I am so glad to see it finally, because they put a lot of, with a lot of time and efforts into this and it's exciting to see where it goes and it, yeah, I think they have some really cool ideas here to, I, I, the podcast thing is great and that.

Where there'll be putting all the you know, the find it. I can't remember exactly what it was called, find

[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: it w P

[00:13:02] Bob Dunn: that's going to be, it's going to be real interesting to see how that plays out and yeah, I'm just, I'm excited for them.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: See where it goes. Find it WP. The website's already up, even though, as it says on the page, it says coming soon, it says curated list of every thing, WordPress.

So every podcast, email newsletter, training site development, agency, theme, shop plugin, shop. Everything. Yeah, that's pretty, that's a quite all order. Isn't it?

I'm going to start a new website each week, spinning off in local and just write a couple of words. I have to keep up with that. No, it's lovely. And I think they, they've spent a very long time building up a fabulous reputation for how to describe it. So doing the right thing and being there and being, I think I've described it previously as relentlessly awesome, something like that.

And and now it would be really nice if, like I said, anybody who has their hands on the purse strings, who is able to contribute. I don't know what level they're looking at. Maybe if tofa drops in the comments at any point or Kate, then you could let us know whether it's corporate or smaller or what the packages are.

Maybe there's no thought in that just yet, but anyway, there we go. There's our first piece for this week. Aero press. Sorry, hero, press network.com for the future. Okay, great. All right. Let's crack on this. Yeah. You got to have a bit of politics. You know, it's important to to have a bit of mudslinging and controversy each and every week.

And this week we've got a piece written by Justin Tatlock. He's something that I think was, you know, maybe there's a few pieces like this that never hit the WP Tavern, but this week he's decided he wanted to share something. And the pieces entitled the next web of publishes story blocks sponsored hit piece on WordPress.

And this was published on the 4th of October, 2021. If you want to go and find it, it's quite a lot of comments, 20 people commented on it, which is really rather a lot. And it's just basically to raise the fact that there was a an interview, which was a piece which was written on the next web, which is which is a publication I used to visit all the time, but I actually can't remember the last time I went there.

I don't know why that is.

[00:15:21] Dan Maby: It's what I'm exactly the same. Yeah. Okay. And to be honest, this has done a lot of damage for me. Yeah. Reputation wise, both across the company that has sponsored this piece. And essentially this is just a sponsored ad.

[00:15:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's what it feels like because the they wrote a piece all about why developers hate WordPress.

And they, they mentioned various statistics about the amount of hate and 67% is the amount of hate apparently. Okay. There you go. 67% of people polled hate WordPress and developers in general. I think it was done over on stack overflow, which to be fair is quite an interesting statistic would be curious to get to the bottom of why that is.

But then it turns out if you read a little bit deeper, it would appear that some of the people who are interviewed, in the piece are. Behind relationships, sponsoring the piece as well. So maybe there's a little bit more to it than that. And and I just thought it was curious, it's nice to have a little, I saw a little bit politics thrown in, in each and every week.

So go and check this out. I've got nothing more to say about it and just you know, I don't have 67% hatred of WordPress. I think mine's quite a bit less probably about the two or 3% currently. Occasionally when the the block editor doesn't save something, it, it rises considerably, but mostly it's in the low single digits add what do you guys think, obviously, Dan, you've you go?

What about you?

[00:16:51] Bob Dunn: Blah, blah, blah. It's yeah. I looked at it when somebody was spreading it around on Twitter, I think before this piece came out and I went and peruse through it real quick and I thought, okay, yeah, this is, you but what network am I on here? It just, yeah, it was.

Eh, it's too bad. They have to do it, it's, it's the way it's going to be.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What's really interesting for me is it gave Justin the, the capacity to do some slew thing, which I thought was quite nice. He was able to actually go and hang on. It's something about, this seems a bit fishy.

And then he went off and did some journalism and the investigation and discovered that there were all these connections to be made anyway, who knew that there was a whole bunch of people out there that dislike WordPress. You know, I guess that's the way it's going to be. I like it. You like it, Bob likes it tofa likes it.

It's fine. Let's just get on. And I move on to that.

[00:17:52] Dan Maby: We didn't need to be a bit catheter and the integrity of this don't we, there's an issue with journalistic integrity, but also the people that are interviewed in this so-called journalistic story, where they are aware of, what were they were being interviewed for, where they aware of how it was going to be portrayed.

I think it's trying to, yeah, it was trying to compare apples with oranges, to be honest. This is, uh, it's all the company that delivers this as a headless CMS with I think 509 active installs. This is story block,

[00:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yep. Yep. Okay. Yeah, I think that was quite interesting. Wasn't it there you, the number of Justin did a nice job in putting statistics on the one hand, on the WordPress side and then on the sort of story blocks anyway there, you mentioned headphones.

Anyone. Oh yeah, that was, yeah, that was a week last year. Wasn't it? Did you get any headphones?

[00:18:44] Dan Maby: They

[00:18:44] Bob Dunn: tried to, I blew them off on Twitter. It was really weird. And I didn't realize what was going on. Wix sent me a DM on Twitter and said, Hey, we want to send you something for whatever. And I was like, what are you sending me?

They said we want your address. We want them to send a little kid. It wouldn't tell me. And I said, ah, no, how fast? So I don't, me, it was either way when I started seeing them coming, but it was interesting cause I thought, okay, there's some little ploy behind there and whatever.

[00:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess you've got to do something.

These days to, to shake WordPress from its poach. And, I guess maybe things like this do have a little bit of a reach. I can't say, like I said, I haven't been reading the next web for such a long time, but I did it, it was really part of my suite of five or six non WordPress specific things that I used to dip into.

But I don't know why that dropped off my calendar because it was right in my feed reader. And I was probably when Google killed it, maybe that's what did it, and I had to start again. There we go. Okay. Let's move on. Let's talk about WordPress actual things. The WordPress community. We have word camps.

Oh, they happened in the real world when things are not all pandemic. Obviously at the moment nothing is happening. It hasn't been happening for over two years. Is that right? Two years. It is two years, two years now. And so everything's online, but we we hope at some point in the future, we'll return to the real world.

Anyway, last weekend, just a few days ago. In fact, WordCamp us was was on, it was in an online capacity and looks to have been a real success in terms of the amount of attendees. And what have you both. And I done, obviously working with word Fest and me with the I'm going to get the right finger. Now I'm not thinking of the wrong thing or the page builder sign up every time I just get it wrong every time.

The, the page builders summit, we know what these numbers are like. And 3,600 is pretty good, but 400 apparently, sometimes concurrent sessions, which is really good, getting 400 people into a space at any one. Time is pretty amazing. Just comparing that to, if you were actually attending a real live word camp event, and 400 people were sat in front of you, that would be a, that would be a terrifically big audience.

You'd be mightily happy with that. Don't know which sessions in particular I with regrets was unable to attend anything largely because it was the weekend time for us. But also because of the fact that I'm trying to get. Pedro wrong finger again, the page, the estimate how do I not remember that? And, and so I missed all of it, but Dan let's flip over, let's go to Bob.

Did you attend any of this? Are you fed up with the old online stuff now? You

[00:21:38] Bob Dunn: know, I'm burnt out at this point. I popped in just to peruse around and I was actually trying to find, but I thought were a few chats going on, but I wasn't able to quite connect with them. I think I saw some people talking on Twitter about them, but yeah.

Other than that, yeah, I just popped into a couple of sessions real quick and. I mean, they had some good speakers, some new speakers and stuff, but I didn't spend a lot of time in there. Again, I was time-constrained down. I don't spend a lot of time on virtual conferences anymore. I'm, I'm pretty picky and choosy when it comes to those.

But I'm impressed with the numbers, and I'm glad that they're keeping it up. At least there's some consistency going.

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What about

[00:22:26] Dan Maby: you, Dan? Yeah, I'm going to attend a couple of sessions. I do have some questions though, and I, I've got a huge amount of respect for the entire organizing team.

I appreciate this was organized in an incredibly short time period. I believe it was eight weeks from from, from concept to delivery. Which is, that's a, that's a massive undertaking to be honest. And I've got a couple of questions around that, are, are we putting too much pressure on ourselves?

These, these events, aren't, they're quite a big task in terms of delivery and having delivered events myself and Nathan, obviously you've gone through this as well, takes a lot to bring this to a community. And I just, I feel are we asking too much of our community in the way that we're doing this at the moment?

There's a few, I've got a few questions around that post specifically. I think that figure 3,600, believe it is those were the registered attendees, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the number of people that are actively actually there. And I just wonder if that's a little bit misleading and I also have a question.

You got a $30,000 budget that was spent on that event. I'd be really interested and I'll connect with whoever I can to discuss. Where was that spent? What was that spent on? Because that's an incredibly high budget for what we can do as a community. And I'm saying this with the knowledge of delivering word Fest twice now at 24 hour event, two tracks, hundreds of people involved across the thing.

And for me that it's about that kind of community focus. And if we can bring the community together to deliver. The an event into our community, which is really the focus that we have our inward faced. And I just wonder where $30,000 has been spent to deliver events,

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: curious. Yeah. $30,000, if anybody does.

Obviously Kate will know because we should give her props. Once again, we're mentioning her a minute ago. She was what was her official title? W C U S organizer. Um, she had the lion's share of things to decide. And what have you, so maybe fights around at some point she could let down.

Dan and big orange dog. I think you've probably got slightly quicker ways of getting in touch with them. But

[00:24:54] Dan Maby: yeah, it's a small team and yeah, there's a lot, there was, I think it was a big ask, I think is really what I'm saying is the big kind of

[00:25:03] Nathan Wrigley: yes. And curiously in this piece, which I should say is on WP Tavern, it's Sarah Gooding writing it.

She did say that they had decided not to go with alternative platforms. So there's lots of platforms which you can get off the peg and they talk about a couple, what were they mentioning? One called hot pin, one called Viet Slee. And I guess these are SAS apps that you can purchase for a period of time.

And they decided to stay away from that because it would have increased the cost significantly. Then they say maybe even doubled it. So they went for a more low key approach. But obviously in my case, sadly being unable to attend, I can't. Feedback as to what that was. But did you say Bob, that it was sort broadcast live on YouTube or was that done?

So one of these,

[00:25:51] Bob Dunn: yeah, I don't, I can't remember where, how I got to it, some link I've found, but yeah, I, and it was very low-key. You know, they kept it tight. It didn't have all the bells and whistles sponsor booths and things like that. I know YouTube can relate to those sponsor booths and chat rooms and stuff like that.

It's I don't know how that, really pays out in the end. If there's a. Activity, if there's enough activity to defend that kind of a cost or whatever. You know, there's a lot of play. I find it real intriguing when I go to virtual, I sometimes go to them just cause I like to see how they have it set up and where people are hanging.

What's doing. And I typically, we'll drop in on almost anyone just. Just to check that out, but there's just, yeah. There's so many challenges and I respect both of you and anybody that goes into virtual, any kind of virtual event, because it's a unique, it's a unique baby, for sure.

Yeah. During this time when everybody's been doing them so long.

[00:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think he's curious, isn't it? So obviously my history with actual word camp events was basically going to the London one and the Manchester one. And that was hour and meetups, I think only a couple of times in Leeds. So it was limited by geography.

I did, I actually, I went with Dan Dunne, took me along to the one in Berlin in Europe, but it really is constrained largely for me by the geography and the ability. Draw you've will get the train or what have you, or to be close by. And the, the idea that, because it's available online, that you, that w th the entire community would, for example, dropping on the word camp, U S one, it's a difficult one.

Isn't it's hard to us, which is why obviously Dan's event is spread over 24 hours so that you are sort geographically close to it. At some point during the day for the page builder summit

thing, I keep raising the reason I'm saying this is to keep raising my hand, because I've got a badge behind me, which is showing the summit, but I can't seem to pick the right house. The we, we try to do us earlier in the day, and then what the following day is a little bit later, so that it can accommodate everyone.

We've just had to cope with the fact that both Manchin and I are only awake at certain hours of the day, but yeah, the geography limits it. And now because it's global, you feel like, oh, I should have gone to that. Whereas actually in my case, not only was it at the wrong time of the week but also, the timings didn't fit me.

And I think that's probably a reasonable excuse to say I didn't catch it this time. I'm really sorry.

[00:28:39] Dan Maby: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a really important conversation within the community around the idea of continuation of virtual events within our space, because of the fact that we've reduced barriers here.

We've, you there are no you know, reduced costs, if visas become an issue for traveling, for example that's removed if we're talking about a virtual event and absolutely we need to also be getting back to in-person that just very aware that we can potentially deteriorate the experience of both.

If we try to focus on the, both at the same time. So if we try and do the virtual whilst we're also doing the, the physical. I, I think there's a needs to be, there needs to be to separate the two and to get the best out of both.

[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe in the future, we'll have these sort of hybrid events, so there'll be more of that and you can attend, watch things live, but the focus I suppose, will be on the people in the room.

And we'll have you just going to pause things for a moment and say, if you fancy stopping watching this for a moment and sharing out the URL, say that you're watching get people to come in and join the conversation. We'd really appreciate that WP belts.com forward slash live. Hopefully it will be working by now, even though the red buttons won't I just simply, haven't got the time at the minute to fix the red bottoms.

Cause I'm doing this next week. I'll make sure that they're working, but WP belts.com forward slash live. Just tweet it out, let people know what's going on. And we got a few people in first one I'm going to mention is Marcus Burnett. Nice to have you on Marcus. He, first of all, just says, Hey fellas, nice to have you with us at the start of the week.

And then he goes on to talk specifically about WordCamp us. And he says there were two tracks. Good tonight, maximum of 200, 200 concurrent attendees in each I believe they were both live-streamed on YouTube. Okay. So that's maybe where we get the figure of 400 from if they're two maxed out at 200, I wonder what happened to people who were the 200.

First or the 201, that's not a word.

[00:30:34] Dan Maby: They were still able to obtain the figure that they

[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: hit. Oh, I see. Okay. That's where it makes that it's not some sort of concurrent limit. No. YouTube wouldn't be quite the success. It was if it could maximum of 200 people watching something okay.

And carrying on, he says no boots this time, but each track use the YouTube built in chat for conversations. Yes. Okay. That's great. Thank you very much. Indeed. And Rick, hi, Rick. He's commenting on the previous article. He says it's like a Mercedes mechanic if he works, if he's, if he likes working on a Volkswagen.

Okay. Thank you for that. Yeah. Greetings, David. Nice to have you along for us. Like I said, go and share, let other people know that you're watching it and we'll press on. The next one is this. I find this quite interesting. This is to say that in the past every so often you got little update to WordPress and when the big update rolls around once a year or something along those lines, we get a new WordPress default theme.

I have to say. And I don't know what you guys are going to say to this. I never use the default WordPress theme. But I know it's an opportunity for them to showcase what's going on, but I, it's very rare that I see the default theme showcased anywhere. Occasionally you see it where somebody just obviously dropped a blog post or something and they just want to do it quickly.

And there it is. Nevertheless the theory is that in the future, the default WordPress theme will be updated in a much more swift manner. That is to say it will come around more frequently. And the reasoning behind this, again, WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding tells us. It's all to do with the way that in the future, these themes are going to be built.

So we've got lovely, modern things like blocks and block patterns and the theme, Jace on file, which kind of takes care of more or less everything for us. And so the idea would be why not? Let's try and speed the process up. And so this is hopefully what's going to happen there. There isn't much more to say than that, but I, for one would certainly welcome it coming around more often because I'm not trying to be you know, I'm not trying to be incendiary or anything, but because I never use it, the most that I do really is when I install WordPress on a new website or when it updates itself and dumps it in a website, I go and have a look at it and go, oh, that's nice.

Oh, I'll never use that. But it will be nice to see, more opportunities for people to, to raise the, basically speed things up a little bit, and also with the new capabilities, block patterns and things like that, hopefully it will be much more modular and you'll be able to drop bits in that you quite like the look of, and maybe that will be the purpose instead of it just being one theme, which handles blog posts and a home page, it'll be, I don't know, here's a as a WooCommerce section commerce repeatable block or a block pattern and here's a hero image pattern and it, and all of those kinds of things will come in and maybe that'll make it more interesting.

So with that in mind, should I go to Danforth?

[00:33:39] Dan Maby: Yeah, sure. I'm very similar to you know, I, I don't use the default themes I did in the, in my early days. And the early journey within WordPress was in it, for me, it was about learning how to theme I'd pull apart the default theme, because I knew that was a good starting point.

You know, to educate myself, to train myself how to, how to write things. But one thing that I'm concerned again, I think I have a lot of concerns today, but I was just looking at the timeline of this and the, this has been built on uh, get up so you can jump in and see what, see the progress that was going on.

I believe the first commit was around. I think it was the 30th of September this year. Yeah. And this is due to be delivered on the 16th of November. So 47 days, I think it is from initial commit to public release a 47 days. That's, that's an incredible timeline. An incredibly short timeline, just think about the pressures that we're putting on ourselves as a community and as the teams that are taking on these responsibilities, I do wonder if, again, we need to just be thinking about how do we spread that out?

How do we space that out? So you're not under such an incredible time pressure to deliver something that's really incredibly important, as you've just said, you may see it. You'll install it just to see what's going on within WordPress and WordPress theming. We're talking about hundreds of millions of websites.

So this is obviously being delivered in. It's 47 days really enough time to to make sure it's fit for purpose.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: What about you, Bob? Any thoughts

[00:35:18] Bob Dunn: nano? I, that makes a lot of sense, Dan, because, I, I, I go into make WordPress. I go into slack, just I just like to see activity. Absolutely have no idea what they're talking about most of the time, but I like to see the involvement and get a reflection on that.

And I'm thinking, yeah, here's another thing. Let's push it out. Yeah. That wouldn't be a concern for sure. And I, I see this as you were. I think you were saying this down. Okay. Probably the post is even saying, it's almost like we have all these toys out. The themes are doing so many changes in the future.

Let's have a theme that kind of reflects all those changes. And B is our, kind of our showcase. Here's what's going on with teams right now. And this is the default theme I've never used it. I know a lot of people that have heavily customized it for one reason or another, but yeah, it, it, I understand why they're doing it, it's but, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes out, one thing we don't need is anymore rush added pressure is as Dan

[00:36:28] Nathan Wrigley: suggested.

Yeah. The I'm going to just going to pop the screen back on again, because here's the quote in terms of theme dot Jason and block patterns, it says innovations like, so I should add some context to this. Hold on. So this is, and I am so sorry. I genuinely have no capacity to pronounce this name, but I'm going to try it.

Gel Wrike stad is the person who's making this comment. And I don't want to butcher what their job is, but they are in some way responsible for this for what's happening. They say innovation innovations, like theme dot Jason block templates and blog block patterns are making theme development far simpler and providing new ways for users to customize their sites.

There's reason to believe that the community can leverage all of this to build more frequent and diverse teams and customers that customization solutions for our users in the coming years, which leads me to Cameron Jones. Hello again, Cameron. He says, so as full site editing becomes more powerful and making themes less relevant.

We get more default themes. It makes little sense to me and I kind of get what you mean. Yeah, it does. Doesn't it, in a way we're encouraging, we're bringing on an era where. The theme really is going to be doing less and less in a sense what's the point. It feels to me as if really what we want is a load of block patterns and headers and footers header and footer builders and block patterns.

But yeah, good point, Cameron.

[00:37:53] Dan Maby: I was leaning very much towards that same theory and we had Anne McCarthy and there, I mentioned his name on this show. Paul

and McCarthy came to join Diane Wallace and myself at the latest WPO again, to have a round table around full site editing. And I was very much in that same sort of opinion of FAPE, other becoming less and less relevant, but actually the way we were discussing it was presenting it to her. Made much more sense that they become more relevant.

They're becoming more important because of the, you're talking about block patterns. Are we talking about styling towards that plot? And how does that, how do we manage that? And I guess there, is there an argument that with almost heading towards a universal theme? What does that look like?

How does it, if we're having this default theme, should there be. Universal theme as opposed to multiple

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: default themes. And I'm about to release a theme onto the repository is called the white screen of death theme. And and it's got white background and white text. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's going to be really popular.

Speaking of Paul Lacey, he's cropped up in the comments. I don't know how he dare a crawl back in here with him. He says I'm 35 minutes behind. I'll put it on 1.5 speed and see if I caught you up. Oh, that'd be nice. Yeah. That you can't even turn up. You can't even be here on time for the show that he's decided to abandon.

I'm going to keep milking that for everything it's worth. It's correct. But good point, Cameron, and I'm guessing that at some point it may be that, that the theme is really just the sort of theme dot Jason filed with some sort of way to interact. Just create some global headers, sorry, not headers and footers, theme, styles, fonts, and colors, and all of that kind of thing.

That's just see. But so Dan, what was that? Cold. Is that available publicly? The chat that you had with Anne and Paul? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:49] Dan Maby: We did a round table at the last London meetup. So that is available through the big orange hearts, YouTube. And it's a 45 50 minute conversation between, and Paul, Diane Wallace, and myself around full site editing.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: You dropped the, if you can find the link for that Dan and stick it in the private child, put it on the screen. And then Cameron. Grab hold of it, or you can drop it into the chat. If you're on a, Facebook or what have you, it will be up to you whichever way you prefer to do it. Okay. In which case we'll move on where 45 minutes in.

So that's just about perfect. So forgive the blatant self-promotion, but I'm going to blatantly self-promote because why not? The, the page builder summit is starting next week. We've got 37. I believe it is people lined up. Now it might even be more can't remember, but we've certainly got a full week of stuff lined up.

It starts on next Monday. We'll, we'll be doing a little bit of introductory work in our Facebook group, just because that's the way we decided to do it. We'll come to Facebook more, a little bit later and whether that's a good idea or not, but we're going to kick off the whole thing in the Facebook group, just because it allows us to chat with each other and put stuff out, live like we're doing.

And then it will be a case of show up, go to the schedule page, which is a page builder, summit.com forward slash schedule. I'll show you that in just a second and just cherry pick the ones that you liked, the look of they are available for free. If you want to check them out, they're available for 24 hours after they go live.

So let's say something goes live at two o'clock in the afternoon, UK time. Available for you to watch until two o'clock UK time the next day, and then we take it down and then we've got this little thing called the power pack, where if you wish to get access to all of the bits and pieces, plus loads and loads of speaker bonuses, then you can access that by signing up.

When you grab your free ticket, we'll give you an opportunity to purchase that. I'll just show you the schedule because you might be interested in seeing that we've got loads and loads of excellent people on service page builder, summit.com forward slash schedule. So you can see we've got Anne McCarthy.

We've got Darren Mariale. We've got Michelle for chef Brian Gardner. Jennifer bone. Who else have we got Corey Dodd, Laura Elizabeth Martin, humpback back and Lindsay Cambridge, Joe. Casabona big at Pauley hat candy, Phelps, Jonathan Jernigan, Chris lip cook. And the list goes on. Rob Stinson, Barna box bound, Pete Everett, Shannon Mottern Natasha Cozad.

David McCann, Jake fol Glenn net. Good bread. Oh, I'm running out of breath. Thomas function. Daniels are Caro. Chris budget, Mike Oliver, Laura, come out. I don't know if you pronounce those. Come up. There is an accent on it and I'm not familiar with what that accent does. Lee Shadle, Erin Flynn. And then on the final day, get my breath back, Benjamin Intel.

And then this Tran, forgive me. Trump are just not sure how to pronounce your name. So rather than destroy it, I'm going to just say tram. And then, Rendo and veto plus, there's all these lovely people who are coming back for a second time around. They're basically in what we call our volts sessions and you get those for free.

They run for the entire length of the summit. So there we go. Page builder, summit.com go and check it out. And if you liked the look of it, sign up and join us. We'll be there Monday next week, about a little bit this time, kicking it off, which leads me to tell you that we won't have a show next week because.

Simply can't do that. And you know, let's pull Lacey wants to come back and go on it

now, but we'll we won't be doing the show next week, so hopefully that's all right. Okay. There we go. That's over promotion. Here we go. This is a, an interesting piece. Jamie, who's been on the show, Jamie Marsland who is behind portal press. This is cool. This is a super simple I say simple in the sense that the interface is super simple and.

This is brilliant. It's a, here's a five minute video of Jamie it's called block injector. And essentially it allows you to create a block and you can use any block that you wish to create that block. So you could, I don't know, put some generate blocks in, or you could put a cover blocking or woo commerce type blocks in, and then you can tell your website, do you know what I'd like to show this on every post who has a category of, I don't know, product or something like that.

And I'd like it to be the fourth block to appear, and it will just do all of that for you. So it's a really simple interface you build in the familiar way in blocks. And then there's a couple of little block fields that you pick from you'll be done in seconds. I think for me, I'm. Pretty much a certain buyer for me, I should say there is a cost it's $49 as it says at the bottom.

But I think for me, that's going to be money well spent. Cause I, I inject all sorts of nonsense all over on our website and this will be really good, perfect case here of why blocks are cool. It's a plugin which chucks blocks all over your website and just go and watch the video if you're not convinced and you think, and I don't get it.

Why would I want that? It's got a lot of really cool uses. So I'll put this one to Bob first, maybe.

[00:45:14] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I known Jamie for quite a while. I love his products. I'm like you Nathan it's, I, I'm not using something like that now, but probably in the future I will. And if I do, this is like a no brainer because, and Mason bee pre-show I know we were talking a little bit about some of the stuff.

There's add plugins out there and there, some of them are very convoluted and they're, so they make it like way too complicated to be able to enter, just inject something somewhere and you just want to make it global on your site. Uh, yeah. And the block thing, that's like that just an added huge bonus because, with all the different blocks is.

When I see something like that right away, I'm thinking, oh, how can I use it? I'll probably just create an idea just for, I can buy it and use it because it's like one of those things that now that I have every block that I can possibly put somewhere and that look like I'm going crazy. There's, there's some options there that I really like.

So yeah I'm sure I'll be snagging it here soon, just because of that reason. I think there's is one of those things. When I buy plugins, a lot of times I don't have a need at the time, but I create needs. And I really love that. Now it's a lot easier and I can use this because, before I kind thought about that, but.

Oh, it's a something, going to do for sure. So

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, in my case, I've got a plugin, which inserts essentially. It's a bit of HTML but it ends up being a, an ad. So for example, Blog posts. It will inject in the third paragraph. So it's a different sort of paradigm, but it will say third paragraph inject that piece of HTML, which ends up looking like an ad.

This will do exactly the same thing. Everything that I do on WP bill. That's not a template. So all the content is created in the block. Editor, welder handles the,

[00:47:20] Bob Dunn: a date daytime on it too, I think, which is really nice too, because yeah you know, how embarrassing is that when you have something up and it's over, tells you, you know, there is some, yeah, it's a really slick little,

[00:47:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

So there's a from and to date. You know, post schedule that basically. And you can expire things really neat, really but the sky's the limit. So the block could, I'm describing something, a trivial, like a little ad, but if you, so that an image really you're just dragging an image block, but the sky's the limit.

It could be, I don't know, featured products or most recent blog posts or anything. So Jamie's just leaving it to other people to decide what to put in, but he's built the structure to inject it wherever you want it. So really cool. Nice. Damn.

[00:48:10] Dan Maby: I am. I think a very powerful tool. I think this is the the direction that we're going with the block editor.

It's opening up some really interesting opportunities.

[00:48:18] Nathan Wrigley: I saw a really nice one and I'm going to credit rich Tebow's table. I'm not printed in a hundred percent called show hide blocks, and I'm pretty sure it's him. And that's a really nice one. It was a simple, simple idea. Essentially, just show this block on this thing.

So it could be. Post category of whatever and hide it on other things it's less, this is slightly different than you get to position it. So similar, but maybe go and check that one out as well. But I should say, ah, let's put that back on the screen. This one is over at. Okay. So it's seems that they don't have a website dedicated [email protected] forward slash block dash injector.

And it looks like it's $49 with a 14 day trial. So there you go. You can check that out under, see what you make of it. I'm a loving. More or less certain to get this ASAP. Okey-doke let's see if any comments are coming in. Oh, Heinrich. Heinrich's just popped in to say that you bought the PowerPoint for the summit with great power comes.

Great expectations. Oh dear. It's no, honestly, it's really good. I think your, if you've got, if you've got any thoughts of watching stuff over and over again, here's a trick Heinrich as if you do buy the power pack, you can watch everything before anybody else, and then you can come to the presentation and you can take charge of the chat and ask the person who's doing that.

Talk all your questions because you'll be fully armed with what it is that you need to ask. So there you go. There's a tip, right? Moving on. Let's go to this one. I honestly, I've got nothing much to say about this, just that it crossed my radar this week. And when I see new stuff, even though in this case, this isn't something I'm going to be using anytime soon.

It's nice to just raise things up, mentioned them. So this is over a log Tivity, L O G T I V I T y.io. And it's branding itself as the new awesome activity log for WordPress. I, because these days I'm basically involved in building stuff largely for myself. I'm not all that bothered too much about the logs, but if you've used WordPress websites and suddenly you've got clients on your back saying how did this happen?

How did who put that there? Something like this, we'll do that for you. The intention being really attracts everything that's stored on your WordPress website, not just the usual stuff. In fact, they excuse me for my coffee. They say that basically they'll log event tracking. They'll give you instant alerts and they've got a customizable reporting dashboard.

That's all I've got about this at the moment, but just thought I'd mention it. I can't remember who sent it in my direction, but just, that was a nice tool. I don't suppose Dan and Bob, you got anything about this? Maybe not.

[00:51:18] Dan Maby: I just think, I think another looks like another interesting solution. How many times have we heard from clients?

Oh, it's broken. What did you do? We didn't do anything trying to resolve what's happened.

[00:51:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. In my case it was always easy. Cause it was always me. Yes. Sorry about that. Yeah, that was me. I've. I've logged myself as doing the terrible thing, but the there's another one. Isn't it? What's the one by the WP security.

Is it WPS the log

[00:51:47] Bob Dunn: activity log? Yeah, that's the one I'm more familiar with. I actually did a tutorial on it a while back and again, I don't use it personally, but I think it's, yeah, there's different definitely value there. And especially even with large teams, just knowing what your team's doing constantly, or being able to look back and see what changes are made.

So yeah. There's a place for these things and for sure. And I know for WooCommerce sites a shirt, this one, I think it probably integrates with WooCommerce. I know the other one does, but that's an important piece too, is seeing, all these products. If you have, 2000 products on there, you can be watching if somebody's switching out a photo or a price or anything, or a description.

[00:52:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good point. And we do, we treat it in, we've been jocular about it, saying we're looking for things go in Australia and it might not be that it might literally be somebody making an you know, either accidental error or you never know. It might be something malicious that's happened.

Somebody gained access, created a, an admin user and it might be the perfect way to actually on do to the exact moment where things started to go Australian. So it's not just about apportioning blame and pointing the finger and saying no, upload those images. It might more be, oh, okay. This is where it started to go wrong.

It's 5 32 on Friday. When Nathan logged in

[00:53:14] Bob Dunn: you know, for myself it might even be good because I forget most of the stuff I do. I don't log. You know, it's what did I do three days ago? I know I did something and I think maybe I shouldn't have, so yeah.

[00:53:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Perfect. For teams, I would imagine, especially, large agencies trying to keep a track of who's doing what and when it went wrong and whatnot.

Anyway, there we go. Just thought that was nice. And in that kind of vein there's again, this is going to fill out and blowing my own trumpet. I'm really not. It just seemed to be the perfect way of surfacing it, that I did a podcast episode with a guy called Justin Clem this week about a product that he's got called ghost inspector and a similar kind of vein in that ghost inspector is It's a service, which enables you.

Do you know what? Let me just click on the, I must have a link. There we go. Ghost inspector enables you to do all sorts of really complicated tracking on your website to make sure it's working. So rather than keeping logs in and trying to figure out backwards where it went wrong, this is all about preventing things from going wrong.

And one of the things that I think is really cool about this is that it'll fill in forms for you and then check the responses. So for example, if you've got a contact form, typically you only know the contact forms gone is stopped working. When you get an, a disgruntled email from a client saying, I know that the contact form has stopped.

When to which you say, I have no idea. It could have been last year for all. I know this will actually fill out the forms and look to see if it's getting a response. It's quite clever how it all works. There's a ton more to at night. Does the typical kind of, comparing here's a, here's an image from five o'clock and here's an image from yesterday at five o'clock.

They're no different everything's tickety-boo oh, there's one Bob. We must

take it. See, but we'll come to that later. Anyway, there's all these really complicated things. And again, the sort of same thing it's a bit like an insurance policy. Like the log activity was that we looked at earlier, it's called ghost in space. Might be worth checking out. My understanding is that it probably will cope with more than just WordPress, but I don't actually know.

But anyway, there you go. Dan, anything, Bob, anything

[00:55:35] Dan Maby: I felt this looked like a really interesting social, actually the way of packaging up delivering a SAS solution for your automated testing, because automated testing can be hard. It can be very complicated. So, um, I hadn't come across this until he shared the link

with me.

[00:55:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. You install a browser extension. So in my case, I'm using brave, but you know, it's the same thing as Chrome, essentially, and then you just. Play on the Chrome extension. And then you just go around the website doing things and it will record everything that you're doing. So you might go and fill out the form or you might go and go through a checkout process and it will just, he explains in the podcast how it all works, not to any incredible degree, but he explains roughly how it works.

And and so it's, it's going up and down the Dom and checking what this elements called. Klaus name is for this, that, and the other thing and recording it all. And then every day, week, month, however often you ask it to do it, it will go and try and replicate that exact same set of instructions.

And for me it feels like woo commerce is the perfect thing for this because, if your checkout stops working or if that upsell button no longer upsells anything, or I don't know just imagine the things that you could be getting wrong with a WooCommerce store. And obviously there's a direct economic consequence to that.

This seems like a really nice solution for it. You should get him on. Bobby's called Justin Clem. He was very nice going. Yeah, that sounds

[00:57:03] Bob Dunn: good. Yep. Interesting.

[00:57:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Let's move on. We, I don't think we had any acquisition news last week, which was the first time in months, but we have some this week I've spoken to Andre Gagnon many times on the project.

I think he's been on the podcast twice. And then I think I've done a couple of webinars with him really nice chap. And for the longest time he was in the WordPress space with project huddle. That was what he did. And I brought it from, you it came out of his head and he created it and it's a tool so that you can essentially get clients to give you feedback on your website.

So you, you have it on a third. On a separate WordPress install, and then you go and drop a bit of code into your client websites and it enables them to make commentary on. So for example, if they didn't like the font that you were using on the title of a page, they can just click on it, make a comment, do a screenshot, all of those kinds of things, very similar to what WP feedback, which then became after him.

So really similar but different companies and and Andre Andres he's this week decided it's time to do other things. And he sold it to, to brain storm force who I'm sure you've heard of. They do all sorts of things, probably most famously the Astra theme. So here we go. More consolidation. I'll hand it over to you guys.

[00:58:37] Dan Maby: I think we're in a really interesting time. Aren't we, it's this evolution of the WordPress space. It's I I'd used project huddle before. I've also used brainstormed force products. Really interesting to see where this, where they take this the, the, the yeah, that, that transition that we're seeing in our space at the moment, if you look at the likes of, for example, Stella WP, the, the, the acquisitions that have gone on there to create an end to end solution, essentially, if you know, we're bringing together a bunch of tools that make sense for our particular niche of a client base so yeah, really interesting to see this taking, taking place.

Yeah. I was

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: trying to figure out what the perfect thing that they've already got is. And I just wonder if it's going to be some sort of thing that they op sell through Astro or something like that, because I couldn't find the product that they already sell, which was the perfect bolt on to this. But yeah, big biggish WordPress company, lots of, they're used to handling support requests and used to pushing out updates.

They do say, as you would imagine, they always say this, in fact, I've never come across a plugin that's been sold where this wasn't the mantra. Just to drop your current licenses, including lifetime and access to project. Topic will not change for the foreseeable time. Project pricing will remain the same and you will get regular updates and support.

And then, again, the usual stuff, but things are going to get better. Hopefully with more eyeballs, because my understanding was that Andre was doing a lot of this himself, and now he's got things like Presto player to divert his time. So maybe it was maybe it was time to move on. Sorry, Bob.

I totally caught you. No,

[01:00:21] Bob Dunn: I, I, you didn't cut me off at all. I absolutely have really nothing to add. Yeah, just with all that physicians, it's uh, yeah, I'm just wondering, it's given us something to talk about on all these shows. That's keeping us busy. That's for sure that gives them an positive side of it.

I just wonder when it will become the norm, when we start, oh yeah, it's just happening. And I come from the, the world of business outside of WordPress, and I've said, myself, this is something I've seen forever. And now it's starting to happen in the WordPress space.

And there's a lot of talk around it. I take it with a grain of salt. I see the opportunities. I love that, people can build these incredible products and actually find people interested in paying some money for them. And that's, kudos to them and good to see it, how it all plays out.

And when it becomes a norm, I'm going to. I'm timing that did win, it's like, oh yeah. It's no more the big news, but we'll

[01:01:27] Nathan Wrigley: see. The thing that I'm finding quite curious is prior to a couple of weeks ago, I'm just rewinding my brain. I could be wrong about this, but it felt like almost every accuracy acquisition was being done by a hosting company.

Um, liquid web neccess go daddy. All of those, they were very large companies with enormous revenue. I would've thought each and every year. And so they were buying them up. But then a couple of weeks ago we got awesome motive, which is a plugin company buying out another plugin.

And then this time around brainstorm force, which is another, basically a plugin company. Company plug-in company doing the same thing. So it almost feels like the dare. I say smaller, the smaller businesses are now starting to eat up the other, perhaps even smaller ones, which it feels like a little bit new.

Obviously people are brainstormed force probably want to not compete in the hosting space at any point soon, I wouldn't have imagined, but they want to swell out their offering. And you, you wonder we had. Conversation last week where people were speaking of awesome motive and they were just wandering Alex Denning wrote a piece about the marketing power of awesome motive and the fact that as soon as they buy up one product, it makes everything that they've got better.

You wonder if the same thing will be true over here? Op cells in Astra, you've got an Astro license. 30% off or something. There's an idea. Brainstorm force it. You heard it here first.

[01:02:58] Bob Dunn: All right, Nathan, the next thing will be a podcast or buys a plugin. Then we'll figure that one out

[01:03:06] Nathan Wrigley: you as well.

I'm going to bind, you can buy my white screen of death theme if you want for

[01:03:12] Bob Dunn: a dollar acknowledged or

[01:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Okay. Couple of comments. That's really nice. Oh, some more about the, thank you for Chris skews and also for Rick for nice comments about buying the page builder summit things.

That's really nice of you to say. And Rob, Ken's talking about ghost inspector, I think saying he loves the idea of solutions like that. And also Rob dropping in again, saying he thinks it is becoming the norm. Now, Bob, it

[01:03:45] Bob Dunn: is it's leveling out, middle. It will become a side post, that's

right.

[01:03:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yes. Even feed you, it just be this week's acquisitions feature from dah, dah, dah. Moving on. And so let's move on. We're out of the WordPress side of things. Bop, bop. I'm curious to know, before we talk about this article, who was both of you, were you affected by the Facebook outage last week?

Did it affect grind your gears have any impact on your life whatsoever?

[01:04:18] Bob Dunn: No, go ahead.

[01:04:21] Dan Maby: I've uninstalled Facebook from my phone. I've pretty much short of deactivating my account. I just not making use of their tools at the moment and that's not been necessarily a kind of a dedicated, conscious decision.

I've just over the last couple of years, it's just drifted away from me.

[01:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. What about you? Bob

[01:04:44] Bob Dunn: ID activated my business and. Personal profile several months ago. I mean, again, I can't, you I'm not trying to sound cocky or anything, but yeah it was like, it was a blip in my screen just because I'm not on there anymore.

[01:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: It's really interesting. It had minimal effect on me, but I'm really interested that both of you have taken steps to really cut back on it I'm the same, but I haven't cut the cord yet because as an example, the Facebook group that we have for this podcast is it's a nice place to be. It's got two, nearly getting close to 3000 people in there, and it's really nice.

It's polite and civil and the commentary. It's not overwhelming. There's not like hundreds a day. There's a few, maybe half a dozen or more questions posed each week. So it's fairly low key. And for that reason alone, I stick around on Facebook, but I've installed mechanisms to stop Facebook getting in my way.

So my Facebook feed with the help of a. Chrome extension. I'm going to say it just doesn't exist. There's absolutely nothing there to see. And I've also container, I was saying to you dumb the other day, wasn't it I've contained the cookies of Facebook is only open on this computer. It can't have been a Chrome extension.

It must be on the what's it called? Mozilla Firefox side. Got this. So I spoke about it the other day this extension in Mozilla Firefox, which enables you to keep the cookies of Facebook inside Facebook silo. So they don't stray out and in fact, everything else. So I've tried quite. To do the stepping away.

And for me, I think that's a happy medium, but I was surprised by the impact that it had like simple things. Like my kids communicate with my wife via what's it called WhatsApp. And all of a sudden there was no recognition that would had broken. And so rather than looking into the story anymore, my kids were sending messages and they just weren't getting delivered and they didn't think to pursue it in another way.

So that sort of just had an impact. I speak to Anshan on messenger to organize the summit. So that kind of dried up and we had to think of something else, but apparently it was pretty bad for quite a lot of people, they've got their entire work force inside of Facebook.

[01:07:08] Bob Dunn: Yeah. I think the dependency, it is, it's, there's a lot of dependency on it and they wrote I'm on post status.

David Bisset wrote something about, we got. I keep saying, own your own content and stuff. And I understand that I understand his, cause a lot of people and I've been guilty of it too, on, in the WordPress space of saying, you got to own your own content, don't be on the third-party platform, but there's a lot of variables there.

A lot of people can't afford it. There's, geographical reasons. So we can't just blanket statement that unfortunately, but yeah, it's it's, there was, and there's a lot of people that, I mean, you I cringe at it that they're depending on Facebook, I, I'm not in their shoes, so I can't sit there and, be home ID and say, Hey, do it this way.

Take the highway or whatever, but yeah, and for me really, I left Facebook because a, more of a personal, I just was disgusted with the platform. I would discuss it with a lot of stuff that I just, you know, I didn't have a real active page. I was a little bit bummed. There was a couple of groups that I couldn't access now.

And, obviously I can't access and I understand that one piece, like you said, Nathan, there's one piece holding you there because that's something you build up and yeah, you can't just dump it and say, okay, everybody we're going to move here or something and move on slack. Or I don't know where, so there's then, and I, again, I, when people ask me, I'm not going around boasting about that left Facebook, because for me it wasn't more of a personal reason.

And I just personally. Didn't like what it stood for anymore. And I found myself complaining about it too much and I thought, why am I just complaining about it? I just need to take action one day. I just did it and said I had to move on. Yeah.

[01:09:02] Nathan Wrigley: Pretty clear that we're probably not the three of us are probably not the perfect demographic.

Are we? Because we've got a foot in the door of WordPress and all that stands for, and so this piece on the Tavern, which Sarah wrote all about going down more of a piece of. Should we own our own content and what have you. And I do think that's true. Obviously, you own it until your hosting company goes down and then just like Facebook going down, you're kind doomed anyway, but it's less that, more that, that you still do and you can download a copy of it and back it up each day and you can take it somewhere else.

You know, there's going to be moments where it goes down, but just really curious that so many people throughout the world. Genuinely unable to function in their workplace and communicate with people because they've become dependent upon it. I know a lot of people who will say this exact same sentence and Dan and I actually now communicate well quite a lot on slack, but also on an app called signal, which I think you can probably get it.

I think it's signal.org. It's a, it's a different approach to messaging. That's all it does. It does messaging. It's, there's no social network attached to it, but I rather like that, but also I I have installed, and I know Dan, you weren't that much of a fan of it. I've installed this thing called master Dom, which you can actually find it.

If you go to WP, build.social, if you want to get involved, if it's a bit like Twitter, But without the, but more confusing than Twitter because it's federated. So don't go there. If you don't want, at least to scratch your head a couple of times. Cause it is a bit strange how you set up your account and everything.

Actually, it's not that hard, but mastered on, you can go in just like you can, with Facebook, you can go and install your own Mastodon instance on a server and I'm imagining this. Opportunities to install that with one click on certain hosting companies. I'm not really sure, but it's, it's great. I really like it.

And we've got 60 people over there and it's pretty thin the conversation is pretty thin on the ground, but occasionally I drop in there and somebody left me a comment. So anyway, there you go. So

[01:11:15] Dan Maby: I'm with Robert's comment there about, we need to teach you Twitter. Yeah. I'm

[01:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: going to,

[01:11:20] Bob Dunn: I'm going to start a summit and there's going to be 30 speakers and it's just going to be for you.

It's going to be the Nathan on Twitter summit, and we're all gonna have our parts and we're all going to block you through it. And other people tend to fine, but we're just going to each have a session to sit down with you and we're each going to take a different part and we're going to have the Nathan

[01:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: for context.

I literally don't get Twitter. What I mean by that is I get that. It's a thing. And it's really popular. I don't understand how it works. I cannot get into my head. So over there is a screen with Twitter on it. One of them is tweet deck. The other one is just Twitter. Normal Twitter. Twitter comes down tweaked.

That goes up. So they're going in different directions for a star. I don't know. So on tweet, deck replies are above the previous, so you have to read the whole thing backwards. But also I don't get where things begin. So I'll see a common and it's got app WP builds in it. And then what, where did that come?

How did that get there? And then Dan showed me there's a little line in the top corner and you can scroll and follow, but that didn't help. I still get it and I get completely lost. Okay. Sorry. I've hijacked the show. Is it possible? Can tweets spawn other threads? So can one tweet go off in like multiple different directions or does it always come back to that one too?

[01:12:51] Dan Maby: Yes. You end up with conversations, a conversation off a tweet, but you can have multiple conversations off

[01:12:56] Nathan Wrigley: that single tweet. Yeah. This is where I'm totally confused, but I don't think

[01:13:00] Dan Maby: you're doing yourself any favors with

[01:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: tweet deck. Ah, I thought I was being really clever. I thought, whoa, this looks shiny.

I can just view nine things at once. Okay. I'm going to turn that off and I'll maybe go back to the original

[01:13:14] Bob Dunn: tweet that can be Villa I've used it for years. It can be very valuable, but you've got to figure it out. You've got to get a system in place once you get in place. Otherwise it's just a, yeah, it's a fricking nightmare.

Dan said, it'll, it'll send you off, and we don't need add to confusion. You're playing Nathan when it comes to Twitter. So focus on one thing

[01:13:36] Nathan Wrigley: and oh yeah. I'm still on the, this, it's hard enough to get the computer to switch on in the morning, um, but yeah.

Thank you Rob Ken saying, we need to take teach Nathan Twitter. Seriously, you made sure. You will fail.

There's no way you're going to I'm just too much of a lot when it comes to know that there'll be an epiphany moment. It will be. I know when it will be as I'm just about to draw my last breath. I understand.

[01:14:09] Dan Maby: Give me my phone.

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: I want it to eat. So then I'll go blissfully off into the afterlife.

Yeah, there we go. Cause that's a bombshell, anyway. Okay. So Facebook didn't affect any of us particularly, but apparently it affected the world. A lot of iron, lots of people, sorry, Dan,

[01:14:27] Dan Maby: on the Facebook, looking at the uh, I think it was seen it reported they estimated that cost Facebook $60 million in revenue for that six hour outage.

So we're saying that estimated value there, the $10 million an hour income from uh, from. Wow.

[01:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. To be honest with you, that those kinds of numbers don't surprise me for a company that big the interesting thing, which Dan and I actually talked about a couple of days ago was actually why it happened.

And let's not get into that because neither of us ended up understanding what happened. But I'm curious that essentially one misconfigured setting could drive the whole thing and not even the Facebook staff could use their own internal tools which oddly, most companies don't use their own internal tools.

They'll use Microsoft teams or slack or something. Facebook's using their own tools. I wonder how many of them went on Twitter to fix Facebook quick, everybody over to Twitter, it's still up. And apparently Twitter, we're quite good at poking fun with a bunch of tweets, the actual Twitter account poked fond, which was quite

[01:15:34] Bob Dunn: fun.

Facebook people understand Twitter.

[01:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I get Facebook. That's a problem. I need to wean myself off Facebook and then understand Twitter. There'll be a, there'll be a horrible, no man's land period, but I'll get there in the end. Okay. Moving on. Did you, so this is not really moving on cause it's the same story essentially, but not only did Facebook go down, but the following day Mr.

Zuckerberg, there is looking ever so cherry he, uh, that that is him being that, that was his

[01:16:12] Bob Dunn: manager,

[01:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: right? The obviously we shouldn't go down this route. There'll be lawsuits. The but they not only did they go down, but there was a big whistleblowing story that blew up last week where a lady whose name was Francis.

How can I believe she testified before Congress? I really sorry. Bob. I don't understand the U S system, but Congress. Oh, good. Okay. So Congress, big, important Congress. Anyway she testified with them and from everything that I saw, it was pretty damning in that it would appear that a lot of internal research that points to what can only be described as alarming conclusions about the impact of Facebook, especially younger users of Facebook seems to be getting pushed to one side because there's an obvious profits conflict.

And I'm sitting there watching all of this and I'm really, I didn't watch the actual conversation where she spoke to Congress. For me, it was more editorialized. You know, where they coalesced the whole thing down into three minutes, I watched those, but it did seem as if there's more questions to be asked and, you've obviously both of you decided to step back, I've been trying to step back.

This just starts to close the lid more firmly than ever before. Really?

[01:17:45] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I agree. It was pretty, yeah, it was one of those things. I went through some of it and read a bit of it and it was like, whoa, I'm in this go. But yeah. It's, it's, it's crazy stuff.

[01:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And Dan, obviously, with your big orange heart on hat, on the whole wellbeing, Really not, not having things in your life which are going to cause you pain and suffering, it would appear that is exactly what is behind some of the products for certain users given certain situations.

Yeah.

[01:18:22] Dan Maby: Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately I think that there were also questions raised about her um, knowledge in relation to her role within the company. So there's, I just think there's just lots of clouds around all of this that we're just, I don't think we really have the truth in some of these matters, which.

Yeah. I'd say it's a very difficult conversation. I think these ones. Yeah.

[01:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Lots of Facebook news this week. Anyway, so Sarah Gooding's piece and then this one was it was from the verge. Maybe you want to go and check that out, but okay. So given that we now all have decided Facebook is something that we never want to use again, obviously go to WordPress.

That's dead. Cool. We all love that, but I didn't get a chance to read this and I'm not therefore promoting it, but I did. I did come across something called mirror. My browser is trying to get me to set up crypto wallets. How curious is that? I've never seen that before. I'm going to make that go away right away.

Publishing on mirror is now open to all, and it says last December mirror launched its first de-centralized publishing protocol. Over the past year, we have also launched economic blocks for crowdfunding auctions, NFT additions, and splits as well as governance as a governance product mirror has evolved from a tool for writers to.

That web three creative suite for communities and DOA more da oh, sorry. More than ever. We believe that every creative project starts with a story. Our goal is to make mirror the best place to share your journey with the world and build a highly engaged community around it. Powered by its word.

Class crypto native tools. Honestly, Dan, I'm hoping that you've read this piece because I don't even get it. What the heck is a de-centralized publishing press.

[01:20:10] Dan Maby: I'm really, it's really interesting timing actually. And I'm glad that you brought this on up. David lucky over CMO at angry creative slipperiness agency.

I don't know if you saw, he's started, he's talking about doing, he's been doing a lot of talking about monetization of content within WordPress, and that's been on the forefront of a lot of his talks and around blockchain cryptocurrency and a new general monetization of our content. This week he has announced the web monetization for WordPress.

If you head over to web monetization dot Dave slash WordPress starting off with a bunch of um, uh, educational pieces, really to. Us start to be able to monetize our web content without having to it. It's basically this it's all this web three point, oh, how do we come away from this horrible system that we've got at the moment where everything's reliant on ads and we're just bombarded with ads to generate income.

And then big companies are trolling our data to be able to serve as the correct answer, et cetera. So really interesting space. You know, the use of blockchain cryptocurrency to, to start to build that. Alternative ways for us to start monetizing our content. I just thought it's a really interesting space to, to be in it though.

What was it?

[01:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: What web monitorization is that with a Zed or with a Zaydi? Yes. Oh, you see that problem?

Oh, I still can't make it. I'll tell you what I'm going to let you figure out the URL. And if you do, I've

[01:21:55] Dan Maby: just dropped in there.

[01:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah, you dropped in. Oh, you're in the private chat. You've dropped into something about a big orange shop. You're advertising to me, check you out, monetizing your content in the private chat, private chats, private, but, okay.

This is fascinating. Although I don't know anything about it, it just caught my attention. And when I see the words de-centralized and publishing something curious happens, and I have to at least bookmark it and I'll come back to it. That's all I'm going to say. Now this is cool. This is Dan's pick of the week.

Like just wait until you hear this. This is so cool. So let me put this back on the screen. I didn't know this was happening. Thankfully, Dan's here to school as all. Go on. Tell us what this is all about.

[01:22:46] Dan Maby: This is cloud phlegm, massively disrupting uh, a big part of our interest industry here. So S3 will, we've all heard.

AWS has three storage incredible infrastructure. Here we are. We've gone from S3 to cloud flares are two. Uh, are two. If you've it is a, it's a storage solution. They are basically looking to remove as you can see on there, the egregious fees in relation to store. I was looking at this, looking at the numbers.

And if you are delivering let's say 50 terabytes of data through your web application a month. If you're on AWS as three, that 50 terabytes of data on the, um, what was this going to be? So this will be on your outbound data transfer 50 terabytes a month. It's going to cost you about four and a half thousand dollars on AWS S3.

Drum roll

could cost you around $10 a month.

[01:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: What I mean? That is. Bonkers reduction. Really that's incredibly different. How do we go from $4,000 to tender? Because my understanding was that AWS was always really cheap and affordable and 50 terabytes. That's a lot of data. So that price seems, have you any insight into how they're getting the fees down?

[01:24:14] Dan Maby: Not a clue, no clue, but if they've come in, not just with this announcement, but they're also, they're massively trying to disrupt some industries here. They've also announced their web RTC components. So an API for web RTC. So all of the stuff that we're looking at right now in terms of kind of the live streaming, all of that, there's huge amounts of potential there.

And they've also announced if you're not looking to, to get involved with the API side, you've got the the, what is now called this stream live service this lot combined, it's just quite an incredible set of announcements that have come out in quick succession from CloudFlare. So

[01:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: a lot of the things, so obviously data transfer is becoming incredibly cheap on the CloudFlare end, but also things like live streaming they've decided that's a component where they want to actively be.

So not just normal data transfer, websites, assets, whatever it might be, but they also want to get involved in. Transferring images and sound. And I wonder if this is a push into more mainstream, not just live streaming like this, TV, uh, Netflix type, if you've got an app you want to release your own local TV channel or something, this might be the way to do it.

And if the costs are that low, that really feels amazing. I don't know if you've got anything about that bulb, but

[01:25:41] Bob Dunn: I, yeah, it's, I don't know what to say. Anything I share is just nothing compared to this. It's like 4,000 to $10. Yeah. It's. If I ever have that much, data that needs to be transferred, I'll be a happy person.

Maybe I won't be happy because I have that much, but at least cost-wise,

[01:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: I would be it's curious as well, because Dan is right in the space where he is. He is building for the WP LVN side of things. He's building a platform rather like this you know, including the sign-ups and the chat and essentially this, but he's doing it all with some open source software and their own in-house code.

And obviously one of the big things is the cost of transferring the data. And this almost brings it down to free for the amount of data that, let's be honest, a WordPress event is not going to be like Netflix. You're not going to be doing terabytes of data. And it brings it down to literally pennies, which is remote.

Absolutely.

[01:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So the last item we've got for you today, that was Dan with is fairly Howie brow. You know, interesting thing about CloudFlare. This is from Bob last time Bob was old, but so good. Last time Bob was on. I can't remember what it was that you dropped. You dropped some vocabulary that

[01:27:07] Bob Dunn: I've made it.

My goal, my appearances here are brought up with a new word that you can use in your everyday language. And last time it was puddling. I'm not even going to tell people what that is because I expect them to go back into the archives on this year's show and learn about it. But I found another one because they're all essentially around laziness and stuff, which is fun to talk about anyway, but I came across this one called Herchel Dirk doing, and it's a 19th century school.

They used the word for someone who is lying in bed lounging about long after it's time to get moving. So those words are great because we're all probably experienced this all the time. Whether you'll actually be able to segway this kind of word into your vocabularies and other, another thing going, but I thought it was great.

You can just get on Twitter and say, sorry, I was her called circling and here I am now and people will think, good Lord, what, what is he doing? You know, it you'd get a good conversation going, if anything.

[01:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things about this, firstly, it sounds cool.

There's just something about the like spiraling the sound of the words coming out of your mouth. It's just supplying. Isn't it Herchel duckling is, I don't know why, but it brings docs to mind for some reason. I don't know. But the sound is great, but also I shall be able to use this because I have teenagers in my house and they have.

What do they do? How does that work? Do they or are they Herchel ductless?

[01:28:42] Bob Dunn: You go with whatever,

[01:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: whatever gets up your Herchel duckling. Again, I shall be using that. That's brilliant. And I love the fact that you've decided you've created a mean for yourself. Every time you come on the show, you're going to try and expand our vocabulary in that way.

That's lovely. Okay. And on that bombshell it's perfect timing. We've run over by just about 30 seconds. So we'll stop there. Thank you few minutes. If you wish Bob and Dan, if you just want to let us know where is the best place to find you, or if you've got anything pressing that you want to share from this week in particular, that's coming up, let's start with you Dan.

Best way to find.

[01:29:22] Dan Maby: So best way to be is across bigger and charts or anything. Social is forward slash Dan, maybe may Y a big orange heart.org for anything related to wellbeing and mental health. Just one of, if you don't mind me quickly mentioning we did announce, the last study period in last week, that word Fest will be taking place again at 4th of March, 2022.

But we'll actually be delivering to so you can expect one on the 4th of March and one on the 9th of September 20, 22.

[01:29:55] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So you got the dates, say them again. Oh,

[01:29:59] Dan Maby: fourth and September

[01:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: 9th. Okay. Put them in the diary. Are they roughly six months apart? They are almost exactly ideal. Nice. Thank you. Okay, great.

And Bob, what about you?

[01:30:13] Bob Dunn: You're in the word WooCommerce, WooCommerce builder, do the blue.io. Do the woo on Twitter. I'm Bob WP just about everywhere else. And yeah I had hoped when I came to this show that I would be sharing this, but just a heads up. First part of November, we are doing a total rebrand and rebuild of the, do the agency doing yes for using a page builder.

They're setting it all up. So I won't have her in it as much, but yeah, it's a huge remake of it, a lot of stuff going on with that site. Um, he watched for that first part in.

[01:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: Fantastic. Yeah. Oh, that's a shame. You didn't make the the, the co I suspect there was probably a large amount of Herchel duckling going on.

Yeah,

that's right. That was just wall-to-wall Herchel dirt. And it never got done, but that's great. Next time you come back on, you can tell, in fact, you can show us it next time you come back on and we'll be able to, we're able to look at it. So thank you very much. Dan, maybe thank you very much, Bob. Can you give us a quick wave?

Cause I use this wave for the album and there we go. That's perfect. Thank you very much. Indeed. I'm going to press stop. Join us next week. No, don't join us next week. We're not here. We're doing the page builder summit. Come back in a few weeks time and we'll have a show for you until then. Take it easy.

Bye.