This Week in WordPress #185

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 185 entitled new, new, new. It was recorded on Monday. The 15th of no. 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined this week by two brand new guests, never been on the show before first we've got Ken Elliott and also we have Kim Coleman. It's an absolute pleasure to have them on.

And we had a really nice chat about a lot of WordPress stuff as we always do first. Pagely has been acquired by GoDaddy Pagely is a very experienced, managed WordPress hosting company. And they've joined the GoDaddy family. What do we all think of that? We also get to talk about something, which I started a week ago and it's got all out of hand.

It's the WP Builds WordPress awards for 2021. It's a page where you can basically buy yourself onto the award. Page, you can become a winner 100% guaranteed. If you donate a little bit of money to big orange heart, we also talk about a new plugin called lemon squeezy, which has come onto the market. And it does basically the same job as easy digital downloads.

We also talk about whether or not the WP admin is in need of a bit of TLC and touch upon WP had minify as a plugin that may be able to help that a security problem this week on the security website, talking about skimming a spoofer, which enables people to skim credit card details from your WooCommerce website, amp accelerated mobile pages is a Google technology, and it seems that they're in the doghouse about it.

And maybe automatic is getting dragged into the argument as well. And that's it. I hope that you enjoy the show. Leave us a comment. If you've got anything to say. But for now. I hope you enjoy it. Hello. Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Welcome wherever you are in the world. It's very nice to have you with us.

This is exciting because I've got two people that I've never spoken to before. Literally never spoken to before until about eight minutes ago. And and it's an absolute pleasure to welcome two new guests to the show today. You can probably see from the the little bits at the bottom that they are Kim Coleman and Ken Elliot.

How are you doing?

[00:02:29] Kim Coleman: Very good. Very good. Happy Monday morning here in person.

[00:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, I have got you up at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, which is literally the worst time I think, to get you up. And I feel that the same could be true for Ken Elliot. Who's joining us as well. Is it nine o'clock? It's nine o'clock

[00:02:46] Ken Elliott: of South Carolina.

Absolutely.

[00:02:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Um, I'm going to do your sort of formal introductions if that's all right. I'll start with Kim. Part of the show notes that we asked the people on the show to do is to submit a little thought, very informal biography. So I'll just going to read them out. I'll do Kim's first.

Kim Coleman has worked with WordPress for over 15 years, wearing many hats, including developer, designer, marketer, and founder at her company, stranger studios. She leads a creative team of 15 people building open-source technical. I'm producing digital content to help people get paid. The flagship products include popular membership, plugin, paid membership pro, and site-wide sales, a new tool for automating sales with WooCommerce, EDD, and P M program.

We will get to something in the lines of EDD and a little while, but thank you for joining us to take him. Appreciate that. And it's so welcome. I'm sure we'll enjoy your expertise. And Ken Elliot is a recovering code addict and now co owner of be creative with a key media solutions based out of Columbia, South Carolina.

He is also the co-organizer of the Columbia WordPress meetup group. Ken's goal is to help small and medium-sized businesses to grow their audience by providing online visibility and services. It's an absolute pleasure to have you both. Obviously, if you've listened to those introductions, we've got a real range and depth of experience in the WordPress space.

I'm going to do my usual bits of housekeeping. If that's all right with YouTube. If you are joining us today, please go to there's a couple of places that you can go. You can either go to WP bills. In fact, I'll put it on the screen either go to WP Builds.com forward slash live. That is an embed of YouTube.

And so over there, you can be logged into Google. If you wish to comment, alternatively, you can go to WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook, and that will take you to the Facebook group. And you can comment in there. However, Facebook are slightly they've got a bit more of a walled garden as regards to commenting.

And if you wish to have your avatar appear or you want your name to appear, then you'd need to go to this URL. It's really tiny on the screen there, but it's chat.restream.io forward slash FB. Once more, chat dot restream dot. Forward slash FB. And you have to give them permission Kluge to that. If you don't want to let us know who you are.

In other words, if you don't want Facebook to have that permission, what you can do is just type your name at the beginning of the comment. So you could say, John Smith and then write your comment and then we know who you are regardless, which is quite nice. The other thing to say would be, if you want to just quickly go and share this podcast, we'd really appreciate that.

As I say, the best link probably is go to WP Builds.com forward slash live. So do that now, pause this, or, open another tab, go and share it on the Twitter, the Facebook, wherever it may be and a coming of a lesson we've got about 85 minutes of WordPress's stuff here. And as always, if you want to drop a comment in about where you are, who you are and all of those kinds of things, please feel free to do that at the beginning.

That would be really nice. I can see Matt Davis has dropped in a comment, Mike Davis, in the UK. You can always tell when it's a Monday, it's the day when Nathan looks like seaside a shower. Yes. Yes. There is some word on this and my general level of cleanliness of it later, we will actually be talking this week about how clean or otherwise I am, but more in sport.

And thank you so much, Matt, for joining us today, right? It's a WordPress podcast. So we might as well get stuck into some WordPress. Everything that we do is based [email protected]. The drill go over there and click all sorts of buttons and subscribe to as many things as you possibly can.

And, generally go and explore the podcast. That'd be really nice, but first news, big news this week, that is a very plain page. Isn't it? I have to say, when you first hit that page, you are so welcomed with more or less grayness, but it's it's over on the page li.com website and it's on their blog and it's simply entitled.

We did it question then I suppose as well, what did you do? And they got bought by . They have agreed. Oh, look at that. Look what happens when you highlight something? Funky. They've agreed to be bought by go daddy. Okay. So on this page, it explains it's actually a really nice piece.

I've got to say they, they say a lot about themselves to founders and it talks about their journey and how they set up. And they really didn't know what they were doing, but they stuck with it at a mission. And on some 15 or so years later, whatever it is now, they're kind like leading the push.

They were the first company to offer an inverted commerce, managed WordPress hosting. I know there's a lot of that going around now. I seem to be more on the sort of enterprise level. Last time I looked, their pricing was a little bit higher than you might pay at some of the other managed WordPress hosting companies.

But after a period of time, I guess they want to move on and and you know, Passengers new. It's quite an interesting pitch because rather than saying that we've been bought by GoDaddy, they turn it on its head and more or less, they're saying we allowed go daddy to buy us. And the reason we've allowed them to buy us is because we actually think that we can improve them, which is quite an interesting pitch.

I can't remember exactly where it was, but in here somewhere, it says , it works. So we did it our way and it all worked. This is the text just here. It works so well that one of the largest internet brands in the world go, daddy wants us to help them to be more like us. That's really curious. So like I said, no, no money has been disclosed.

As far as I know. But I'm curious because we don't know each other, Kim and Ken, there's this sort of awkward period where nobody wants to interrupt anybody and everybody feels like, is it my turn? Is it my time? The truth is just bought in whatever you want. Just get in there. So over to you, you blurt whatever you want.

[00:08:55] Kim Coleman: I'll, I'll start because I'm also co-founded with my husband and bootstrapped. And when I read this acquisition and when I read about other acquisitions I think about just the family and the personal lives of the founders. And I don't think a lot of articles have really captured just kind what stage everyone who's selling right now is in like we're mid thirties to mid forties.

We have kids and like the two to 10 year old range um, I think there's a lot under the hood of the personal life and the shift you get when you decide to sell like this, that just isn't being talked about.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. Yeah, that is good. Yeah. And so that then leads me to us. When are you saying

[00:09:39] Kim Coleman: our direct competitors? Some kind of one's kind of sell and I think it does raise a lot of concern within our team and our customers we're at that stage too. Our kids are nine and 13, almost 13. So we're at that stage too, where we're reevaluating. What does the future look like for us?

And then these next few years and having teenagers, but we have no plans right now to,

[00:10:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's quite interesting because although that stuff was writ large on the piece, I didn't really pick up on it. And I'm glad that you did, but now that I've just scrolled through there's about four pictures, like really personal pictures of, here we are on holiday, here we are on on some sort of took here.

We are in a garden, the hugging and all of this kind of thing. And you're right. It is a really personal angle. Isn't it? And you've got things like Uh, selling recently and you've got Elliot, not, not Ken earlier, Elliot Condon selling recently. And I wonder if the if the justification does come down to look, I've done my time.

Let's just have a bit of, let's just have a bit of normality and family anyway. Sorry, Ken. I think

[00:10:42] Ken Elliott: I said the big buzzword. There is time. It's a matter of how much time do you want to continue to commit to what you're doing? We all are passionate about what we're giving to the community to WordPress, but at the same point you want to eventually get to that place of, okay.

I'm getting paid. I'm getting my freedom back. Now I can go and invest back into my children and create those memories because really when we're alive, our whole purpose for living is to create those memories with the ones we love. And if we're not going to create those memories, then we feel like we're lost in that ever going you know, chase tail circle, tail that we were like, what is life really about?

And so I think eventually you have to get to the point where, Hey, I need to focus out. I want to spend more time with my family. I want to create those memories that when you know, I leave here, I can say, Hey, this was great. I did what I had to do on this earth.

[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: What a great. Bunch of people we've got, this is great.

Really you're talking my language. I love all this stuff. I I've deliberately tried to make my life as in terms of work, try to really lean away from doing lots of work, to doing less work in order to foster time with my kids. And, I kind of regard myself in a sense as a bit of a part-timer in that.

And that was a decision that I made long ago because I had exactly the same thought process as you can, which was simply w what will I be? If in 50 years time I look back like good grief thing, assuming I get there and think, ah, do you know what I wish I'd worked harder as opposed to, I wish I'd spent more time with my kids and I know which one it would, would have more regret.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Anyway. And

[00:12:29] Ken Elliott: I think the opening taillight for me is just exactly what it is, where you talk about recovering addicted Kodak. Because early on when I started, I was always okay, is my client not satisfied? Okay. Now I've got to go in and spend 16, 17, 18 hours, okay. To resolve whatever the issue is.

Okay. I got to make sure that the deadline is met in at what compromise. And so eventually you say, okay, I can't compromise the things that I loved and are with me every day to satisfy a client, just to make sure that they're making are taking care of whatever their need is great. Cause we know we're all big about customer service.

That's really important, which is the other thing I noticed in the article was customer service was the, is a big thing for them in any company that says customer service automatically just tugs at my heart. For whatever reason, I don't know what it is about customer service, but I'm a big advocate for any company that talks about customer service.

[00:13:25] Kim Coleman: And that's, that feels closely aligned to GoDaddy as well. They kind catered to a lower end, less, less expensive, maybe per ticket for customers. But I think most people will say that they're have responsive customer service and definitely their team that I'm friends with on Twitter. It's very positive.

And, they're always saying great things. They have a great social network of people sharing and, kind of advocating for GoDaddy. It seems like you've got alignment for those

[00:13:53] Nathan Wrigley: reasons. Yeah. And just I'll just add a few comments in at this point. First of all, Daniel, thanks for joining us in Tampa, Florida.

He's probably nine o'clock as well. I would imagine. And then Paul, Paul Davis, sorry, Matt, Paul Davis. I got Paul Lacey, Matt Davis in my head here, Pedro, an amazing company who said he was sad to see the cell to go daddy originally. But it makes sense, especially when you consider just how much they you've, Pagely added to the managed WordPress ecosystem.

Yeah. That's a really good point. The and then he goes on to say, and I think this is replying to something I said as for no money, the blog posts talks about multimillionaires being minted. Yeah, they actually did say in the article didn't they. Th they themselves, I think, are now in the millionaire category.

And that also, they believe they've arising, tide carries all boats, that their employees have also been taken up in this swell. What I meant to say there, Matt, I should have been more specific is it doesn't disclose the amount of money that was changing hands. Yeah. Um, so it's going to be a considerable amount for an extremely well-rounded system platform and team of great thinkers.

You have really good point and we'll just have to see where this goes. Maybe, maybe in a year's time, six months time go, daddy will firmly be pivoting that maybe rebranding it or just calling it Pagely and go in for that incredibly managed WordPress hosting. They've got the hub and all of that kind of stuff and go daddy pro.

Yeah. We'll have to see how that one goes. Paul Lacey, no, I don't know what to say about this. Paul Lacey who's avatar. Isn't even available. Great insights can and Kim, certainly a time where so many people are reevaluating. Yeah. Good. Thank you for that. Okay. So there we go. Pagely has been acquired by GoDaddy.

Keep your ears to the ground and see what you think. Okay. Let me move on. I've got another article. Let me just pop the screen back on. Oops. This bottom is hi. On Orthodox. Okay. Paul, I am so glad that you're in the comments here, actually, because Paul Lacey, it never made it into the show notes this week, but Paul, I don't know if you want to share the URL of the piece that you wrote recently.

I think what we'll do is end up talking about your piece next week. But as the show notes get created on Friday and it never made it in, but this piece did, this is Tom MacFarlane who. Read morals, everything that he writes. And he's got this piece [email protected] and it's entitled play by the rules and be careful what you write now.

There's no quick way of summing this up, but basically it goes a bit like this. A while ago, Tom wrote something which could be described as a little bit controversial. And in essence, people jumped in and despite the fact that he's been in the community for ages and he's committed code, and he's been helping out in core and he's done all these wonderful things and make people's lives immeasurably better.

It doesn't take much to get the storm of protest going, shall we say? And the comments blew up and it, all of a sudden it got personal to the point where he felt that individuals were getting attacked. Um, and he wrote to the individual who appeared to be under attack and said, shall I pull the comments?

And they said no, leave it up. We can see where the conversation goes. And essentially it goes like this. He's now reevaluating his strategy regarding what kind of content that he'll produce. And it feels almost in a way as if he's drawn himself in a little bit. And he wants to be more careful about the content that he produces.

So in the past, he was quite happy to write about community and all of those kinds of things, but now he's being much more specific in the future. He's going to, and it's on the screen, he's going to define his content. He's going to define what his intent is when he produces content. And also, it sounds like he's going to stick firmly in the camp of writing about something where there's not really too much controversy.

In other words, he's going to stick to the things like code and. And I just actually wondered if either of you two had any thoughts on this and by thoughts on this, you know, do you, when you've got your websites being deployed for clients, do you tell them to switch comments on, do you have everything wide open?

Do you tell them that the world's a beautiful place? Nothing. Untoward can happen open up the comments, let the flood gates go Oreo a bit like Tom, are you thinking actually, do you know what, in this day and age band down the hatches and be careful be mindful, right? Thought for the, never write anything that could be considered controversial.

So again, the flow is one of you go for it.

[00:18:23] Ken Elliott: The Kim go first. But,

[00:18:25] Kim Coleman: Definitely we actually on our own website turned off comments on, I think a year ago. First of all, we weren't moderating them quickly. So time would go on and then we would go see an a paid member would comment on something, have a support request.

So we realized people were using comments, at least on our own technical product blog to get support. And it wasn't the right place. Most of the time I would, trash the comment directly, email the person and say you know, you meant to ask for support. This is unrelated. Definitely in our own site.

But I think to this article, what I took from it is that we've because we've lacked face-to-face word camps and meetups. We've kind lost rapport with people. Um, just that, engine of social media and commenting has just given everyone a little bit more strength to be bold and be outspoken, but we don't look at people face-to-face and have these conversations in hallway tracks, like we used to.

So I think it's in part because of that.

[00:19:26] Ken Elliott: That's good. Yeah, absolutely. And I think just because of how it is, how the internet is anyway we all have just got to be very mindful with everything that we say. And so just being very, some of the things you would just ramble out there, like you could say rent, like even here or even what you could say.

But as you miss a cue on face to face those conversations that you could have, where if you say that in a place like online, anybody, and everybody can screw Nass what you're saying. And so they feel as if, okay, if this is a tackle me and it may not even be an attack on them, it's just that they insinuate, Hey.

And even when you put people's names into it, I think people just feel as if, Hey, this is free rent. I got a screen behind me. Unprotected, you can't attack me in person. So I'm going to say whatever I want. And if you really want to do something. I guess here's my address, but I truly think people just have to calm down and relax and really think, okay, is this really an attack on me?

Am I really, are we really trying to attack people? Are we trying to attack an idea or a thought, if we really want to see something get better, then we're going to actually attack the idea and try to deconstruct and reconstruct into something better, not attack an actual individual person.

[00:20:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Kind of WordPress has the mission of democratizing publishing and it totally is doing that.

And I suppose you could argue, although it is hidden behind some sort of advertising model, Facebook and Twitter, and all of those platforms probably have a similar purpose. The intention is whether or not it gets confused is just to let people push stuff out online and whilst that's great, nobody really wants the flack that comes with it.

Nobody really wants to put something up there. Even if you. And I realized that you guys both in the United States, a lot of that sort of free speech stuff is protected by the constitution and the laws that you have. I'm not quite sure what the position in the UK is, but certainly we seem to have a really robust system of allowing people to say what they like, but, if you're putting something out there, which is at best modestly controversial, or at least you're just putting an opinion out and you hit click and then you get deluged by bile and people just expressing shock and horror and wonder at how dare you write this kind of stuff.

It w it's strange. And I think in a sense, this persona that people have got has evolved over the last 20 years, this anonymity that you can have on the internet, especially on WordPress, where you can literally post the comment. You just have, make up a name and a, and submit it with a made up email address.

And you're off to the races and policing. That kind of stuff is a big job. And I'm sure that even the thickest skinned person, when they read something which is personal and incendiary and deliberately harmful, there's going to be a moment where you go, oh yeah, I just had deflating experience and maybe Tom's had a little bit of that.

I don't really have the answer, but I am curious as to what you guys did. And I think I share your opinion, Kim. I think where I enter publishing client websites. Now, I probably would be telling people, just switch off the comments. I took a tip out of Kevin quirk, who is a UK cybersecurity guy.

And he has hijacked the comment system on WordPress and replaced it with a button which launches your email client. The idea being that if you really want to get in touch with. Just stick it in an email and then, and I feel like that barrier to entry. And then of course there's the whole, there's the whole side of the, just people writing absolute drivel as an SEO hit, trying to get

exactly what it is the SEO.

[00:23:28] Ken Elliott: Some people just like the more people that are pinging your pace, the more likely hold this must be really important. And here you go. Now you have traction on a page that probably doesn't deserve that much traction.

[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Let's let's put some thoughts in here, Michelle Frechette, who is on the show very often and is destined to be more on the show along with Ken she says, hear me out moderate koans Michelle by that, do you mean that just open the flood gates, but ticket on as a moderating option?

Yeah. My experience of that. He's mixed. Number one, it doesn't stop the horrible stuff that you don't actually want to read, getting in there. And number two it just sometimes just fills up with stuff and you just go delete, delete, delete. And it's just clearly some robot that's decided at your website's farm.

[00:24:17] Kim Coleman: I think there's also like an ethics to that because you publish something you've opened comments and said I want to hear what you have to say, but then you're moderating. Throwing some things out and keeping some you know, in a sense, it's not an open comment floor. It's not public.

Yeah. It has the second layer of the human, validating or throwing something away. So that's like an interesting thing as well.

[00:24:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I think Michelle's right. And if she can, if she can keep on top of it and likes to, do that whole process, which I'm sure she does, but in your case, Kim said that it all got a bit, you all just got behind and it was never on like the SOP of important things to do.

It was always like other bottoms on somewhere and never got done kind of thing yet.

[00:25:01] Kim Coleman: Yeah. We would on a Friday afternoon, me and one of my team members would grab a glass of wine and process comments and just laugh because we were like, what are they talking about? An article about one product thing would be totally unrelated comment.

Yeah.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we've got a few comments in the first one is too, is that we have to rewind a little bit, cause some of these are out of the GoDaddy Paisley piece and Paul's saying that he's a he's. He's obviously pleased to see it. He thinks that GoDaddy and Paisley are two great companies.

That's right. The game GoDaddy Bell's podcast is going to be a different experience in 2022. That's right. We also hope to be millionaires by selling two to go daddy, by the end of this, maybe by the end of the show, you never know. Let's see what happens. Various people saying good morning and Chris uses nobody touches beloved kin stir.

So it doesn't care what happens with other hosting companies just leave, consider alone. I'm struggling to keep up. Uh, okay. So Daniel says WP drama. I love this hashtag you could use it. You can deploy this at any moment for almost anything. And yes, we've definitely created the WP drama and Paul Lacey in the WP projects is so open.

Sorry, did that was that. Okay. In the WP project. It's so open. If you question the bigger picture, then there is always an angle to think that it was an attack on an innocent individual caught in the crossfire. It's a problem within the structure. Okay. Yeah. Paul will surface your piece next week, I think.

And you never know. I might even be able to track you on for 10 seconds and call you a traitor as I always do. Do you know the story of that guy? I won't bore you. He knows. He knows it. So it's a joke. Okay. Let's move on. Oh, there's loads in there. Should we carry on with the comments for a second to do, are you enjoying that?

Okay. So I was saying, Michelle, did you mean you were going to moderate the comments more and you said yes, but you can let the ones in that you want to. Yes, I agree. There are some websites that are managed in the past that was so inundated with spam, like four or 5,000 a week. That process became totally unmanageable.

And despite their best efforts with plugins and all sorts of strategies, it was just switch off. Oh, there was no hope. There was no way of sifting out the wheat from the chaff. But sounds like Michelle. Nope.

[00:27:22] Ken Elliott: Let me ask a quick question. This might be even a good question here, Kim. I'm going to ask you here just cause I'm loving the wine.

And

so let me ask a quick, so how much time are you dedicating? And I'm going to just say a week how much time are you dedicating a week to moderating comments

[00:27:42] Kim Coleman: back then? I would say maybe two hours a week when they were on, because we waited until that Friday. And then we saw there was like a hundred unmoderated comments and oh my God.

But most people are using email support. You know, we're email every day, 30 to 50 emails, but those comments just sat there and said,

[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: okay, it's an interesting amount of time. Would that be sustainable for you Ken? Two hours a week. So that's like a 20th of your working week.

[00:28:11] Ken Elliott: Oh man. See, and that's what I was wondering because if I sit there in, I bring in a couple of my team, I know how my team is.

You're like really are going to look at comments or I'm like, eh, let's have them send an email to us or hit us in slack or any of the number of communication tools that we use. But I'm moderating comments, probably

[00:28:36] Nathan Wrigley: not for us. Here's a really good point from Chris, which we haven't really touched on.

I've several clients who have their comments kept on. They have complete control over them compared to things like Facebook, et cetera. That's a really good point. There are pages with comments on a peer to get better lifts in the SERPs too. Okay. That's another really good point. So obviously if you are moderating and as Michelle here says to keep out the vitriol and spam, and they're adding something to the conversation, if you're lucky enough to have commenters who are writing really useful on message things, it's more SEO juice, isn't it.

And. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. The, the whole two hours thing that's quite amazing. Actually. I'm amazed that you stopped, stuck with it for as long as you did. That's remarkable. The wine

[00:29:27] Ken Elliott: helps. I'm sure

[00:29:29] Nathan Wrigley: it was actually eight minutes. It was one hour 52 of cracking jokes and having us on the line and then eight minutes clicking.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's a really interesting piece that prompted a lot of debates. So thank you, Tom, for prompting us to talk about that. That's really interesting. And we went off in a really different set of directions there. Okay. Speaking of different set of directions, this. I don't even know what to say this.

I seem to be promoting myself more these days and I apologize for that, but I couldn't let this one go because I actually thought that this was this was really funny. I put a spurious poll up on the WP bill to website and I called it, the WP Builds web WordPress awards, 2021. And when I put it up, there was one option and it was the first one, this one, and it was best WordPress podcast called WP Builds.

And you didn't get a choice. You had to click the button for me and then submit the form. And then over on Twitter Jamie muslin from pootle press came to me and he said, I'll give you $10. I think he's a 10 pounds, but $10. If you make me the best WordPress tennis player. And so there he is. Look, he is now officially in 2021.

It's totally official, right? It's completely official. He is the best WordPress tennis. For this year because he donated $10 to big orange chart. And so now this page has gone a bit out of control. We've probably got I don't know however many that is, it's probably about 25 or so people on there who've given, and this is the point you don't give me $10, give big orange chart, $10.

We all know what big are in charter and what they do. And essentially if you go to big orange chart and you donate them a minimum of $10, which I believe is their smallest donation, then come back to this page, which is w let me copy it into the chat. That might be a bit easier. Let me see if I can add it as a caption.

There we go. If you go to that page, then you can fill it out and you can pay. To be the best in whatever category you pleased this year. How about that as an offer, you just give Barry big orange, Charlotte's some money and you will officially be the best at something, some bargain. And I might even give you a sticker or something when the whole thing's over you give

[00:31:54] Ken Elliott: me a sticker.

[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. We're on. Okay. So just so that we know where we're at this year so far the best WP Builds podcast is WP built. The most unique display advertising goes to Jeff Chandler for his little trains. I don't know if you've seen that on WP main line, the best WordPress tennis player, as we said is Jamie Marsland.

Michelle. Is actually triplets masquerading as one. If Michelle she's here at the cupboards, she literally does the work of nine people. So yeah, triplets is under selling yourself there, Michelle, best WordPress podcast that Bob Don actually to be fair to Bobby said, name whatever category you like, I'll give him some money.

And so I said you are the best WordPress podcast. So that's the, ah, here we go. This is my reference to earlier the least clean member of the WordPress community. That's me. I won that one. The best WordPress writer who points things out like they ought to be is Eric . And I don't know if I've pronounced that correctly.

The most traitorous podcast co-host in the WordPress community. That's Paul Lacey, the best known collector, Leon Melton. It just gets more ridiculous. Best mitten knitter in the WordPress community is Heather Gray. Justin Tatlock, the best WordPress halo player. The best online directory of WordPress live streams is actually WP live streams.

That was the more sensible one from Daniel shut Smiths. Who is I think in the comments still maybe best WordPress dog Walker, David McKee. Who else we got best love this? So there was obviously the most traitorous podcast. As a rebuttal, Andrew Palmer came back the best enough traitorous cohost of the WP tonic podcast.

And then somebody contacted me and said, I wanted to be the best tennis player in the WordPress community. And I said what about the best, this best tennis player best this best WordPress tennis player is Nigel and Rogers. And and I had a message from Jamie who said, we really should decide this properly, get the tennis records out.

Best African speaking, WordPress community member hosting a summit that Anshan LaRue, who I know very well. So cool. She changes global warming is Cynthia Anand, and finally the most awesome 13 year old in, sorry. The most awesome 13 year old in the world is Isaac Coleman, man. Now I wonder who Isaac Coleman is.

[00:34:27] Kim Coleman: I think at this stage, in his life, my job, his mother is embarrassed, embarrassed. So I'm going to show him this later. He's just going to curl into a ball. I

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: think that's absolutely brilliant that you did that. And now it's official. There is nobody on the planet who is of the age of 13, who is as cool as them, it's totally official.

So anyway, please, I should put that URL back up. Please go to that WP Builds.com for it. I should have made the slug better than that, but there you go. WP Builds dash, sorry. WP dash builds dash WordPress. Stasha Watts touched 20, 21. I might change that for next week, cause it's going for another, oh, it was at the top 30 days, I think.

Yeah. Another 30 days you've got to make your money. Let's get up. Thousand dollars. So let's see if we can get this real big up to a thousand dollars, spread the word. If nothing else, it will make people chuckle because it's absolutely ridiculous. Um, Kim, you've obviously cast your vote. We now know about you know, you're very cool.

13 year old son, Isaac, but what about you, Ken? What would you nominate yourself for?

[00:35:34] Ken Elliott: I will most likely be the best WordPress hallway speaker.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:35:42] Ken Elliott: I think I've considered that because I love having conversations in the hallway is always the best time and people are like, can I go into a session? No, I don't think I'm gonna just sit and chat with you all in the hallway.

[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. I can't wait for the day when I meet you, because we often have this conversation about word camps and stuff, and I think more or less everybody is in agreement that the whole. If not equal to quite honestly sometimes better because at least in the hallway, you're guaranteed to have a chat with somebody.

Whereas in the hallway, in the, uh, in the presentations, it could be missed for you personally, but the hallway is great. Okay. Well, I expect to see the email dropping. No,

[00:36:26] Ken Elliott: once this is over, I am going to send it a sad,

[00:36:30] Nathan Wrigley: oh, very good. $10 to big orange chart, make the WordPress community better.

They do amazing work and they need your help. Okay. Right. I'm going to miss out that that one that we talked about before the show was started, I'm going to go straight to this one. A new product came came my way this week. You've probably heard about it. It's been in various blog posts and things like that.

But I'm curious to see about this. This is a thing called lemon squeezy. I in error assumed that this was a British built a plugin because I in error assumed that lemon squeezy was a British thing. That was a saying that we had in Britain because we have this product called lemon squeezy. And it's like a, it looks like a lemon.

It's a plastic lemon and it's got lemon juice in it and you squeeze it over your pancakes. Anyway, it's called lemon squeezy. So I just thought it's gotta be bright. It's not, but what it is. It's an easy digital downloads. That's the best way to describe it. Think easy digital downloads and think of all the things that it does.

This is a product trying to, it would appear, emulate the same sort of functionality. So in other words, imagine you've got a digital product and you wish to sell it out into the wider world. At the moment, you can use all sorts of SAS solutions but for a variety of reasons, the default one in WordPress seems to be easy, digital downloads.

I'm sure many of the people watching this have bought things via easy digital downloads or implemented at them. So we have a different rival lemon, squeezy.com. You can see it's billing itself for selling products in the easy peasy way you create a store, as you might expect, you can sell your products.

It looks like at the minute you can do things like offer payments by card or with PayPal. It's got a fairly traditional sort of payment system. And what have you there's options to bolt on. And I don't know, in what state of development or readiness, these are email marketing bundles and upsells lead magnets discount codes.

They've got a reporting so you can see how things have been going. All of the normal stuff, and particularly Kim, because I know that this is something, with paid memberships pro and all of the different integrations that you've got. You said, you've got an EDD integration with paid

[00:38:48] Kim Coleman: membership or whatever.

It's separate of our subscription membership thing. But it's just for putting EDD on a time to sale. So a product, an ABD could be on sale from 12:00 AM. Till 11:59 PM for a day. And it turns itself on and off. So a little different than this, but I do see some overlap with this product and our membership one, because they're going to do subscriptions and digital products.

So I'm interested to watch where this goes. But looking, we looked at it and the WordPress plugin under the hood and really it's just a connector to their SAS platform. Um, we're a membership plugin or EDB. Your users are sitting on your site. The subscriptions they make help management all feels integrated.

It's part of your WordPress admin, it's part of your front end with this, it's all going to sit and on the lemon squeezy side. You know, there's pros and cons to that owning your list, owning your users or having them elsewhere. So I think that's the heart of this conversation. Can

[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: you say, can we drill down on that a bit because you've obviously got more insight and you've explored more in this than I have, but on the EDD side, if a sale or a transaction takes place, all of that data goes into tables in the WordPress database, and you are there for the custodian of that data.

And then this, the last, other over the last few years, that kind of stuff has become more important than ever certainly things like GDPR. And I'm sure there's equivalent things happening over in the U S that that mean that data is not something you can trivially manage. Now, you've got to make sure that you know what you're doing with it.

And are you saying that on your investigation, lemon, squeezy has taken a different approach. They're storing it on their side,

[00:40:25] Kim Coleman: and I dug into kind of the, how it works and even taxes and things like that, and that they're handling on their side. So it's something that as the merchant, you're not registering with a bunch of states and countries and having your own kind of payment for Texas there, they're handling that piece with.

Anything legal as a small business, without a huge team of people behind you. If you can offload that to someone else and not lose sleep at night, that's kind a great thing.

[00:40:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's a really interesting part. I mentioned to you both it prior to doing this podcast, I did several e-commerce sites, nothing with WooCommerce.

It was always Magento, but there was a moment in time when I just literally got too scared about it. I just saw, I don't want the responsibility for this. And some of the sites were taking in considerable revenue and I thought, I'm just happy building regular brochure type websites. And so I stepped away and now more than ever, I think I'd be concerned if I was building these websites in case there was something that, got hacked or was taken away and the people were going to come after me.

So it is like a UVP for them. Isn't it? Take care of all of the data. So it's on us. We're just going to look after that. You got any thoughts on this?

[00:41:40] Ken Elliott: I was trying to think of some questions here. I think one of the things I look at, because as one who have used WC WooCommerce, one of the things are always concerned about is using plugins not using on payments in the kind of the payment transactions choice like between PayPal and between square, which are the two big ones that are out there right now for payments.

But Kim, just out of curiosity, is, do you have a preference of what type of payment platform you want to use or are you just have to use whichever one that says provides to you,

[00:42:17] Kim Coleman: With lemon squeezy, I think it's built into theirs. I would imagine it Stripe under the hood, but I don't know for sure.

I did read that they make payouts to you as the business through PayPal or a direct pay. But we ourselves use Stripe with our plug and that's our most popularly used payment gateway integration. And then PayPal is a close second. Um, I think developers prefer coding for Stripe because it's they're clearly documented and they're a leader in especially subscriptions and billing type APIs.

So, definitely above PayPal. And then a lot of the older gateways you would think of like an authorized.net Stripe is leaps and bounds ahead of them.

[00:43:00] Ken Elliott: Oh yeah. I've had my first experience with Stripe this year. And I don't know if I say square, I'm going to say square earlier, but I'm going to say Stripe, but you know, with Stripe without a doubt, I wish I would have used straddle with straight would have been here years ago when I was building these all WooCommerce sites is it's amazing.

Click at API keys and you're done. I love it. It's forever forward. I'm advising Stripe. Any chance.

[00:43:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's just, no, it's just so simple, isn't it? Yeah. I remember when they first came out they build them. So maybe they still do. I don't know. I never go to the Stripe homepage anymore, but they build themselves as payments for developers.

And it was basically just a collection of forms. Wasn't there that they handled in the background. And I'm just going to put the page on actually, because it's curious, actually they don't say Kim or at least I can't find a reference to, I wonder if I did a command F and then searched for Stripe if it would work, but they talk about the fact that they accept cards and PayPal and curious thing on the pricing side here is that the fee you can see in all cases, whether you go on their basic plan or their pro plan or the advanced planning that feels like they're that three plans that they've got that don't speak about.

Anything else. If they're charging a 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction, I'm always used to seeing 2.9. And plus I believe 20 is what I'm used to seeing or something like that. Anyway, so the, there seems to be a little bit of markup here, and I wonder if that's because they are taking on the GDPR type burden, they're hosting the data.

And for that, they're going to take a let's say 0.5, 0.6% caught on top of the strike fee. But then Kim, you also mentioned that recurring subscriptions actually have a different tariff to just one-off payments.

[00:44:57] Kim Coleman: Yeah. So with Stripe now, they've, this is a pretty recent update and PayPal did as well.

They've upped the recurring billing to add an additional half a percent. So maybe this, if this is backed by Stripe the 2.9 plus have 3.4, they're still getting a little bit per transaction, which I think is where for SAS, that's where you want to be. It aligns your goals with your customer's goals.

The more they sell, the more you make. I think smart. We're trying to do it with our product as well. Great. Those alignments.

[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is good. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That's a really strong argument. Isn't it? I actually did just do a search for on this page and look for the word strike and I didn't find it, but whatever they're using, if they're, if they're taking that burden from you, whether it's Stripe or I don't know, Braintree or something equivalent.

You don't have to worry about it. So if you're happy with those numbers, I'm going to be interviewing w the, one of the developers from lemon squeezy for a podcast, which will probably appear in the new year, but I'm going to be interviewing this week. So I'll definitely get those questions asked about the payment processes and how it all works and where the data is held, because that's probably going to be one of the major concerns, but yeah.

Okay. So cool. So if you're in, if selling stuff, products, whatever digital stuff, I should say, a lemon squeezy is a new player. Go and check it out. Lemon, squeezy.com two ease and a Zed, as we say in the UK. All right. Now, WP ad minifies. Okay. So this is just me having a bit of a moan. I've changed my tune about this until very recently, I was very happy with the WordPress admin area.

I thought it's fine. It's totally fine. And I was just just in it all the time, thinking I'm totally used to it. I click it around and more than happy. And then I did get to start being a bit more critical and I, with a critical eye, went to some other apps, I've got Gmail over here and it's constantly changing and adapting and I've got Evernote and I've got things like notion and all these other SAS apps.

And for the first time ever, I actually thought, okay, I'm going to stare at those and see how they do things. And then I'm going to go back to the WordPress admin. And I was left with a feeling pretty quickly that actually, I think a bit of an update is long overdue. I don't have any insight into whether the core team is going to be making those modifications.

But before we go on to the purpose of why I'm bringing this up, in other words, this WP admin, if I, which isn't really news, it's just, it's been reviewed. So I thought I'd raise it. What do you guys think about the backend of WordPress? You happy showing this stuff to clients or do you do that play the game of let's just strip it all out and change it.

Let's hide things. That's changed the colors. Let's modify it so that it's, I don't know, different fonts, different colors, different everything. Do you do any of that sort of stuff?

[00:47:50] Ken Elliott: No I will say this. I don't only because WordPress is universal and I don't want to do a whole bunch of confusion.

You know, if you've used WordPress in the past and oh, let's do customizations your clients get a little nervous and I have to do brand new trainings on, okay. How do you navigate this new interface for the administrative dashboard? So that's my biggest fear. Now, do I. UI design is well overdue.

UX is out as well. And we do absolutely because, we're looking at other platforms that are doing a really good job in modern job monitoring sizing. I'm saying that terribly, but the interface and it looks really crisp and clean and organized and it looks new and you look at the WordPress dashboard and it has looked the same since gosh, the early 2010s.

So I would absolutely love a refresh of the administrative dashboards. So people could feel like, oh, okay, we're presses coming up. We know it's improving, but when you look at a back end, it doesn't seem like it's improved that much.

[00:49:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What are you, what do you think him.

[00:49:14] Kim Coleman: I kind of echo what Ken said, because if I instruct my, users to a screenshot of something, I took on my site and then their admin looks more like this, that's a jarring experience for them.

But at the same time, I think there are lots of people racing to, reduce the amount of time users spend in the admin, make it a front end experience, both to post and to just view your site. So I think that'll be, everyone's racing to do it. There's also extended Phi, which is a new kind of kind of building the same thing.

They're building a more user-friendly usable version of WordPress. So it'll be interesting to see how these all move forward. I work less with clients now, so I'm not as. Confronted with that confusion on a daily basis and the training.

[00:50:03] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's my exact problem. I think can also hit the nail on the head is that essentially it's me logging into my own website and it more or less most of the time now.

And so I know where everything is and I've become used to it. And so I don't really question it. It was only that moment where I thought, actually, I'm going to spend 20 minutes looking at other UI interfaces and see if they can be improved. And then this post came along and I just thought it was really curious.

You're right though. If you wanted to have some sort of cross website video tutorials that you can push into the admin of your your clients, where it tells them how to, I don't know, create a post or update something or delete something, or, load something into the media library, you are really going to be stocked with this kind of thing.

And also, I guess this we'll have to try and keep pace with whatever WordPress does as well. So if WordPress modifies something, these guys will be having to react to that. And yeah. So can I take your point for the meantime, stick with WP admin, but pray that maybe it gets a little bit of a facelift and my other

[00:51:05] Ken Elliott: fear here too is, and I was looking at some of the features and the functionalities for the plugin and, it's chocked full of stuff with like page speed builder and stuff, different stuff like that.

And I'm wondering how many fouls are, how much code is in this plugin in, does it wear on the the bandwidth of the website? Does it take a long time for it to load? And I mean, am I excited? Absolutely. Certain things like dark mode, of course, anybody who knows me, I'm a big dark mode fan. And then, some of the.

Removal of administrative notifications. You know, how many of those you get, um, WordPress site. So those two alone are just like automatic. Yes. I would love that. But at the same point, if you're going into the back end to just get a couple of things done, Hey, I need to just do a post or, Hey, I need to just input, um, a product then having to navigate through this new dashboard.

And if it might wear on your arms, It may not be worth it

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: in the long run. Yeah. It's a really good point. Let's hope that we get some sort of extensible system built into WordPress where you can modify it. You imagine a situation where dare I say it, Gothenburg could be used to do the, the color palettes and the global styles of the WP admin.

And you could just upload some sort of theme dot Jason file. And all of your WordPress admins are exactly the same. So I'm curious comments coming through. Um, Daniel, comments, and again, he says you use admin menu editor, pro admin menu. I'm trying to think if that's one that I've ever seen before.

Say that it is a to customize the sidemen use to better organize groups. Oh, okay. So you've hidden things. You've got rid of spurious stuff, which maybe the editor role never really needed to see. Also use it to change the background and to brand colors. That's nice. Make it feel a bit more personal and override the login screen.

Okay. So it can do all of those things. That's cool. Chris Hughes, does it hide Yoast banners though? Now there's there's a question we may get onto some Yoast news at the end. And Peter. Hello Peter Ingersoll, prefers creating a custom editor admin page versus messing around with left sidebar Australia too far from the core.

Oh, okay. So do you literally Peter create a page that they, then that you dump all of the, like the links for the, I don't know, adding a post or adding a page, and then they visit that page as if it were the admin or are you using something like, I dunno, beaver Thema and dropping Thema layouts into the admin backend.

That's curious. That's an interesting way of doing it. Oh yeah. And then there's David Von Greece who has ultimate dashboard pro that's another one. And there is WP admin pages pro, which is a written DOE dookay from WP Altima. He's got one as well has near there's a whole way of doing this, so we'll have to see what people think.

Anyway. There you go. Oh, okay. Thank you, Peter, for clearing that up. Yes. Dashboard homepage link. On instructions. Okay.

[00:54:14] Kim Coleman: So I think they read it in that admin of five, that it has that feature. So you can add a new admin page and put kind of tutorial information for the person who's doing the day-to-day editing.

That's nice. Rather than having to code it as a developer, that you could, turn that on, as a feed,

[00:54:32] Nathan Wrigley: Kim, you and I are no longer sort of building client websites, but it sounds like Ken, that you still got your feet firmly in that. Do you offer this as a thing, does the WordPress admin ever come up in conversations?

Do you, do you say, okay, we're going to skin it. We're going to make it look beautiful. We're gonna, we're gonna come into your office and teach all of your anybody who may touch the website, how to do it all. Do you get involved in all of that? Like post website creation, help and assistance? I think

[00:55:00] Ken Elliott: there's not as much conversation about that only because really they can care less.

It's you know, if you're in a business, Hey, as long as my storefront looks good, as long as the actual inside of the store looks good, people can buy stuff and navigate the store. They're fine. The back closet is whatever. So I mean, I truly don't believe people care too much about the WordPress backend, as long as they could go post pages.

They can make modifications that they need to make. They're fine. They're not in there long enough to be, worried about the backend WordPress admin. Now I personally care about it just because I'm in the WordPress community, but they can

[00:55:43] Nathan Wrigley: keep yeah, yeah. There we go. I've invented a novel, another hashtag WP drama that really would not need to exist.

But I do like Peter's somebody. No, no, no, no, no, no. It was Daniel's idea. I have done that quite a bit of just getting rid of menu items, which have no business existing. Cause confusion. What happens if I press this? Nothing happens. You got the screen, which tells you, you can't access that.

Okay. That's helpful. Okay. Let's move on in that case. Thank you for that though. Lots of interesting thought around that, right? We're talking security. It's been a while since we did security, actually, as far as I can remember, we haven't noticed security piece on for a long time. This one is over on the security blog.

This again, if you need another reason not to not to create e-commerce website here may be this. This is the WooCommerce skimmer spoofs checkout pages. Now the guys over at, by the way, if you can hear a sort of noise, I think Kim has got, is it like some sort of garden blower or something going on?

Yeah. All

[00:56:48] Kim Coleman: leads are being cared for right now.

[00:56:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, no, it's fine. Just in case people are going, hang on, what's wrong with my what's on my audio. It isn't you. It is us. Um, this is a recent bug report that sorta got filed and security looked into it only to discover a horror of horrors, that our little piece of Java script, which was encoded in such a way as to look like a JavaScript jQuery file.

And then when they dug deeper, essentially anything, any page which had this string in it, let me see if I can find it. Yeah, if it had the word order checks. Command car direction, men, her counter. I don't know why that would be in their account. Check out all these other different bits and pieces. Then it would, it would pop up this problem.

And essentially the problem is that it's asking for credit card details. It has no business asking for credit card details. And in this particular case, this was, it seems like just some chances. Dare. I say it in experts person who just thought I've got the skills to force a WordPress website with a certain string in the URL to pop up a credit card prompt and say, give us your credit card number.

It's fairly clumsy. Honestly, somebody like me, I'm going to fall for that 0% of the time. But my I've got relatives who would fall for that a bit. If the, if the warning sounded appropriate, like your website is going to be locked down, you've forgotten to pay your hosting fee, something like that.

And they're really not sure. Oh, okay. I thought the hosting was paid for, but okay. I'll fill it out and just be sure all of a sudden you've just lost your credit card details and all you did was log into the backend of your WordPress website. So stuff like this, not only does it make me angry, it terrifies me and I don't really have anything to share other than, go and read the posts and If you've obviously come across anything like this do report it to security.

But now that I know that Kim, you've definitely got yourself into the e-commerce angle. What are your thoughts on this kind of stuff? Does this stuff keep you awake at night?

[00:59:03] Kim Coleman: To a degree, but I also think that merchants are building in like Stripe. For example, we talked about earlier, they're building in a lot of prevention and early detection of things.

So, you know, for this, it wouldn't have protected in this case. But for people using like our e-commerce checkout, there's a lot that Stripe is watching with how your API is being hit. It can detect things faster than even security can detect when malicious things are happening on your site.

But in this case, it wouldn't have protected that. But I personally have had my credit card information stolen from shopping online, and it's often, a few conversations with you. Credit card company and then the things get resolved. So that's just a tough one. I think what this article pointed out was that there were dozens of administrator accounts and the access was obtained through brute force, just continuing to try to break that.

So that's what we try to do with our customers is be like, maybe two admin accounts is all you need and limit what they can do on the backend. Maybe this admin tool we talked about earlier can do that. But some of those other plugins that scope the capability of the user account, a locked in and just disable some things.

[01:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think the site had 15 admins and so you've got 15 vulnerability, 15 points of attack. And if just one of those people had changed their admin to do you know what the most common, this is a bit of stale news, but it's about four years old probably. Now I listen to a podcast called security.

Now, do you know what the most commonly used password is so weird.

[01:00:42] Ken Elliott: Is it's a 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm trying to remember, which

[01:00:47] Nathan Wrigley: is the word monkey followed by 1, 2, 3. Isn't that weird, but like why monkey of all anyway, so that's, if they're probably just going monkey 1, 2, 3, let's try it on that one. And so that news is probably stuff, get yourself a password manager by the way.

But yeah, that's a good point.

[01:01:07] Ken Elliott: I think there's two things here. When I look at this one is password, like you said, it's the point of, and it's one of the things I have a small concern about when it comes to password usage in WordPress. Eventually you have to say, look, we need to really invest in better password.

Some type of password, strength management in WordPress, where. Some symbols capitalization's numbers because I'll come to class and they'll say, Hey, can you do you know, all lower case five word, five letters, and that's my password. I'm like, oh my goodness. No, that, and it's a common word.

I'm like, no, that's terrible. You're just lining yourself up just to be hacked. And so that's one of my big concerns. There is just password training, how to create good passwords. And then the other one is in this instance, the actual page that was coming up, that was very simple. It could have been much more elaborate where you could have a lot of stylish.

They could have selected a whole bunch of other words that mattered more so than just account. And so this could have been a much more elaborate hag. And like you said, for anybody like you and I, we would recognize this instantly, but if it's really well w well done, then. Anybody could have been like, okay, they have a paywall, Hey, to see excess information, this is a paywall, please put in your credit card information.

And the next thing you know, credit cards are gone just like

[01:02:50] Nathan Wrigley: that. It's on the front-end. Yeah, yeah. And you've got to imagine that whoever this person is, this, it almost feels like this is my first go. Let's just see what happens. And then we'll iterate and we'll hear the feedback on the, you on the podcasts and the, in the press.

And we'll read the blogs and see where we screwed up. Oh, we'll have another go. And let's see where we go next time. Just out of interest then just for your own personal use, I'll tell you what I do for just about anything. I use the last pass and I create a unique password for every single service that I sign up to.

I go for 50 characters because I just think why not? Because if last pass has remembering it, it might as well be, it could be 3000 as far as I care, but I know that 50 is really out of the bounds of. Technology to sort of decrypt. So I use that. And then if anything is possible for me to, to FFA, I use that last pass is authenticated, which is just um, the Google one, or I presume there's one on the apple side where, you get the QR code and you scan it and it gives you some some options and you have to type in the six digit code each time you log in.

And the mantra, is, you know, with security comes inconvenience. You can't have better security without it becoming more inconvenient, but I'm happy to do that. And so I do that and also these days, My bank and I'm sure it's the same for you guys. My bank, every single transaction now comes up as a notification on my phone within five or six seconds of it happening.

So if if I spend 5 cents, I don't spend 5 cents spend five heads on anything. It appears on the phone in real time. And so I can see that I've prioritized that notification and that's probably been going for me for about three years and thus far, nothing weird has come up where I thought that's not me, cause I'm not actually in a shop buying anything.

But, uh, but that's really helpful as well. And that makes me feel reassured that nothing is exiting my account prior to having that though, I was once at the shops and I got a phone call and the bank said, are you buying gold watches and pearls at the moment? And I said, no. And they said, okay, we'll get back to you.

Then they got back to me and said, yeah, somebody just bought 10 gold watches and a string of pearls with your credit card number. And I said, how did you know? And they said, we can't tell you, but we knew it wasn't you. And I just thought I'll ask clever.

[01:05:17] Ken Elliott: It's not that they look right at your transaction history.

Okay. It does make them buy bunch of bowls. And,

[01:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: but apparently they do that stuff just before Christmas, the fraudsters will purchase things. And in this case, it's probably the number of golden watches. If it had been one gold watch or string of pearls, it might not trigger the warning, but they buy allegedly paid by things which are considered wouldn't necessarily hit the.

In a normal run of the year, but gift time. Okay. Here's some weird stuff that I don't normally buy. Anyway, they got the ingredients, 10

[01:05:50] Ken Elliott: is a bit much. They probably didn't go. We went to,

[01:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: but I never called them either. I think

[01:05:57] Ken Elliott: the other one that you deal with, as well as the person who, who has taken it in and they just ping a whole bunch of various locations.

And you're just like, okay, I'm paying for gas here in Columbia, but Hey, I just got pinged for purchasing Chicago. How could you be in Chicago two minutes later when you're paying for gas at Columbia? Yeah.

[01:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. My my banking has all gone totally on the phone. I've now adopted a bank where there's no branches at all.

Everything's done through chat or voice, and, um, and it's all done on the phone. I know it's a bit dystopian. I'm sure a lot of people, yeah. Beacon is Greek to me too. A lot of people would still like the high street to be there. And I can imagine a scenario where in the future that isn't really going to be the case.

But Michelle Fernandez, she says, I thought they were gifts for all the podcast guests. Oh yeah. No comment. Anybody want to call them? Okay. Let's move on. We're fast approaching the end. We've got about 20 minutes to go. Let's hit the last couple. Now this is interesting. Google getting in a bit of hot water this week.

I don't feel like I'm the, my phone just went off and okay, Google. Sorry. I said that word everybody's phones just gone off. Apologies the okay. So if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time or building websites, that, um, accelerated mobile pages, amp came around a little while ago and there was a full push more or less from every direction it felt at the time like this is the future.

We want all things to be amped so that they load quicker. I never jumped on that bandwagon. I don't quite know why, but I just saw I'm not getting involved with this because it's so proprietary. So I just stopped with normal server-side stuff. Now it would appear that Google has been slightly disingenuous in the offering of amp.

And that is to say that they were offering, they were basically. Slowing down sites that weren't amped by up to a second, in order to increase the ranking in the little carousel at the top of Google, for pages that were amped. And so the narrative goes a bit like this, okay. We've offered this technology that we want the web to adopt, and we want everybody to use our amp technology.

Okay. That's fine. But nobody seems to be adopting it, or at least it doesn't seem to be working all that well. So what we're going to do is we're going to slow everybody else down a little bit in the sense that we're going to offer those premium spots at the top two websites, which are using amp. Of course, now that this has been found out and it appears that court documents.

This and that I'm reading from an article by Sarah. Gooding's a really nice piece such you should read it. It's called amp has irreparably damaged publishers trust in Google, that initiatives. Okay. So they've got the hands wrapped over this, but the argument goes, okay, why should we ever trust Google again?

Who is Google to tell the world how we ought to design our websites around, particularly around speed? So you've got things like core web vitals, which from everybody that I've spoken to who follows it seems to actually think this does make a great deal of sense that, there's nothing in there which is weird or controversial, but then you've got things like this flock technology, this federated learning of cohorts, where they're trying to modify the.

The landscape for tracking and the way you can be tracked around the internet and make it so that you're put into silos of similar people for a couple of weeks. And all of that. We've talked about that. And I'm sorry if I haven't got time to explain it all, but basically the argument goes, why on earth, should anybody trust Google with these initiatives trying to design the future of the internet.

Now, when we just know now that there is that there can be ulterior motives just to put some context on it, 10 years ago, anything that Google did I jumped on. Immediately Google came out with Gmail. I signed up to be a B2 user and I'm still actually using it. I was using their feed reader.

Soon as that browser came out, I was all over that. I ditched whatever it was at the time I E seven or something. And I was all in on Chrome and synced everything with Chrome. And you started using Google docs and all of that kind of stuff. My feeling about Google as a company is slowly but surely changing.

And I'm going in exactly the opposite direction. And I'm trying to decouple myself for exactly things like this. There are publicly owned. I don't know if that's the right word in the United States, but they're, you they have a responsibility to make shareholders happy. And I see that the conflict between that mission and the mission to make the internet a better place is a difficult one to, a difficult tight rope to walk.

And then right at the bottom of the article, the sort of thing that makes it relevant for WordPress is that automatic were also responsible for being a part of the initial rollout of this. They collaborated with Google and they were an early adopter and they made a, an amp. Plugin available on the.com side.

And I believe it was available in.org, as I say, I didn't really use it. And then when pressed about it by Sarah in this article, you get these kinds of non-answer answers from what can only, it feels like it's some sort of lawyer it's gone through the prism of a lawyer or something saying we didn't really know about that at the time.

And I don't have an ax to grind against automatic, but I do feel my trust in Google has been diminished. And so that's it really, I wondered where you guys are at uh, I guess for me that's a big one, right? Yeah. I think it's that, which side do you want to sway on it? For me personally, I've done my due diligence of trying to remove all of the. Our business information off of Google as much as I could. So even back in 2016, I went as far as to tell my business partner, I said, look, we're not going to use Gmail.

[01:12:23] Ken Elliott: We were using Gmail to manage our emails. And I was like, no, we got to go. We're going to use our own hosted email from the hosted off company. And we're going to have all our emails there because I'm almost absolutely sure the emails are being looked at because like you said, being that alphabet Google is a publicly traded company.

Their goal is to make sure that their investors are well taken care of. And when it comes down to it, the more they know about you, the more they can sell you. And so you have to look at it that way as Google is going to look out for what can make them profitable and make their investors profitable.

Now in regards to automatic, I don't know because really. You, you, you could always come in with good attempt in the beginning to say, okay absolutely. I'm hoping that, you are being genuinely honest with what you're telling me, Hey, you're actually trying to help improve the web. But as mentioned before, you don't really know because Google could show one hand and then be hiding the other hand behind their back.

So that's the only problem you have to really, when you look at certain things you have to look at, okay, is Google really, truly interested in our wellbeing? Are they really, truly interested in improving the web or are they really trying to just, Hey, let's get you on so that we can say, Hey, we have automatic back us as well.

And sometimes people like that.

[01:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. That is a really good point. Kim, have you got any thoughts on this? So you're not, yeah,

[01:14:01] Kim Coleman: I know it's a very hard thing. It's like an enemies closer. Keep your friends close enemies being like, yeah, I know what you mean. And then at the same time, you look at smaller companies, so you would take your business to, and you have really linked very little visibility into how they operate, the checks and balances on smaller companies who you might host your email with and what they might be doing with your information, other search engines you might be locked into and using.

I don't know. It's interesting. I think as companies get bigger, they're capable of doing these, you egregious acts, but also it gets found out. It gets talked about publicly. I don't know. I think I sit in the middle here. We do use a lot of Google services for our own products. But I think there's enough checks and balances in their organization because they're public.

They don't want. Be defamed too much and have these kinds of things repeatedly happening too. So there's incentive in their company to, act on the up and up, I guess you would say at the same.

[01:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, you carry on

[01:15:04] Ken Elliott: council as I've seen it. One of the things that are really hard here is that because Google has such a, they, they can't so much across the internet landscape.

You cannot go without using them. I mean, just for all of my clients, I use Google analytics because Hey, if the most easiest simplest, I won't say it's easiest as simple as well as, let me take that back. Let's go back a little bit. It is simple enough for them based on the plugin that is being implemented into the WordPress site for them to understand what's going on their web page.

And of course, Google analytics is free. Google, um, was it was it console manager? I think it's console manager tag manager. Tag manager. Yeah. You just put that in and then it helps your website get found in search engines. And so there's so much stuff that Google provides that helps you get visible on the web that you're like, okay, if I don't use it, then I'm failing my company's visibility online.

So you have to choose, okay how long do I stay with Google? If I do use Google. And then once I realized that Google has just selling me out for their investors, when do I leave?

[01:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. We see, we are in a sort of a point of something pretty unique, I think on the internet.

If you cast your mind back to, I think you're all old enough to have lived in a period where there really wasn't an internet where there was just bricks and mortar stuff and you had to go and get in a car or walk to a store and you hand over some physical cash and you get something in return.

I really I'm struggling to find almost anything in life that was free. Where there wasn't an actual financial transaction. You know, if you wanted anything you had to pay for it and you would set up a subscription or you pay in cash or whatever. And then the internet came along and suddenly data was a commodity, which in the future would have value.

And so people like Google worked out that boy, man, we could really make a buck or two, if we can get enough data to sell it to our advertisers. So that essentially the ads become almost irresistible. You see an ad and you're like that's what I want. I really need that. You know, right now I want a surfboard or, I've been searching for surfboards or whatever it might be.

And, and so we're in this period of time where we really haven't, we've heard this argument thousands of times, but you said it can, Google analytics is free. It's totally not free. It's like free at the point of no money is transacted, but you are giving up an awful lot. And I think that's the point that's concerning me is that I have really no window into what that non-free bit actually looks like.

What is the sum total of the value to Google of just my little bit of data. I am fairly good at preventing Google, even where Google would like to be. I switch on ad blockers and I use brave, which I'm hopeful is stopping a lot of that sort of stuff. So I think my little footprint has probably shrunk in more recent times and I don't use Google as a search engine anymore, but a typical person using Chrome browsing the internet, using Gmail and so on and so forth.

You've got to imagine that their footprint over the days, weeks, months, and years, and, got Android, your maps have given you location away and all that kind of stuff. You've got to imagine that you are worth lots of money. And that's the conundrum. That's the bit where I don't want, I don't feel comfortable.

And it's because I don't feel comfortable that I'm slowly backing away. I've got no reason to not trust them, but I equally don't really have any reason to trust them. And I think that's the argument they haven't made. Yeah. I think

[01:18:57] Kim Coleman: you mentioned that because of our age, but when I look at my children, I think that they are embracing how they're being tracked because it's giving them better YouTube video recommendations and it's improving their lives and they're not questioning it.

So that's the worrisome thing. I suppose we might be the last generation of people that has.

[01:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you, when you talk to your kids about online privacy, cause I'm a bit of an old commodity and I speak about this kind of stuff all the time. I just get the eyes rolling, it's just oh dad, who cares?

It's just, I get good videos on YouTube. I don't care that it's tracking me. Okay. But it matters. Think about, yeah, it's not working. It's too irresistible. Okay. Okay. There we go. That's it. I think unless either you guys have got anything else to add, feel free to do it now. No, I think that

[01:19:47] Ken Elliott: is

[01:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: it. It is a wrap in that case just before we go, because your both new to us at to give you both intern a moment to just tell us, tell us what you're doing this week, or some little website URL or Twitter handle that you'd like to drop.

In other words, it's a little moment for you to just show off about yourself or, tell us about where you're going to be hanging out this week. So let's start.

[01:20:12] Kim Coleman: Sure. I'm be working on paid memberships pro this week, preparing a lot of content and things that have to go out for our black Friday sale.

Um, we are doing a lot of pages do black Friday roundups, but we've been for the past few years doing a Roundup of people that use our software exclusively. So it's a cool way to showcase if you are using our product you can submit it through our Twitter handle PM pro plugin or to our website.

We have a form to submit black Friday sales, but it's specifically people who are running a sale with their membership site. So a different kind of aggregator.

[01:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's very nice. Oh, I like that. That's a bit more. Yeah, that's very cool. That's nice and personal. Where can we contact you if you wish to divulge that?

Sure.

[01:20:56] Kim Coleman: You can go to paid memberships, pro.com/contact. You can submit information there. My personal Twitter handle is Coleman K 83.

[01:21:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you so much, Kim.

[01:21:08] Ken Elliott: Absolutely. Um, just first thing, it would be on the the pocket there's this has been awesome. I've enjoyed it. So one of the things I got to do Wednesday, I got to do a site launch for.

Which is funny, cause I say small and medium sized businesses, but this was actually pretty large. I'm doing a career site for an airline. Um, let's let's just say that I need to get that done. So let's just say that I got to get that finished Thursday, got a training with them Friday. And so that's my week right there is getting this website completed this.

[01:21:51] Nathan Wrigley: Correct. So cool. I'm so pleased to hear that you, yeah. That's where if people wish to find you email Twitter handle, whatever you,

[01:22:03] Ken Elliott: yeah, absolutely.

So of course we're be creative. B K R E a T I V e.net. You can find me though at, on Twitter at Kenneth speaks, K E N N E T H speaks with the S and. Just chat about whatever you want to talk about. Hey, I will re I will retweet our reply to whatever you send to me.

[01:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's so nice. Thank you so much now.

Unfortunately, you didn't know this, but it was coming, but we make, we we ask all of our guests just at the end to wave because I use the little wave and we all wave any chance, Kim, can you wave? Yay. That'll do it. And then we ended the show basically on a look wave. So thank you, Kim. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Can again, really appreciate it. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for all the comments. Really appreciate your participation. Bye-bye for now.