This Week in WordPress #187

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 187 entitled what a load of BF it was recorded on Monday the 29th of November, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'm joined by a panel of WordPress experts. The co-host this week is Michelle Frechette, but we're also joined by Ross Morsali from search and filter pro and Adrian Tobey from Groundhogg. There is no stop to the WordPress news each and every week. There's loads of it. And this week we talk about the fact that 5.9 has been delayed WordPress core 5.9 coming out to next year instead of in December. And there's a few tutorials that have come out from the team, including Anne McCarthy explaining what is involved in the new version of WordPress.

We also talk about the fact that there's some events coming up big, orange hearts are doing their big orange heart state of the heart, big orange heart. Aren't the only people doing a state of something because also Matt Mullenweg is going to be doing a live event it's happening live in New York invite only, but you can watch it live as well.

And so we discussed that. We also get into the subject of Thanksgiving and what we're thankful for this year. And there's some interesting commentary about that. Then we have quite a long debate, all about the carbon footprint, the environmental impact that each and every one of us has by using the internet and building WordPress websites.

We also talk about black Friday deals. Did you get anything this year? Is there something that you got for yourself perhaps you've been preparing for Christmas? We talk about that at great length. And then finally right before the end, we talk about the 1.2 million passwords that have been leaked to over on the go daddy, the managed WordPress hosting cap platform this week.

So that's it. It's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello. Welcome. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. And welcome, argh, darn it, Ross is I was hoping to introduce a chair

[00:02:15] Michelle Frechette: because they want a way to make an entrance.

[00:02:17] Nathan Wrigley: So those of you who are listening Ross, Ross just nipped out for a second while the video was on.

And I was hoping to just use that opportunity to introduce his chair, but no, this is the, this week in WordPress show. It's episode number 187. And as always got loads of WordPress, he stopped to talk about today, some WordPress and some, not WordPress, but lots and lots of stuff to talk about. And as always again, joined by some fabulous guests, we've got one of us in Europe and two in north America nearly said the U S then two in north America just made it.

And I'd like to introduce, first of all, Michelle Frechette, who is the cohost of the, this week in WordPress. Pretty much everywhere on the internet, where the word WordPress exists, how you doing Michelle?

[00:03:01] Michelle Frechette: I am doing well. Thank you.

[00:03:02] Nathan Wrigley: How are you? Yeah. Yeah, really good. It's been a, it's been a busy week.

You over there have got your Thanksgiving holidays under, is that gone now? Forgive me.

[00:03:12] Michelle Frechette: It has gotten, it was Thursday. And so we've just, most of us had a four day week. Some of us worked Friday. I was one of the work Friday people, but that's a, and this is okay. It's all good. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Big family time to get together with people that, you know, and

I think that's the bit that I understand this Turkey. I see lots of imagery of Turkey. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us again, Michelle. And we're joined by Adrian from Groundhog. How you doing? I'm doing

[00:03:41] Adrian Tobey: great. I'm really excited.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I've you. Thanksgiving as well. I know you're in Canada, so it's

[00:03:47] Adrian Tobey: different backing off.

We have Thanksgiving, which is essentially the exact same holiday, although be it for different historical reasons. But we have our Thanksgiving back in October. And really, we just felt left out, but we didn't want to be perfect copycats. So we just we're just going to have a day where we're thankful, but we're not going to have it November because Turkey day at the end of November and at the end of December, it's like, those are close together.

So we're just going to, we spaced them out a little bit further. Oh yeah.

[00:04:17] Nathan Wrigley: Turkey. Michelle, do you do Turkey, Christmas as well? Is that like the tradition over there as well? Christmas stuff?

[00:04:23] Michelle Frechette: No. Well it depends. Every family has a different, a lot of people do hair. I do lasagna's I do Christmases Lanez for the last 20 something years.

[00:04:32] Adrian Tobey: Yeah.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that does sound good. Anyway, thank you. Okay. Okay. Turkey, lasagna. Thanks. Thanks Adrian for joining us anyway. Appreciate it. We'll get stuck in and I'm just a moment. But before we do from search and filter pro, we have Ross. How you doing Ross? I'm very good. How are you doing? Yeah. Good. I wonder Ross, just because you've leaned back in the chair.

Your microphone seems to be a little bit further away now. I wonder if you could move the mic. Yeah. That'll probably make all the difference. And Ross tell us where you are. Cause I know you're not in north America. No,

[00:05:03] Ross Morsali: I'm not right now. I'm in Barcelona.

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: Check everybody's jealousy when they hear the words Barcelona,

but that doesn't sound so well either. You've got an incredible you know, you've studied hard at your English or you are from the UK and you're now living in Spain. It's

[00:05:26] Ross Morsali: a long story. Yeah. I grew up in the UK. Yeah. So I've had a bit of a round trip started in Holland to the UK. And now for a few years in Barcelona,

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much for joining us.

It's Ross's first time on this podcast. I can't remember Adrian if you've been on this particular show, but you've definitely been on, I haven't been on

[00:05:46] Adrian Tobey: your show, but not

[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: on this show. Okay, great. Anyway, welcome. Hopefully you'll come back to join us. Just a couple of things to say before we get started.

If you are wanting to make a comment, we'd love that a few people have already done that and you're in the, in Facebook, the Facebook group you'll need to go to chats.restring.io forward slash FB, the ever memorable URL, chat.restream.io forward slash FB. That allows us to see your avatar and your name.

Otherwise you come up with. You know, anonymized user or something like that, a clued your way around that is to just write your name. If you don't want to do that, you can just write your name at the beginning of the comment. And if you've got any questions, just drop them into the chat and hopefully all the chats get amalgamated through the mystery of how restream works.

I don't really know, but there we go. The other thing to say is that we've got a few people saying, hello. Hello, Maya says, hello everybody. She's based in Europe. We've got Trevor. Hello, Trevor. I don't recognize your name to be a friend of mine. Oh, a nice, very bad mic. Repeating delay like echoes. Okay.

I'll all I would say, Trevor is refresh the browser unless it's one person in particular, in which case drop us a comment and we'll see what we can do, Leslie, all the way over in Singapore. Hello, everybody. Lots of friends on this live stream today made me excited to tune in. Leslie of course is a newsletter glue.

She doesn't use lots of gluten and Chris says, hi. Hi, Chris and Rick. Hello guys. Do I need to reauthorize anything? Nope. We can see you. You're all sorted. It's working fine and dandy. Okay. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Thanksgiving. Actually. We are, we'll do that later. Let's let's just start with a few bits and pieces today.

This is our webpage. If you want to see any of the content that we produce, we've got episode number 256 or the podcast. I did a did an episode this week with toddy Jones, from club copy flight. Anyway, there's a there's that plus all the other stuff that we produce. If you fancy looking at our black Friday page, I'll show you that in just a moment, but let's crack on with the WordPress.

I was getting all excited for WordPress 5.9. It was coming around the corner. Everybody been talking about it for absolutely ages. It all seemed to be happening. And then the whole darn it, the the team pulled it. It's now not happening this year. It was due to happen on December the 14th, if memory serves and now it has been delayed to January the 25th, having chatted to a few of the team involved.

They reckon that they could probably have pulled it off if they hadn't of had, here we go again, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In other words us holiday season just got in there, got in the way of the cycle. So rather than try to rush everything in the confined amount of space that they had, they they decided to push it back until January the 25th.

5.9 coming out then with all the full site editing. Goodness Adrian and Ross going to direct this question, particularly you being developers of plugins. How does this sort of stuff affect you? Do you get things lined up in expectation of major release cycles? Have you, you have to tweak things and then hold off pushing things.

How does this kind of news affect you? Is it good news, bad news. Are you in.

[00:09:05] Adrian Tobey: Ross can go first because his answer's probably a little bit more interesting than mine.

[00:09:11] Ross Morsali: Thanks. For me, a delay is always a good thing rather than the opposite. So we have more time to prepare, which is perfect. I'm glad the guys who could just, made the decision to delay it.

If it didn't get, it was good to read it. It was going to be rushed. I'm preparing. But I'm not ready. So that delay just suits me perfectly.

[00:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: What do you have been ready if they'd have done it by the 15th of

[00:09:37] Ross Morsali: December? I guess we could have been if we had to do it, but breathing room is always good.

[00:09:44] Nathan Wrigley: Ross. What in particular was other things that you have to do, particularly with this one? With the 5.91. Is there any sort of major stuff going on?

[00:09:55] Ross Morsali: I think if you're more on a kind of website builder perspective, this is all about that. It's all about foresight. So it's for people who are building websites, they're going to need to be doing those things as a plugin builder. I'm trying to see where we can fit in some of our technology into the full site editing experience.

So it's not so mission-critical for me. But I imagine for people who are relying on getting Bogart, awaiting WordPress to have the full kind of FSC in place, so they don't have to use third party plugins

[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: to have more well, I'm pleased that you've you, you can probably just relax a little bit more over Christmas.

That's going to give myself a

[00:10:34] Ross Morsali: Thanksgiving,

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: get a Turkey, and Adrian, you said your answer. Wasn't going to be quite as interesting.

[00:10:42] Adrian Tobey: No, my not I mean, so like my plugins are all on the backend. We don't do front-end. Primarily because of these reasons where you're head, you have to keep up with the development cycle.

And we, so we're just like, you know what, I'm not messing with that stuff. We're going to build like our own like sub product within WordPress. So we don't have to put to deal with any of that. So I see like the release updates where like WordPress and 5.9 Gutenberg. And I basically just ignore it.

Someone's going to lose sleep over this, but it's not

[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: going to be me. That's a nice position to be in. There is an awful lot coming down the pipe though, in this release, most, most notably, as Ross mentioned, the FSC Serbian, the intention is that you'll be able to modify all sorts of different things within your WordPress website, headers, footers, and all sorts of other things.

There is, there has been a bit of an effort to communicate this by the team this week and I'm going to find it difficult. To share the URL in a memorable way, but I've got a couple of videos that I want you to know about. I was contacted this week by Anne McCarthy, who is the full site editing.

Let's just say she's leading that initiative. And she wanted to point me in the direction of couple of videos. The first one is this, I would imagine the best thing to do is go for, go to introducing WordPress 5.9. That is the that's the name of the video it's now playing in my ear, which is going to really put me off, but I'll see if I can click new, where do we do mute?

There we go. But this looks like a really professionally done video. It's only about three and a half minutes long, but I don't think that I've seen a video describing what is going to come in WordPress being pushed out before, you often when you've updated to WordPress 5.7, 5.8, does that little kind of video, which sits in the dashboard saying what's going.

This one, I think they're trying to get ahead of everything. So they are trying to show in this video, what full site editing will mean what 2022 is going to look like and how it will work. And it looks really professionally done. So Bravo to the team got. Yeah, that's right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's fair to say that automatic have got big boy money, but I just thought, I thought that was curious.

And and I know that they are trying to be up from and trying to get ahead of things before they happen. I think there's been a history in the last couple of years of people probably justifiably complaining that the community only found out about things when they were released. So you can see it on the screen.

If you're watching live, there's just a whole, it's like a tutorial, how to different things work inside a 5.9, which is quite nice. And then just to take it a little bit further, again, you'll have to search for it. The video is called exploring a WordPress 5.9 blocks, theme flows, styling patterns, Explorer, and more.

And this is a video that Anne put together. So it's very much sharing a screen of how to actually achieve lots and lots of the things in WordPress 5.9, not really Not really something that you can look at probably now, but go and search for those. But I just thought it was quite interesting that they're making an effort to get ahead.

[00:13:57] Michelle Frechette: Let's also remember that it's a marketing thing too, right? So they've put this big delay on it and in order to save face and continue to tease it out in a positive way, you create a marketing, something to go along with it, to continue to stay positive about what's happening.

[00:14:15] Adrian Tobey: Yeah. As a PR move.

I think it's absolutely solid.

[00:14:22] Ross Morsali: There's a lot of people that are apprehensive about Griffin, black full-stop and FSA. So I think it's another way of saying no, it really is going to be great. And it's not just another way of backing up the reason for it, for implement. Yeah,

[00:14:36] Michelle Frechette: right. It's like pre Gutenberg only.

Now we're going to show you a little bit more, so you get excited about it and not apprehensive about it. Like we did when Gutenberg drops

[00:14:46] Adrian Tobey: communication is always a good thing. Yeah. It definitely never be too much communication. There's not enough that people get all. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:55] Nathan Wrigley: Can you imagine if the sort of 5.0 release had been handled in this way and we'd have had lots of videos explaining what Gutenberg at the time would do?

I just think it would have been a lot smoother. Obviously this is a couple of weeks out you know, 9th of November at the point and made this video, it's pretty clear that they were still shooting for December the 14th. Cause I think if I'm right, she even says that in the video. But she was, she was sort six weeks ahead putting this video out so kudos to them.

So anyway,

[00:15:24] Michelle Frechette: I do want to remind you that I also have a plugin developer oh, you didn't ask me that

[00:15:30] Adrian Tobey: question

[00:15:34] Nathan Wrigley: which one's your plugging. Hello.

[00:15:36] Michelle Frechette: Beautiful. I haven't plugged it in the repository.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: I had entirely forgotten. I apologize on my lunch

[00:15:43] Adrian Tobey: hour.

[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: Tell us what it does again. Cause I forgotten

[00:15:48] Michelle Frechette: it's like hello, Dolly, of course. But instead of a lyrics to a song, it tells you how wonderful you are.

Every time you log into your. It is all five

[00:16:00] Adrian Tobey: affirmations.

[00:16:02] Michelle Frechette: I recently crowd source a whole bunch of more stuff to put in it. So it's coming, there will be an update coming soon so that you have, I believe so. I can't remember who gave me, which but somebody said something along the lines of you deserve that next cup of coffee.

So we'll be working on.

[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh I apologize for missing you out on the developer questions, but no, I know it's fine. I deserve it. The anyway, go and check it out. There's a couple of videos. I will link in the show notes that go along with this episode, what the actual as well are, but it's going to be difficult to project those onto the screen.

Okay. So let's move on. We've got this piece, which is called the state of the word. If you don't know if you haven't been in the WordPress community for too long each and every year, it's been for many years. I don't know when the first one was Matt Mullenweg, who is the founder of the WordPress project.

He gets up on stage and kind of summarizes where the, where WordPress has gone for the previous year and then signposts a few things which are going to be happening in the forthcoming year. Traditionally, this has been done at WordCamp us. I think I'm right. I've never attended WordCamp us, but I believe that's where this has traditionally happened, but there's this sort of slight change of tack because of the fact that we're being increasing.

I don't know what the state of. As of now, but it seems like holidays and air travel is becoming more and more unlikely at this exact moment. So it's been earmarked to go live from New York. Now I haven't read this story particularly closely. I think Michelle, you seem to know more about this. Are they like hiring a venue or something and then live streaming at that, from there with a limited select audience or something.

[00:17:48] Michelle Frechette: So it is coming from their offices in New York city, which somebody told me might actually be a penthouse that somebody we know might be living in as well when they're in New York city. I don't know the answer to that for sure. But they did send out some specific invitations and they also have open a number of spots that you can apply.

To attend in person. And so some of us have been invited and some people can opt in to a lottery to be selected, which I think might even be happening today. I don't recall. It might be on that post that you're on right now. But yeah, so I'm going to be there. I'll be there live. I'll be there watching.

[00:18:31] Adrian Tobey: Yeah.

[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: You mean to say you made the car, you got the invite.

[00:18:36] Adrian Tobey: I did. Oh,

[00:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: that's so nice. How was it? How was this communicated to you? Did it come in like a golden envelope, much like Willy Wonka would have with a pair of headphones that start with a free pair of

[00:18:50] Michelle Frechette: the horse and carriage pulled up outside. The footman came to the door.

It wasn't email, it wasn't email,

[00:18:58] Adrian Tobey: but

[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: on a serious note, I are you a little bit chuffed with it? I think that's really nice. I am

[00:19:06] Michelle Frechette: super excited. Yeah. So of course started asking other people that you could invite it. And then I know a handful of people that will be there with me. We're all staying in the same hotel so that we can be helpful to one another and you know, do dinners and things like that.

So I'll be going out on Monday and returning on Wednesday and the event happens.

[00:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's so nice. And so you're heading off to New York. The rest of us though can watch it because it's being live streamed. And this is a curious thing. I don't know if this is something that anybody would be interested in, but obviously if you're not going to be live like Michelle is, then you may just want to collaborate and watch it with other people.

The there's a post on wordpress.org, entitled watch state of the word at a WordPress party with your WordPress friends. And they're encouraging people to create WordPress meetups and this kind of thing. I don't know if it's the kind of thing I'll be doing. I know that a lot of people are really wedded to watching this live and just want to do that.

I'm guessing Michelle you want to be watching it on Twitter if you're there in person. That's correct. What about you guys? Adrian. Ross is the, does these kinds of community events excite you at all or is it just, nah, I'll watch it when it's when it's all over, I

[00:20:20] Adrian Tobey: prefer to catch the WP Tavern.

They do the whole, it was like here's what matters. Here's what you're going to need to know. Like here are the bits that people are arguing about. Here's the bits that everybody's excited about and here's the bits that everybody wishes would regress to like 2013. So I plan to read that article I don't really do the whole.

The whole community stuff, I should do more, but I don't.

[00:20:47] Michelle Frechette: Having, since I'll be there, Cory Miller, I'll be there. We'll have something on post status as well. So you can see different opinions.

[00:20:56] Adrian Tobey: That's Cory for you.

[00:20:57] Michelle Frechette: I mean, actually Craig had a personal invite cause he had a meeting with Matt face to face the week.

So his invite was more along the lines of the foot and app. That's fine.

[00:21:09] Adrian Tobey: You should come to this rubbing shoulders, yes, exactly. Yeah, of course networking has its

[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: benefits. The I'm guessing that post status will be treating this with a fair degree of, respect and authority and pushing out a lot of content around it.

Obviously they're, they do loads of news content. They produce there a weekly newsletter, which is just enormously impressive. I don't even know how they, you guys find the time to do that, but there'll be some kind of summary round Roundup like WP Tavern does, as Adrian said, there'll be something like that in post status as well.

Right.

[00:21:42] Michelle Frechette: I'll make sure there is because if I have to write it, I will, I have admin access to the site. And the, yeah, so it will be, it should be a lot of fun and we'll definitely be writing about it afterwards and our experiences around being there. Yeah, it should it should be a good event.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: No. Any thoughts from you, Ross?

Do you, would you, even if you were living in New York, would you wish to attend this kind of stuff? So

[00:22:05] Ross Morsali: exclusive? I would absolutely attend. But aside from that, maybe I wouldn't, in terms of the terms of the. I normally, I don't normally plan a plot my time first. And then I find out about these broadcasts and I'm usually already busy or doing something else.

So I just know that I can pick up the luck you guys say that the takeaways from it the next day and post it,

[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: whatever. Yeah, though, for you three plugin developers, the the fact that there's going to be some retrospective stuff, but also staring into the future. A lot of that could be of real interest to you, and it would be good to know if there's any blue sky thinking or something has yet on announced just a couple of comments come in.

The Maya again says she loves how Anne communicates. This is going back to the previous piece and is helping to help prep, prepare the community and Macron. Cromwell has arrived to to, just to somewhat you feel better. She says, she's just, he's just there to make Michelle blush. Okay. Keep it coming, Matt, we'll see how red each of us can become during the course of this episode.

Okay. Next piece coming up is, so we've done the state of the world. We've done the. WordPress parties. Now I confess Michelle. This one is definitely going straight over to you because I don't know almost anything about it, but big orange chart we know is a fabulous organization working to help.

Remote workers have a better lifestyle and a quality of life, and to help them in all sorts of ways. And this giving Tuesday, which I am I'm thinking is tomorrow is a slight adaptation to stay at the word you're in the state of the heart with you, with Dan with now, when it says hero, press, I'm guessing that's tofa and Kate, or is it all of the other?

It should be both. Yes, both. And I'm sad to say that. I don't know who my sweet Kate. Oh, is that correct? It's

[00:24:10] Adrian Tobey: Kate.

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: The Rosa? Yes. Okay. That's perfect. What is it? So it's going on?

[00:24:15] Michelle Frechette: So we're going to do a live Twitter spaces tomorrow. I'm at 7:00 PM, UK 2:00 PM. Eastern time here in the U S and it's going to be an opportunity for us to just talk about what's happened with over the last year or so, or we've never done one.

So I guess there'll be from the beginning of time until tomorrow, and then looks like for a big orange heart. And I've been after Dan to do a state of the heart for awhile, and I always want them to do it during one of our word Fest when he's up to his ears and everything that happens with where Fest.

And so this made more sense. We're going to do it tomorrow, which is, as you said, giving Tuesday. And our goal for tomorrow is to try to raise a thousand dollars during giving Tuesday for big orange. If you are somebody who would like to donate and contribute towards the work that we do at big Barnhart, I am the president of the board.

Dan is the founder, Kate, and Tofor both work. Kate works with us a lot on the marketing side of big horn chart until is one of our volunteers. We are working really hard to try to continue the work that we do, which is to eliminate isolation and those feelings that come with that when you're a thousand

[00:25:29] Adrian Tobey: dollars, just a thousand.

[00:25:33] Michelle Frechette: That's what we're trying to raise in one day. Yes. Is

[00:25:35] Adrian Tobey: that, has that been. Historically difficult to achieve.

[00:25:39] Michelle Frechette: It is actually we do get sometimes donations for, we have our sponsorships and things like that. But as you know, the donations, those more trickle in than anything. But you know, when I've done a birthday fundraiser and things like that, I've been able to raise over the course of a week or two.

I don't know if you've all seen my liquor and heart tattoo that I have. Raised over $1,500. I said if I raised a thousand, I would get the tattoo and raise $1,500 for the organization and then went ahead and got the tattoo as a, you part to show my That I would keep my word basically and do that.

So we're trying to raise a thousand dollars in a day. I would, of course, love to see that. I would love to see us triple or quadruple that even, but I, but that's, our goal is to be just to raise a modest thousand dollars tomorrow. I still have to get the landing page up for that, but it doesn't even matter if it comes through our regular website page, our donation page, our landing page that we'll have for giving Tuesday.

We would welcome all donations to help us continue to move forward through the end of

[00:26:43] Adrian Tobey: this year. Do businesses get a tax receipt?

[00:26:48] Michelle Frechette: That's a very good question. They will, so right now we are in the process and you'll hear this on the state of the heart tomorrow, but we are in the process of actually relocating the charity as from centered in the UK to set out in the U S and we are in the final processes of completing the 5 0 1 C3.

So I pledged tomorrow would be the equivalent of a donation for us. And then once the 5 0 1 C3 hits, then you can make the donation and it would be texting.

[00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: I think it is quite hard to, to raise money in all sorts of areas. Not just this, my understanding in the UK is that it's more difficult than it ever has been for.

We call them charities. I think you call them nonprofits, don't you it's more difficult at this time because of the rising cost of everything. And the fact that people are, there's concerns around how the world's going to play out in the next year or so. And and I do know it is there's a lot of money needed to make big orange heart work.

I do know the number, but I'm not a hundred percent sure that number's in the public domain, but it's a lot of money. And certainly a thousand dollars wouldn't cut it. It's kind more in the region of a thousand dollars a day that they need really. But any donations would be. If you want to go for something smaller, you can go to the WP builds awards page, where you can nominate yourself to win anything.

I'll happily take your cash. And I will proclaim you the winner of whatever you want. $10 a night. It's a big orange chart. You can just win something. Quite a few people have got on there. Jamie muslin is the best WordPress tennis player. I am the least clean WordPress mem what member of the WordPress community.

That's the awarded myself of that, but it's WP builders.com forward slash awards and tenor to big orange chart gets you a guarantee wedding slot. Oh dear. You couldn't make it up for two

[00:28:47] Michelle Frechette: so I can shake it. And you, but you've already raised almost. I think it's at least 800. Yeah. Grief. Yeah. So we're grateful for that because it's how does the minimum, but some, several people have given over $10, so I

[00:29:01] Adrian Tobey: did

[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: not oh, well, that's very cool.

That's great to know. Anyway that the, the big orange chart thing is happening tomorrow. Over at Twitter, our handle is at a big orange heart. You have to add the a at the beginning and it's not on Twitter spaces. And just before we started, you explained what Twitter spaces work. As we know my capabilities on Twitter are equivalent to that of a, I dunno, a potato.

I really don't know how to use Twitter. What is a space?

[00:29:32] Michelle Frechette: It's just, I don't know how to describe space. It's just a meeting. It's basically an online meeting and it's. Anybody can watch it and listen to it and join into it as like you've walked into a Jitsi room, but without the video, basically.

So if you think about

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: it, you have a Twitter account to contribute and be a part. Absolutely. We can listen.

[00:29:57] Ross Morsali: Oh, okay.

[00:29:58] Adrian Tobey: Yes.

[00:29:58] Michelle Frechette: Yes. But in order to even participate, if you want to be able to speak, you have to do it on mobile. Because of right now the desktop version doesn't work to contribute. You can listen, you can partake that way.

But you can only do

[00:30:15] Adrian Tobey: want to be able to speak shitty cell phone. Mike, you can't do it. I like, I have a several hundred dollars set up here and I can't use. I've never used it, so correct.

[00:30:26] Michelle Frechette: You ha. And it is only through phone silly. That's a Twitter. That's a Twitter thing. If I would love to use my nice mic too, but unfortunately it doesn't work

[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: going back to the the, the whole charity raising money thing.

We've got Matt who knows a thing or two about raising money for WordPress causes. Michelle, correct me if I'm wrong. Is he the founder of give WP?

[00:30:53] Michelle Frechette: He is one of the, one of the founders. Yes.

They

[00:30:56] Nathan Wrigley: were one of the founders of give little ups, had good questions. Adrian nonprofits really work hard for every dollar earned.

It's a different world than business. Yeah, yeah. I'm getting as in different.

[00:31:09] Adrian Tobey: The marketing is always the same. Yeah.

[00:31:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Leslie says Twitter streams. Have I got that? Yeah. Twitter stream or a bit like audio, Twitter, sorry. Twitter spaces. Audio only live streaming. I'm intrigued by this now that I've learned about it, because obviously most of what I do is audio and that'd be quite

[00:31:27] Michelle Frechette: interesting to

[00:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: see how it works.

And Matt says it's zoom, but it's Twitter and it's mobile only. Yeah. I think the mobile only thing is weird. I'm going to write a strongly worded tweet to apt Jack and you know, I'm sure it will be sorted by 20, 28 or something. Okay. Let's move on. We've got some more stuff to talk about here.

The next piece is, okay. We mentioned Thanksgiving at the beginning. You forgive me. For my lack of understanding of Thanksgiving, I don't want to go into the history of why Thanksgiving happens, particularly. I know that there, there is history and all of that. That's not what I'm talking about.

There's a couple of pieces that cropped up this week, there was probably many more that I didn't see, but I saw this one from Tom MacFarlane called happy Thanksgiving. You can find it [email protected] It's on his blog. And then just shortly afterwards, we had a piece by Justin Tatlock over on the WP Tavern, which was called WordPress blogging and things we're thankful for.

Thomas was just called happy Thanksgiving and and I've never done anything like this on the show. We always just drone on about the WordPress news. And I thought it might be quite interesting because these pieces. They're kind soul searching pieces where you just go out and search for something that you're thankful for.

Dare I ask. There's four of us. What we're thankful for in the year 2021. Is anybody willing to contribute to that? Shall I go first? Definitely. Okay. I'll go first to set the tone. This has got nothing to do with WordPress, but. I'm really thankful that I can work at home, I suppose that is to do with WordPress.

But that is one of the major things during the last couple of years, a lot of friends of mine have really struggled because they've got to do commute. There was all that time of uncertainty where just the mayor standing on the train was, it was honestly, they thought they were rolling, rolling the dice each time they did that.

And every time they spoke about that, I just shrunk into a corner and said, no, I just work at home. It's a, my life is basically the same. And as they slowly became more used to things like zoom, their lives became more like that. So that's, I think that's the thing that I'm thankful for, but then marrying up to WordPress, probably many of you will have the same thing.

I am really thankful for the WordPress community because a lot of my actual friends are now people who I met at word camps and just a few days ago well, not a few days. It was a couple of months ago now I had a small holiday with a bunch of my WordPress mates. We, they came up here. It was Dan that to, Michelle's just been talking about Paul Lacey Paul smart Giles and Leo Mindell.

They all came up to where I live and we had a little holiday together and that I haven't done anything like that since I was at university, which is years ago. And and so I'm just really thankful for those things. So if anybody else has got the, I don't know what the right word is here. I've got the willingness to join me in being thankful.

Go for the next. Nice.

[00:34:31] Adrian Tobey: And I'm going to, I'm just going to do a little bit of a humble brag. So this year, my, my other half has been bugging me for three years. Like Adrian, meet, she'd go buy a house. We should go buy a house. We go buy a house like before it's too late. Like the market's going crazy. I live in Ontario, which is one of the hottest real estate markets.

Face the planet at the moment. Now, there are more, there are places where I'm more expensive. You go to Chicago or Seattle or Silicon valley where it's like, everything is totally without, out of reach. But in Toronto, in the surrounding GT area, it's also quite expensive. It's four X over the last four years, basically a house that costs a hundred thousand dollars, maybe in 2010 is now half a million.

If not more. Yeah. And but there's there's no signs of it slowing down. There's a ton of immigration to Canada and the growing population as well, just makes the housing and they're not building any. So it's like supply and demand. What are you going to do? But we managed to pull together our finances and we found a place miraculously, and they took our offer in competition with eight others.

And I am just very thankful that we were able to put our name on a deed and then we had to completely gut it, found mold under the sink, and we had to rip walls out and the floor had to go and it's been in, I'm living, you can't see behind me, but I'm in my office, in the basement now. And there's still boxes everywhere.

We've been here for four months and we're just like, not even like fully unpacked yet, but I'm just happy to not be in our small apartment in Toronto anymore. So I'm thankful for that. And in addition to. Very thankful for, as you said, the WordPress media, I made new friends this year you know, I'm talking a lot more to people like Leslie, who's on the chat here.

If you can, where to Michelle, I'm speaking more to Corey Miller and the people in post status and just making a lot of friends. And I'm thankful for those people who are way smarter and more intelligent and more successful than I am helping me out. Try to get to a place of global numbers.

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Lovely answer.

That was really nice. I didn't expect the house thing that, oh, congratulations. Thank you. That's a big,

[00:37:03] Adrian Tobey: was a big win for us. And we just wanted to celebrate that a little

[00:37:07] Nathan Wrigley: bit. Yeah, no, that's really nice. Oh, I'm so pleased for you. That's lovely. Let's go to Ross. If he's willing. I had one

[00:37:14] Ross Morsali: willing, I had one item possibly for this and you've covered it off perfectly, Nathan.

It was just, it was just a, this kind of a the, the living and working lifestyle that I have, but it seems to be all of his health not just been enabled by WordPress it's yeah, it's been in my last six years a bit more even, and yeah the, the, the virus hitting by the church decides in terms of continuing with working with life and paying bills.

Yeah, I'm just grateful that we can continue to do that.

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. That is nice. Yeah, I share that obviously. Yeah, that's lovely. And Michelle, I know that you not only are you probably going to give us something that you're thankful for, but you do a lot of things that make other people thankful, so I think I probably just add something in here.

Thank you for all the enormous efforts that you put in. Sometimes sometimes mentioned loud and clear on Twitter and sometimes probably just going on in the background and just getting on with it and doing the work and being a good custodian of the community. So there you go. Thank you. And what would your things be to share?

[00:38:24] Michelle Frechette: So my daughter got married this year. And so as a parent, I think one of the things that makes you just the calmest and most confident about your child is knowing that they have a partner that they are. In love with, and that loves them and that they can move forward together and that she will always have him beside her to, help one another and to know that she's cared for, and that she has someone to care for as well, so that, filled my heart back in may to be able to walk her down the aisle and, to give her a way so to speak to her husband.

So it's, it's very fulfilling to have that happen. And then of course, also to the WordPress community, I wouldn't be where I am. Today, if it weren't for the WordPress community. And to think that, six or seven years ago, I was going, I wonder if I should join a meetup and get involved in the community.

And then went to my first WordCamp us and was just like blown away with the amount of giving back that people do in this community. But th and the reason that people, how do you do it all? I do it because I love this community. I have received so much from this community, my entire career, and the majority of my friendships are here in WordPress.

And so it makes sense then only to spend time here, but to do what I can to give back to the community as well. And I'm grateful to be able to do.

[00:39:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Thank you so much. Yeah. Nicer. Well, that was a nice one. The whole walking your daughter down the aisle. That's lovely. Yeah. I can only imagine maybe one day that'll happen to me and I shall be tearing off I'm sure.

Well done. Okay. So that's that was quite something we don't do here, but I thought it would be nice to share that this, yeah, this next one is like really totally from one extreme to the other. So we're talking about things to be grateful for. This is, I think probably something to be concerned about.

I've got on the screen a it's a plugin on code canyon, and honestly, I'm not endorsing this plugin. I don't even know what this plugin is capable of, but it came across my radar and it hit me on the screen and suddenly it promoted me to think. Our community and what we do in terms of damaging the environment.

And this was largely brought home to me this week because I did a podcast episode with somebody and it'll come out in the near future. And they're from a an inverted commas green hosting company. They're called green geeks. And we spoke for about 45 minutes and I was really fascinated by. The amount of stuff going on every time.

So here we are now, right? We're all of us are sat in different parts of the world. We've got a computer on, we've got some lights switched on, were consuming resources. And we got into this whole conversation about every time you go search for a webpage, you are in some way impacting the environment and it's measurable and we know how much it is, how much carbon is off.

It needs to be offset. If you like each time you do that. And then we got into how you can, strip your theme out and make it smaller and reduce the footprint and how your hosting can impact all of that. And I was literally saying to him, I do not connect. At all with the environment, when I finished like a plastic bottle of milk and I clean it out and I Chuck it in the recycling, I look at all the recycling.

I think I'm plumbing out. That's made of plastic here. I am yet again, chocking stuff, which is probably going to go into landfill. And then 10 minutes later, the same thing happens. We do better than we did 10 years ago, but I genuinely don't think about I'm scrolling on Facebook for 10 minutes, whatever it might be Twitter, just getting consumed.

I just do not make the connection between the environmental impact of that. And, and my need to curb it a bit. And I don't, I genuinely don't know if you've got any thoughts on this, but it did make me think I need to see. Producing bloated websites. I need to stop needlessly using devices. I probably need to switch light sophomore, but keeping it to the WordPress side of things.

I'm just interested. If you had any thoughts on this, about keeping things lean and keeping things small and making sure that you're building your clients for your website's for your clients in a sort of sustainable way with a smaller footprint as possible. Then if anybody wants to jump in on that,

[00:43:00] Adrian Tobey: There's two ways to contribute.

I think there, there is reduction contribution, which is making things smaller. And then there's additive contribution where you grow in order to be able to create more resources in order to offset greater impacts, which maybe you create greater resources than what you would potentially be putting out.

Be able to offset that. So there's kind of two ways to think about it. I don't know if creating small websites. Like, no matter how big the WordPress community will never have a bigger footprint than Ethereum mining and cryptocurrency mining, which I am not part of that community all and is totally, I'm just, I just don't get it.

I'm not smart enough to get it. And I'm, I have no judgment against it, but I know that I see a lot of stuff on my Twitter feed about how that impacts the environment. So no matter how, like scaled or even smaller websites are, I know that's even just 10 times more. So I think that are the best that we can do to make an impact is to use the tools that we need in order to create wealth and understanding and whatever, in order to be able to donate to worthy causes like big horn.

And other green initiatives in order to offset that cost, I don't think we're ever going to be able to get to a point where it's probably neutral. But we can do the best that we can.

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you, Adrian. Ross or

[00:44:37] Adrian Tobey: Michelle, anything on that?

[00:44:40] Michelle Frechette: So I think it's, it's an awful lot we all have to do our part of course, but we also have to remember that we have to hold the big companies to a higher standard as well.

You know, the Amazons of the world, what are they doing? Because they are driving, who's driving the biggest traffic and how much are they using and wasting and how much are we using wasting just by, spending time perusing and that kind of thing on their sites. So while it's very important for us all, to be very mindful of the impact that we have individually, we also have to remember to hold the big guys accountable for the use of resources that they have.

[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: And Ross, thank you, Michelle.

[00:45:20] Ross Morsali: Yeah, from my from my limited understanding, all I can see from a, like a developers position or website builders position is to do the things that would save energy, which is building efficient websites using green hosting. Yeah. And I guess using the devices, using your devices, actually browsing sites and using applications and using energy, apart from that, a message know a global initiative, a global standard it's I feel like we don't feel we can make much impact.

Even if we all say we're gonna do our best, I think it's, the big planners like you guys have said are the ones that can really influence things like the big hosting companies. So the Amazons.

[00:46:08] Adrian Tobey: Yeah.

[00:46:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Th this this comes off the green, this is the company that I was talking to green gates the other day.

And they were saying that that at the moment there are we, the, the internet creates 2% of the world's carbon emissions, according to this here. I can't vouch for whether this is true or not, but apparently the internet consumes as much carb or producers as much carbon as the airline industry.

And honestly, that kind of caught me off shore. I was thinking, yeah. Airplanes are really stinky and smelly and they produce lots of exhaust horribleness, and I genuinely was taken up by that and they reckon that in the next few years it's going to double and then double again, as things become, as, as it becomes more and more ubiquitous to be switched onto the internet with different kinds of interfaces.

Anyway, I just thought that was amazing. I don't know what my contribution is going to be to this, but I think that says

[00:47:04] Adrian Tobey: more about the airline industry than it does about the internet. Interesting.

[00:47:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We need electric airplane. No, we don't need electric. I don't know if I'd ever get on an electric airplane.

Okay. Total aside, nothing to do with WordPress or indeed the environment who here would get in a self-driving car without a steering wheel.

[00:47:29] Ross Morsali: As long as many people had tested it first, then no problem.

[00:47:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I'm not getting in there first. No, I don't think I'm getting in there. I just don't think I'm going to be getting in that car at any point soon.

I just can't quite give over my driveway or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, if it was literally to the end of my drive, I do that. It's about eight meters, but I just can't imagine. I want to be in control of that moment where the cat walks out in front of the road and I veer left instead of via right.

And make, I just, yeah, that sort of stuff really

[00:48:02] Adrian Tobey: terrorist for Hughes is saying that he'd get

[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: in one. Oh yeah. Hi, sorry, Christopher. I've missed a few comments here. Haven't I? Oh, check it. Is this true? Is this a volume being, am I being a troll here breaking years? Jackie's stepping down as Twitter CEO.

Is that actually happening? Is that actually happening. And then somebody else, Larry says that the Twitter stock a sword. I don't know if I'm being trolled here or not. Yeah, that's right. He just made it happen. The and then Chris also says probably a good way to reduce the environmental footprint, make this show monthly instead of weekly, I can do it annually, Chris or just abandon it altogether.

And we could probably save lots of the environment. Mayo is saying, perhaps installing private solar panels at home contribute. Yeah, we don't have, solar is not really much of a thing in the UK. I wonder why. Because essentially the sodden never materializes in the UK. Yeah. That's a good idea. And then Mia says.

That she would not answer a car due to bugs, not place. Yeah. I'm with you. And Chris says he would trust a computer more than a human differing opinions. Yeah. I'm not there yet. I'm not

[00:49:17] Adrian Tobey: there yet. I still worry about the guy about the electric technology in general. I live in Canada and it's cold a lot of the year.

And like it's snowed probably five, six centimeters. Wow. And the batteries you know, batteries are negatively impacted by the cold. And if you have an earlier model, Tesla, people are like taking screenshots, like they're, they have their fully charged tests. They leave normally to come back.

It's 30% and it's The technology certainly has some in like in climates, Northern climates. There are certainly some obstacles that have yet to be overcome for electric car owners. And there are still no overcoming the fact that you can go to a gas station, fill up in a minute and you have 600 mile rains in negative 20 degree

[00:50:06] Nathan Wrigley: weather.

I I remember going to Canada for the first time. I was actually Quebec in February, so it was cold. It was about as cold as it gets. It was really like cold. I'd never experienced. And I remember seeing all the cars had a little electric plug dangling out the front. I don't know if that's still a thing.

Every car seemed to have this little plug on a small cable at the front. And I was like, what on earth? And it's just a, is that for the battery? Just to stop the battery at night, cooling down in that way.

[00:50:34] Adrian Tobey: I believe so. And it's also a lot of cars have block heaters. So a block heater is basically an electric blanket that you pull that you put over the block, your engine block to keep it from seizing because the metal warps, when it gets really, really cold.

And I have a friend out who lived in Sudbury, which is even further, which is Northern Ontario, but laterally higher than Quebec is. And he had a, like a 1999 Jeep TJ Wrangler old, older car and more susceptive. This was an iron block and an iron six cylinder. And he had to use an engine block because if he didn't or an engine heating block.

Cause if he didn't He would go out at eight in the morning to drive to the university of their university library. And it was just, you wouldn't even turn over because everything was just too cold. Like the the oil, oil

[00:51:37] Michelle Frechette: solidifies. Yeah. I threw a rod back in college, so we're talking almost 40 years now.

But back in college or 30 years, I threw a rod in my car. I got out and started it in the morning and ruined the engine because it was too cold to start my car.

[00:51:54] Adrian Tobey: Like a push rod, like one of the, the pit, like a piston rod. So you have your piston and then you got the rod. And then basically if the engines to colds, some of the cylinders will turn, the other one will not, and it will snap the piston rod in half.

And that's the brittle as it gets colder to.

[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you ever like we've suddenly become the, this week in cold automotives, but just carrying this on for a moment, have you ever looked up a map and if you look, where the Hudson bay is in Canada, I'm familiar with where that if you go from the south of the Hudson bay, Go directly east, you hit the Southern part of great Britain.

So all of the UK is north of pretty much every single bit where the Canadians live, but we have this lovely thing called the Gulf stream, which stops us all getting incredibly cold. And yeah, that's

[00:52:55] Adrian Tobey: what are called polar vortexes where the cold air and weather patterns from the Arctic circle come down to where I live last year.

[00:53:07] Michelle Frechette: I'm right across the lake from you. So yeah, we get them to whatever you having in Toronto. I'm pretty much getting in Rochester as well.

[00:53:15] Adrian Tobey: Yeah. Yeah. And it got down to Nate, like a few years ago we had the great ice storm where just everything froze and basically society. Chaotic for a solid week as just everything broke down and martial law was instituted.

That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it was cold, man. It's cold.

[00:53:39] Nathan Wrigley: Rob Ross. I'm sorry about this. This is not a typical episode. We've totally gone off paint off piece today. We bring it. But it's fun. I love all this stuff. Anyway, this was all prompted by a conversation about. About what you can do to reduce your footprint.

I would love to think that it will have an impact when that episode comes out sometime next year. Hopefully listen to it and see, but just curious as to how we're ever going to make the connection with what these little electrical devices are doing, which is so benign and so lovely. And my computer is nothing but good.

I'm patting it now. But it's using up, it's using up the earth resources. So we've got to figure something out. Jack Lennox from automatic has a seven K website, which might be worth looking at, okay, let's move on. We're onto we're onto a fun story. This is black Friday. We have our black Friday page.

Here it is. It's WP belts.com forward slash black.

[00:54:37] Adrian Tobey: Did you? I did it last year and I did it the year before that. And I

[00:54:40] Nathan Wrigley: forgot this year. See if I submitted it for you. Cause sometimes I know, I'm sorry, know,

[00:54:45] Adrian Tobey: I went, I went to the site the other day to be like, can I like light last minute submit, but I saw that you had crossed.

Yeah.

[00:54:51] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Sorry about that. Yeah, next time. Next time. Anyway, the point is there's black Friday still going on from a, from a commercial developers point of view. I don't know what your posture is. I'd be interested to know what you think. And then let's get into a conversation of whether we actually got carried away by all this and actually bought anything.

I'll just start. I don't have a plugin, so I've got no, I've got no skin in the game regarding whether I slash my prices or just stay firm. I know Ross has got something to say about this, but I bought one thing. I bought a singular thing, which was a thing it's called X splits. It's an ma. Windows as well.

And it makes my background into something different so I could make it into a Hawaiian scene. And typically if you do that with things like zoom, Obvious what you're doing like, but looks amazing. You really look it's crystal clear, the edges of your fingers look good about stack social, I think 30 bucks or something.

So if you do a lot of live presentation and you want the background to genuinely look good and not look like, oh, that's a fake bag. X split is a dead good. It's called V. Yeah. It really works. So all I'm ever going to do with it is just blur this background so that you don't have to put it. Yeah.

That's right. This is every week. My son, nobody knows this every week. My son comes in and write something incendiary on this board. And every week after we raise it just before the show, I said, I got a blow that's out. I don't have to go through the hoops of getting sued by whatever my son writes there, but that was my thing.

So let's go around the table. Let's start with Michelle. Did you buy anything? Did you know,

[00:56:40] Michelle Frechette: I did not buy a thing, but I did post a lot about the stellar sales that are going on for black Friday, cyber Monday. Some of them extend to today, give us until, is through giving Tuesday tomorrow.

So if you are interested, there is a landing page that I've created. So if you go to seller wp.com/. Black Friday, you will find all of the sales, but they are also all listed on your site. Nathan, as cause you saw them all come in the other day.

[00:57:09] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. You were talking to me in, they came one at a time.

There's quite a lot of them. So the whole suite got a reduction across the board, right?

[00:57:17] Michelle Frechette: Yes. Depending on the which which you're looking at, they're all different because all of our GMs, run their products as though they're still independent companies, but they are under LiquidWeb brand and they're under the seller WP branding.

So they're all in there. Yeah.

[00:57:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yup. Thank you. Let's go to let's go to Adrian next.

[00:57:37] Adrian Tobey: I didn't buy any, I bought a couple things last year, but I didn't buy anything this year, aside from some very inexpensive Christmas shopping. Cause now's a great time to, to get the gifts. Cause everything's on sale.

[00:57:51] Nathan Wrigley: I wish I had the foresight like that. I, every year when it's all over. Don should've bought all the things during black Friday, but I'm just not that organized, but you are. I

[00:58:02] Adrian Tobey: didn't,

[00:58:03] Michelle Frechette: I didn't do software. Oh yeah. I bought myself a new apple watch. I bought myself. Oh, you meant for other people? I had to replace my apple pencil because I lost it.

I'm brand new apple pencil and I lost my pencil, but I bought a new one

[00:58:16] Nathan Wrigley: and my apple pencil setting. It does

[00:58:18] Michelle Frechette: not, I was so at all I could imagine as it fell in the trash, because I couldn't find anywhere. Anyway, I did purchase another one and I did all my Christmas shopping on Friday. So I'm done. As soon as that started starting.

Come in this week.

[00:58:33] Adrian Tobey: Yeah. That's what that's same boat, Christmas shopping. I didn't do a whole lot of shopping within the actual WordPress plugin economy or theme economy. I've I have pretty much everything that I need. And I bought, I thought a few things last year, just for the sake of supporting people and that, but I already have those licenses and I'm paying the renewal fees already.

So there wasn't a whole ton and I'm not super big on all the apps do most stuff that a lot of people are like, some people just go collect licenses, like their Pokemon cards and, power to you like that. It's just fun to have licenses. They like collect them their badges upon like, boy scout, badge Badger or something like that.

Cub Scouts. I used to be guilty of that.

[00:59:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I used to be guilty of just consuming AppSumo licenses. And then I just realized I was literally squandering money for exactly what you said. It just sat on a shelf, but I had this sort of idea that I vaguely, at some point in the future, this great idea would come upon me, which I hadn't even got an inkling of yet.

And it would come in useful. I need a thousand seats for this plug-in that I'm never, ever going to use, but yeah, so well done for getting all your Christmas shopping done. I really wish I was that organized Ross. Oh no. First of all, Adrian, tell us about Groundhog. Does it. Slash the prices. Do you get involved in any of this?

[00:59:55] Adrian Tobey: We we do a sale and we do a real sale. We drop our price. Our prices are normally multiples of 10. So we have a $40 plan, an $80 plan, $30 plan, a $20 plan. And when you do all of those at 20% off, which brings them down to really nice round numbers. So four 80 becomes 360 360 becomes two 70 or something or to, I don't know what it

[01:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: becomes something with a zero, something

[01:00:22] Adrian Tobey: with a zero.

So it's a really nice round number. So they all come down and but if we're going to talk about the marketing side of black Friday and just like discounting in general, we can, we can get into the psychology of that. And that's something that I actually really enjoy. So if we want to, if we want to dive into

[01:00:41] Nathan Wrigley: that, I would, because one of the things that I always think of it, so stellar who Michelle was talking about, they've across the board, decided to do it Groundhog, obviously your product you've decided to do it.

And I wonder, we'll get to Ross who I think has got a different position in a minute, but but for now, yeah. Tell us about that. Adrian, Michelle D do you have any insight into, are you just doing it because everybody else is doing it and you sort of come across as a bit different, you're not opting in, or, does it represent a significant amount of annual revenue comes over the last week?

Any of those kind of insights? So

[01:01:17] Adrian Tobey: when I entered the space in 2018, That was, or 2019 was the first year that I did a black Friday sale for Groundhog because I started pretty late into 2018 to do, to get on the bandwagon. But 2019 was the first year that I did it. And it was mediocre at best in terms of like revenue.

There was a lot of stuff that I hadn't worked out yet, like pricing and positioning and marketing, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that I was totally missing out on. And at that point in time, like there were pretty much everybody did a black Friday sale, but it was a little bit less upfront and salesy and marketing as it is now.

Like it's a little bit less in your face. Like people would go around and they'd look for the plugins that they wanted and they pick up a couple of licenses for their clients. And everybody would have like either, it was like the longest time pan with like maybe two weeks, like the week before black Friday, and then the week of black.

And then the next year it extended out like another week. And then the next year, this year, basically people were offering black Friday discounts. Six October is really what it felt like. And. So as a result, I think that the overall impact of black Friday sales for this year is less significant to my company than it was last year.

Last year, black Friday sales made up the majority, like by far like a five X return this year, it was more like of a two X. And I think the reason for that is probably because of people just being overstimulated with the amount of choice and the sales and a lot of people, I sold a ton of a special license, a three-year license.

So you can go like sign up for hosting plans and you sign up for three years to get like this epic deal. And I basically did the same thing basically if by two years upfront, you get a third year free and I'd actually run that deal this year as well. But I sold a ton of those last year. So those people aren't renewing or are buying or orange doing that again this year.

So all of those renewals are basically pushed out through. Which is fine and it's a great way to, to get customer lock-in. And I think a lot of people bought lifetime deals and a lot of people bought the deals like that last year. And overall people are just less incentivized to spend money on WordPress products.

And I don't know if anybody else also experienced that. That's at least what I experienced. But yeah, I hope that's kind just that was my experience share. Yeah,

[01:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: no, that's good. Oh, it's interesting that you made it work and you've got a long-term view on it as well. You've obviously realized that things deals that you did in the past were beneficial then, and they may not come back and offer that same benefit for a few more times, but you've got the sort of, no, not at least for three years.

Yeah, that's

[01:04:13] Adrian Tobey: right. The best people who offered lifetime deals, that presents an, a super huge spike to revenue day off. And probably for the rest of that year, but the next year, like that money is not coming

[01:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: back and you got to support all those people for ever as well.

And yeah. Yeah.

[01:04:33] Adrian Tobey: And there's a lot of companies that I know that swear by it and, and, they're doing gangbusters and really I've, I don't personally believe that's a smart business move longterm because it totally tanks valuation when it comes time to sell, which is also like the end game for most plugin companies now is like either to join stellar WP or automotive or, or one of the other hosting companies just picking up plugins left and right.

And center. And so it's either merge or be acquired. And first the end game for independence like us and I was unwilling to I, if I had a dime for every time I asked to do a lifetime deal, I'd probably be extremely wealthy, but when it comes time to sell, like that's all, that's a whole obstacle that you have

[01:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: to overcome.

Yeah. That's really

[01:05:24] Michelle Frechette: so that not to step on Rossi's is sitting here watching us. I'll talk because we give them an

[01:05:29] Adrian Tobey: opportunity,

[01:05:32] Michelle Frechette: but there's a couple of things to look at when you're doing that. So what is the actual. Of your average customer. So if you have looked at the lifetime cycles of your customers, and let's say that most people renew for year two and year three, and then they stop renewing altogether, then a lifetime deal that charges at say times four is going to make you more time, more money off of your average customer than not so new.

There's more that goes into it then should we, or shouldn't we, right? There's a lot of research that you have to do into what your customer base looks like, and that's going to be way, right? And it's gonna be way different for a for-profit company than a nonprofit company. For example, what's the average lifespan of most nonprofit startups, do they last, do they not last it, all these questions go into whether or not you should look at lifetime deals, which is why you don't give is not done a lifetime, get a lifetime deal yet.

My first year of web designing, I bought elegant themes, lifetime deal, and I still have taken advantage of that. And they could have made so much money off of me over the years because I would have continued to renew. So it really does take a lot of that into account. Like you were saying aging and whether or not it's good money up front.

And the second thing I wanted to mention is if you are thinking about selling, let me know. Cause I can put you in contact with the right people at liquid have

[01:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: nice. You heard it here first. I heard it here. That's it? Okay. So we've, we've had the serve. We now get the you know, the tennis munchies, a thought it's now Ross is turned to bat the ball back.

[01:07:00] Adrian Tobey: So

[01:07:01] Ross Morsali: by saying thanks for those opinions because I'm planning on doing this at some stage, so it's always good to hear people. Who've got experience doing these things. I'm not doing things differently because I'm smarter than all of you. And it's basically just because I haven't got around.

To doing. Yeah. In a way. By the, what I mean is the plugin I'm selling has been basically at the same price for six years. And in the last few years I really decided we're going to move, take it, fold into the step and we're going to up the game and we're going to hire really grow in that kind of stuff.

So until I put up the prices, which is inevitable because it's not even the rate of inflation from when we started up until that point, we're not going to do any offers and deals. So we're working on a really big new version of version three. That's been in the pipeline for a long time. And once that comes out, we'll adjust our prices.

And then we're probably gonna get connected to this whole black Friday cycle.

[01:08:01] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[01:08:01] Adrian Tobey: Okay. So it's not even really so black Friday is less of an opportunity to offer a sale as more as it, as an excuse to email everybody on your list. No kidding. The, for example, my company, we offer 25% on black Friday is the deal that we offered.

And the rest of the year, we make it brain dead. Easy to get 15% off. Like you can at any point, do we. Never offer anybody who asks for it, a discount there's 17 forums that you could submit on our website to get a discount for 50% off. And on our checkout page, if you put in save 15 into our discount code thing, which everybody tries, cause like you might get lucky, will automatically give you a valid discount code.

Even if you input something that doesn't exist, we'll give you 50% just for this. That's awesome. And people think yeah, I beat the system. And so we bake it into the margin. That's just what you do as a software company is you. You bake it, you bake whatever you can offer into the margin so that you can still be profitable if someone uses it.

If you're, if you're

[01:09:21] Ross Morsali: the margins, I need to fluff them up a bit so I can bake it in

[01:09:26] Adrian Tobey: exactly because people ask for codes and if you're giving everybody a discount, but it's not baked to an emerging, you're losing money and that's not good. You have to, you have to make money in order to be a business in order to write code in order to support the people that you're hiring in order to do the sports for the people who use the plugin.

It's that's how it works. So we bake it into the margins and, 25% off is a little bit more than we usually offer, but it's still as well within, our comfortable range. And really, it's more of an excuse to just get those people. Who've been on our list since February over the edge and an excuse to just blast an email every single day about black Friday, because.

And people are comfortable with receiving that messaging during this period of time, versus maybe any other point of the year where they basically write back and plan. It's Hey, you're emailing me too much. Yeah. But there are bombarded by all of these different companies and it's oh, it's okay.

Now

[01:10:22] Nathan Wrigley: I am I, for obvious reasons, I sign up to literally every WordPress company that I come up against, I sign up to their email newsletter. And most of the year that leads to a trickle of things. There's a product update or we've we've been acquired or whatever. There's a handful of things coming in this last couple of weeks was a real illustration, like no other year of how unbelievably intense it is.

Because yesterday when I went to sleep I had I had 48 emails in my inbox. I woke up this morning and there were 300 and something emails in my inbox and almost every single one of them, you can, there's like two or three in there that are ones that I want to read. Everybody was announcing today that, the final day of the deal.

And I thought, boy, if there's anybody like me, I am. Absolutely out on the floor, unable to process that amount. And so that's interesting, carving your way through that noise and getting to your customers. And it's so hard.

[01:11:27] Adrian Tobey: It's very hard. And I think the fact that there's just so much stuff to sort through that really, the only way that it works is if someone is already at a very high stage of product buyer awareness, right?

Like purchasing awareness level. If someone is already I've been waiting for this to go on sale for six months and those people exist, those people are out there and those people are going to buy. But for someone who's like at a very like lower level who maybe only like problem aware and not necessarily product or solution.

That they're going to, it's going to be a such a more difficult time this year than any other year to really get them over the fence, unless you have the best sort of like onboarding content strategy on the face of planet earth. I probably don't have that, but I'm, if you

[01:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: do. Yeah, no, you know what?

That's really curious because your eye is drawn to the one product and you don't delete it. I was just going to delete delete, delete, delete, delete with the tiniest of glance as to who it was from. But the one or two that I was actually interested in haven't bought anything as I say, but they missed it and they say, you're right.

I think that's true. They make the cut. The, this is Chris he's saying you know, should try the code test 100 crown dog. See if that works. I doubt it. But Chris use every year for the last few years, we've we've had, Chris was on this episode where we talk about black Friday and Chris spends a prodigious amount.

It's the, it's probably the equivalent of a small United States state on black Friday deals. Chris, it would probably be easy to say, what didn't you buy this year? But he says, he says, he's living in a tent now as a result,

[01:13:13] Michelle Frechette: he doesn't live in Toronto or Rochester,

[01:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah.

[01:13:18] Michelle Frechette: Minus one degree Celsius here this

[01:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: morning.

Yeah. We got something similar in the UK. Actually this week is really cold. Okay. Right now. So we talked about the, all of this black Friday stuff. And whether you bought deals or what have you. I saw this really interesting piece of this week and okay, let's get this out at the beginning. Nobody. I cannot tell you whether what I'm reading in this article is true.

I just want to raise it as a subject. I'm not trying to name and shame anybody. It's on WP raccoon.co. And this is I'm imagining Adrian with your Groundhog hat on, and your expertise in marketing. You probably have something about this. This is the idea that some companies WordPress or otherwise, but it deals with the WordPress site.

Can I go to the lengths of trying to convince you that there's an offer on, whereas in fact, there isn't, in other words, the pricing during the year is basically the same. And then they simply manufacturer that they've had a sale. I guess the principle being that you are you are convinced that you're getting 20, 30, 50%, whatever it might be off.

But if you were actually to rewind the clock a couple of months ago and look at the same website, you only discovered that it was exactly the same thing. Now, I don't know where I fit on this. Obviously, if people are prepared to pay that amount of money, that seems that's okay. But it does seem a little bit dubious that there are some some people out there who take this position.

I don't know if anybody's got a thought on this. It's a bit controversial and I don't want anybody to get in any trouble.

[01:14:54] Ross Morsali: That's what Amazon's been doing for years. That's why you have the Amazon price trackers. So you can see if the product has been inflated before the sales date. So many products in Amazon, they go up before they go on the breakfast, black Friday sale. And then to get around that, and you have other websites which track the price of these products a year long round, just to make sure you don't get caught out on these kinds of things.

So either we need to do something like that for WordPress, or I dunno,

[01:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: no, Ross, that's a really interesting idea, like a plug-in price tracker that would go, and maybe there is something that would go and scrape the prices year round, and put them on to. You know, some sort of table or something. Yeah.

That's really interesting if only we had some sort of expert that would, some searching and filtering kind of somebody needs

that, but that's a really, it's a really curious idea. It sounded like Adrian, you wanted to chip in there as well.

[01:16:00] Adrian Tobey: I'll go, I'll go after Michelle. Okay. Because I've been talking a lot so true.

[01:16:08] Michelle Frechette: I just find it very interesting. And I know that the brands that I represent were very know, very keenly aware of how this works and we know that people watch our prices all year long and the integrity is here.

We would, it would never even occur to us to raise prices before we lower prices or pretend that we're having a sale on anything. When you see our black Friday cyber Monday sales, you're actually getting a really good deal that we're not offering any other point in the year. So I just think.

W people are more savvy than a lot of companies think they are. And if they're looking to buy something for a while, you've been watching the price and what's going on. And then, if you're gonna buy the competitor, if you're going to buy the product that you're looking for, and, it's just, just have integrity.

Everybody should have integrity, especially in this industry where we give away so much for free already anyway, and they're positive already. Just have the integrity that you need to be able to continue to move forward and be somebody that people can trust and rely on.

[01:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: And the way back machine is your best friend.

Yeah,

[01:17:15] Adrian Tobey: every time you say

[01:17:16] Michelle Frechette: way back machine, I think of Mr. Peabody.

[01:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's a great film. I really enjoyed watching that with my kids. Yeah.

So

[01:17:26] Adrian Tobey: there, there are two groups of people of buyers within WordPress. There are the WordPress professionals and kind of community members, people like us, people who go to word camp, people who go to where Chris meetups, people who watch and listen and attend state of the word.

And then there are people who visits or who use WordPress as a means to. And the first interaction that they have with WordPress is WP beginner, right? Those are like the two kind of groups within WordPress. And one of those groups is so much more susceptible to what people may now consider as you know, a little bit shady marketing practices, like manufactured, FOMO and scarcity things like that.

Which has been around these are not new strategies and they are valid tactics. FOMO is the driving factor of black Friday sales. And I capitalize on that as I'm sure as every company at stellar WP does and every company that automotive does and everybody, every other independent WordPress company out there capitalizes on the FOMO of black Friday by offering a discount.

You know, and as I mentioned, I make it totally brain dead easy. Deal on Groundhog every single day of this year. It's not as good as the one we have on black Friday, but it's still a deal and that's baked into the margin and that's manufactured. But I don't think anyone is going to accuse me of being shady about it.

So I have probably like still 75% of my sales are full price, even though I make it like so easy, it's just, people don't know what they don't know. And I don't think manufacturing, the ability to give a discount into your price is a bad strategy or a bad tactic or something that is shady.

And I don't think giving people discounts on that manufactured price is. Bad practice. And there are companies within the WordPress space that make it super, brain-dead easy to get 30% off every single day of the year. And there's always a sale on, at the top of their website every single time. And it's an evergreen FOMO scarcity builder, but that thing works for that subset of WordPress users that I mentioned earlier. And it's just a different, it's a different customer market that they're after, but not after us. So what we perceive as maybe something that's a little bit dubious, someone who's in their market, or someone who they're specifically targeting would have no idea or not even care or where they're probably doing it on their own website.

And they see that as an opportunity rather than something that's dubious because we're just at a different mind.

[01:20:16] Ross Morsali: Sorry to ask, do you think you might alienate some of the more serious within this concept? More, more of the serious let's say developers or something, those kinds of use of products by having those.

But as always across the top, all year round, I know for me, I would, I get put off companies when they have marketing tactics like that. So if I need to use that, plugin are probably still in the buying it, but if I don't need to. Okay,

[01:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: That's,

[01:20:43] Adrian Tobey: that's the thing you still would write. And it's I use a ton and we all know who we're talking about here, but I'm not going to name and shame.

But I use several of their products because they're good. And because they work and because they make my life easier, regardless of whatever marketing they tactics do. And because they're going to do what they're going to do to target that specific segment. They're not targeting us, but we use them because they work.

And that's the thing. If, if they alienated a few people along the way, I'm sure market or that people that they're ailing, this is much smaller group than those that they are attracting, which is kind like how they operate it's business first. That's sort like an easy decision to make every second. That's true. Some of us some companies choose to operate differently and that's also fine.

[01:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I know Michelle's got to go in just a few minutes time. Michelle, if we carry on just for a couple of minutes and you need to drop out of course we understand your time is precious and that's absolutely fine.

If, if you want to contribute on this next one very quickly, before we head off, you can, this is over on WP Tavern, but in all honesty, I think you could probably have found this story almost anywhere this week, including on. Normal domestic channels in the UK, it made it, it's made its way into just regular print and television media.

And this is the story that GoDaddy had a data breach this week. I'm sure it couldn't have bypassed you 1.2 million active and inactive managed WordPress hosting accounts. Data was exfiltrated. I don't know the details about how that was done, but it looks like whoever it was that managed to get in got in on the 6th of September.

So quite a while ago. And it says here that essentially it's locked to the managed WordPress hosting side of things. So I believe that if you're not on the managed WordPress hosting side, you don't need to worry about it. But it's yeah, managed WordPress hosting customers had their email addresses and customer number exp exposed.

The exposure of the email address presents a risk of phishing attacks on quoting the original WordPress admin password was set at the time of the pres provisioning was exposed. And if those credentials were still in use, they say that they reset them. Anyway, we could go on. We've got very little time.

We've probably got about two minutes left, but I'm just curious to see what anybody's reaction was about this. It's a pretty, it's a pretty bad PR hit for go daddy, I guess

[01:23:26] Adrian Tobey: I

[01:23:26] Michelle Frechette: just like to say that it's a reminder that anybody can hack into anything, but within that, I mean, nothing is locked so tight that it can't, there's not a way around it, especially when you're looking at the fact that it's not, steel walls and.

Fireproof doors and things like that. It's code. And if there's a way to get around it, somebody will find a way to get around it and it may take longer, or it may not take longer, but just a reminder to keep, your passwords different on different sites to make sure that you've done everything you can as a user, any place that you are to protect yourself, because nobody is you know, not everybody is able to be hacked.

[01:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: It says and I'll quote, it says go daddy's initial investigation showed that the attacker gains access gained access using comp compromised password. So presumably this was I'm guessing forgive me if I've got this wrong, but it sounds like an old, perhaps a, an old employee or something like that, but they gained access through a password which did exist.

So that account at some point had existed. So that I guess makes the attack slightly different, as opposed to them just rocking up and figuring out a back door, which then

[01:24:43] Adrian Tobey: says,

[01:24:44] Michelle Frechette: don't put your password on a post-it note and stick it underneath your keyboard because they know

[01:24:50] Ross Morsali: yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4

[01:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: either.

Yeah. I heard I listened to a security podcast each and every week. And that is the password of choice guests. It used to be monkey 1, 2, 3, believe it or not. And now it is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Or for a bit of variety, you can go 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. They're the most popular ones. And just because you can't be bothered to hit the FA the six key that's too much effort.

The next one is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You've following up from that is the word password. You can't make it up. Anyway, if you're a GoDaddy customer, I imagine that you've been reached out to, by their support at this point. But yeah, we're we are literally out of time, there probably was a whole boatload more to say about that.

I'm going to, I'm going to have to just wrap it up cause I need to get everybody to wave. Could you all give us a wave at the same time? Cause I used that. Yay. We've done it. Thank you so much. Quick. Thanks, firstly, I'll say thanks to Michelle in case she needs to just flee the scene.

Thank you, Michelle, for joining us this host of the show. We'll have you back at some point very soon. I'm sure. And thank you Adrian from Groundhog. Michelle, if you'll go in, that's fine. Do you want to just say a goodbye and give us your Twitter and.

[01:26:06] Michelle Frechette: Yep. So you can find me on Twitter at Michelle aims and I'll have my, everything [email protected]

[01:26:14] Nathan Wrigley: Go to at a big orange chart tomorrow, and you'll find Michelle doing the the Twitter spaces thing for big orange, Adrian, where can we find you by?

[01:26:24] Adrian Tobey: So find me at Groundhog with two GS, which is here.io and a. Twenty-five percent off all their stuff, or if you're an existing customer, which I see a couple of few actually on the live chat, or I think Christopher Hughes's customer actually

[01:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: he's bound to be a customer here.

[01:26:41] Adrian Tobey: Christopher, you can get, you can extend your license for another three years if you want. I know you did that last year. I think so if you want to do it again and push your renewal all the way out to 20, 26 or whatever, we got that for you. So it's.

[01:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And Ross, what about you?

Where can we find you?

[01:27:00] Ross Morsali: The easiest way to find me is on Twitter. My handle is a bit odd, so you can find me at search and filter from diabetics to find.

[01:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Indeed. Hopefully guys, you've enjoyed the experience and we'll have your back at some point on the show. If we, if if we don't see until Christmas and the holiday season have an enjoyable holiday and we will be back this time next week.

I can't honestly remember who's coming on the show, but we'll be here as we always do Monday 2:00 PM UK time. And we'll see you next week. Thanks a lot guys.