This Week in WordPress #191

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 191 and titled flying horses. It was recorded on Monday the 10th of January, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I am joined by some notable WordPress guests. This week. I'm joined by Michelle. Mark West guard and Ronald Gijsel. And we're going to talk about the different bits and pieces of news that have happened not only this week, but also during the holiday period.

First stop. We show you the new block pattern directory and have a little browse around, see how that works. And then a different kind of directory created over at Gutenberg hub. It's the WordPress themes, directory, and it's a third party take on a themes directory, and it looks really nice.

We then get into there's a course starting this week. It's a webinar. It's all about jump stack. So we mentioned that then move on to talk about the fact that Yoast SEO is moving outside of WordPress, and they're going to be including Shopify stores in the near future. Joe Casabona has his 20, 22 year in review.

And it's a very honest portrayal of his last year. We talk about Jeff Star's new book, all about S Q L it's a bunch of recipes to help you learn SQL. And then we talk about whether or not the no-code way of doing things is the way in the future. Perhaps we're moving towards a yes code future simple CSS is a new framework designed by Kev quirk to keep your CSS frameworks light.

The whole thing only comes in at about 4k patch stack. I've got a new way of doing login protection and there's a couple of deals around the most notable is WP funnels over on AppSumo. And then there's a few freebies at the end, some lovely photography over on the guardian and some free recordings from days gone.

It's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. I don't know if there's anything else. Good. Something. Welcome. Welcome. The first, this weekend, WordPress of 2022 and absolute pleasure. We took the week off last week, basic because I'm lazy.

There's no other excuse, but we're back. We're back and we've got a really nice panel joining us today. First of all, I'm going to introduce my co-host traditionally, the cohost kind of resides over there somewhere, but

[00:02:42] Michelle Frechette: tends to deal with snow this morning. So she was the last one in the room. That's

[00:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: fine.

Oh really? Okay. Tell us about the snow. What like, are you talking like inches, feet? How does it work

[00:02:52] Michelle Frechette: inches over the weekend, but then it started snowing again this morning. It's currently minus eight Celsius, 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

[00:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. This

[00:03:02] Michelle Frechette: is the green Ronald's window and that's the CGI.

I'm very jealous.

[00:03:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to introduce you properly though, because this is Michelle for Frechette. If you didn't know that she is the director of community engagement for stellar WP at liquid web. In addition to her work at Stella WP, Michelle is the podcast for restrict WP coffee, talk.com. She's the founder of underrepresented in tech.com and the creator of WP career pages.

The president on the board of w a big orange heart, the director of community relations and [email protected], author business, coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester where it's currently snowing, which is in New York. And she's an avid nature photographer.

Yeah. I really enjoy looking at your pictures, especially of the birds. You're obviously into that, and you can find out more at our website, which is meat to michelle.online. There's a lot going on there, Michelle, but Thank you for taking out time each well, most weeks in your busy schedule and being with us.

Appreciate it.

[00:04:04] Michelle Frechette: I love this show. It's fun. It's fun to be here. It's fun. It's really fun because it's we can't change anything it's live and what happens. Happens.

[00:04:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's it. Okay. Let's move on. We have with us also over. Yes. Got it. We have Mark West scarred from Ws form. I can't remember mark, if you wrote anything in the, I don't think you did give me a biography.

So I'm just going to make one off. Mark lives in the USA. He's from he's from the United Kingdom originally, and he is the founder coder general amazing person over at w S form, which is a form plugin for WordPress. And I might add, it's a form plugin for WordPress that if you haven't checked out, you probably should, because it.

Boatload more than you would ever anticipate. So a bit of a plug there, mark hopeless. All right. I appreciate it. Yeah, no, that's fine. Anything I missed? That's it.

[00:05:00] Michelle Frechette: It's not minus eight where you are though. Is it mark? It's a loud.

[00:05:05] Mark Westguard: 70 degrees, centigrade. What's that about? No, 70 degrees

[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Fahrenheit. I going to say you should melt.

[00:05:13] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Yeah. I'm still, I still mixed between the U S and the UK after 15 years. So yeah, I bet what's that 21 Celsius. So yeah, not too bad

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: here today.

Oh, stop it. 21. Celsius is a fine summer's day in Britain. We can bridge. Yeah, we would be on the beach, but yes, we can have Britain. I have somebody also in the UK with me today oh, look at that. It's two halves. There's the pond. There is the Atlantic ocean right down there. They've got the USA on one half in the United Kingdom on the other it's Ronald, how are you doing rumbled?

I'm

[00:05:48] Ronald Gijsel: good. And I'm even cited from where you are. Cause you're in Yorkshire and I'm in the middle and the console. So just almost.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yes. Yeah. We should probably swap. Yeah. Anyway, but Ronald just simply wanted me to tell you that he was a marketing and partners consultant, the whole thing.

Oh, I'm so sorry. I bet you, I saved over the top of it in which case, Ronald. So as not to spoil it, would you introduce yourself correctly because I've butchered it. Okay.

[00:06:18] Ronald Gijsel: Yeah, so I, I work with companies and I support the Google marketing and various other marketing activities. But also I'm the co-host of the WooCommerce London meetup, as well as a co-host for do the work and do a lot of podcasts together with with pop and other panelists, which is which is a whole other thing as well.

Yeah, and I live in, in, in the UK and and need to call. So it's it's, it's been raining here. Michelle noted earlier that it's green and it's white where she lives.

[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it's cold miserable, but it hasn't yet managed to snow here. We never quite do get over that tripwire. I want it to, if it's going to be this cold and this miserable, it might as well bloomin' snow, but it never seems to.

Anyway, typically the British have started talking about the weather. This Harold's a time to move on. Let's get onto the more important stuff. If you join in a slow leave and you feel like sharing it, then please do. So I think probably the best way to do that would be this one. There's a URL for you.

Share this URL. WP builds.com forward slash. Put us on a different screen for a moment. Open up Twitter, open up Facebook, whatever you like. WP Builds.com forward slash live. The more the merrier. It'd be nice to have a whole bunch of you. If you want to comment Facebook sees fit to hide your avatar and name, unless you click a special link.

If you're watching over on the Facebook side of things and the special link is chat.restream.io forward slash Facebook, it should be buried in the comment right at the top of this video. And if you go and click that, then we can see who you are. Our little work around is just to write your name at the FA in the, the first couple of sentences that you write.

Just say who you are. Otherwise you'll come across as a Facebook user with a default little profile picture, which is no good to anybody. So do that. Nice to have you. If anybody has actually joined us live, looks like they have. Thank you, Jeff, for coming along. Very nice. Good morning, indeed. Indeed. It is.

It's the afternoon at this point, cowbells. Now I don't get this joke. Maybe this is a joke.

[00:08:26] Michelle Frechette: It is well, it's a Twitter thing now. It's not an inside joke, but if you last week, I believe it was Friday. I just sometimes tweet stream of consciousness, which is probably to my detriment. And I just wrote, I want a cow bell.

That is all, and now there are probably 30 different people who have added them to cart on Amazon. And I'm terrified to go to my mailbox over the course of the next week.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to guess that you that you've got the will feral joke posted at you quite a lot.

[00:08:58] Michelle Frechette: I've never owned a cab. It's just looks like fun.

And I was told by several different people, you can read it. It's all on Twitter, but that if I would somehow bring them with me to word camps, then I would be guaranteed to have more. And as most of I use I a mobilized scooter at events like that. I could just do check the mail. Jeff says I could just like, like after somebody has been married, they put like the tin cans and everything behind their car.

I'm just going to announce my presence by dragging cowbells with me wherever.

[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: So here we go. If you want to fill Michelle's life with joy

she doesn't want any cow bells

[00:09:42] Michelle Frechette: donating cow bells to local children's.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Jeff, for making the beginning of the show a little more lighter than all of

[00:09:50] Michelle Frechette: your children.

[00:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: My, a male long car says, hello. I am. How are you doing? Courtney Robinson says happy Monday, indeed. Peter Ingersoll. Good morning from Connecticut USA.

Jeff says he wants to live on boxing of the cupboard. Jeff, keep this calming. This is good. This is going to punctuate the show with so much clarity. Brilliant. One more time, if you fancy sharing the show just before we get started, go to WP bills.com/live, send people there. That's probably the easiest way to do things.

Okay. Let's get stuck into the show properly. WP builds. There's our website. If you fancy subscribing to what we do go and, fill out that blue form thing there. And and you'll be subscribed to us. Alternatively, go to our little subscribed page and over there, you're able to find all the different channels, the YouTube, the Twitter, and what have you.

And there's a couple of forms here to fill out. This one is if you want to be kept up to date with our content and this one here is updating you on any deals that come our way that we hear about bots. Let's get stuck into the WordPress news properly. Firstly, an apology. We've had a few weeks off. Not only did we have the sort of holiday season, but I also, like I said, took last week off.

So if a couple of these news items have crossed your path over the last week, apologies for that. But they're not stale to me, even if they might be with. First thing up really exciting, like genuinely exciting. That sounded like really sarcastic, but it wasn't supposed to, this is this is wordpress.org forward slash patterns.

Let me say that one more time. wordpress.org forward slash patterns. This is the very beginning. Of an exciting project to make patterns much, much easier for you to drop into your WordPress block editor based websites. It's, as you can see, it looks very much like the plugin repo essentially you can filter by category.

You've got the option to look at buttons, columns, featured gallery and so on. You can look at this at your leisure, but it's so simple to use. I really like it dead easy. You simply go to a website, you have a look at it. You decide if it's what you would like to use. You got the option to change the, change the viewport aspect ratio of a little look.

And then if you like the thing that you're looking at, all you do is you click the copy button, just like that. It's now in your clipboard, you head over to the website that you would like it to be in, drop it into a block and click paste. And that's all there is to it. What more is there to say? I just think this is absolutely fabulous.

I'm going to open up the floor to anybody who wants to. I like

[00:12:30] Ronald Gijsel: to log in to collect your favorite. So you can build up your own library of your favorites. Cause I can imagine as it grows, it's going to be quite difficult to search with, especially search with keywords. Something that relates to design must be, the black button is a black button and you probably get a whole lot of black buttons, but when it comes to columns with a funky wavy pattern, it's quite difficult.

It's relatively small the library

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: so far, but okay. I confess, I hadn't seen that. Yeah. So how does that work? Do you know how that works? Do I just simply, so I don't think I'm logged in, cause I'm an in in, on incognito window, have you experienced that, Ronald? Do you just click like a little heart icon and make that your own plugins

[00:13:18] Ronald Gijsel: and things?

I remember haven't done it for a while. Let's say, but yeah, you can add your favorite plugin. So

[00:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: it's easy to. Yeah, I think you made a good point there at the moment. It's very sparse. So for example, if we click over on the buttons patterns, there's only nine columns, 23, the ones that are being featured.

I don't know what the criteria for this is, whether it's popularity or just some person at the directory deciding what's what there's 14 in there, gallery nine header. You get the point where we're well on the sort of the number 50. And I think I'm right in saying mark and Michelle, because you were both at state of the word.

I seem to remember that Matt's ambition is to get this up into that like multiple tens of thousands or something. I think it really

[00:14:04] Mark Westguard: needs to be, to be more useful. It's a great start, but I can imagine the categorization on this is going to become quite extensive. I wonder whether they might introduce patterns that are a little bit more generic.

You know, more of a layout rather than actually having content in there. I think it's nice to have the content so you can see what it looks like. But yeah, I can see this really growing quite extensively. It's a great idea. And if you have a look at it behind the scenes, when you hit copy, it's just copying the Gutenberg mark.

And then when you paste that in, it just makes that part of your Gutenberg content. So it's a, it's a really cool concept the way it works behind the scenes as well.

[00:14:47] Nathan Wrigley: The yeah, unfortunately, because of the nature of the way I've shared on this live stream, I can't actually put any other window apart from Chrome ops.

So I'll take your word for it. If you can copy and paste that into a word document, you're just looking at the Gutenberg markup as you would see it, if you click the, a, the code view on yeah, that's nice. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Michelle, anything on this very exciting moment? I

[00:15:12] Michelle Frechette: love the fact that some of the things that we're doing with like their directory is our pattern directory is our photo directory is things like that are making it more accessible to people who aren't developers aren't in it to learn code.

You know, there are lots of people who are building a website for their own business and, having to learn code, is that something that's in their you know, their ability. So let's say they're, they're a house painter and they want to build a quick website. They have access to tools to be able to make a website that looks fantastic without going to a proprietary website builder like Wix or Squarespace or one of those places.

So they can do all of that with granted. There's some research still involved, but they don't have to dig into code and do things like that. And so I think this is a great way for making the website or making WordPress more accessible to people who are not.

[00:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, my, my initial thoughts are I think the, the way of copying and pasting at the moment, it seems like trivially easy.

It's interesting though, in the comments, Courtney, thank you, Courtney. Robinson has said when 5.9 ships in wild, what is that now? Just over two weeks on the 25th, there's an update coming to partners, permitting folks to submit patterns easily. I'm grabbing a link. So Courtney, perhaps if you could flesh that out over the next couple of minutes, do you mean that we'll be able to create our own patterns and then submit them to the directory via a website that we've already got going perhaps that is what you mean.

Getting back to this page though. I kind of wonder at the moment, because everything is organized by category. I wonder what it'll look like when it's really busy, but you would like to filter by. Essentially something done under the same umbrella. So maybe by the same author or a being a certain pattern or a same width ratio, or I don't really know, but just the idea, for example, if I like this one and I want lots more, which look just like this, but maybe it's floated right.

And not left. And it's got forms that fit with this field. I wonder if that's going to be something this coming down the road

[00:17:21] Mark Westguard: and if they're going to extend this to themes as well. Cause I know that with themes now you can bundle these patterns. With the theme which is gone and kind flow into the next thing.

You're going to show Nathan, but the, I know we've met with the themes. Now you can actually have a pattern library within that. So I wonder if they've expanded out to themes and you've got to see with all the multiple parts within it that you can download separately.

[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not sure. No, I don't know. But curious to think that once upon a time, the plug-in directory.

Had these kinds of numbers as well. If imagine rewind, God knows. Probably like 14 years or something like that, there was the plugin directory and it had 25 plugins and it fast forward to today, however many tens of thousands there are now it's a huge number. I'm imagining that give this the space of one year.

This will look remarkably different. And like you say, mark searching and filtering is going to become a really important part of it. A few comments that have come in from this seems to be a question coming in from Jeff. He's saying, can the partner directory only go as far as how creative you can be with core blocks?

I don't know if that's a question or not, but thank you. Copy and pasting a block partners pretty danced. And I was like, yeah, it is. Isn't it. I was thinking that myself, just copy it, go somewhere else, paste it in. It doesn't get much easier than that. And. Jeff also says he'd liked to search for a resume, a block pattern, which doesn't exist at the moment.

I'll the idea for anybody that wants to make it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, those are the sorts of things that I think will be quite useful for filtering in the future. A whole suite of resume a ones I don't know, four months and so on and so forth. Let's see what time brings. Thank you. Okay.

So that's the wordpress.org take on things and obviously it's patterns. So in theory, you can drop them wherever you've got a WordPress install, just moving along slightly. This, I think crop top before Christmas, but like I said, first time we'd done one of these shows. Oh, I should probably go back.

This is at themes dot Gutenberg. Dot com let me say that one more time. Themes dot Guttenberg hub.com. And this my point of contact with this was Manir Kamala. I don't know if he, individually singularly is responsible for this, or if it's a team effort, I know that he works with extended five, but I don't know if it's under that umbrella, but it's his Guttenberg hub project.

And he's now got a theme directory, which I find quite curious, obviously we've got the wordpress.org thing directory, but this is ones which work particularly well with Gutenberg at the moment, it looks like we've got about what's that 12 per page. And it looks like we got three pages currently. So just, just over 30, something like that, it's quite a nice process as well.

You go Kubrick, you look at that. You go to you, you just pick one by the thumbnail that you like, the look of. If you want some more information about it you click on it. You can then. Click on a preview on something just like the customizer pops up, where you can see what all of the different elements of this might look like.

If you want to see a little bit more, you can take a look at some of the different kinds of pages. Like how might an about us page look and how might a sub page looks. And then if you want to see what all of the, the H one through H six and blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of stuff, you can you can do that as well.

And like I say, there's about 30 of these at the moment. When you have decided which one you want, you simply go to the download button and you download a zip file and presumably go to your WordPress install and update it. I just thought this was like I say, it's a little bit old. This news may have reached you by now already, but I just thought this was well worth mentioning because it's a lovely little project.

Anybody else want to jump in? I

[00:21:05] Mark Westguard: installed one of these last night just to have a look at it. They're great quality, little themes. And these are themes that have the Gutenberg patterns built into them. So they have like various header blocks, various for the blocks patterns. And you can just drag and drop into Gutenberg and have a play around with them, but a really nicely put

[00:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: together.

Yeah just really nice sort of community endeavor. Just lovely. Michelle or Ronald, anything on this,

[00:21:39] Ronald Gijsel: it reminds me,

[00:21:43] Michelle Frechette: it reminds me of what a lot of different page builders are doing. You know, with cadence, theme and cadence blocks, we are doing a lot of those kinds of starters themes as well.

That work really well to get things up and running. And I'm, as I'm building things myself, I'm constantly like feeding into Ben writer's ear. Ooh, we should have a starter theme that does this, and we should have a starter thing that does that. This is doing that for Gutenberg for for the map.

[00:22:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Ronald.

[00:22:13] Ronald Gijsel: I think it's great to see the design initial design, but I think the issue sometimes can come in when you add functionality, if you know, simple, simply installed WooCommerce or some other plugins, how does that play? How does that work? And that's very often where the frustration starts because you know, if a simple block and you add one or two plugins, that's fine.

It probably works lovely. But I think more functionality on top of functionality, whether it's a marketplace or a form builder and things don't really quite align as you would like it to that's when you get frustrated and then kick it out, try something else that doesn't work. And, you go into this panic mode of trying different themes.

Patterns into one. So I don't know what the answer is, but it's it's nice to play with and I hope that people leave feedback and say, just work beautifully with so I'll give you plug Ws home, for example this works very well together you know, that's a good stack. That's a good good solution solution.

If you want to the X, Y, Z.

[00:23:24] Mark Westguard: Yeah. The one that I tried did have WooCommerce elements to it, which was nice to see. So it did have a product layout in there. So they were pretty, the one I tried and I'm not sure if all of them are like that, but the one I tried, they did seem like they'd done quite a bit of work on it, which was good to see.

[00:23:46] Ronald Gijsel: It's a bit of a misnomer, isn't it. To have more commercial.

[00:23:51] Mark Westguard: Yeah, everything I see that comes out, everyone's okay, what does it, what we call most it's, it's an essential nowadays, so it's nice to see that they had done that on some of these

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: look at up beauty. Remember the day, how is it?

Do remember the day of. That's cool. Who knows,

who knows where money is going with this? I don't know if this is a philanthropic effort or if he's got designs on perhaps making their paid add-ons or something in the future, but for now a remarkable effort and definitely worth checking out themes.gutenberg.com. And just to your point, Michelle, about the bits and pieces being added to cadence, Rob, hello, Rob, happy with us.

Once again, he's making the point that he's enjoying his experience with cadence. He says he loves cadence. Michelle.

[00:24:45] Michelle Frechette: I just built my first site with cadence recently. I'm I was, it was great. So I haven't been using link tree. Are you familiar with link tree? I know. Okay. So lake tree is something that a lot of people in social media use to point you to all the different things that.

You know, you can go to here's my fundraiser for this. Here's my main website. Here's my social media links, et cetera. But the link that I put in my bio here, which is meet michelle.online, operates very much like that, but I get all the traffic instead of sending my traffic to something like link tree.

So I'm, so I did that. I'll use in cadence,

[00:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: the cadence and painless learning experience. I

[00:25:25] Michelle Frechette: think I, I executed that site within about 40 minutes, total.

[00:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's nice.

[00:25:32] Michelle Frechette: It is a one pager, one of the nice things about it too, when you're building your own site, right? So you're whether you're using cadence, you're using Gutenberg, whatever you're using, you have the ability to add things that all of these other third parties don't have.

So if you look at the site that I built, which I'm not saying that you should necessarily do that at the moment, but I've actually added a form to the site. So if somebody wants to be in contact with me, I'm not sending them off site to yet another website. Do a quick contact. I use Ws forum and then better they're right on that page.

[00:26:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And all the love today, markets. Yeah, that's great.

that's a secret. Jeff. See Jeff, what a deluge of comments. Thank you so much. He says he finds it interesting how individuals can create these new thing, directories concepts, but to apply their ideas to the official theme directory requires going against a good bit for actually, yeah. Good points. I wonder if my money or actually just thought it was easier to put 36 themes together on his own site than it would have been to try and.

36 independent themes to the plug-in directly. Yeah. That's that is a good point on one wanders. Okay. Let's change direction completely. I just wanted to give a hat tip to a live event, which is coming up. I should probably just share my screen again. Here we go. This is the, the body.works site. If you're interested in JAMstack and all that goodness.

Then there is a webinar actually starting not long after this particular episode of the podcast finishes, if you're watching this live. So it's oh no, I am completely wrong. It was on it's on January the 12th. Yeah. Apologies for some reason in my own head, I had this coming out today, so there's much more time.

Don't panic. This is a. A webinar called a crash course in jump stack with headless WP, Astro, and body. So the correct dates and times are actually the 12th of January at 5:00 PM. UTC, I'm going to drop the link into the show notes. You probably can't see it if you're watching this live, but if you come, it's just there.

Let me see if I can, not that as a caption, it would go, right? Let's put that one on. Then there you go. That's the that's the URL that you're going to need. I'll leave that on the screen for a couple of moments, but basically it's for WordPress developers, jump stack developers and product owners. If you want to demystify this Daniel Olson.

And I, I never know how to, I think it's much. Yeah. I don't know why I can't get that in my head. I had to phonetically write it down when I was doing the podcast with him. And they're going to be doing that this coming Wednesday. So if that kind of topic interests, you check out the URL on the page.

I'll put it in the show notes. Okay. Nothing more to add to that, but this was a piece of news that took me by surprise. I did not see this calming bit of stale news. Apologies, because this has been out for a little while now, but nevertheless yes. It's coming to Shopify. Didn't see that comment.

Obviously everybody knows of Yoast. You've probably got Yoast tucked away on one or two websites of your own. The brilliant plugin that helps you manage all of your SEO goodness. On your WordPress websites. They've got a bit of a pivot going on as always is the case with these things.

They make great. They go to great pains to, to make the. The WordPress stuff is not going away. This is a bit of a bolt on a new edition. I don't know if they've hired extra people to make this work, or if they've just got this as a bit of a side project, but they're coming to coming to Shopify to make your Shopify website or web store a little bit more SEO friendly.

And it's called an app. It's not a plugin on the Shopify side of things. My, my thoughts on this are why not, but also if I was a Yoast SEO customer I would be, I guess I would be wanting to know where the, sort of the hours of development are going to go in the future and whether or not they have got a new hire.

And what have you Ronald is steeped in woo commerce side of things. So I don't know if you've got any thoughts on this.

[00:29:43] Ronald Gijsel: My first thought was because did they not add a CEO to Drupal in the past? So it seemed, makes sense. You pivot to other platforms as well. I think it's a good move because, if you have the code, if you have the, that the subheading is SEO for everyone.

So why not for outside of WordPress, in terms of plugins, pivoting into other commercial, hosted platforms, I think from a business owner's perspective, it makes sense because you upcycle a lot of the same potent and functionality and instantly generate a new revenue stream. So I think there there is, there is a good reason for it.

I think WordPress people are very proud of that WordPress ecosystem. So some might take a little offense by it. But then again, if revenue gets poured into open source, then you know, maybe it's. I'm on the fence on this one. But I think from a business perspective, it's it makes sense.

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it's gone off the tip of my tongue who bought Yext about six months ago, who was that last new phone?

That was it was new fold wasn't there. And there was some concern around that. And I wonder if this is a new project we hopefully will be having taco from Yoast on the show, in the very near future. And so maybe if we squirrel this piece of news away, because it's actually unavailable at the moment, even if you've been watching this and you've got a Shopify site, there's not a lot you can do with it.

It's just news at the moment, it looks like on the 18th of January, as it says on the screen, it's actually going to be coming. I presume they've got some sort of app store on the Shopify side of things, and you're gonna be able to install that after the 18th, to be quite interesting to see what the UI looks like and what can, Conception they've got of that compared to the WordPress side of things.

But I guess if the pie is bigger and yolks to gets better as a result, one thing that occurred to me was that Yoast, according to the state of the word address from mats, which happened and both mark and Michelle were present, I remember at some point during that presentation, he actually put a slide up showing the amount of contributions that come from word sorry, from Yoast.

And aside from automatic yolks are actually in second place in the amount of hours. People, don't know what the exact number was, but Yoast came in second place. And so the strengths of Yoast as a company is directly related to the WordPress project moving forward. So if their coffers get swelled by this and they decide to put some of that back into WordPress, all the better.

I

[00:32:36] Michelle Frechette: remember that it's state of the word. Matt also talked about Gutenberg being something that will expand beyond WordPress as well. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that other businesses are building products that expand beyond WordPress. So we also, there are, I can't think off the top of my head, but there are definitely WordPress plugins that also have SAS versions.

There are, there are themes that and things that are components that we use outside of WordPress already. So the growth beyond WordPress of some of the bigger companies, should that be a surprise to any of

[00:33:06] Mark Westguard: us, and Shopify, they've got what close to 2 million stores. It's a no brainer NGOs to do that.

And I know that Shopify, when you apply to become a Shopify app or a certain category, That you can and cannot join right now. Like we tried on the form front just to see if that was a possibility for WSB, because we're mainly a big kind of JavaScript front end that we could apply to other platforms, but they weren't accepting full plugin.

Applications at the time, but I think it would work great with Shopify. Just, I've built a few Shopify sites myself and I think it would be relatively easy for people to implement into manage. So I think it's a good move for Yoast.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting as well. I think at this point, there'll be thinking, oh, we're so glad we didn't call ourselves WP Yost.

Just no rebrand needed to just, and just carry on as normal. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting news, maybe at some point, like we say, tackle will come on and with that Jeff yet again, Jeff, thank you. He's making the point that apparently they did. You're quite right. Make a plugin back in 2015 Drupal's market share, I think shrinking, suddenly for that project since well, since the last few years, but taco did apparently mentioned on the WP, the Friday WP Hangouts that they're going to have a Yoast merchant store built on Shopify.

So there you go. Okay. Let's move on. This is Joe Casper. Joe Casabona I love this piece. I really liked Joe as a, as an individual, as a podcast comes on the show quite a lot on offers, lots and lots of value. And he was, he was he was a bit of a quid pro quo in a way, because he was very kind about.

It's a WP Builds podcast and something that he wrote recently. So I'm most grateful to him. He did a really nice piece. It's called the 20, 22, the year of retreat. And I will not go through all of it, but it's quite an introspective piece where Joe picks apart his own year and berates himself for some of the things that he believes he didn't handle as well as he would have liked, things like, he talks about the fact that at the start of the year, he wanted to spend less time on his phone and he believes that he failed on that journey and various other things, but then it ends with a on a sort of more positive note, worry outlines is if you like a bit like new year's resolutions, the thing that he's going to do in the future.

And it essentially, it involves this idea of essential ism, just stripping away all of the bits and pieces, the things that he's repeating too much. Like he, he says that he's been doing. Too many pieces of content each and every week. And so he's going to strip that down, concentrate on all the things which are going to benefit him in his business and so on.

And so I'm going to spring this on you three. Have you guys got any new year's resolutions? It doesn't have to be related to tech mine. Funnily enough is very similar to Joe's. I am going to try really hard this year to, to think very carefully, much more carefully than I have done in the past about what I do and try to manage my time a little bit better.

I'm going to really try during the course of this year to, to become a bit of a nine to five. Obviously you being self-employed that leaks in that bucket is just full of holes. And it many is the day that I get to 10 o'clock at night and I'm still subtle to this computer for really no good reason on the other than that.

I was ill disciplined earlier in the week. And so my resolution is basically to go nine to five and try and constrain myself in that way. So can we do a little bit of a round Robin, maybe if we start with let's go round mark then Michelle then Ronald, if you've got anything to add any resolutions for this year yeah, I think

[00:37:01] Mark Westguard: I'm almost in the same boat as yourself and Joe in that I've realized that last year I was incredibly stressed with work doing too many things at once and working too late and in all honesty neglecting my family more than I should be.

So I've got two young children who were about to turn 10, 13 important times for their lives. And I want to spend more time doing things with them and my wife as well. Yeah, I think it's time to, and the way I'm envisaging tackling that is just by removing some stuff from my life that is superfluous and not really necessary.

And focusing on the things that I enjoy doing and make me feel good. This is going to take a bit of work to make that transition happen because I'm juggling quite a bit at the moment with the Ws and my agency. But it's the direction I'm going in is to just make life a bit easier and really doing it for my own mental health.

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. One of the best things about being a freelancer is you don't have a boss. And one of the worst things about being a freelancer is you don't have a boat and everything just leaks in every direction. Doesn't it? Sorry, just keep me in check.

Okay.

You concentrate on yourself now, Michelle, tell us, have you got any thoughts on this?

[00:38:34] Michelle Frechette: I have two goals and I have a resolution for the year. So my, my one goal is to publish a calendar for 2023 with a friend of mine, of my photography on her. For for next year. My second goal is to publish a book this year.

That is a complimentary piece to the other books that I've written more of a journal for entrepreneurs and small business owners to move themselves forward in business. And then the resolution is I have resolved not to buy any URLs that I can't use within one week. If I can't use it, if I can't develop it or at least begin to develop it within a week, as in I purchase it for a specific goal, I'm not allowed to purchase it.

I can, however. Tell other people how wonderful an idea it is and get them to buy it instead. But I can't purchase it myself.

[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: That's a nice idea. I love the idea of a collaborative calendar, especially, that's nice. I think collaborating is a great way to lock in the fact that you're going to do something I find I'm far more likely if I've committed to somebody else to get, to see something over the finish line than I am.

If I just say it to myself once or twice. Yeah.

[00:39:45] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And I had somebody say nobody buys calendars anymore. I'm like you're 28 years old. No you don't. But

[00:39:53] Nathan Wrigley: I buy calendars. Yeah. I think as soon as you've got, as soon as you've got children, I couldn't manage with our calendar. We've got every bit of screed on the wall about what they're all up to.

And if it was on electronic calendars, nobody, we dropped the ball so much. What about you, Ronald?

[00:40:09] Ronald Gijsel: However, every year we do, we did with the family. So we all get a little card and we write down what we want to do. Go a place, learn a skill. And then also we'll be on from each other. So the kids write what they want from me.

And so last year was D didn't happen last year. So I want to carry on what we've started last year, which was work towards the four day week and have a bit more quality time, whether it is it's my wife or with the children. So I've failed this year to do that. But hopefully now with a change of you know, contracts, I can work towards that.

But the other thing is just more quality time. I've got also kids, nine and 12. So I'm planning a two week sailing trip in the Mediterranean around Easter is a big part of that just to build these advantages together because that's what the children want. That's what they remember from the last few years.

You know, stuff look let's focus on these key moments that truly are

[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: memorable.

Yeah, you can check. We had a black

[00:41:22] Ronald Gijsel: Friday deal on a charter and it's a massive catamaran with four double bedrooms and it's only the four of us.

[00:41:29] Nathan Wrigley: So they do black colored black Friday deals on boats.

Oh, that's

[00:41:36] Ronald Gijsel: great.

[00:41:39] Nathan Wrigley: I will leave you in peace. You don't need me destroying your holiday. Oh, how lovely though. Everybody's got something going on. I thought like new year's resolutions and all that was maybe a bit of a dying thing, but apparently not. But thank you, Joe. Casabona for inspiring that idea, this basics.

[00:41:55] Ronald Gijsel: We share the

[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: link and yeah,

[00:42:00] Ronald Gijsel: there are a lot of business owners that's come up with. Beginning of the year reflection of last year. And I love reading them. I think that, the more honestly the more

[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: admiration I have. Yeah. And what I is you just got a little bit of a window into somebody's life and in this case it may be that they've had a fabulous year and you get the impression that everything's gone.

But in this case, Joe was very open about, the sort of vulnerabilities in his year, last year. And I, I like. When people are able to display their vulnerabilities as well. So to Joe. Very cool. Something else. That's cool. This came across my car. I don't even know where I saw this, but if you are, if you're making your WordPress websites and you let's say that you've been in the game for a while, and you know that there's a database, but you don't like to interact with the database or anything like that, then this might be of interest to you.

This is Jeff star. He's got a company and I don't know how many publications he's got, but he keeps linking back to perishable press. I presume that's him. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but he's got this fabulous new ebook. I believe, I think it's a PDF download. I'm guessing. I don't know if there's a paper version, paper would be hard because of the nature of what it is, but it's called wizards collection.

It's called SQL recipes for WordPress, and it's trying to bridge the gap between no code and hardcore developer is trying to give you some simple recipes for things that you might like to achieve by doing SQL. And I think really the point isn't to necessarily make you into a brilliant SQL developer.

The, I think the idea here really is that you just wet your appetite. Shows you that certain things are really possible gives you repeatable content that you can do. And, and from everybody that I know who's bought it, I know David Walmsley, who does the podcast with me on a Thursday. He bought it and he really raved about it.

There's 300 SQL recipes. It's all syntax highlighted. I'm guessing if it's a PDF, it will be copy paste stubble. Oh yeah, there you go. Copy paste code. I'm available. You can get it in an ebook or PDF 10 chapters, 200 pages, loads of notes and tips. And I just thought this was a really cool idea. We're going to talk a bit more about no code in a moment, but I avoid this sort of stuff nowadays.

Pretty much everything that I do these days is to, is through a plugin or a theme. And and I feel like this might be a really good purchase for me to get my interest. I just noticed that last

[00:44:32] Ronald Gijsel: bullet point of a lifetime three book ebook update. So that's a nice

[00:44:39] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Lifetime licenses. So it's free updates.

Yeah. I guess if it's a PDF, there's not a great burden if he does. So the nice thing about this is not a lot is going to change. Is it, once you've, it'd be very surprised if the if the book changed massively over the next few years, but yeah, that is really nice. I think 40 bucks is the price and it says, save $10 across the top here.

I don't know how long this code is going to last. I've actually only just seen it. You can use the code wizard 2022. And in fact, that's $30 as it stands at the moment by the sounds of it. What a great idea. I love this. I think

[00:45:13] Mark Westguard: it's a, I think I have a folder on my computer with sequel little bits of sequel that I use for WordPress.

So I think this is a fantastic, and one of the things I liked in particular, I'm going to buy this. They have a section on optimizing sequel for WordPress, as far as I'm aware. What's really interesting is I was working with a pretty big client of mine and we moved their hosting for one hosting provider to another.

And we had consultant working with us on it. And he had a bunch of sequel that he ran on WordPress, which was indexing and other things like that. That really improved the performance of the site, things that you would hope would perhaps already be in WordPress. But for a larger scale website will be really helpful and I believe they have an entire chapter on or a section on optimizing WordPress, so that.

It was interesting to see, but I think this is be a great resource for a lot of developers to have up their sleeves.

[00:46:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I'm just showing the demo. At the moment there's a free to view kind of list of the table of contents. Welcome section. There's a there's an overview of how SQL works.

Then there's, there's some recipes for, so chapter three goes into WP posts and pages. So it's things like finding any string and a post content. Find all the password protected posts, replace any string in the post content. Then it moves on to post meta WordPress comments, WordPress users, taxonomies options and then a whole bunch more recipes at the end.

Yeah, you're right. Look, there you go. Chapter 10, optimizing. WordPress replace weird characters in the post content remove on wanted shortcodes from the post content, delete revision posts and related metadata. Yeah, that's actually a really good one that will probably free up a lot of space on a lot of websites find and delete posted.

That's an excess, I could go on a we're on 209 is the, is the number of pages it looks like, and it looks like each one of those is bound to its own page as 209. At least I think it said 300 on the posting, right at the

[00:47:29] Mark Westguard: beginning of the book. It very importantly says backup your database before

[00:47:34] Nathan Wrigley: you try any of this.

Jeff. Awesome. I'm going to call him awesome. Jeff, from now on, he said, he reminded me about Jeff Star's project back in the day with Chris COIA. Can you remember this? He had a book called digging into WordPress back in 2011. I actually am a proud owner of that. And I think if memory serves whether or not that book is still under review or revision, I don't know, but it was the same deal.

You got a lifetime deal. So if you bought it once, you've got it forever. And and I've still got it. So yes. Thank you, Jeff. For Roman.

[00:48:11] Ronald Gijsel: I thought about it and I'm totally sold out from the applicant to buy it because it was just one of those libraries, which is just so super useful. Yeah.

[00:48:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 30 bucks from a bonafide good source of information.

Jeff star, certainly as well as following on, I follow him on Facebook, but I don't know if he's on Twitter or anything, but I follow his posts on Facebook. So I imagine that's where this dropped into my life. Although it might've been David Walmsley the website, I'll just give you the URL. It's books, dots, perishable, press.com.

And then presumably if you go searching for things you'll find it. There's a shop books here, but you're looking for the wizards collection, SQL or web recipes for WordPress. And it's looks like it's black and white brilliant stuff, right? In very much the same vein. I'll just hide Jeff's comment.

And I'll just put pizza's comment on very quickly. He was saying, we're going back to the conversation now about, decluttering yellow. Joe, Casabona his piece. He's saying he's got quite a few registered domains hanging over his head. So he's going to turn off water a new for those. And let me, let them out the wild, let them be free.

I

[00:49:22] Michelle Frechette: did that last fall and it was very freeing to do it. And then when I see the expire, I have a little twinge of, oh, what could have been,

[00:49:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Michelle, are you like me then? Do you have an idea? That probably in my case probably will never come to fruition, but you have this kernel of an idea and then you immediately go out and buy the most suitable domain name, nothing happens.

And yet you still hold on for a little, two or three years in case that seed germinates. And it never does

[00:49:51] Michelle Frechette: thing. Let's just say the WP cat lady.com.

[00:50:03] Nathan Wrigley: Let it go. Oh no, go and get that one back.

So you

[00:50:12] Ronald Gijsel: can see some trading side, the theme, WordPress people, they just

[00:50:17] Nathan Wrigley: run the show. I'm imagining that URL was. Actual cats, but instantly I have pictures of like superheroes in my head,

[00:50:26] Mark Westguard: that's brilliant.

[00:50:28] Michelle Frechette: And I, I'm a single woman. And so I thought the only people that really get me are WordPress people because I spent so much time in WordPress.

So I had registered WP, coupa.com as well, but I don't know how to build a dating site. So that one also. I'm back into general. If you have any, I will be your first customer. If you go out and buy that domain, I promise. But I did. Sadly, let it go.

[00:50:53] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. And Rob, Rob says he's 20 go this holiday season.

Yeah, I must admit I purged mine probably about a year ago. I don't think I had hundreds. I probably had a half a dozen or something, but

[00:51:07] Michelle Frechette: no, but I had hundreds of dollars that I was spending over the course of a year and that doesn't make any sense.

[00:51:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, doke. Let's move on. So again, sorry, in the theme that we were just talking about a moment ago with Jeff styles book, trying to encourage you to upskill a little bit.

We have a really interesting piece. I don't think I've ever linked to a LinkedIn piece before LinkedIn to me is. Walled garden where you've got a login, but seemingly not. They allow you to publish things as well. This is Aneal dash, who is the CEO of glitch. I confess, I don't know what glitches, maybe it's dead famous and I've just never heard of it.

Really interesting piece. I don't know where we'll sit on this. I know mark. I know your credentials here and you can take it from one side and I don't know what Ronald and Michelle have to say about this, but his point is that maybe we've over the last decade or so perhaps a little bit less people building words, WordPress websites, any website.

Specifically talking about WordPress, we've been encouraged to go down this no-code route where we are given a UI, the UI so beautifully, thought out that we really don't need to understand any code to make a really decent attempt to our website. In fact, to the point now where I would really say that no code websites are every bit as good as websites, which are custom coded.

Anyway, with that being said, his point is actually, can we just put the brakes on, pump the brakes and put us in reverse a little bit? Wouldn't it be nice if people who are curious about building websites? So AKA me. Panelists here. And if we up-skilled a little bit now, I don't think he's trying to paint the picture that we all need to go back to university and get a degree in computer engineering.

I think he's basically saying if you're curious about this stuff, rather than perhaps going and finding a plugin, why not see if there is, if it's a simple problem, why not see if you can figure out a way to make it your own Kodak, get a little bit of help, figure it out. Perhaps you could even then open source that.

And I just found this really curious. And the reason I find it curious is because there's a, I think a bit of a groundswell of this happening at the moment. There's a lot of people that I know who are at the point now where they've been using these no code solutions for the longest time. And. How to describe it, perhaps the enjoyment of it has disappeared.

They, they started at the same time as I did where you have to literally write out the HTML, had to learn a bit of PHP. These tools came along, you decided to step off the PHP train or the JavaScript train and make it easy for yourself. But maybe there's a bit of fun to be had in learning it again.

And maybe mark, I'll just throw it over to you. Do you love this sort of stuff? Do you enjoy coding and getting into the nitty-gritty and all of that? Does it give you a sense of satisfaction?

[00:53:55] Mark Westguard: It's my hobby. I've been doing it since I was five years old. One of the spectrum, 48 K users and, and used to write code, then I think what I've seen, having run an agency for the.

26 years. We've gone from the days of writing machine code, low level code to higher level languages, Java script to now this whole no code environment. And it's really just been a natural evolution of trying to make using a computer easier and easier to use for people. And, and I've seen that affect my industry.

20 odd years ago, when I was building websites, we had to write everything from scratch. We didn't have WordPress, we didn't have all these content management systems. In fact I wrote one of the first content management systems and I wrote it for Sony back in 1999, because there was nothing out there to enable their staff to be able to maintain the products on their website.

So we actually had to write that from ground up. But nowadays. For me to build a website for somebody, the likes of wicks, the likes of, even WordPress has made that easier for people obviously to build websites. There's just been a natural evolution for the industry. I think it has had a positive effect in terms of enabling more people to join the space and to be able to build content online and publish content.

We use a lot of no code in Ws form just because we want developers to be able to build complex forms quickly, and not have to re regenerate that code every time, not have to reinvent the wheel. But I still love getting my hands dirty with code. I, when, when I build a site for.

Clients or we use as few or plugins as I possibly can. And I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and write a new form because there are plenty of full plugins out there. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and build an e-commerce platform because there's an e-commerce plugin that does that. But there's a piece of functionality that our customer needs are generally try to code that because it will be more efficient.

I won't have a huge library there just for a very small piece of code that will be on the page. And I think it is good for people to learn how to go. But I think, reading this article I'm not really aware of who glitch are. I had a quick look at their website and it seems to be like a programming community.

So no code is probably effecting. Industry because less and less people are doing code in because you've got these notecard environments out there. But I don't think in any way, no code software is stopping people from coding. If they want to code. I think there's a, such a rich library of information out there.

Tutorials that goodness knows what else online to encourage people to program. There are so many great products for children about how to program. I've tried it with my children, have a, have a go at coding. So I don't think no code has prevented people from doing that. I, you know, if anything, I think it's just increase in productivity and make him using the web a easier.

It's just been the next natural evolution in in online and program and in general,

[00:57:27] Ronald Gijsel: It's nice that you're able to open the the bullet, and see what the code is like. And if you're curious and you want to dive a little bit deeper, that you can play with it and add something or take something away.

And that then evolves into doing a lot more. And then mark is saying, like the replacing a bit with a bit of code. And I think that's a really good way to introduce people to code because it doesn't stop you from creating the website or the business website that you want to create. But it does allow you to customize things.

If you really wanting, if you are eager to do that,

[00:58:12] Mark Westguard: Plus sides to WordPress is it's open source. All the plugins are open source. You can go into any plugin and have a look at how it's been built. Some of the other platforms, like, like the Wix is and the Shopify, you can't really see that code behind the scenes, but with WordPress, if you are curious, you can go in there, have a look and see how they've done it and learn you know, what's under the hood as well of the test.

[00:58:39] Nathan Wrigley: Anything to that, Michelle,

[00:58:42] Michelle Frechette: I only learn code number one that I need to, or number two that I have interest in because I'm not my, that's what I wrote. I wrote a whole article about why I decided to. Develop my little plugin that's in the repo, because I just wanted to understand better about what happens with coding and with development and what it takes to put something into their pository and all of that in a presentation, last month at WordCamp Taiwan about that whole adventure of mine.

Only to discover that I probably will just stick with the little CSS tricks that I need and continue to use a lot of no-code because that's my level of wanting to be involved in needing to be involved. And then when I need other things, I just have so many people at disposal to, to get help from or to hire and, so it's just, I think it's a great idea.

I also think it just. Obviously I'm not his audience necessarily, and, and people like the painter I talked about before the house painter is not his audience. It really depends on who you are and where you sit as to whether this makes a lot of sense for you.

[00:59:50] Nathan Wrigley: It was really interesting in the UK, we call the first set of schools that you go through primary schools and the primary schools.

When I went to school, there was this BBC computer. Every school had this BBC computer and it basically sat in a cupboard because all the teachers were afraid of it because it was very expensive and it was likely to go wrong and nobody was trained. And so it never got used. However, if you were lucky enough to be at a school where there was a teacher who did get it out of the cupboard and use it, it would appear that it launched a lot of careers.

It was a very groundbreaking machine that was widely available. And it just sparked that sense of curiosity in children fast forward, sort of 15 years, where Microsoft had come along, the whole primary curriculum had changed to the point where they were now being. Never ever how to code anything there we're being taught how to consume Microsoft products.

Largely it was how to use a spreadsheet, how to use words, just introducing them into the menu options really, and how you might put a tiny little bit of a macro into a cell on a spreadsheet or something. And then I. I don't know about eight or nine years ago, this little raspberry PI computer came along, which seems to have sparked the interest again.

And now the it's flipped right back to where children of a very early age of being taught, how to code, with simple little tasks to begin with often driven with kind of like fun cartoon apps on mobile platforms, but it gets increasingly more difficult. I would imagine there is a groundswell of kids who are about the age of coming out of school fairly soon, who are gonna blow us away with what's possible.

They're just at that point where they're, 16, 17 heading to university, they've been taught how to do this stuff. And I think we're on the cusp of something really cool. Yeah. A lot, a

[01:01:42] Mark Westguard: lot of those educational programming products that I've seen are still quite high level though. Kind drag and drop conditional.

You know, that the ones that I've seen with my children anyway, don't have a lot of, hands on coding on them. There's a lot of direct this from here to here and do conditional logic using a user interface, and it's still doing the coding for the behind the scenes. But I agree with you that the raspberry PI thing has been popular.

It's basically a little Linux computer that you can do pretty much anything with. And I think all these products are great for teaching K we, we need programmers for the future. That's for sure. To, to keep, keep the no-code

[01:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: alive. That's the interesting point, right? If you're using WordPress and it does what you need.

I wonder if there's a whole bunch of people for whom it just works. And they're not that they don't need to know the current, but given. The given the opportunity to learn the code, they would welcome it and they would enjoy it and they would thrive on it, but because it all just works and it ties together and nothing breaks.

Most of the time, they don't even realize that there's a that's fun to be had in there. So anyway, really curious idea. It was Anelle dash over at LinkedIn. I will obviously post the link in the show notes. Ronald has just nipped out for a couple of minutes. He says, I'll be back in a moment, but I'll just put Rob Cairns.

Interesting comment, Rob saying, he's actually got a programming background and he now prefers the no code. He thinks it's a good idea for everyone to learn coding. So you understand how computers work and that, that is the endeavor in the UK, at least anywhere. I think the government have decided that coding as a, as an industry.

Is a very valuable one. And it was one that was being basically missed out upon. So in the UK, at least anyway, that's become a bit of a priority. And Ronald Ronald's back. Hello, Ronald. Welcome back. We're we're just going to press on actually, cause we're running short time, got about another 20 minutes or so left.

Can I called Kevin quirk, who is in the UK. I just thought I'd raise. This is a really interesting go to simple css.org. Kev is a cybersecurity expert. I hope I've got that right, Kevin, if you're watching and but he just, he tucked fiddles with all sorts of web technologies in his spare time.

And it's obviously got a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the bloat as he describes it of big CSS libraries. So he's decided to reign one in himself, and this is just really for those people out there who like lean simple websites, he's got simple css.org. The whole thing comes in at a whopping four kilobytes.

Don't get me wrong. It's not going to do all the things as he says that bootstrap does, but it does basically everything you'd want to do. If you've got a simple. Largely simple text-based websites with, I don't know, you might want a block quote or you might want some headings and some paragraphs and various other basic things, but really this is me.

Just hat tip to calve. Thank you for doing this. I just think this is really cool. It could easily be used in your WordPress website and it literally comes in at 4k. Nicely done.

Mark. Yeah, I

[01:05:13] Mark Westguard: like this. It's we were talking about people learning how to code. This is actually a nice little simple CSS,

[01:05:20] Nathan Wrigley: like segue that very well did I should have,

[01:05:23] Mark Westguard: Yeah. As an afterthought, it is actually quite a nice transition because this is a class list framework. So there are no classes you have to use in your code in order to start anything.

He's basically styling all of the core HTML. Elements such as a header for two UL block quotes figures and things like that. Just the nice little library to get you started really. And obviously CSS being cascading style sheets. You can cascade your own styles on top of this to make it look how you want.

So

[01:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: really nice. Just nice and clean. Yeah. And anybody that writes spoiler alert in an accordion that opens up to say, you smell gets my vote.

[01:06:10] Michelle Frechette: I get to do is look a little further down. You could see what it was, but yes. Yes,

[01:06:14] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. That's right. Just really nice little project. So hat tip Kevin he's, he's made some comments in the past. Infrequently communicate on mustard it's really nice. Really like it. Okay. Just moving on.

I just found this quite curious. This is patched stack WordPress. Largely WordPress. It's a firewall, it's a plugin for WordPress they're security related. They got this new idea in the most recent version of the plugin. It's absurd, it's security through obscurity, which isn't always the best way of doing things.

In other words, holding your WP login page is not going to keep people out if they really know what they're doing, but they've got this interesting notion. They've come up with a, an idea of security through obscurity and it works like this. You go to a predetermined URL, which is now your unique login page.

If you visit that URL, presumably it's some garbage, just pseudo random noise. Then your IP address will be white listed for 10 minutes. As able to log in. So in other words, if you never disclosed that quirky URL, hopefully nobody will ever get hold of it. Hopefully it'll never be discovered. And it just adds a tiny little bit.

I just thought it was interesting.

[01:07:33] Mark Westguard: Yeah I, I always recommend to our clients that we just completely IP block the login for WordPress, but for a lot of people that can be a little bit technical to do. We usually do that on front end with something like CloudFlare or a firewall, but this is a nice alternative solution to that gives you that temporary logging URL.

I'm curious to know how you get. URL the URL with an email.

[01:08:02] Nathan Wrigley: But yeah, I'm wondering if it's part of the plugin in the backend. I'm imagining there's a string, which is revealed to you somewhere maybe early. No. If all of a SIL is listening or doesn't Phat, listen, let us know. But all it says is access to the WP login dot PHP is completely blocked and not hidden.

The only way to access the login pages to access a secret link after which the IP address is white listed, you will then be allowed to access the login page to log in. So you got 10 minutes basically to get it right. And if you lose that unique URL, maybe you're toast. I don't presumably you can go and install a patch stack with F SFTP or something like that.

But anyway, there you go. Just put it to them for something a bit different and offer. I've never used this. This feels like a Ronald's territory. Again, I don't really know. It's a thing called WP funnels is on AppSumo caveat emptor or you know how these things can come and how they can go.

It's a, it's a funnel builder, which goes, I think sits on top of WooCommerce and it's $59 for life. So I just thought I'd mentioned it, Ronald, anything here? I think you're muted. You're muted. You're muted word. It's the phrase of 2021. He's not muted. Actually thrown his microwave, you're going to have to use Semafore or smoke signals, or if you've got a Davy lamp, you happily do the Morse code.

Shall I come back to you? Ronald? When you figured that out. Oh, you got your back. That's back in the room. He's back in the room. Yeah. And WP

[01:09:39] Ronald Gijsel: funnels. I think it's a good way to get started, but it's you know, to get some inspiration on how. To build out a funnel. But I'm not quite sure if I like the terminology that they use, like sales, bump and song.

I think it's sometimes it's off-putting and a bit too commercial in terms of you know, working with customers. If you use these sort of terminology, they go, oh no, our customers wouldn't like that. But actually if you explain what it actually means, then they do see the value in that.

So it's a yeah, it's a double-sided thing, for business owners, it's probably a useful

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: tool to get started. The nine bucks for a lifetime daily, it certainly, so certainly felt like it was worth mentioning. So I will do that and then swiftly move on, but I'm

[01:10:29] Ronald Gijsel: not going to go for this.

I'm going to go

[01:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: for the. Sequel a heart oh, okay. If you've got the box burning a hole in your pocket, you're going to buy two copies of the sequel and not buy one and give it away and buy one for yourself. Yeah. Fair enough. Do you know, that'd be really an interesting segment in each of these shows. If we gave everybody a virtual hundred dollars, what would they Bali this week?

Lisa only virtual stuff this week, by the way I bought these things or didn't it. Shall I just show you are fun. They're called nano Leafs. Check this out. Look they're the hexagons made of this laminate wood effect. Actually let me just put that. You can't see anything. Can you.

And just ripple lights around, look to your moods or, okay. So the light, this is in any way on topic, but here we go. This is called warmish white. That's not warm in any way. Is it less like runaway white? This is ambient white. The problem is I've got the light on too bright so I can just turn it down counter.

Yeah, yeah. That's right.

[01:11:50] Ronald Gijsel: And then

[01:11:50] Michelle Frechette: this is cool. Where were you on the night of the 22nd

[01:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: interrogation, but this is fun. Look, you can make it so listens to your voice. So if I, let me just turn that down a little bit. If I speak. They will change as I think that's about the most exciting thing you've ever seen.

That's what I spent my money on this week. It's called nano leaf on there. There you go. Now we'll, we'll get onto the real meat and bones we're else use user created stuff this week, because I didn't put these next few pieces and this has come from the guys either mark or Michelle in this case.

So first one up is this one. This is a one, one Y dash one oh one.com. So a one, one Y dash one oh one.com. And this is marketing. What's this.

[01:12:47] Mark Westguard: Yeah. So I like making stuff accessible. For two reasons, make it accessible to people that may have trouble accessing stuff on a webpage, but making stuff accessible is also just great for usability as well.

And there are a lot of websites out there that describe what you should do and how you should make page elements accessible to people. But this site actually shows you how to do that. And I stumbled across this when I was looking at the main a 11 Y website and I was looking into how to make SVG icons accessible to people.

And this has some great code examples in it that took you through how best to do that. So if you click on development on the left-hand side and then maybe click into. Some of those other sections is quite a lot on here, but here we go as a chair. So there you go. So it shows you how to, what, what attributes to put in and what accompany encodes.

You need to make different elements on a page accessible. So it's just a nice a nice resource for people. If you're looking for code examples of how to make your site accessible, this is a great resource. Then there is actually a main website as well. I forget what the web address is, but if you Google a living way, it'll come up.

Great resources, for developers.

[01:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: Cool. It's not only, it not only makes it really easy to find what you want, but I don't know if it's in every case, but the two or three that I've done so far, they give you don't know what this little video is going to show me, but presumably it will tell me reasons why it needs to be this way and how it's so easy to consume.

Yeah. Nice. So that's a one, one, Y. Dot com no, dash 1 0 1. I'll link it in the show notes. Yeah, that's very cool. And then we've got one which is totally related to this, but this one came from Michelle. I don't know if it was coincidence or for you two we're in coops, but this is Becky. Tell us about this, Michelle.

It's called resolve to have an accessible website in 2022.

[01:14:53] Michelle Frechette: So that is. Amazing with accessibility, her team actually volunteered. They gifted underrepresented in tech.com and accessibility audit, which we were able to implement almost everything on the list to make sure that the website, your website is as has, is as accessible as possible.

And so she's put together a great article here on ways that you can resolve to have a better, more accessible website. There's all kinds of statistics and it depends on who you read and where you read, but, up to 25% of the web needs, some sort of, or users need some sort of accessibility for me.

For example, I make everything bigger because my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be in large part due to the answer that, and being online so much. So it has to solve its own problem. But. You know, even things like you know, nursing mothers who are trying to do things and holding a baby with one hand, still have to deal with some accessibility issues.

So it, isn't always about people with physical disabilities and long-term disabilities, but just the fact that there's so much that we can do for every site to be better for every user.

[01:16:10] Nathan Wrigley: That's really cool. She's actually. I bet. I don't know. Forgive me. I don't know bet, but there's a link here also to join the WordPress accessibility meetup.

I don't know where that's going to take us to let's have a little look where it's not going to end up that he's going to meetup.com forward slash WordPress dash accessibility dash beat up dash group fashion. I expect. Yeah. Cool. Wow. 433 members. Next meeting is next Tuesday on the 18th of January.

So maybe I'll put that in the show notes as well. That's yeah. Yeah. Two, two coincidentally accessible related things. And the next one as if this wasn't all deemed to happen. So this is a website called Ws form. I think mark might know something about this, but this piece is written by somebody called Michelle for shout.

And I think Michelle Frechette might know something about this. What's going on here. How have you two got into cahoots and writing for one another? That's.

Okay,

[01:17:17] Michelle Frechette: mark Ws form is one of the sponsors for WP coffee talk. And I always want my sponsors to do well in the world. So I reached out to him in the fall. I'm like, Hey, do you need any help with anything? Can I help you a little bit around black Friday? And he created a not Hootsuite was a buffer account and I w and just gave me car Bosch.

So I what it started posting for him. And then I was like, Hey, we should do some more with your blog. What if I wrote this article? I really want to write this anyway. And he's yes, send it on over. And so that's how that, that all came about. A lot of it.

[01:17:57] Nathan Wrigley: Kind of has a, has a bit of a callback to what we were talking about earlier.

We were talking about our own personal new year's resolutions, if you like, and this is website resolutions for 2022, where you go through the eight things or maybe there's more, but you've settled on eight things at the beginning that you think your website should have and accessibility guide, it's all meant to happen this week.

Isn't it look number six of which is accessibility. And you've got a whole boatload, more links down there. One of which I've just put on the screen. Cause mark mentioned it. Privacy policy contact form ratings, testimonials about our social links. And of course the meat and potatoes of WordPress, a blog,

[01:18:37] Michelle Frechette: the website, and the article started out as six things you should have.

And then we kept talking about, oh, we should add this to that. And suddenly it was

[01:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Nine things. You need a live stream. They go on the screen from Amy Letson, she she's just charming into what we were talking about bets saying if you haven't caught a presentation on accessibility, bike back, keep an eye out.

She's so good. I feel I'm going to have to put some of these links in the show notes as well at the end, but yeah, that's a lovely bit of a coincidence. That's really nice having you both on the show today. And here we go. The last word Pressy related thing again, Michelle, you're up for this one.

The I don't even know what a Twitter conferences, but post status organized by you. I think Michelle are having a Twitter conference later in the year. What even is that? What even is Twitter? Sure.

[01:19:32] Michelle Frechette: I'd never heard of it until about two years ago when Phil Barker and pat Lockley through piggy and Hey, Presto created a Twitter conference a few years back.

And what it is it's a really great way for people who might be stage shy. They don't want to be on camera and do those kinds of things to be able to create a share knowledge using a hashtag that identifies the conference throughout the day. And so what we're doing is on May 24th, from nine to five, we will be having two presentations every hour.

So the first half hour the first 15 minutes of each half hour will be one tweet a minute from. The presenter. And then the second, 15 minutes of every half hour will be Q and a and discussion about that topic. So the idea is that anybody can go to this post status, Twitter conference on PO on post status and apply to present.

I keep saying speak because I'm so in line, but you're not actually speaking. You could write, so you could record 15 one minute presentations. If you'd like and present your information. That way you can present simple tweets, you can present slide decks. However you want to do it, but the idea of this year at post status, our theme is give, grow together and so special, consideration will be given to anybody who can work that into how they are, what their presentation is.

And then, and you can, if it's a very sensitive subject, I believe in allow you to present anonymously from a word from a Twitter account that you can spin up for this, but I still at least need to know who you are so that I can vet and make sure that I'm putting together the best case scenario for the entire day.

And yeah, so we've, I actually spoke with pat and Phil got their blessing. They have decided, I see I spelled organizers wrong. I'll be going in and editing that But I spoke with them. They had said, I just want, they wanted to give me a heads up. They weren't going to do it any longer.

And I said, do you mind if I take up the mantle and run with it, not doing exactly as they had but running with that same concept. And I had their full blessing. And so I even pilfered from their website with attribution, of course, so that I didn't have to rewrite and re invent the wheel, but I'm super excited about this.

And some of the presentation applications have started to come in to through the website. And I'm super excited. If anybody has any questions, they can hit me up on slack. They can hit me up on Twitter. I'm happy to answer any questions even vetting some topics that people want to talk through some of those

[01:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: ideas.

Nice. Thank you. So all happening on Tuesday. 24th of May from nine o'clock. And if you go to the the URL, it is post status.com forward slash post status, Twitter conference, each word separated by a hyphen. Then you will be able to sign up cause there's a form on that page. And you can use that yourself signed up.

Yeah. Thank you, Michelle.

[01:22:38] Michelle Frechette: Not a Ws farm. I'm sorry, markets.

By the end of this week the WP career summit.com will be live in that does, that will be using Ws farms. So if you want to see a Ws form, an action with lots of different bells and whistles included, you can go to that site hopefully by the end of this week. Absolutely post that to Twitter when it comes

[01:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: live very nice.

Couple of things, nothing to do with WordPress. If you like music free music, I came across this it's called archive archive.co.org. I'm sure you've heard of that archive.org forward slash details forward slash George blood. Apparently 312,000 five hundred and seventy four seventy eight. RPM records have been digitized.

Well, George blood, I'm guessing George blood. Is that an individual? If so, how has he got the time to digitize? 312,000? Literally that's seven years of your life or something. If you're into free music a long time, maybe you put them onto 3000 RPMs and then digitally slowed it down.

Who knows, but it's completely free. Came across my radar this week. I just thought,

[01:23:55] Michelle Frechette: cylinder recordings, like the original cylinders,

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: George blood is a. That's what I thought. Cause it says George blood LP. And I wondered if that was for long player, like, like the original LPs, I didn't know.

Anyway, free music who doesn't realize that. Look at it. There's a laundry list of good stuff.

[01:24:18] Michelle Frechette: The first one who doesn't want to hear Fido is a hot dog. Now I have to go,

[01:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: oh, you know is a hot dog now. You've got Billy holiday Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, a whole bunch of stuff. I think I saw Bing Crosby in some various.

Tons of stuff on there totally free. We love this kind of stuff. And last, but by no means least I thought I'd do this one. I didn't know mark was a photographer until about an hour and a half ago, but this is for him as well. But I put it in here for Michelle because I know she's into photography.

This is just some beautiful photographs that the guardian, the newspaper in the UK have put together apologies to those of you who are listening, but the photographs are brilliant. You really should watch the live show. And, just to see that, but just like 15 look at, what are the chances of you catching that picture?

It's a picture of what looks like a lifeboat under the moon. And it's almost like Steven Spielberg set this scene up to aluminate the lifeboat. There's nothing else going on. There's pictures of LA, is it LA Palma in the Canary islands that got deluged law. Ash during this past year there's some fairly harrowing ones of COVID, but there's also Tom Daley, the Olympic gold medalist diver who does knitting prior to diving.

And there he is doing his pre dive net, which is quite fun. The storming of the capital in the U S this beautiful picture of somebody out on a raft with a grate, with a couple of whale sharks, literally inches below their feet, and then a bunch of Nazis standing around the volcano, as it's about to consume them, just a beautiful picture of a mountain gorilla there.

And then some, some political ones as well, but just absolutely fabulous. These images really nice. So I just thought I'd mentioned that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. Of course. believe it. I feel like such a fraud. Whereas the horse here it is. Mark's favorite. It's coming. I promise you it's coming there.

How did this picture ever happen for those of you who are listening? It is a picture of a horse basically suspended at about 20, 25 degrees almost as if it's being swung on a merry-go-round merry-go-round right. There's nothing to give it context. There's just a blank sky.

yeah. It's like iron man does in his spare time, just go horse swimming.

[01:26:56] Michelle Frechette: I don't know. I don't know the the photographer. I can't pronounce his name, but I love the fact you could tell he's not from the U S because his understatement is wonderful. I suspected it might make for a nice picture.

[01:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: There's absolutely abusive. A horse being swelled around in midair. That's it on that bombshell. We're going to end it this week. I'm absolutely delighted to have had you guys on this week. So we've got mark from Ws forms, Michelle from literally everywhere. And Ronald, who is I don't know, where's the best place to reach you.

Let's go one at a time. Let's start with Ronald. What's the best slack

[01:27:33] Ronald Gijsel: Twitter, but yeah, I think I'm doing a lot of DW stuff now, so that's probably a good way to connect. Brilliant

[01:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: for the. Yeah, do the Wu podcast with the legendary voice to Bob dumb go and check that podcast out and you'll hear Ronald on that Michelle, best place to reach

[01:27:51] Michelle Frechette: you.

Meet michelle.online. We'll give you links to everywhere that I am.

[01:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. And lastly, mark,

[01:27:59] Mark Westguard: W S born got calm on Twitter, WSI underscore form and my personal Twitter is at west guard.

[01:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. We've got to do this slightly humiliating wave thing that we do at the end of each week.

So if we can all manage that there, we've got everybody wave and we're all wave and it's very good. Thank you very much. We'll be back next week. Hopefully I'll have you guys on at some point in the near future. That would be really nice, but for now bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.