This Week in WordPress #197

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 197, entitled to. Or not to add it was recorded on Monday the 21st of February, 2022, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And today on the show, I am joined by three lovely guests. We've got taco Verdin shots from Yoast. We've got Sabrina's a down from X WP and we've also got the Chen Harry's from AMD Farrah.

We're going to talk about WordPress. We always do. And this week we're going to be talking about the block navigation. I did a podcast with some automations about it. So we talk about that, but we also more broadly talk about whether or not anybody is ready to really carry out a full site, editing job on their WordPress website or whether they're still reliant on other tools, page builders.

And so on. We talk about ad [00:01:00] blockers. This is the main conversation today. We talk about whether or not we should be allowing ads to creep into our WP admin and increasingly inside the block editor is that. A bad thing. Do you like it? Do you hate it? Find out what the panel thinks about that. And should you have the rights to be forgotten on the internet, Google expunging, any records they may have about you?

It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress, the WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Cloudways. Cloudways provides the ultimate managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting solutions. Easy setup allows you to get started in minutes, focus on your business and say, good bye to hassles. Get started with our three day free trial to enjoy unmatched performance, superb uptime and 24 7 active support.

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Hello? Hello? Hello? I say hello. So hello everybody. We are back for episode number 1, 9, 7. I can't believe it's that many of the, this week in WordPress show. I'm Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined this week by three utterly fabulous guests. I must make sure that I read out there. Do you know what I nearly said?

I nearly said read out a bit series, which is really not what I intended to say. Read out their bio's correctly at the beginning, but just very briefly joined by three people taco, as you can see, and Sabrina, as you can see. And Jen, just before we begin, I don't want to butcher your name because we've never spoken before, but I'm assuming you're.

Yes. Yes I am. Okay. In which case I'll go around and do a little round Robin and introduce all three of you one at a time. So firstly, welcome to taco is one of the six co-hosts of the show. And taco is a community manager or manager manages [00:03:00] the community at Yoast, which includes awesome areas like sponsoring the Yoast diversity fund and the Yoast care fund.

He's deputy on the WP community team, which he says in brackets is slightly dormant organizer of the WordPress meet up in a place whose name I'm going to mess up niche, Magellan

Taco Verdonschot: close. Okay. I was nowhere

Nathan Wrigley: to be honest. He joined the word com Netherlands 2020 two.org team just last week. And according to the bio, he hasn't told his wife yet.

So let's hope that she's not watching this moment. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. There's going to be an awful lot of taco in the show, I think. And we talked just before the show. There's quite a lot of interest to talk about with taco today. So second up. Hello, Sabrina. How are you doing? I'm good.

Thanks Sabrina. Sabrina, hasn't been on the show for a little while and I'm really glad to see her, but she's the performance engineer at X WP content team lead at [00:04:00] WordCamp Europe, 2022. How's the ex WP job.

Sabrina Zeidan: It's going very well with making web faster each day. That's why I haven't been at the show was to be

Nathan Wrigley: it's.

Okay. Sometimes you just got to do what you gotta do, but the word camp, Europe thing, I've been spying on your Facebook feed. The, I think you've have you been to Porto twice?

Sabrina Zeidan: It's a nice place to go and do venues just superiors. So yeah, why not?

Nathan Wrigley: And you've been just scouting it out and making sure everything's as it should be.

I'm guessing.

Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. Exploring the venue the main venue for social, without the organizers, just making sure that everything is.

Nathan Wrigley: And is everything has everything

Sabrina Zeidan: is fantastic. I know that I cannot be objective, but for me it, everything looks just awesome. I can't wait

Nathan Wrigley: for June, so nice to have these impersonators

Taco Verdonschot: glowing.

When you talk about it [00:05:00] even more.

Sabrina Zeidan: For June, you will be the same.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. It's I'm glad to say that I have not missed a single WordCamp Europe yet. And I'm planning on missing it

Nathan Wrigley: this year. Oh, now I'm caught. Oh dear. Anyway, let's move right along and talk about Jen, because Jen is here joining us for the very first time. It's very nice to have you, Jen.

I said earlier that I didn't know how to pronounce your, so your first name, but your surname is going to present an equal problem. Perez, Harry. Okay. Thank you. So Harry's like H E double R Y S. That's sort of pronunciation. Yeah. Okay. Jen is a white label, WordPress developer, the owner of Farrah, which is a web access and she's a web accessibility advocate and organizer of the Baltimore WordPress meetup.

How does that happen in this time of COVID? Have you been going online or have you gone through.

Gen Herres: I [00:06:00] actually picked up the Baltimore WordPress meetup during COVID WordPress sent out an email saying that they were going to disband the group and stop funding it because the admins hadn't done anything in a couple of years.

So they said, if you want to be an admin contact us. And so I contacted them and I took over the group. And so we've done everything online with zoom. We have some very popular ask me anythings, where we get people from not only the local area, but also all over the country. We've even gotten a few people from other countries come visit.

Nathan Wrigley: How very cool. Really appreciate you joining us for the first time. I hope it's the first of many, but the three of us are going to talk about the WordPress news. That's happened in the last week. Just before then. Let's say a few hellos firstly, a bit of housekeeping, if you would like to comment.

And you're on Facebook particularly in our [00:07:00] Facebook group, although that might be on the page as well. I'm not entirely sure. Then there is a link which is embedded in the post at the top it's [email protected] forward slash Facebook. If you don't click that link, that's fine, but we won't know who you are.

We'll we'll rely on you telling us by typing your name in. But if you do click on that link and authorize it, then we can see your avatar and so on and so forth. If you would like to go and share the stream, put it on to pause for a moment and go and tell them. All about it. That would be nice.

Where over on WP Builds.com forward slash live. That's probably the best place to send people and they can use Google's chat because it's a YouTube link. So good morning from Lee who's in the UK, Lee, Matthew Jackson. I'm guessing, cause he's written trailblazer there, and then we've got Rob Cairns.

Who've joined us each week. Nice to see you. My friend Beth I'm guessing is somewhere in the chat, but I can't see her as yet [00:08:00] almost one. Oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah, that is almost 200 episodes. Isn't it. Three more to go. And we'll get over that milestone. Nathan is. Oh, I sometimes look at myself and I feel that I'm you know, getting a bit more, getting a bit rounder.

And what have we got here? We've also got a living a bit urine. Yeah. Sorry about that. Duh, duh, duh, WordCamp Europe. I applied to speak at WordCamp EU hoping, still might go hard to make travel decisions these days, whoever you are. I know exactly what your dilemma is, but there we go. Let's get stuck into the main event.

This is our website. WP Builds.com. If you head over there, you can subscribe to the content that we produced. This is called this week in WordPress. We do it on a Monday and it comes out on a Tuesday. And then we do a podcast which comes out on a Thursday and you can find all the links, just down there.

There's what are we on episode 266 of the podcast and obviously 197 of this one. [00:09:00] Let's get stuck into it this week. This is a piece over on smashing magazine. It's written by Leonardo loser, which I apologize, Leonardo, if I have butchered your name, we did talk about this a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but I just want you to go into it and not in a little bit more depth, but just talk about it some more because I've got some new panelists and I think this is a really interesting subject.

Anybody who uses WordPress will realize by now that blocks are the thing and blocks are connected in most people's heads with Gutenberg. You drop into the block editor and you drop in a block and that block. Old manner of things, write a paragraph or create an image or perhaps put a piece of audio on, but recently a chap called Joel Spolsky and I think I've got his name, right?

He is the founder, or at least he's in charge of a Trello and stack exchange and a bunch of other things. He's decided that he wants to do a. [00:10:00] I think called the block protocol. So this would mean that blocks on any property on the internet. So again, divorce, WordPress from it. WordPress blocks hopefully would work.

But any other kinds of blocks. So imagine like a MailChimp block worked with an active campaign block, which also worked with a Google drive, a Google doc block or something in slack or something in WordPress. The idea is that. All be able to inter operate. And Leo has put this piece together this week.

So it was saying why he thinks this is a really nice idea. He goes into sort of the technical aspects of how it all might work. There's lots of interesting charts that if you're watching, you can see at the moment, but he also makes the point that it will be really a difficult thing to pull off, because imagine that you own the company notion or medium, and you are in the business of getting subscribers to create their contents, their, whatever it may be over on [00:11:00] your platform, Leo thinks it's going to be a bit of a hard push to get those people, to give up their proprietary blocks and start to make them inter operate.

Because obviously that then. In a way kills their kind of commercial advantage. So anyway, I just thought this was a really interesting piece. I don't know if you guys have got any thoughts on this, but the idea of having my WordPress blocks, being able to work in Evernote or Google docs or who knows where is really fascinating to me.

So I'm just going to open it up. Feel free to just interrupt. And if you cross talk, I'm sure one of you will back out and the other one can speak. So it's over to you. Three

Taco Verdonschot: already hurt Sabrina. Humming, but you want to go first

Sabrina Zeidan: to speak? Everyone has keeping silence. That's right.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I've gotten used to. It's funny. When I first started doing the [00:12:00] show, those silences felt like hours, like three seconds of silence as somebody doing what I do feels but I've grown. I've grown to love it. And to understand that the silence is just the pause between people actually committing to speak soak Sabrina.

Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. I like the idea of a room. I also see how it can work in multiple directions when each service has its own blogs and they're reusable over the internet too. To me, it sounds like a great mess. Like nothing will be developed properly. Nothing works properly. No, no unification. I'm a developer, right?

So I like when everything is a unified strict and very easy and understandable and believe me it'd cause as much freedom you give to user the emotions is you have Ms. So I like the idea of limitations, but it's nice limitations. For example, to have WordPress what we call now, WordPress blocks because you a while it can be changed, maybe it will be WordPress [00:13:00] inside blocks, not blocks inside of WordPress.

You know? So the idea of having WordPress blocks in say MailChimp account, it sounds very attractive to me and vice versa as well to have something from MailChimp come into WordPress naturally. So you use the same interface. You save the same functionality in both systems, because right now it's a mess trying to set connections between anything.

So I am seeing the opportunity here to replace. Maybe some sorts of this can be the continuation of API development where API APIs in general can go. I think this works.

Nathan Wrigley: The it's a really, we use things like Zapier or Zapier, depending on how you pronounce it. That's it. You've got to go through a third party conduit and you've got to really set everything up to be exactly following the rules so that the correct thing happens.

I have literally no idea how this would look. So if you want it to suck something out of MailChimp [00:14:00] and it automatically go into a WordPress website, I don't know what that UI would look like, but I think what we're just trying to describe here is just how do they talk to each other? What are the components?

What are the bits, the metadata, if you like that is encapsulated in a block so that they can all speak to each other and we'll worry about how they speak to all speak to each other on another date. Sorry, taco I interrupted. Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: I think that's interesting because what you're describing is basically a, would be a MailChimp block inside WordPress.

But I, what I was thinking when reading this article is we could have. Paragraph block. That is the exact same thing in MailChimp and then Drupal and then WordPress. And we can add an image block that you can use, like a hero image block that would work the same way in all three, but not necessarily a [00:15:00] block inside WordPress that would connect into MailChimp because that is entirely different functionality.

And as a big, big fan of open source, I really liked the idea because open source, one of the biggest benefits of open source is that we're using our resources only once to create a thing. Once we've invented the block, why would someone else need to invent the same block? If they can put that same energy into improving the existing block and then both.

So the open source mindset behind the block protocol that is brilliant from a practical and. Point of view. I have no idea.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I know what you mean. I think you're right. Obviously WordPress is very much involved with pushing stuff onto the open internet so that you can [00:16:00] see it or read it or hear it or watch it.

And that's, that is the purview of WordPress. It's a publishing platform. But the idea of connecting it to do other things, and an example that comes to mind is when I've embedded something from a Google spreadsheet, into a Google doc, it's there. And if I fiddle with it in the spreadsheet, it's now going to be changed on the Google doc on the fly.

I don't have to. Go back and copy and paste it again. It's just that they're all interoperating and the beauty, the, imagine the possibilities of that, you might have a, I don't know, a desktop for example. And you just swap it in one place on the 15 different places where your logo is Twitter or who knows, but yeah, an image, it will just instantly percolate around the internet and that you've just got this one original source blog.

That's where I'm seeing it going anywhere. I realized we co gen out of this conversation. So Jen, have you got anything to add?

Gen Herres: It's okay. [00:17:00] So I, I think it's interesting, but I also think that, wow, this is going to be a mess to try to implement.

I think it could actually work within possibly WordPress to start because at least then you would get some traction and some something going through. It would be really cool if I could, have a block in one website and then, click it, click something and my other WordPress install and just instantly populate that block over there.

That would be really cool. And it would be amazing if you could do that on like the dashboard. For someone who administrates a lot of different websites, it would be fantastic. If I could modify something in one WordPress admin and then have it instantly populate to all of my others. Like I could have some help documents.

I [00:18:00] publish a few different help pages for my clients and whatnot. It'd be really cool if I could just update information about that right on their dashboard and have it instantly populated.

Nathan Wrigley: The, yeah, I totally get what you mean. That's got a real solid use case in the real world. Hasn't it? The, I think one of the things that Leo feels is that really, this is only going to be able to be contributed to by, by people who've got very deep pockets.

And that's a sort of slight concern. We'll have to see how this develops. I just think it's an absolutely fascinating idea in the history of creating content on the internet, everything's basically in a silo and you pay a third party company to suck stuff out of that silo and put it into another place that you may wish to have it like Facebook or Twitter or wherever it may be.

And also I can just see the permutations of this that are never visible. So it might be, I don't know, banking or something. You might be able to, update banking, details [00:19:00] across multiple different platforms with the same kind of block. If everything interoperates, it's just a fascinating idea.

So that was a smash. Magazine article, it was called implications of WordPress joining the block protocol. It's totally worth a read it's about, about 15 minute reads, something like that. And it will probably inspire lots of thoughts. Just a quick one. We've got a comment in here from WP roadmaps. Hello.

He says he can't find the Facebook link to tell you who I am. I'm just going to pause the show for a while very quickly and put it on the screen. Here we go. It is chat dot restream dot forward slash F B chats.restream.io forward slash FB. I hope that helps. If not, don't worry. We can. We can probably get out of you.

If you stay on, if you stay over here on YouTube, that's absolutely fine. Oki doki. Next piece then is going to be this one. Okay. Before we get into Tammy Lister's piece, which I'll show on the screen in a minute show of [00:20:00] hands who has tried between the four of us, who's tried to build an entire website with full site editing.

Who's tried straight or managed. No, tried managed is the next question. So three of us have tried who's succeeded. Okay. Nobody. That was kinda, that was the perfect introduction. So this is a piece over at extend. If i.com Tammy Lister, who I, I think.

Taco Verdonschot: Where does she? She XW.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So she's one of Sabrina's colleagues.

That's a coincidence. I genuinely had forgotten that she wrote a piece on the extended, if I blog and she used to work for extended fire. And then pre prior to that, she was an automotive person who was in charge of designing the block editor, the actual look and feel. And what have you. And she's raising the question about full site editing and the pieces called [00:21:00] Gutenberg full site editing does not have to be full.

What she's basically saying. You are forgive me, Tommy. I'm not saying that you're saying this, but the piece felt to me, don't try to do too much at once. There are so many pieces coming down the pipeline at the minute you've got the theme, Jason, you've got full site editing, you've got navigation blocks and all of this hitting you in what feels like a bit of a hurricane at the minute.

And her thought is don't try to do them all at once because it's certainly not going to work. And I've tried it. I probably gave it several hours. Taco can tell us about his experience and Sabrina and Jen, if she's had a federal with it as well. But I kind had to back out and try to achieve far less than so Tammy's strategy is basically this she's saying, look at all the different.

We've got to fiddle with the actual editing of the site. There's block-based themes. You've got to worry about those global styles. There's the theme dot Jace on file there's templates and template parts. So editing [00:22:00] specific blocks, block, widgets and navigation. And then you've obviously got your older gear design tools as well.

And so I've highlighted a little bit where basically shits, she says slow down. Don't try to do anything more than one thing at a time and her advice, as you can see, if you're looking on the screen ID in yellow, my best advice to anyone looking to start on this journey right now is to start with patterns, or collections of blocks to achieve a particular design goal.

I guess, move then onto the theme dot Jason component, and try to figure that out once you've got patterns, sauced, and then from there gradually move on to whatever of the other bits and pieces that are new to WordPress. Makes sense for you. I think for me, it would probably be figuring out how the navigation block and all of that kind of works properly so that I could implement it.

But it was just interesting from somebody who's steeped in all of this kind of stuff. It does feel to me as if you try to do everything all at once at the moment and try to build a website, there is potential for frustration and failure. So let's go around. Let's start with let's start with taco.

You were just, before we [00:23:00] started recording. You told me a very short tale about failure.

Taco Verdonschot: The backstory is that my wife started her own business late last year. And obviously she didn't have a lot of funds to start with and was thinking about spending money on the website. And I was like, yeah I've been working with WordPress for eight years.

I can do this mind you. I haven't been a developer for almost eight years. And the last time I touched the code of a theme has been well about eight years ago. That didn't work out to build a basic standard WordPress team, because I forgot about all the moving parts there. And I was like, wait, this full site editing is coming up.

I've been playing with blocks. I can do blocks. So I installed that was just before five nine. So I installed the Gutenberg plugin, the [00:24:00] latest that had full site editing. And I started playing with that thinking, Hey, I can build a site with this because I know how blocks work and it got to.

60 70%. And then I had a custom post type in there and I got lost. I had to do something with the theme, Jason and I had no experience whatsoever. I got frustrated, took me a couple of hours in the evening and I completely destroyed everything I had decided to remove it installed Elementor and now the site's almost ready.

Yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: there you go. I suspect that story is the case all over the place and it isn't a question of you not having the capacity to do it. It's probably a function of time. Really? Isn't it? You haven't got that. You haven't had the history with it all the time to research at the minute.

Taco Verdonschot: That and I wanted to be nicer.

I could have easily both the [00:25:00] team adjusted some colors and then say, honey, here's your site. This is your starting point. And. Good to go. But I wanted to make it nice. And that's where I went wrong because that was just,

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Tammy then is giving Sage advice. If that's the case, she, her recommendation would be go back to the beginning.

And where did she say it start? What was it? Oh, but patterns just fill about with patterns for a bit. But obviously if you've got custom post types and all that, there's more moving parts and that kind of has to work. Doesn't it. And I guess with elements or you're so used to it, it's almost like doing it in your sleep.

You can just create it and anything that's not that workflow is horrible.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So actually it's only the second site that I built with element or as well. But it's it's easier. Because there's so many tutorials out there. There are so many videos by the elementary team. While I pretend to [00:26:00] be also to my wife, because all she sees is progress.

All I'm doing is watching YouTube and, doing that and asking for help from other Mika BofA, lat. Who's absolutely awesome at element or so.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I get it. I totally sympathize with you. Sabrina. What about you, you had, you raised your hand for trying, you kept your hand down when it was succeeding.

Sabrina Zeidan: I've tried, I'm very hopeful to try again after with a 5.9 because the navigation walk, what made me talk in previous time? It wasn't just impossible navigation and venues. Very, very excited to try again. And I hope that this time it will work out. I very much like the advice coming from Timia and it's fascinating to see this kind of advice.

Don't freak out basically coming from someone who was so deeply involved into building the tool. Like I think it goes back to the [00:27:00] principles of wellbeing in WordPress community. Like Tammy is not saying you have to learn this deeply. You have to know this from a to Z that you, you like, if you don't know something you're out of the game.

No she saying quite opposite, take it slowly, baby steps. Don't worry. You have support. And I think it represents perfectly what's happening with pressed community in general, not just in this small.

Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And Jen, obviously you mentioned that you've got a lot of client websites and things.

So how far have you strayed into giving the block editor a chance with your clients? Are you using it for anything or is it still very much other tooling?

Gen Herres: I've I've watched a few videos on the full site editing after which I said, I'm not letting this anywhere near a client reach out. I mean, clients are like, I want to click on the text and have a cursor [00:28:00] show up and type.

And the block editor, I've done some simple pages with Gutenberg and it's still a fight to get something to land in the right spot. And you've always got to pull up that sidebar with the you know table of contents, sidebar, okay. And you've got to always move things around in there.

And then you've got to pop back to one side, insert placeholder paragraph blocks because you can't possibly drop something into an empty area. And yeah, right now it's mostly elementary on all of the client's sites because they just can't deal with Gutenberg. Quirkiness and whatnot.

Nathan Wrigley: It's fascinating that the two of you taco and Jen, you both using elements or it's tried and trusted.

It does what it says on the 10. The, I [00:29:00] feel like the promise in six and 5.9, going forward with all the new videos that will be created, I feel that the promise is cool. The navigation block, I think, is really cool, especially when you drill down and you look at how it actually structures it, but it also feels like a step too far for a client who probably doesn't want to see all the nested different blocks, all the pages nested on the page.

They just want to know, okay, that's the menu that we're choosing. I actually did a sort of skip to this bit. I don't know if I've mentioned it. Yeah. Yeah, very quickly. I did a podcast episode for WP Tavern this week, or it came out last week, Wednesday. Oh, by the way, this comes out on a Wednesday.

And it was with Dave Smith, Isabel Brisson and Joel yo and Asma son. And they're all autumn petitions who've been working on the navigation block. It's a really nice, honest appraisal of where it is. And I think it's fair to say that they also know that there are problems as an [00:30:00] example. You can't.

You can't create a sort of draft menu and save that away somewhere. What you create is what's going on the website. There's no ability to play with something and put it away and not introduce onto the site. If you create a menu it's going on the site, so you don't get any chance to fiddle around and not implemented, but there's lots and lots of promise here.

At the minute we're tied to WordPress themes, taking control, all of that. So if you're not experienced and you don't know how to unpack all of that, what you get in the theme is pretty much what you get with all the options. Whereas with this, you can, because it's a block, you can surround it by anything.

You could put two menu links on one side and then an image, and then a S I don't know, a subscribe form. And then some more links, whatever you can do. Absolutely anything. But the point was that they know that there's work to be done to get it into client's hands. And I think Jen, your point is absolutely correct at the moment, isn't it?

The clients are gonna freak out and prob literally break [00:31:00] everything if you were to do all of this in Gutenberg right now.

Gen Herres: Yeah. So

Taco Verdonschot: the interesting thing is that on Yoast of gum someone else's responsible for all the theming and all the stuff. But if I got to work with the block editor on the help pages that we have for the plugin, I absolutely love it because those blocks allow me to super easily create a site, create a page that looks nicely and that does what it should do.

But for me, it's the theming parts and building it from scratch. That was too hard. But using. Is so much better than

Nathan Wrigley: what we had before. Yeah. Really good point. Yeah, I don't think it's there for the whole full site editing. Anyway, the piece that we were discussing there, let me just see if I can find it again.

There we go. It's Tommy [00:32:00] Lister on the extend if I blogs. So I go to extended buy.com and then click on the blog. It's called Gutenberg full site editing does not have to be full. And I think Tommy's words are probably wise words. Pick one thing, probably block pap, play with those and take them there.

Don't try to do everything all at once. Okay. Just a couple of quick comments. It would appear that this is Beth Livingston WP roadmaps. I should have made the connection, but no. Beth, we cannot see you. We, we, we just see you as Facebook users still. So what I would recommend. Throw the computer at the wall, who knows, why switch it on and off?

What is it? They say, turn it on and off again on the it crowd Rob, he's loving the block editor and he's now playing with full site editing, Rob let us know how that goes. Let us know if like us, you get frustrated by it. Or if you have total insight and revelation and it just works out of the box.

My, [00:33:00] my experience hasn't been a hundred percent smooth so far and Beth just says,

keep going, Beth, can you go? We believe in you by the end of the show, you'll be with us. Okay. Next one. Okay. Firstly, two pieces that are very much interconnected. This is a WP main line, which is , Jeff Chandler's blog. And he's written a piece called I live in a world where an ad blocker plugin for the WordPress back end exists.

And he's referencing this piece, which is on WP Tavern, called the clarity out of blocker for WordPress announced, receives mixed reactions. And we'll go into those mixed reactions in a moment and get different takes. Cause we've got some probably different opinions in our little community on the show.

But he's basically saying that a guy called Stan is laugh. CRO mov, I'm going to say is his surname. He has [00:34:00] he's the author of something called clarity. And he's got this idea of creating a kind of ad blocker within WordPress. So it's a plan and the idea being that it would. Stolt stunts the ability of your WordPress plugins from showing notifications, which you may not see as relevant.

So I think everybody would see it as relevant if there was something critical. I don't know, you, we really want to make it clear that we've had some kind of breach or your plugin needs to be updated. And it's much more important than the usual cycle. We'll get to that in a minute. All of those kinds of things, I don't think anybody's going to argue with, depending on whether or not they are for clients.

What have you, I think the principle here though is more about whether or not there should be advertisement, upsells, upgrades, whatever in the WordPress admin. And we've discussed this in the past lots and lots of times. And so Jeff was saying basically this, how is it? How has it come to be [00:35:00] that we were in a world where.

It is possible. If we flip over to the C article on WP Tavern, it's really interesting. Cause you get a different perspective in some of the comments. Now I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this will the instant reaction, which I'm sure taco can confirm in a minute is ads no bad, get rid of all costs, make them go away.

Can we have a notification area? Can we have a solution built into WordPress where all of this stuff lives? So we don't have to see it. And of course it's a commercial thing, WordPress. I'm sure everybody connected with WordPress. At some point, we'd like to make some revenue and put food on the table and all of that.

And so some of the people who are responsible for creating plugins have pushed back. So for example, we have here a comment on the screen. I'm just going to quote it. It says by creating an ad. You're selfish disregard for the commercial realities of open source [00:36:00] is a delicate ecosystem. One developer wrote in the AWP thread.

If you use a free product, pay for it by tolerating, a few nags, and then somebody else says the idea of taking somebody's work product, but bypassing their ads is at minimum on ethical ropes. Another developer, nobody is forced to capitalize on the fruits of anybody else's labor. So we seem to have two very distinct positions.

The crowd, if you like, who say no ads, WordPress is free. I don't want to be cluttered by ads. I certainly don't want my clients seeing all of this stuff. And then on the other hand, we've got these people are saying, look, this is a really effective way of us turning something free into something paid.

In fact, it's one of the only opportunities that we've got to advertise our. Superior service, superior plugin, Ben, whatever. And so it seems to be some sort of pushback now [00:37:00] into that mix, we're going to throw taco because as we know in the past, Yost have put various different things in the platform on this new show.

We've talked about it in the past ads at the top, which you have to dismiss. So taco go for it. The ball is in your court. I hope that you're not feeling too on the spot, not at all. And by the way, I say frozen for everybody else. No. Is he still moving? Okay. I can hear every word you say, but your video is currently frozen for me, but sometimes I can hear.

Oh, and you back. That's fine. Okay.

Taco Verdonschot: So I'll tell my provider, I need a better connection. So the, I think it's. And one regard a really hard discussion because there absolutely needs to be a balance between informing users that there [00:38:00] is a paid version of a product. And in the other hand, not getting this wall having time squaring your backyard.

There's a lot of area between that. And I mean, I work at Joest, obviously it CESO here. And it's very obvious that I'm on the side of having the option to at least communicate to users that there is a premium version of the product, because if everyone who uses free would have this clarity plugin.

And it's slightly smarter than that because it doesn't remove all the ads, but even if it takes out like 90% of the ads, and that means that our sales of the premium plugin would go down by a [00:39:00] lot, that would significantly affect the free product because we're paying developers, not from the income that we generate with the free program, they need to make a living as well.

So we need that paid product to be able to sustain the free one. And the challenge that we have with Yoast is obviously we do have admin pages. So an administrator to a website sees some of them, but it's not pages that you need to visit very free. As soon as you set up your your social profiles, there's no need, unless something changes to go in through those admin pages.

So even though our plugin is installed, an admin would only see [00:40:00] our admin pages every so often. So if that's the only place where we can have ads, or it can have some form of a upsell, it's a really hard sell because how do we then tell people there is a premium version? The thing that people see all the time is the OCL metal box, because that's when you're writing a post or a page is what gives you the information on how your S your page is doing on the, how your your post is doing in terms of SEO and readability.

The thing is that oftentimes admins are not the people writing the posts, they're building the sites. So the people writing the posts are the editors or the authors on the site. And if we're not allowed to show that group, that there is a more advanced [00:41:00] version of the analysis they're using, then how are we selling our premium products?

Because you're basically not allowing us to reach our target audience. And that's a real hard problem because we want to have some upsell there, but it shouldn't be intrusive. And finding that balance is a constant battle. And our UX team UI team is doing that older than.

Nathan Wrigley: That was a really nice answer.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that. And it is a difficult, it's a difficult tight rope to tread, isn't it? Because as you say, if the commercial product directly let's be honest, the commercial product enables the free product. On some level, you couldn't have a product of that magnitude for free where it's just, you guys have all got to put food on the table.

It's as simple as that. [00:42:00] And it is curious that we're in a community where there is a very polar reaction to this. And it's basically binary. It appears like anything that's an advertisement is considered to be really horrible. And so even if you gently tread over that line and presumably you guys are constantly thinking of what.

Manage that tight rope without pushing too far over to one side or over to the other. Yeah. That's really interesting. Taco, do you have any thoughts on, because Rob mentioned it and I've mentioned it in the past, do you have any thoughts on this idea of a notification area within WordPress? So if I log into any one of the multitude of SAS apps that I've got there very often got this, it seems to always be a bell, some kind of like little bell icon and the bell icon is wobbling or there's a red.next to it or something like that.

And it's alerting me to the fact that there's stuff I need to know. Do you have any thoughts on putting stuff like those inside a notification [00:43:00] area or is that not enough? Do you need to be in the, the eyeballs need to see it, whether they go to the notification area or not?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So then again, the difference who is your target audience? There is a Very nice project in development. I think it's currently a core feature plugin, which is WP notify which is doing exactly that it's offering a place for all the notifications from all the plugins to be shown.

And that would absolutely work well for the things that we've now built into the Yoast notification center, because in, in the hostess yield, there is a specific notification center and those will work really well. In that WP notes fi [00:44:00] sort of general notification center, if it start getting admins.

But I don't think that you would want that same bell with that red icon next. For all your authors and all your editors on your sites, because it will also probably also show notifications that are either not relevant to them, or you have to be able to set that up for a specific role, but then the notification would be out of context.

Whereas what we're trying to do now is to have a notification that says, Hey, you're using this analysis. No, that there's a better version of this without making it big and screaming and having a big banner. And we've made that mistake. But you know, it's trying to be right there where you would expect that extra feature to be, instead [00:45:00] of being some annoying bell in the top of your screen, that's screaming for attention where you don't want to give attention to because you're writing.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, sorry. I thought you'd finished. I apologize. Carry on.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So I think it really depends on who you're targeting who your audience is, but also what kind of plugin you have, if you have a plugin that does caching, you don't need to annoy a user that doesn't have any rights to change any of that with the notification.

Yeah. So it really depends on the plugin, whether that would work,

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely fascinating. Jenny, you mentioned that you've obviously got lots of these client websites. Do you get any pushback on this kind of thing? Do you get people I don't know, ringing you up and saying, what on earth am I supposed to do with this?

It looks like I haven't got everything. They're telling me to what grade I'm not specifically Yost [00:46:00] related, but with any of the multitude of plugins out there, do you have any thoughts?

Gen Herres: So I've basically taught most of my clients to just don't even read it. They just click the dismiss button, they just ignore it.

Don't even bring it up because I'm in your website regularly. I will see it. So they're basically taught to just completely ignore any of those notices up top. Because you let's say ACF wants to do a database update. No, the client should not be clicking the database update because I do a backup before I do the database update so that, in the unlikely chance that something goes sideways, I can restore it.

But I think that the bell is a bad idea. I can tell you on my banking app, there is a bell, I check it once a year and it has 15 notifications and [00:47:00] I have. And honestly, none of them matter. Cause they're like your statement is available. You sent me an email about that. Yeah. Honestly I have lots of apps and they have bells and I never ever checked the bells, but I also think that they shouldn't.

There's the notifications you get on like the plugins page and on your main dashboard. And I think that those should ideally be reserved for stuff that's actually important. Like your database needs to be updated. But as far as, a plugins own page or a plugins own panel, I do agree that it's a little bit of the wild west.

It's your pants. You should be allowed to do whatever you want on your panel. And if it gets really offensive, you're going to get a lot of really negative reviews [00:48:00] on your plugin. And that's going to be a self-correcting system, but it's your panel. It's your plugin. It is not up to me to tell you what to do, but on the flip side, it is open source.

The whole point of open source is that I can modify your stuff if I want to, because it's open source. So

Nathan Wrigley: the it's interesting, isn't it? Because in another realm where everything is free, let's say commercial telephone. You totally wear it. Every 15 minutes along come calmer, a series of adverts and you may well do the equivalent of clicking dismiss.

You might go off and make a cup of coffee or something, and be out just press, mute, whatever, go and feed the cat or something, and then come back in when they're over. But they're there. And they're a part of the, they're a part of that ecosystem. You have a total understanding that the telephone.

It doesn't [00:49:00] get made without the ads. There's no telly. And I just don't know where the boundary lies, whether that boundary lies in the actual physical space that you're allowed to occupy, whether it relies on, are you limited to certain number of words or are you allowed images in there?

Does it have to be dismissible with a certain type of box? Should it be surrounded by a certain WordPress default color to indicate whether it's security or whether it's just an ad, should it look and and it almost feels like we need some sort of consensus to be drawn around what these things should look like so that when it's broken, everybody can go.

That is breaking it now. And we know that's out of bounds, but that discussion, it doesn't appear to have been fruitful. Sabrina, any thoughts?

Sabrina Zeidan: I was just thinking how apartment complex are built. So when they built buildings not [00:50:00] houses, but buildings for apartment complex, there are two ways to make pathways around that area first way is to build them in while you're building an apartment complex.

So you make people here is the building. Here is the grocery store. You make people to go the way that you designed. And another way is not to make sidewalks at all, but lets people walk the shortest way, the most convenient way, the way that they prefer. And then to build a sidewalk where it's already been marked by people's footprints because they choose to go this way and not another designed way for pre designed, wait for them.

Do you know what I mean? Like you just let people know. Choose the most convenient and most appropriate weight way for them to do thing. And you adopt to this. I think this is a huge challenge for all WordPress plugins and themes and everyone in the community, but it's [00:51:00] just the way it is. We can't make users behave in the way we want them to behave.

We just need to adapt ourselves to the way they see. Th the right thing like taco mentioned that you are doing in yours trying to put things where they irrelevant, where they expect it to be, this is exactly what I mean. I strongly believe in free market. I don't think we need some limitations or something like a strict guidelines because the WordPress ecosystem is so various.

For example, even like to my mind, the good idea might not work just because the market is so verus. For example, like security, we can market, this is a performance issue. This is a security issue. This is a UI issue, but first of all, who decides to where it goes. The person who decides maiden might not be deciding this [00:52:00] in the right way.

And then the person who sees it might not be understanding why it goes there and there. And then it's a mess. Again, I think the best way to handle this is like nature naturally. Like Jen said if you do, it's just very, not like others. Do you get better reviews because people are expecting something else.

The market will tell you that you are not doing the right thing. That's very easy. You don't need to guess people will do.

Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting as well, isn't it? Because I really don't know how long it takes to go to Twitter and write to the world that, you've dismissed an ad. It probably takes longer than it probably takes longer than dismissing the ad.

But I guess if you're doing it, 50,000 times on 50,000 different websites, that's certainly interesting. I genuinely don't know what the answer is [00:53:00] here, but I'm really compelled by what taco said about sticking things in the right place. And also the economic imperative of. We don't get their email address.

That's another good point. You don't capture their email address from wordpress.org. They basically just come and, you get something totally gratis completely for free and in normal and, normal website commerce, you would probably capture their email at the point where they downloaded the free thing.

So there's another sort of impediment, but I think some sort of consistency in the way it's done and where things are placed. We've got a few comments about that coming in. Where have we got so this is, this is Beth again. One of the, how many clicks per day are spent on dismissing notifications across all platforms would be an interesting study.

Yeah, it would be, it would also be interesting to see how. Angry. It makes people, does it really genuinely cause anger or does it just cause that sort [00:54:00] of,

Sabrina Zeidan: I don't think that people get angry. We just make this intuitively we just to close up everything right on, on all apps, just dismiss all the certifications.

And this is not a good thing because you might be dismissing something really important.

Nathan Wrigley: Good point. What else have we got? So this is max. Hello, max. He says annoying is relative. Ebell is small and not so much in your face. Presumably liking the idea of the bell icon. And Beth again says she's got OCD.

And when there are notifications showing those little red dots, she has to go and stop them and address things. Yeah. I'm a bit like that. If I see the red dot, it does make me want to go and do that. Again, to tacos point, limit them to a role. If you're the administrator. Yeah, exactly.

Yep. But max again, Bella, whatever, but a separate place, like an inbox. Yeah. That's what I was meaning like an inbox where all of that stuff drops in. And then that argument. Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: But then I think it [00:55:00] got to the point like the banking example where there's a single inbox on once a year, you review your inbox and you go oh yeah, this might've been relevant year ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Probably should. Should've clicked this sooner. And then the next year you'd do the exact same thing because you didn't bother because it's not the word. Yeah, somewhere

Nathan Wrigley: else. I think what we should have is a little bell. And when you click on the bell, it plays baby shark really loudly at you.

You know, just, it could be worse. It could be worse is all I'm saying. Max says that argument doesn't work for me. It would be like leaving notifications to be defined by app developers. Is that apple defining the workflow? Interesting. I don't have an answer to this, but Beth enjoys my baby shark comment.

There we go. All right. Let's move on. Thorny issue tackled. Oh, no. [00:56:00] I want to just throw something in. Let me see if I can find it. Let me see if I can find it. I can't find it. Yes, I can. Here it is. I was in communication with Ross, with Whipple? No. Oh my goodness. Windfall, I've forgotten how to pronounce his surname.

Hold on. Let me just find it quickly. Oh, dear Ross. Wintle it's got an N I do apologize, Ross. I had you as a double T, not an end Ross Wintle who whose one wanted me to to try out his little tool and I have to say, I get a few tools mentioned to me each week, but I've really did this one.

So I'm going to give it a quick plug. It's called turbo. It's a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension. And I think possibly something else as well. So you install it into Chrome and then whenever you go to your WordPress admin you define a keyboard shortcut. In my case, I've got control alt command and P [00:57:00] so those really easy for me to get and up pops this little thing here, and it's a bit like spotlight on your Mac.

And I don't know if there's an equivalent on windows, but a bit like Alfred on the market pops up and you can then start typing. So for example, you could type in, I don't know, posts and anything to do with posts will come up. And if you click on I don't know, all posts, you'll go to all posts. And if you type in, I dunno, custom something or other custom post type UI, it might be take you to customize or whatever you can type in plugins.

Anyway, the thing, it just saves me so much time and it's not. Plugin. So you don't have to go round installing it on every website, you stick it in the browser and any WordPress admin that you hit. He says there's a few use edge cases where for reasons, not yet discovered it doesn't work, but in the vast majority, it works.

I've tried it on every single website I've been to it immediately worked. And also it's got this curious [00:58:00] little idea where there's a toggle. One of the settings is you can, this is coming to the ad piece. You can click a button and it will make. Ads dismissible, and I think it will make those dismissible kind of imperpetuity.

So if some kind of notification comes up, you can click a button and it will hide it from view into a special area. I think it might be in one of the drop-downs that you get at the, on the right of the WordPress admin, where you can drop down and all the different things appear. It drops them into there.

So they've not gotten, they've just been put somewhere out of mind and it's a setting, it's an experimental setting, but it's well worth looking at it's there's a free plugin, but the browser extension, I think is $35. And I really liked it, but I just thought I'd mentioned it in the context of the sort of hiding the ads.

It's not getting rid of them. It's just putting them somewhere else, dismissing them from view a taco. [00:59:00]

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I haven't seen this tool before. And I'm definitely going to look into it because it sounds really useful, especially for our support team. Who's navigating, like it's on the different sites a day.

And this could definitely speed up their workflow having this in the browser.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to put the, I'll put it in as a notification on the screen. That's the URL for it is called turbo-admin.com just seems like a really nice little endeavor. And obviously in Jen's case, if she's flipping through a hundreds of different websites over the course of a week and and you don't have to install anything in any of those hundred websites, just a really cool take on something, which I would have thought was the realm of a.

Gen Herres: Yes. Looks very cool. I'm going to take a look

Nathan Wrigley: at this. Yeah. Okay, good. Alrighty. So there we go. Next piece let's do this. So this is [01:00:00] right in the wheelhouse of two of our guests today. Obviously Sabrina is over speeding up websites, expert, so lots to do with core web vitals and Taeko, obviously working for the Yost team.

So peace over on a search engine journal, it's called good core web vital score scores. Won't improve indexing. Now, first of all, I don't know if that's true. Second of all, I assumed it was plainly true. Web vitals had become totally crucial to. Index that felt like message that's been banged on again and again for the last 18 months or more that if you don't take care of core web vitals, your search engine rankings will be user upped by people who have made the efforts to speed up their websites at all of the different bits though, we don't really need to go into but essentially it comes down to the fact that apparently not because you've got experts from Google, the likes of John Mueller, I think [01:01:00] is how you pronounce his name saying that tension, not as catastrophic as it looks.

I don't know if Google is walking through something back here or if everybody just meant a few months, but it seems like ranking factors and quality factors are two completely separate things, which I didn't know. So I'm going to toss the ball to. Sabrina and see where she see what she does with it.

Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. I think it's just the confusion of terms. This is this is just separate things indexing and drunken and quality over the website. There just different things. I'm thinking about the example. All right. So here is a blank page with nothing on it. It's going to pass all Cora vitals is going to be fast.

There is no information. There, there is no workable information to use it. So it's passing, but the quality of this page, so it's parsing, it's fast. The quality of this page is no quality. There is nothing there, right? So this is like an extreme example. You can have the foster speech [01:02:00] ever, but it has no, no, you need at all.

And also the other thing that they're saying, it's not going to impact indexing. So when there is in you patient, you upset, published, Google comes and Take a look at it, and it exists. And if it finds it useful and the information you bought it will come again. If it's really useful and really available and it's visited, it will come up again often not to miss the updates that you're getting on your website.

So the more quality content you have, the more people are the better way people are behaving on your website. What does mean better way if they interact with the website, if they stay on the website, if they do something like that is considered to be the design actions, all this, a user centric things.

So if user behave in a good way on the website, we will we'll come often, will come regularly and not to provide the newest [01:03:00] information in indexes. But Korver vitals won't and they were, they never stated they are in this process. They were stating that ranking process. So once Google got to know that there are some information on the website now it's a, the next step is to rank these information against against others.

So coral vitals was impacting the ranking thing, not indexing thing. And also I think with the, I know the title, this millions of times in each my, my public speaking or anything, but there are so much information about this. People are just getting lost and just forget that. Ranking factor means ranking factor.

And one of all others, ranking factors, speed is not something that take you from bottom to the top. Automatically you [01:04:00] have the content on your website. You have the, the value that you provide. So even in, in ranking thing, core were vitals are just a part of user experience. And user experience is just a part of all ranking factors.

So there is a pool of ranking fractures. Some of them are devoted to user experience. And a part of user experience is speed is just a small part of the entire pool of ranking factors. But because we talk about this so much, it looks like the only speed can substitute everything, but it can not.

It's just a, it's just a silly idea. It's just a silly idea to think that once you make your websites fast,

Nathan Wrigley: That's right, but I think you've hit the nail on the head for me, at least. Anyway, you Sabrina is that the last 18 months have felt like there's, we've talked about very little else and it's become of key [01:05:00] importance.

Everybody's been going on about it. All these SAS tools have popped up so that you can measure different things. And, I'm sure that Yoast has had a great push to make this sort of stuff understandable, but it does feel like it's kinda got consumed that core web vitals became everything.

And the annoying thing with all things, Google and ranking and SERPs and all of that is that we just don't know. We have no real understanding of what that jigsaw looks like, which piece is bigger than all that.

Sabrina Zeidan: They're given some hints of what matters, whatnot. Yeah. And speaking about shrinking folks just last week one of the clients I was telling them, all right, guys, you have no descriptions. You have that many texts, archives pages on your website. And there is valuable content. There writes unique descriptions for those pages and use them to bring you in you new visitors to your website, through archive pages as well.

So I'm telling them, all right, you have to write unique descriptions and unique titles for [01:06:00] your archives. Maybe put some unique content for that archives pages. So not only single posts, but we'll be bringing traffic to their website and their, alright, we'll do that. But how fast it slowed in wherever consult.

Oh, it's loading. I was like, guys, you have to slow down there. There is no real content on your website. If it's, if those pages are fast, it will change nothing because there is no actual content there that would, that Google would continue. You both theme for users. Yeah. Does it happen a lot?

Taco Verdonschot: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm the only thing that I hear in the back of my head is what can we do to hire Sabrina? Because she's saying all the right things. I surprised,

no, this is absolutely a hundred percent through. And there's little I can add to this. Asset in the article core up files is a ranking factor, but more [01:07:00] importantly, by having the title this way people see it as an excuse. Oh wait. So I don't have to write blogs or websites, which is obviously the wrong take on the entire topic because CORBA vitals is important because it's measuring.

Quality of your page. It's measuring the quality for your users, because if you go to a page and it starts loading and you start reading and all of a sudden everything's pushed down, half your screen, it is bloody annoying. And that's exactly what core, what they'll sing. Don't have that content shifts because that's stupid and they will annoy your visitors.

So if you use this article as an argument, not to get enough caring about core reprisals, you're [01:08:00] doing it wrong because you're not understanding what John Mueller was saying. And that goes for pretty much everything in SEO, where as Sabrina said, it's so many small things that make up the whole one of the examples by a colleague of mine Name, you may have heard before a general Ellison.

He says, does your typography have a huge impact? Probably not the color of your logo. Probably not. Whether you have valid HTML, probably not. If there are typos in your content, probably not, but if you add all of that up and all of that is slightly off, it's a horrible experience. And this SEO is or should be approached holistically.

So all of the little bits should work to your advantage and core web fighters [01:09:00] should work to your advantage. And it's not the single most important ranking factor, but it's a very small piece of a very large puzzle. So yes, everything Sabrina's.

Nathan Wrigley: I honestly, Sabrina job offer on the show. Fantastic. The just for a few comments in here.

So here we go. WP robust is Beth again. She, first of all, she said, really she's been touting. She fell into that trap. It sounds like she's been touting it as being like super, super important the COVID vitals thing. And she says, so it's like a hierarchy speed is part of COVID vitals and COVID vitals as part of user experience, which is one ranking factor.

Is that correct? The answer I'm guessing from both the taco and Sabrina would be, yes, that is correct. Kind of like this comment from Peter Ingersoll. Hello, Peter. I always tell everyone who will listen to all the effort put into trimming. [01:10:00] Microseconds is much better used for getting the basics right.

And creating good content. Yeah. So content first then do the Microsoft microsecond shaving a little bit later, and it seems like you've got some sort of other work office. Sabrina wants you to talk to her students about this. So Sabrina is going to be very busy. Yeah. So I totally get why, because the press has been covering it.

Even like the normal press, the actual normal press in my country has been talking about core web files and the impact that it's had. And when that, oh yeah, not so much now, but 18 months ago that you would

have things about. And at that point it starts to feel like that's the only thing, because they're never talking about this stuff normally. And all of it, there were artists don't get me wrong. It wasn't like it was during the sort of Brexit period, I don't think it ever beat Brexit to the [01:11:00] headline, but it was there.

It was in the paper. So it was interesting. Let's move on. Let's deal with another one. We're running short of time. So we're gonna have to curtail the amount of time we spend on these. First of all, this quick one Google again, and this time the right to be forgotten. It's a search engine journal one small, and just, I don't want to go into this article too much.

I actually just want your opinions because I haven't really got time to discuss all of the bits and pieces in there, but I just wanted to gather what your thoughts were on this in where I am. That is to say the jurisdiction I'm in the UK. I'm still not that sure what my rights are in terms of phoning, Google up and saying, look, can you expunge me from the internet, please?

I don't want to be discovered for some ludicrous thing that I did when I was 14 or a photo that somebody put up with me in it. And I didn't consent to it being on the internet. My, my [01:12:00] personal take is that given. Given the fact that, I'm just an ordinary citizen, I'm not a politician and my decisions don't actually impact other people's lives.

I feel that I should be allowed to phone up Google being, whoever it may be and say, I want all of it gone, please. And I'd like it to be done in, I don't know, 60 days or some reasonable amount of time. What are your thoughts? Does it concern you solid example for me is I don't put any photos of my children online.

Not ever, not once, never the thinking behind that is what if they regret it? What if there's just that photo where I don't know, they just got that weird smile and they just look a bit embarrassing or who knows, they were young and they were running around on the beach and had less clothes on than they probably would do when they're 18, for example.

And I just think that's their decision to make, they can stick as many pictures of their, like on whether when they're in that age group, they can do as much embarrassing stuff as they want, but I don't [01:13:00] want it on there so that they don't have to be facing. And I feel it's important that we shouldn't have a lasting record of ourselves online forever, that we don't authorize as Jen's not spoken for a bit.

Can we go to you, Jen? What do you think?

Gen Herres: Sure. Let's just say I'm really glad that when I was in my early twenties, Instagram did not exist.

Right.

Gen Herres: I'm so incredibly glad of that as. Many parties that I am so glad there are no cameras to have ever recorded them. Right. But I live in the United States.

I happen to live in the national capital region, which means the area around Washington, DC, which is where all of the three letter agencies for the U S are station, which means I know that I have absolutely no rights to privacy. Because I'm in the U S they don't exist. We have giant [01:14:00] bunkers being built out west to store data on all of us.

Nathan Wrigley: And I'm not right in saying that you, Jen, you literally in the United States, that there is no law that you can turn to to ask for this, to be done because from my, from what you carry on

Gen Herres: in the U S the basic one is that while there is freedom of speech, there is not freedom of defamation.

So you can't go after and defame people. So generally the only right, to try to get someone to take something down about you is to go the course of defamation,

Nathan Wrigley: right? Which is not what a lot of people are going to be willing to do. There was a really nice example in the piece here. And it was basically saying, imagine you'd come to the crime.

I don't know. You're 20 years old and you commit crime and you end up in prison and you serve your time 3, 4, 5 years, whatever. Then you come out and you have a [01:15:00] clean sheet for ever after that. You really don't know. But I'm saying, imagine that you are that model citizen. You genuinely are just not the kind of person anymore.

That's going to commit that crime. You show up to the job interview. Somebody does a quick Google search based upon your name and it's. Got it. Sorry, we can't possibly because look what you did. And that just seems it's not very forgiving. Is it? They say you're nodding your head taco. I don't know if you share my thoughts on this.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so I, I do think that is absolutely problematic, especially as Jen said, we're, I'm with you that I'm so happy that not every stupid thing I did in my twenties were caught on camera because the quality of cameras was well, as far as they existed on phones, not enough to be able to recognize, be recognized.

But [01:16:00] for my kids who are now five and two years old, by the time they will be in their teens or in their twenties, every thing they do will be caught on some cat. Every doorbell has a camera. Every house has a camera. Everyone's phone has a camera. Everything is listening all the time. What if they made a stupid mistake?

Let's do something stupid. Like shoplifting. They're caught 14 years old puts online because they shoplifted and then 30 years later, they're not able to get a job. I think that the right to be forgotten is becoming more important. Now that we have more ways of recording people and recording every single thing they do, which is why the U S example makes me so sad because this is going to affect [01:17:00] at least one, but possible multiple generations that are caught in between.

And that's why I think that GDPR and the right to be forgotten and are such a good thing.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting. There's a quick comment here before Sabrina chips in from Beth again. Oh, she's changed the name there. There we go. In the U S you can't get a job at 40, if you had a DUI. I don't know what a DUI is.

Gen Herres: Drinking while driving.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So you were caught having too much alcohol in your blood at 18 years, and even at the age of 40 some, 22 years later, that would still be enough of an impediment for you to get a job in

Gen Herres: the U S juvenile records. So anything that qualifies as a juvenile offense, which sometimes people are technically under 18, but still tried as an adult in the U S so juvenile is sealed, but.

Once you're 18. Everything you [01:18:00] do will haunt you for the rest of your life. If you get convicted

Nathan Wrigley: of it literally a few were 18 years and one day and committed the same crime as the day before you, that would haunt you forever. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. That's it's just a fascinating subject because obviously when I was a kid, there were computers more or less.

Nobody had them, there was no surveillance. You know, there were no cameras anywhere. There was nothing like that. There was just people talking to each other and writing things with pens and paper. And it is, it's a cause for concern Sabrina, what your thoughts.

Sabrina Zeidan: I completely agree on everything that you guys just said, except for one thing, if a vote for politician or something like this, if it's a public person, I don't want their records to be forgotten.

I have, I don't know how it can be solved, but I think it's a different thing when you're like, like you said, Nathan, regular citizens citizen. And when [01:19:00] you're politician, for example, we don't want that information. We want to know who we are voting for. We don't want to have information. She has been erased because people because person doesn't feel comforted.

Presenting to public. You already making yourself public by going for lecture or something. So I don't know, maybe if everyone has the right to take it away from internet, but if you try to, to be elected for some public role, you have to present the cases. When you ask us to take something away or something like this, to make it public backwards, maybe some sorts of this network,

Nathan Wrigley: or I do know what you mean.

Sorry.

Taco Verdonschot: I don't agree with you because even the politician although they are all the, a more public figure than [01:20:00] most of us is still a basic, you is a human being and makes mistakes in their teens and in their twenties. Even then they have the right to have that well underage drinking as the example that passes in, in the comments.

But they have the brides to have that part forgotten because it's been 10, 20, 30 years ago and no longer relevant. Obviously if it goes for big crimes, if someone robbed the bank and is later trying to become like the minister of finance. Yeah. That might be problematic for that's a different story then, especially the small misdemeanors.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the other area where this may be a cause for concern is where you are simply not guilty as charged, the [01:21:00] Google keeps a lovely permanent record of all the press coverage up to the acquittal. And there's no smoke without fire. So look at all these things that they were being accused of.

Actually hang on a minute, go forward one year and you'll find that they were acquitted and it was all made up. But your reputation is tarnished. Online at your job could be lost. And these days, it really does seem it's as simple as writing a poor tweet and you can be ruined forever, know?

And I don't know, forgiveness maybe is the word that we want to look out here. We are in a rush. Let's move on a little bit. That did first things first flight. This was brought to my attention by Jen. It's called a, we designed a more inclusive flight. I'd like you to tell us why we're why we look at us today.

Gen Herres: Yes. So I happened to have noticed this because I have a number of websites on flywheel and [01:22:00] I was like, wow, this backend is really a lot easier to use. Things are just clearer. Wow. I can actually read all of the buttons. This is great. So then I noticed that they had did that also on their blog and they had published what they did and they did a short little I don't remember what it was called, but they did a little sprint of, and fixed a lot of their issues and they made their buttons significantly easier to read.

They made link significantly more obvious. It just became a whole lot easier for me as someone with perfect 20, 20 vision to use their website. And so I just wanted to point out that it was. A really lovely point that doing some accessibility can really benefit everyone. And it doesn't always have to be a earth shattering undertaking.

Nathan Wrigley: So this is [01:23:00] the UI once you're inside, but also their blog, their public facing blog they've gone in and they've looked at it from an accessibility point of view. And that's something that you're very, you're really into that. So you're just pleased that, ah, okay. You can find the piece it's called.

We designed a more inclusive flywheel is published on the 8th of February, Mikey, Mickey, Mikey chap, Glenn on the Getz flywheel blog. Okay. Let's see what else we've got. What's this one here. I'm not missing this one. Taco put a few pieces in and because time short, he said. A couple of them. So we will, but I'm not skipping this one, a Wordle press a Z.

If that hasn't already happened. Those taken over the universe, I don't get it. I really don't get it. See it everywhere. What's what have you been doing taco what's WordPress?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So a couple of weeks ago, [01:24:00] someone Sweeta, like we should have a a WordPress version of a Wordle and told us what'll press.

And my mind immediately goes, Hey, if this domain isn't taken, we should make sure that it stays available to the WordPress community. So I registered the domain and earlier. I think this week some conversation happens on Twitter asking for that, and this is made by Ross Windell and and he he had some time to play over the weekend and said, okay, let's get, let me give a first shot into what a Wordle press could look like. So yeah, it's, it's very interesting take where you get to guess the [01:25:00] the WordPress function that consists of four parts. And I've been playing with it for.

30 minutes last night. And that's really

Nathan Wrigley: hard. Obviously you've got to be like, oh, I've just renamed it. It should be called nurdle press.

Taco Verdonschot: He exists. It's a M is a avid player of oh,

Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. So what it'll press, you can find [email protected]. I'm guessing if it's carries on it, won't be staying there, but it says stupid, very early prototype, very in italics. This is a Wordle type game. It gives you a new random puzzle on page reload.

You have to guess a WordPress core PHP function, name EWP on discord. Get on the Scott attachment, underscore image, the score logic isn't quite right yet, but it's great. So you [01:26:00] go in and you've got to guess what these functions are. So you've got to know your WordPress. Actually this is a fun little thing for those people who are learning WordPress, at the end of, just the fundamental way of figuring it out.

Sabrina Zeidan: You mentioned, there is a link to, to, to what this function does and to arguments and to everything. Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot: So it will eventually live on wordpress.com. But Ross, wasn't quite ready to put it out that publicly. So I'm sure he's going to hate me for putting it on the show. I know it's so much fun if you have no idea about WordPress functions, go to developer.wordpress.org, look up the functions and you can just try them try pieces of it and it will still be.

Nathan Wrigley: That's cool. Wordpress.netlify.app is where it's [01:27:00] currently living. And and if you liked the discussion we had earlier about Ross's turbo admin, there's a link by the looks of it at the bottom of that post as well, which looks like it's there. Okay. What else have we got? What's this one. This is you Sabrina.

Don't wanna miss this one? What's this? You Sabrina the optimism. Yeah, it

Sabrina Zeidan: was me. Yeah, I think that this is a very neat article by consenting of saving about the service side suited to, to generate the images. So usually we use something like pixel or image to generate the images in our website, and then we need to either.

Rules to access to make redirection. But it never works because no one is you were a few people are using a proxy server right now. Most of them using in China. So the [01:28:00] other option is to enable JavaScript replacement, which doesn't usually work properly because for process, so session module assist him.

And then when this parts of content are replaced something, there are lots of chance. Something goes from anyways, the best way to do this degenerate web images and to add rules into your Ingenix configuration file. That's what everyone usually does. But there is another thing there when you add rules to angina next configuration file.

Yeah. It's not super easy. And also you have to contact your host and there might be not modules might not be enabled to something like this anyways. And this is a tool that you can use. If you're using something like a digital ocean, or you have your droplets elsewhere, you can use this tool to generate web images for free, without subscription, because sorts of services.

Paid subscriptions right now, you actually [01:29:00] rating them for free on your server. And then you serve images in web before, but it does more than that. It does more than just serving images. It compresses them, it resizes there. You, you, you can put all the arguments there, but the main thing is where P because it's caught my attention because usually you pay for generation with P and this is a free thing and easy to thing.

So you just install it on your, if you're already using droplets, you're installing it on your server and you get it for free. Isn't that nice?

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is nice. And you're right. I do pay for a service that would do that. I never used them yet. I'm still caught in that. It's not a hundred percent. So I'm still in that kind of it's 95%.

I'm still using PNGs and JPEGs and things like that. I haven't quite made the gap yet, but yeah, free is always good. So you can find that on the [01:30:00] sale.io bloggers, blog dot sailed dyo is called optimize images and serve web P. Yeah. So the tool

Sabrina Zeidan: is called image proxy. Once it does, it's actually just, proxying the images it creates where P version and a proxy in the request to the images, it looks very nice and it's server side and not based on Java script, obviously it's more performance it's

faster.

Sabrina Zeidan: Another thing, short pixel, for example, it hosts the images when you generate a repeat hosted elsewhere. So you're making another request to their service server. And this is hosted on your own server. No, no outbounds requests. And I spend.

Nathan Wrigley: Very good. Thank you very much. I think we're, I think we're done.

We're certainly done in terms of time. We've gone over a little bit. I do apologize to the three guests, taco and Sabrina and Jen. Very nice to have you on once again, really enjoyed having you here. I hope you'll all come back and and do it all again at some point [01:31:00] in the future. We're at that part of the show, Jen, I'm sorry, you won't know about this, but we've got to do the awkward wave because I always get people to wave so that we can use this as the album art.

So if we could all yeah, and the awkward wave is over. Thank you so much. We'll be back this night. You can stop now Sabrina. We can we'll be back this time next week with a different panel of guests talking about WordPress though. And so until then, thank you taco. Thank you, Sabrina. And thank you Jen.

Really nice to have you on take it easy.

Sabrina Zeidan: You're welcome. As long as you be here.

Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.