This Week in WordPress #206

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 206 entitled the wrong t-shirt. It was recorded on Monday the 25th of April, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by my cohost Taco Verdonschot, but also by two other guests, both of them new to the show. We've got Rachel Winchester as well as Jack Kitteridge.

It's called this week in WordPress. And of course, we're going to cover some WordPress news from this week. First stop WordPress 6.0, has a new beater that needs testing and McCarthy has a load of accessibility, things that she would like to be tested as well. There's a whole load of churn in the WordPress space.

This week. We mentioned for people who are moving, some of them are leaving WordPress. Some of them are coming back to WordPress, but that's an interesting story. We also talk about the fact that some plugins, notably featured plugins with lots of installs will be required to disclose if they change hands so that the plugin can not be modified in.

People's already existing websites, brave the. Based upon chromium is deciding that they want to no longer support amp pages. Is that a good idea or not? And the web 3.0, what do you make of it? Is it good? Is it bad? It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello. This is this week at WordPress episode 4,000,603.

It's not really it's episode two, 106 were not that good. Very nice to have you with us. If you're joining us live, that's really lovely. If you're listening to this a day afterwards on the podcast, nice to have you along as well. If you didn't know, we do it live. These are not a, these three fine people that are joining me today are real.

They I presume that I've never actually met them in person, but hopefully one day I'll meet them in person. I heard some interesting news about AI this week and it is quite plausible fairly soon that you could be AI, but enough of that, let's discover who's on the show today. First off a regular co-host Taco.

How are you doing?

[00:02:21] Taco Verdonschot: All goods except for a computer that cost a bit of stress just now, but we're here.

[00:02:29] Nathan Wrigley: You, what happened? Tell us, did just, you did the reboot. Yeah.

[00:02:34] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. So I think a minute before I was supposed to join my computer just completely stalled and I had the option to reboots or just reboots and then it just tied it to install all the updates.

Yeah. Yeah. It took 'em two minutes longer than it should have. And that's a long two

[00:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you've got something to do. I know this feeling, it's always that the most crucial moment. Anyway, it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us. Once again. I'm glad that you've managed to get in under the wire.

Nobody knew Taco. If you just said nothing, nobody would have known. That's very honest. We're also joined for the very first time by Rachel Winchester from digital cue. Hello, Rachel. Rachel, I think is muted. If Rachel's not muted, I can't hear her. Can anybody else hear Rachel or is it just me? No. Yeah. I can't hear you, Rachel, which is odd because just moments ago I could, Rachel, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to introduce our other guests, Jack, whilst you have a quick fiddle around and see if there's any setting or any wire that got dislodged, if not, you might have to do a Taco reboot and and we'll see you in half an hour, then she's gone. She's gone. She's gone to reboot. I'll see her on the other side.

Let's put her back in. There we go. Let's hope we can hear her now, but whilst we figure out. Oh, yes. All right, Jack, I'm sorry. You're gonna have to wait. Rachel's back. How are you doing Rachel? Nice to have you with us and good. It's very know exactly at the moment. Yeah. Early here in Philadelphia.

Okay. I always have to apologize to our north American guests because it always is stupid. O'clock I'm going to do the proper introduction, Rachel Winchester, or when she's a product designer focused on elevating the arts and cultural industries. She works full time as a UX product designer at digital cube.

As you could see on the screen, focusing on their WordPress products, client websites, and other initiatives for their users and communities. Additionally, as a freelancer, she works one-to-one with entrepreneurs and small businesses to help them realize their goals and solve their problems. She's very active in the WordPress community, organizing the Philly meetup and the New Jersey meetup groups, as well as an organizer for this summer's WordCamp Montclair, I have to confess I've.

Heard of Montclair. Can you tell what is that close to Philly or is that a bit further away?

It

[00:05:01] Rachel Winchester: is a New York city suburb. Yeah, so we're expecting some of the New York audience to come to Montclair. But it's in north Jersey. Maybe like a 15 minute drive from Newark, if you know where that is.

But yeah, so the Montclair meet up in person meet up joined forces with all of the other Jersey meetups for COVID. So there's this mega meetup called the Jersey press meetup and that's virtual. And most of the Jersey press meet of organizers are also organizers for word camp Montclair.

So it really feels like all of New Jersey. We're at camp.

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Wow. That's cool. You do a lot, by the way tech, I was giving you a bit of a round of applause. I'm going to do the same thing. Yeah, well done. That's a boatload of stuff. I appreciate all of the, all of your efforts. And let's see if let's see if Jack's equipment is working.

He put in the show notes that he wasn't quite sure if he could see us. Can you see us in Harris? He's all right. Yet, has the rare quality that he's from the UK, nobody apart from me is ever from the UK on this show anymore. Not since we lost Paul Lacey, but Jack has a very short and simple biography.

I'll read it out and then we'll find out a little bit more Jack's biography is forwards. It says product manager at learn dash. Tell us a bit about that, Jack. What's LearnDash we all know, but tell us.

[00:06:25] Jack Kitterhing: Yeah. LearnDash is the most popular LMS system for WordPress. And one of the very few that constantly ranks in cafeteria it's talk LMS systems, regardless of being for WordPress.

My day-to-day, I manage our engineering team, which is always fun and interesting. And. Most of the recent highest will be my own friends. So

luckily, cause we'd like to, we would just sit there, throw in plastic thoughts. So each other's heads

[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: or having water gone by well, when the CEO was away, Taco can tell us more about that in a minute. It's an absolute pleasure to have the Taco. Forgive me. It's very nice to have the two new people.

That's always really nice. And obviously Taco is an absolute pleasure to have you as along as well, just a couple of captions to throw at you. If you want to go and share this with your friends. Yeah, we have fairly a fair few people coming live. It's mainly about recording the audio for tomorrow's podcast, but if you do want to share this stop what you're doing, put it down and go to WP Builds.com forward slash live, then copy and paste that and send it off to Twitter or to mustard or.

Facebook or wherever you send things off to go and share it. And let's see if we can swell the numbers. If you join us and you want to comment, that would be lovely. We tried to get as many of those comments on the screen as we can. If you're going to the WP Builds page, which is WP Builds.com forward slash live, you need to be logged into Google because it's YouTube comments.

If you're in the Facebook group, you need to give us a bit of permission. Otherwise we don't know who you are. We just get a blank. The generic avatar, which looks very boring and we don't get your name. If you want to amend that and let us know who you are, you have to go to this highly memorable URL, chat.restream.io forward slash F.

Yep. You heard it here. First chat.restream.io forward slash F B. You'll be saying that to yourself all night. And if you put that URL in there, they'll say, can we have your avatar? Can we have your name? And personally I declined, but don't tell anybody that we're going to carry on with the show.

And we're going to talk about WordPress things. Just a couple of things. First. Let's say some, say hello to some people who've made the effort to show up. Hello, max. Nice to have you with us. Rob Cairns joining us as he always does. I'm going to, I'm going to start referring to Rob as reliable Rob, because he's always here on time every single week.

And I really do appreciate him. If you don't know Rob Cairns has got his own fine podcast and you can go and Google that a bit later, right? Let's get stuck into it. Let me share my screen. This is us. Ooh, let me hide that. This is us. WP Builds.com. There's our website. Go and explore things. Click buttons, go to links, subscribed to things.

That's my pitch. The next thing to mention is we've got a show this week with the lovely peach and Neri we're going live. Oh my goodness. It's tomorrow 2:00 PM. No, it's not. It's 3:00 PM. UK time. Peacher is a URL. Guru. She would probably hate being that, but there she is. And she's going to dissect a couple of user generated websites.

People have been sending things in that they would like her to have a look at. So if you fancy doing that, you can go to this page and sign up and then we will keep you updated and hopefully get your stuff on the show. And we'll be live right here in 25 hours time. If you like the darker side of the internet, they used to call them dark patterns.

Now they've renamed it. It's now called deceptive design. Apparently, those little things where the continue button is made all green and lovely and the skip is, are grayed out so that you have to, you know what I'm talking about, that's called deceptive design and we're after examples of that so that we can name and shame people.

So feel free to go to WP builders.com forward slash UI, fill out that form. And hopefully we'll air some of the content that you've created. And offer me droning on let's get stuck into WordPress. We have a new version of WordPress in beta, as you can see on the screen, it's WordPress 6.0 beta.

I don't know how you say it. I say beta cause I'm from the UK. What do you say, J? I would

[00:10:47] Jack Kitterhing: say the same as you, but I now say it the American way. Cause everyone always used to laugh at yeah.

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's loads of words like that. I've given up saying the English, the British English way, and I say it that way.

Anyway, here we go. Bita two. I have nothing really to add. Just if you're into contributing to WordPress now is the moment if you want to help, WordPress is future. There are 209 tickets in WordPress, six there's 110 new features and enhancements there's things around the block editor, the pattern's rest API.

There's no news here except that there's a new beta two. And if you want to go and help go and read the post, I will put it into the show notes. So we'll just quickly move on. Sorry, everybody. We're just gonna get. And McCarthy, who is the most busy person on earth as far as I'm concerned? Honestly, where is not in the WordPress space, if you open up any article and is being mentioned, she's she's looking for to, for help.

And there's a great laundry list of things that she need help with. She's trying to improve the accessibility of WordPress 6.0 and the post is [email protected]. And I'll link to it in the show notes. And if you're looking at screen, it's just called make sorry, WordPress 6.0 accessibility improvements.

And there's a laundry list of general improvements. Look at that on the screen, there's probably about 20 things which they need help with maybe. So there's things which need helping out with the navigation lock blocks in general, the list view needs a bit of make-over the media, the quick bulk edit feature, the login registration theme.

Basically, if there's sounds like every bit of WordPress needs a bit of accessibility work and she needs some help. So go to that piece. And I was wondering Jack and I was wondering Taco how much effort you guys put into accessibility these days in terms of where Yoast the plugin and learn dash the plugin.

Are you there yet? Are you like a hundred percent or are you more on the journey towards.

[00:12:51] Taco Verdonschot: I'm not sure a hundred percent is achievable. I think there's always room for improvement. There's always more that we can do to make sure that everyone can use the product. But yeah, under their fair charge on our team is in Italian accessibility experts and also doing a lot for work for score and accessibility.

And let's just make, say that just his presence makes all our developers think about accessibility all the time, because they, everyone knows that he'll get mad at you.

[00:13:36] Nathan Wrigley: That's what you need.

[00:13:38] Taco Verdonschot: Don't get me wrong. But yeah, it's no, it's super important. And as yo for everyone means as yo for everyone and not as yo for everyone who can use a mouse and the keyboard.

[00:13:51] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, good answer. Taco is almost like you'd rehearse that. That was brilliant. Jack

[00:13:57] Jack Kitterhing: w we're definitely on the journey.

Atlanta actually has been a big focus of as may, maybe a little hidden is that we're completely redoing the templates so they can be accessible. Part of, I struggle with Landa. She is in. The essence that the theme also impacts accessibility. You need the theme to be accessible because the contents can on the page.

So there's still aspects where, you can be as accessible as you can be, and then the thing just ruins it for your product. So we have some themes that we recommend and we know we work with good people. Cadence, for instance, they work along accessibility stuff which also part of Stella WP.

And it's really something that we want to do. Yost have been great themselves. I've had a lot of feedback directly from Yosh on accessibility, stuff that they passed over that we're working on. And yeah, I can't wait to show everyone what we've been working on. Cause it takes a long time to do accessibility.

It's not quick, it's not easy, but it's an area that we want to invest in. And it is an area that we are investing in because. Everyone should be able to learn online regardless of

[00:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: their requirements. I know that formulated answer. I don't know what's happening on the show today. It's two so far.

Let's see if the third one, let's see if Rachel could keep up the spec, Rachel, as a person who's into UI and UX and building client websites as this become a more of a feature of your builds over the last, because it feels to me as if it's a big talking point now, and it has been for the last 24, 48 months, just going to throw this one out.

[00:15:40] Rachel Winchester: Accessibility is huge. As a user experience designer, our users are people, real people of all types. Our users are also sometimes robots. When I think about SEO and how I have to design for robots as well, but they're mostly people. So with my freelance stuff and with the work at digital cube I think about accessibility just as.

Just as I think about all of our normal users.

Do you

[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: have it as part of the process, right? From the start, when you're building a website or is it the kind of thing that you tackle? Let's say 70, 80% in, so you've done the design, you've laid things out, you've got your fonts and color palette and all of that sorted and that you're basically nearly there.

And do you then concentrate or are you doing it all from the.

[00:16:30] Rachel Winchester: I mostly focused on the UX part and the research part. So I keep it in mind when I do that work and I work with another designer. So who is also a lot more aware of accessibility issues, but all of our work goes to an accessibility specialist consultant afterwards.

So we don't work like hand in hand with him as we're making the designs. But we have to be aware of some of those best practices. And then afterwards it will be checked by a

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: specialist. It feels to me that our ecosystem has matured so much and maybe just the internet in general, but so there's Taco and you've got a whole industry of people who just do SEO.

There's the SEO guy, obviously you're employing an accessibility person. I don't know if that tack. Only rolled, but they've got that hat. And but then we've also got like the learning management system ecosystem. We've got the act and it feels to me like you could actually make a career these days in being an SEO, being a LMS person, or being appointed the wrong way then, or being a, an accessibility person.

I know in the UK, there's quite a few people who are having that as a little bit of a niche for themselves. They are an accessibility guru. If you like a nerd and they go out and they go to WordCamps and they teach people the tools to use the legislation, which needs updating and the things that you've got to do.

So what, how is it that a tiny sliver of the internet WordPress can have its own tiny little slivers, SEO, accessibility, whatever it might be. And they're all viable careers. It speaks to a giant ecosystem. I'm just going to put this piece back. So she rarely does by the looks of it need an awful lot of help.

If you can see this on the screen, apologies. If you're listening to the audio of the. There are absolutely loads of things which need addressing. I'll just read you out to give you a gist of some of the things on the general. We've seen the use, the post title as the featured image alt text when linked to the post that needs looking at ensure that blocks with a placeholder set up, have their description ready, read by voiceover that needs looking at the navigation block is identifiable with area labeled, using the menu name, field.

You get the idea we're into the nitty gritty, the weeds of what needs fixing. And if you're at all into accessibility, then this really would be I think, a great place for you to spend a bit of your time. It's on make.wordpress.org, and it will be in the show notes. All right.

[00:19:09] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And I would even argue a Nathan that if you're not into accessibility, but you are a developer, definitely do dive in because.

Of course you'll learn a ton because you'll be working with them. But also because it helps you in your future projects, in your future builds as a developer to think about more of these sometimes really small issues, things that you can fix in five minutes, but next time you prevent them from needing fixing, because you know that it will be a problem later on.

[00:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And that was, I think I misspoken you corrected me there. Thank you. That was the right way of phrasing it, even if you're not particularly into accessibility. Yeah. Go and check it out again. Check the link in the show notes, but it's on make.wordpress.org. Just go and look up.

And she is at, she is an a Z a N E Zed, a Zed U. And she's everywhere. I suspect if you go out shopping. And we'll be there. It's quite likely that she's, she'll be doing the tale. She'll be fucking the shells. She'll be helping with everything she's everywhere. So is Michelle Frechette. Who's joining us.

Hello, Michelle. Very nice to see you. Thanks for joining us today. That's really nice. And hello Elliot. Elliot's down the road from me and he's regular Elliot. We should really go for a beer like we're 10 minutes drive away. Who would be nice to meet up with you in person? A key dokie.

Let's move on. This is a section we've never done before. I don't think. And there's three people who are leaving the WordPress space. So it's with a tear in our collective eyes that we talk about. These three fine people. We'll just go collectively through them, I think, and talk. What they've meant to us, if indeed they've meant anything, some of them may be less, less famous view, but two of them, I know Taco you're very intimately connected with.

So the first one is Chris. Lemme Chris Loma is well who hasn't heard of Chris lemma, frankly. He's one of those guys that seems to be. In all places a bit like an he's written a lot on a lot of helpful tutorials for people over the years. He's decided, as he says in this post, he's decided to move on because it would appear that in all the time that he's been working with WordPress, he's led a bit of a double life, which I didn't know about.

He's worked. He's been working in the background. I imagine the weekends and things like that in ministry and churches. And although I don't really know the full story and he doesn't flesh out in great detail, it would appear that he's been offered an opportunity in that arena that he feels he can't really pass up.

He's been helping out. I'm guessing Jack that, Chris pretty well. He is your boss. I don't know how that works. He was great. You can spill the beans then. He's moving on. It looks like to carry on that side of his life. Maybe time has come. I don't really know.

Is there anything there, Jack, anything that, that didn't make it into this article it's public knowledge. That would be nice.

[00:22:24] Jack Kitterhing: No, I don't think so. I think just the mind thing to now, the crises, a great leader. He was an amazing boss. It wasn't a very long time. I think it was six months after liquid web, but quite line dash w Chris was my boss for, from acquisition.

He oversaw that and right through to this row point. But fantastic guy very funny. Always has a story or 50 to tell. And yeah, just all

[00:22:53] Nathan Wrigley: around a great guy. I genuinely didn't know that he had that kind of pastoral side to him. I just knew him as the WordPress guy.

[00:23:02] Jack Kitterhing: I don't think many of us had a clue.

We already. Wait Chris

[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: has this side fam other Chris' level. Yeah. And I guess that's part of it really. And he makes the point in the article that if you've ever seen him at a world camp he's quite good at, he's quite good at laying out things as a story. He's, he doesn't do the here's, the presentation, here's some code let's run through the code and how it works.

He's more let's lay out a nice story for you and he begins in that way. And then he re then you realize that he's told you about a problem and here's how he might fix the problem. And obviously he's got that side, which has been built up through many years of delivering and writing sermons.

It would appear do you know exactly what this role is? Cause he doesn't, he didn't make it obvious or at least I didn't pick up on it. Anyway. I just know that he's going off to do that. It seems like he's remapped somebody from his past who offered him this position. Yeah. Yeah, I don't

[00:24:01] Jack Kitterhing: quite know the specifics of the role.

I just know it's in the AI field in that area. But it sounded like an interesting opportunity and it certainly Chris is very passionate about, so we're all pleased with him at liquid work. We're sad to see him go. It was a bit of sweet email when a CTO sent me out, say that Chris is leaving obviously over excited for Chris, very sad for us.

But we will keep annoying him in slack, Equinix, Skype us that easily.

[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: I be really surprised if. There's many people who've been around in the WordPress space for any length of time who haven't not literally bumped into him, but haven't, come across his website, read an article. He was really big on kind of membership solutions and things back in the day, writing comparisons and downloading them, all, buying them, all, checking them all out and writing lists with lots of charts about what it did and what it didn't do and all of that kind of stuff.

And I don't know if he's been doing that more recently, but that was my introduction to Chris. It was all about the membership sites. And if you Google membership sites, WordPress, I'm just pretty sure that Chris is stuff will come up. Attacker, you got any experience with Chris? Do you ever meet him?

Hang out with him.

[00:25:16] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Yes. Quite a few occasions. I'm happy to say at the first Yoast con he gave a presentation and I think. Pretty much, you'll be able to recognize everyone who's there. When you say hope is not a strategy, everyone will think about Chris goes the way that, yeah, like you just said, his storytelling way of presenting oftentimes matching his t-shirt to his presentation is definitely amazing.

I've had some personal time with him at several events, just talking about WordPress and life. And I think he's very famous for the Cabo press event that you're currently scrolling into which is happening again this year. And I was trying to find it, but I can't just now, but someone was saying the Cabo press, which is a sort of an event for entrepreneurs.

We'll be even more fun now. You're you don't have to be afraid that Chris is going to buy your company.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: That's a good idea. Yeah, it says here, it says my Carver has conference will continue. So I don't know if that means it'll carry on because one's already organized or if it means it's just going to keep rolling over, but you always see on Twitter, that laundry list of people standing on the steps that I've been to Cabo press who's, who've had a nice time.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing those thoughts together. That's really nice. Rachel, do you know Chris, you ever bumped into Chris, met Chris read Chris's stuff?

[00:27:04] Rachel Winchester: I definitely see him around Twitter and I've seen his blog posts around. I'm also, I'm still new in the WordPress community. Like I've only been doing this for maybe three years now and sometimes it's hard to remember everyone that I've met.

I went to what is it called state of the world? In person last December, that it was in the offices in Soho, and I might have met

[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: him there. I have to ask, forgive me. This is really impolite D the back, the backdrop of that event was COVID. There was a lot of talk about COVID. I hope you managed to stay safe.

I hope it was all right. The fact and didn't, it wasn't one of those super spreader events. So not really asking you a question, I'm just saying hope everything was all right. But thank you for sharing that as well. He does say, he says that after more than 20, I'm just going to verbatim read off the screen.

Cause I think he's quite nice. You get some context after more than 25 years of having a tech day job and ministry orientation in the evenings and weekends, I'm shifting a role to where I bring both together in a daily way now I don't know how some people manage this. So Chris writes lengthy blog posts.

He runs all sorts of things over at Stella WP, including learn dash and then yeah, just in the evenings, just so have a totally different thing that I'm doing. Some people get the energy. Ah, yeah, but you'll be sadly missed Chris. Hope you keep coming back into the WordPress community. We're not dumb though.

We've got two more people. We're not waving goodbye at all to the next one in the WordPress community. Sounds like you've going to step up the WordPress game, but it change in focus. Shall we say? And this is yeah, it's REM cus REM, because he's often on the show. He's one of the co-hosts like Taco is, and he's moving.

He's been at serve bolt, which is a hosting company. He's been there for the last couple of years. It sounds like they're doing really well. So it's not for those reasons that he's moving on. He just said essentially it's time. He just, he says with a heavy heart saying goodbye to serve Bali's people, its products and services.

They're very actually aligned with many of my goals, but after a good run of over two years, I find myself, I found myself in a position where I can. Change you into a direction that was more aligned with me where I wanted to be a whole and not just some parts. It says they've split up super amicably and here's an insight into what he's going to be doing.

He says, he's going to start refocusing on his WordPress agency. I guess that must have taken a bit of a backseat. He's going to take some time off both to reboot his dock site, as well as his English alternative is going to be focusing on performance, scalability, e-commerce and building cool stuff.

He's going to rejuvenate his newsletter and he's also. Going to start a podcast. Now

we're actually having a conversation tomorrow and I'm going to, I'm going to tell him how to podcast. I'm going to tell him everything incorrectly, so that it's a total disaster, but don't tell him that you never know you might be listening to this now. And that would be his, let's say at the end of the goal.

Yeah. That would be falling. But yeah, REMCOs obviously I think of all the three of us on the pallet, I'm going to guess that Taco, you know him best of all. He's coming back. It looks like he stepped away from WordPress. He's coming back into WordPress, right? He was a big part of the Yoast community for years.

If you've only nice things, please.

[00:30:47] Taco Verdonschot: Yes, no all the good things about ramekins. The first time I met the guy and trust me, once you meet him in person, you never be get because he's like soul prong. So he's really a big person, not easily missed. But he's the friendliest, giant you'll ever meet.

And yeah, he was organizing WordCamp Europe. The very first one, he was one of the founders of working. And that's where I first met him. And then when we started organizing a local WordPress meetup, he was one of the first speakers at the meetup and yeah, I've interacted with him a lot. Co-organized defense and I'm very happy to see that he is moving to a place where he can do what he really likes.

Again, even though I know he had the best time it's.

[00:31:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's really nice. Yeah, nothing. You can tell me all the bad stuff when we've clicked the stop button, and

[00:31:58] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, maybe after a few drinks,

[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: he is massive. He's really, I remember seeing him at WordCamp Europe. That was the first time I ever met him.

And I was stood on some stairs at the time. He was taller than me and and every so often me and Paul Lacey get onto we use signal to chat with each other and we comment that, oh, look, REMCOs has released another video of throwing heavy objects over tall things, or the weekend. He likes to lift the heavy weights and just throw them in the air.

It's it's brilliant.

[00:32:33] Taco Verdonschot: Actually competing in a strong man competition. It's his first one ever, but yeah, it's insane if you follow him on Instagram, you'll see some videos, things that are not humanly possible.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So we got Chris, who's got a sideline in preaching. We've got REMCOs, he's got a sideline being really strong.

Jack or Rachel, do you know? Do, maybe you don't know Rimkus I don't know. It's a

[00:33:00] Jack Kitterhing: quiet what camp London, whenever the last one or that was before the pandemic

[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: 2019, I think it was, yeah. That's the one.

[00:33:08] Jack Kitterhing: Yeah. Yeah. I was there with, Malpais and rancorous and Kim, the CEO of Malpais they were talking, we was all talking and it was like a two hour conversation.

Absolutely great guy and yeah, incredibly cool. I'm pretty tall. Like I'm like 60. Inquiry lodge and then Rome Costa Stein. And next to me might need it.

[00:33:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's quite a spectacle. Rachel, I don't know if

[00:33:36] Rachel Winchester: I don't think I've met him. I would think I would have remembered meeting someone

[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: like that.

Yeah. You would remember the gentle giant that is REM cause he's going to be back on the show in a couple of weeks time so we can get the low down figure out figure out how his new life has gone. But it's always nice when people make a decision. I think he's really brave, I think, throw in stability and throwing it into the rear view mirror and going for your dreams and trying to do things for yourself for your families is always very brave.

So joking aside, good luck Rimkus I hope that whatever you taken on really works out for you. So that's two of our three, we've got a third one. Yeah. Th I think Taco, this is totally over to you because you're going to know this person better than just about anybody. I would have thought. Tell us about this.

Yoast. From my perspective, Yost has been moving around. He's been going around for the, like the last three or four years, trying to figure out where you fits in the scenario. So he worked for what I was going to say, automatic. I don't know if he did work for automatic, but he worked for the WordPress project for a little while.

And then he came back and he, Maricka took over at Yoast and so on. And where are we at with him? It looks like he's doing a final, proper farewell.

[00:34:54] Taco Verdonschot: Not entirely, but mostly. Yeah. Yost is obviously the founder of of Yoast. This is highly confusing. I know. But it was, it started out as a one man company with just Yoast to folk and it grew over time into the wild 150, 160 people company that we are now.

And he's always been involved for the longest time as CEO until Mojica took over as CEO, then he was still the chief product officer. So it was still very much involved with Yoast. And last year Yost was sold to new folds and that gave us the chance to. Also take a look at where I am.

Am I at, and what do I want to do in the future? And he decided fairly recently that his future is not as an employee at Joest but as an external consultants. So we'll still get to use all of his expertise regularly, because he'll be in quite often, but not in a employee role at Joseph.

Which is a huge thing for him and for us,

[00:36:24] Nathan Wrigley: how, forgive me for prying into the internal workings of Yoast when you've got a founder. Really, like not only is the company named after him, but it really was started by him. In fact, I can barely, I literally can't think of another firm whose founder is the name of the company.

That the whole thing is tied around him. How's it? How's how are you guys taking this? Is it like bitter sweet? You're happy for him on the one hand, but come back, you host on the other.

[00:36:54] Taco Verdonschot: I think that until 20 15, 20 16 Yoast and ghosts was pretty much the same. We had of course it was already a company and we have people working at Joe's, but it was all supporting what he was.

Since, yeah, late 2015, early 2016. There's been quite a shift already because it was no longer sustainable to have everything built around a single person. So we've been working towards hiring people, but also educating people to take on all the different roles and to already slowly fill Yosef shoes.

So it's been a process for years and I can confidently say that we're now able to actually take over and to to continue to grow Yoast to company because we know enough about SEO. We are, we as a company are experts in the field. We know we're press well enough to build onto WordPress. And we'll still have him as a

[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: backup.

That's nice. That's like the best of all worlds. Isn't it? Did you say 150 people? Yep. Good grief. I didn't know. There was that much SEO in the whole world. That's remarkable all over, right? Just not just in that office where you are distributed all over.

[00:38:33] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Roughly a hundred people are local to beacon where officers are and the rest of them is a remote.

So spread across the world.

[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: Man alive 150 people. That's huge. So there we go. I don't know if you guys over there want to share your story. I've never met Yosty he never came on the show. So you know, there's that, but

[00:38:59] Taco Verdonschot: if you implied to Tim,

[00:39:02] Nathan Wrigley: he was like, he's what are those counts? It's like me inviting Matt Mullenweg onto the show.

It's a bit like, I'm a bit scared of that invite. You should just, I should, that'd be hysterical one day. Just bring in modern bug onto the screen with Yoast and who else? I don't know. But yeah, Chris, lemme, maybe we can do that trifecta. Yeah. I'm really pleased to hear that it's all very amicable.

So this is the story that we've put that is if you want to register for a webinar, which is.

[00:39:36] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah tomorrow we'll I, okay. It's a bit of joking sale, final goodbyes, which is not really final goodbye since it just explained, but we're going to celebrate everything that Yost did for Yoast to company.

And you probably wouldn't expect it, but he hates to be the center of. So this is going to be brilliant and yeah, if you want to be part of it, just register, show up and it will be so

[00:40:06] Nathan Wrigley: much fun. So you can go to a yoast.com forward slash webinar. I'm guessing if you click that, you're going to get to an archive and there'll be the latest one, but it's it is called SEO news, web, and goodbye Yoast.

It's happening tomorrow at 4:00 PM CST, which is 10:00 AM. Ed T so go and sign up for that. I don't know if Jack or Rachel have got anything to add to that. If not, Rachel, I'll move on to your you've a piece into the news feed. Just. Should we go for that one? Let's do that one.

Rachel, who, what, who's this one I confess, I don't know about this one, but we found another person. We added a fourth person. This is this Ebony Butler of, I said that, right?

[00:40:53] Rachel Winchester: Yeah. I've been knee is one of the lead engineers for WordPress 5.9. So she worked on the full site editor in that whole big project.

With the rest of the all female engineering team,

[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: I have to say, you drop me the URL. And that is the coolest home page ever. It's really subtle. If you're looking at the screen, it's like a cartoon. She's obviously had a cartoon drawn and there's a few little things going on. Like the like the little twinkly lights are twinkling, but you don't really notice.

And the computer screen is scrolling code and there's a cat waving its tail. That's sublimely cool. I really liked that. So she's moving on to what's she doing now?

[00:41:36] Rachel Winchester: Yeah. So she was an engineer at an agency called the hikes in Philadelphia and she's moving on to be a lead engineer at Penske media.

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

I confess it's not somebody that I'm acquainted with, but thank you for letting us know about that. Did you want to, did you want to contact,

[00:41:55] Taco Verdonschot: you should invite her to the show as well because she's doing amazing stuff and she's really an amazing software engineer.

[00:42:02] Rachel Winchester: And also I'd like to say community world she leads the WordPress women of color group.

It's mostly on slack and we have virtual Hangouts every week, every month. So if you identify as a WordPress woman of color look out for her or for me and Angela.

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: If for some reason Taco and Rachel, if I forget but at the end of the show, after we've clicked stopped, will you remind me?

And I'll try and see if I can figure out some details. Cause I would definitely like to have her on after everything that you've just said, but good luck Ebony in your new venture. Let's move on. There's our four people, it was supposed to be three. And then we snuck Ebony in at the end. Thank you for that, Rachel.

That's really cool. The, I just want to mention a couple of things. There's no news around this and unfortunately this video will no longer play in my browser, but. Really, this is me just giving a bit of a hat tip to learn.wordpress.org. If you go to a wordpress.org, you'll see like fourth menu along.

You've got plugins, themes, patterns, learn. Boatload of interesting tutorials. This one caught my attention. It's about the difference between reusable blocks, block patterns, templates, and template parts. And I had various things that I wanted to show, but I can't because it won't play for reasons. I don't quite understand, but I'm just saying if there's any bits of the project, especially the new stuff around Gutenberg and the roadmap and all of the new features coming out make your way over here and start to consume the content.

I think this is just such a fabulous project. We haven't really had anything like this. When I was trying to learn WordPress, it was like Google and cross your fingers. And the amount of time that I wasted doing all of that, now there's dedicated tutorials, written explaining everything, all the new concepts and what have you.

And this was just one that I found curious. There's no real benefit to this one in particular, but like I said, if you click on learn.wordpress.org, you've got workshops, lesson plans. It's absolutely. Loads of stuff in there and you can get involved yourself as it says on the screen. And see if you can contribute.

I don't know if any of you guys are into all this sort of stuff, but I just wanted to give them a bit of a shout-out. So I'll open it to you. Three interrupt as you see fit.

[00:44:24] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I think we shouldn't ask Jack which a LMS, a learning,

[00:44:32] Nathan Wrigley: Which SEO plugin from you, Ali.

[00:44:38] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah if only, oh, SEO plugin, but yeah, anyone would be better than what we currently have at the dork.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: The it's just such a fabulous load of stuff and that they're being made. They're totally freely available.

Hopefully I'm going to be doing a podcast episode with Courtney Robinson later this week, and we're going to dig into what this project is all about, but free video tutorials about WordPress. What can you possibly dislike? So learn.wordpress.org. It's not new. It's not a news item, but I just wanted to mention it in case you've never heard of it before.

Okay. This is R w. Drama piece. You've got to have a WP drama piece each and every week. This is actually the antithesis of a drama. It's this is the fix for a drama. Hopefully I can't remember what it was, what the actual new story was. But last year I think it was, may have been the year before.

I can't really remember. There was a plugin which was bolt and. It was sold to somebody new and the new owner of that plugin I'm scratching my head, trying to think what it was. And I cannot remember here's an

[00:45:46] Jack Kitterhing: avatar plugin. And then the whole blown, like profile

[00:45:49] Nathan Wrigley: building that rings a bell that I think you're right.

And then

[00:45:56] Jack Kitterhing: just added loads of stuff people didn't

[00:45:57] Nathan Wrigley: want. And that is, yeah. Yeah. So it started off as a really simple plugin, which did one thing. And I think it, it was to do with avatars. I think you're right. It doesn't really matter what it was. It was just, it did this one thing it got bought and then the new owner decided, you know what, I'm just going to totally radically change it and make it into something completely new with a load of other new features.

And I think it was some sort of like membership system bolted up where, it did one tiny little thing and all of a sudden it was a full blown membership system. And up until that point, I don't really know that this had been a bit of a problem for WordPress plugins tend to get developed.

And then once they've gone a bit stale, they drop off the repository. People stop installing them. Nobody talks about them anymore. Or now that we're in this marketplace where there's a lot of value in WordPress plugins, if you've got thousands of active installs there's a route to profitability.

You could sell it cost. The idea would always be that you'd sell it and the person taking it off your hands would at least do something vaguely similar, but there's no rules around that. You can buy it off somebody and do whatever you like. It. No longer is the thought, so this is a piece it's written by Justin Tadlock.

It's on WP time and it's called plugin directory limits ownership, and committer changes on official featured and the beater plugins. So basically they're trying to put a stop to that, making it so that it says plugin owners can still manually add or remove support reps for their plugin in the directory.

However, they must email the plugin review team to change ownership or commit access. In other words, there's this extra layer. You can't just get it. You, if you want to hand it over to somebody, you need to go through this extra hoop and on, although this is a bit of a, I'm not a storm in a teacup, it's just unlikely to happen to you.

Fingers crossed, but it was something that I think needed addressing. You imagine.

[00:47:53] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, it's only for featured and pizza plugins.

[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a bit

[00:47:59] Taco Verdonschot: limited set of plugins that is affected by

[00:48:03] Jack Kitterhing: this change of 59,000.

[00:48:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So far, is this though, is it just that they're trying out and they need some things to test it on, do you think that's probably what's going on and they just need to see how it works or is this the limitations of it that scope in general?

[00:48:21] Taco Verdonschot: I can imagine that doing this for 59,000 plugins isn't really viable because then the plugins team would need to bruv manually approve every change of committed to every plugin out there. So I don't expect that we can expect this for all plugins. At the same time, it might make sense for The plugins that have more than two or 3 million active installs because they.

Have the user base to really hurt our press in a single change.

[00:49:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I don't know how many featured plugins there are in total, but you're saying the number it's where in the region of about 15 or something like that. And I th I think that's a really, that's a really good point, like Yoast, for example, I dunno what you're at now.

It stops at 5 million and you're at plus 5 million. So we've no idea what that number is, but it's a big number. Yeah. If somebody were to purchase Yoast and then start to do nefarious things and bad things on the backend, it would be good to put some sort of thing in place. I think you're right. Taco.

I think it would be ridiculous to try and expect 59,000. Plug-ins having said that I don't know what I've no insight or even intuition as to what the churn rate for plugin ownership or commits is. Maybe it's hundreds a day, thousands a day, in which case. Probably a complete waste of time trying to keep up with that.

But if you are big and you have the capacity to hurt, if should something go wrong, then yes, that sort of seems to make sense. But anyway, yeah,

[00:50:03] Taco Verdonschot: to be fair. There's better ways to secure we're press. Any accounts that has committed axes to whatever plugin should probably have some two factor authentication at some point.

So I think there's easier things that we can do to keep WordPress and WordPress accounts.

[00:50:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think just, it, was it just in the wrote this or was it, yeah, it was just in the roads. He made that point. Didn't he? He said I think he made that point. I have a memory of him saying something like that, but it's only 15 plugins at the moment.

Yeah. We'll see. We'll see if anything is stopped, but there was a problem. It was on a much smaller scale than these ones, but I guess it's a good place to start. Maybe they can work on these very large ones and then trickle down if they figure out some sort of automated way of doing it, or they actually discovered that it's not that difficult.

There's not that many changes going on. We seem to have lost Jack or at least we've lost the picture of Jack. I don't know if Jack is still. Hello, Jack. Hello.

[00:51:07] Taco Verdonschot: Let us know in the private chat that he needs to let his wife in because she forgot her

[00:51:14] Nathan Wrigley: key. Oh that's a great excuse. I like it.

I'm going to do the same in a few minutes. I'm just going to go and open the door to my wife or something like that. I'll just leave you to, you can chat. Anything on that, Rachel, anything on that, Rachel,

[00:51:31] Rachel Winchester: I just think that was a interesting story that you shared. That was the first time I even thought of of a plugin developer.

Taking over an old plug it in and changing it like that. I've never even thought of that happening.

[00:51:47] Nathan Wrigley: And it really was quite a spectacular alter alteration. It really was a situation where the plugin, I think, enabled you to replace the default avatar with something else not to Gravatar. So you could upload something from somewhere.

I think that's literally all it did. And then in the stroke of, on the stroke of midnight, on one particular, everybody woke up and they had a memory. Plugin stalled as well at the same time. He's back. He's hard on the dock. That's great. Yeah, you can't help normal life getting in the way, but thank you for letting us walk all the way down all the way back.

Yeah.

[00:52:26] Jack Kitterhing: I flopped the stairs. I would come back and I'd be

[00:52:28] Nathan Wrigley: sweating. We were just we was just talking about this. I don't know if you've got anything on this one, Jack. This is the plugin ownership swap problem. And how it's been addressed. Don't know how much of that you caught because in all honesty, I didn't catch when you went, but anything to add, I

[00:52:44] Jack Kitterhing: think, oh, it just died.

I know callings, who'd done this. He is genuinely a great guy and I just think he made maybe a not so great decision in changing the entire amount of he did, but I think we've seen ownership changes be successful before, when you might use us aware of what's going on and you don't completely change the whole.

Can you cut it down? What you want it to do as a premium plugin and just left it as the free, and it'd be a nice upsell. I've brought plugins on WordPress old before myself. I've done the exact same thing. Keep the free as it is, fix the stuff that's broken, introduce a premium version, and then you get the best of both worlds.

Cause you keep the current users happy and you don't annoy people and you'd still get a great path into an upsell.

[00:53:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it was, he he quickly walked it back. Didn't he on social media and was trying to figure out where exactly what miss steps you've made along the way. And he at least created a problem which was fixable and here we go.

Here's a solution for it. Let's see if it trickles down. I know. And

[00:53:51] Jack Kitterhing: just to add a note that we have seen big companies do the same thing before as well. We've seen OSA if a couple of times behind opt-in monster and other plugins where they've brought April, the foams plugin from theme mile, they brawl WP SMTP, I think, and done some things there.

They brought one of the SEO plugins and lots of ton of staff. And, you suddenly get influx of one-star reviews. So I don't get, it's not just the, the people on their own, but make the mistakes. Big companies can do the same.

[00:54:27] Nathan Wrigley: If you think about it the reward is potentially excellent.

Isn't it? If you're hovering, I dunno. Let's say that you've got a plugin and it's a hundred thousand, 50,200,000. The temptation is real, right? It's not like you've got, you've totally got them. And if you can just convert 1% of a million. To whatever it is that you're selling it, I don't know, a hundred dollars a year or something.

You have to go through the little ethical conversation with yourself, don't you. And if it's it's human nature, sometimes I think it gets the better of us. So putting these things in place is an interesting, it seems

[00:55:05] Rachel Winchester: to me he should have consulted with the product manager like Jack.

[00:55:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, we don't wanna, we don't wanna launch into him in particular, but at least somebody is addressing it and I think it was Mika Epstein. So we'll see how this goes. Maybe it'll trickle down in the future. Yeah. Okay. That's that one? Let's move on. Let me pull up the next one. Oh, by the way, I just want to mention if you, if I don't know if you guys have heard of it before, but Ross Wintle has a fabulous Chrome extension.

So you can. It might be Firefox as well. I don't know, but it's called term of I'm hovering on it now waiting for the little modal to pop up. It's called turbo admin for WP, just go and Google that. And and it adds a couple of things in one of which is it adds in the ability to hide certain admin notices.

So you can make some things, not go away, but be visibly gone. They're still there. They're just hidden in this new section. It's a Chrome extension. So it works across all your WordPress websites without you having to install a plugin. And it's very cool. So hats tip to Ross. I think it's $35 for pro and I think it's the, there's a free version, but I don't quite know what the free version does cause I've got the pro one.

Alrighty. Let's not do that one because time is running out. I was going to do this unless any of you wanted to talk about the distraction-free mode thing, I will counter. Nobody's got any interest in that least of all me, so let's carry on. Okay. Let's let's talk about Google amp pages. What a glorious thing.

This was what, a moment in history we had. Oh my goodness. So I don't know if any of you are a user of brave the browser. I am. In fact, the screen that you're looking at now is done in the brave browser. It's basically a Chrome, a chromium fork, and they've got rid of the Google-y bits. So I think it phone home, phones home less, and they've got the shields op mode that they.

They present themselves as a more, a less tracking browser. Should we say with all of the benefits that Chrome brings? I don't know the truth behind that. Anyway, they've taken a stand this week, according to search engine journal, they've now decided that they're going to bypass Google amp pages and I quote, brave browser will now redirect all amp links to publish URLs by default, stop it.

Search engine journal. I don't need the modals. And that's the long and the short of it. The article could basically, there's nothing more to say if you're using the brave browser and somehow you end up on a Google amp page. Now it's going to go. No. We just, can we just have the normal one instead?

What was all this about? It felt to me like this was all about Google. I could be wrong, maybe I've missed judged it, but it really did feel that it was about Google owning more of the internet. I feel Taco you might be the person to give us the best insight into Google. And anyway, it's gone in brave.

[00:58:23] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. My colleague Jono is on the amp advisory board, so I do tread

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: carefully now.

[00:58:33] Taco Verdonschot: No, yeah. I don't know all the exact details because it's I think it's still quite complicated. But obviously when seeing this news, I asked for his opinion and let me quickly pull that up because I wish I knew everything by heart.

But yeah, so this is specifically for amp pages which is what Google was. Offering as a way to make the internet faster, which was a really nice idea, but not a very good implementation probably. But web stories are still huge

[00:59:20] Nathan Wrigley: and then it's not still there. Oh,

[00:59:22] Taco Verdonschot: okay. Yeah. Pushed heavily by by Google.

And I think that amp email is growing enormously or at least that's what Johnny told me. So I'll just repeat what he said here.

[00:59:38] Nathan Wrigley: I blame him

[00:59:40] Taco Verdonschot: now. Slightly on the technical side for me. But yeah, so I think that the idea behind amp was brilliant to have a faster internet and to strip out all the bits that you don't need and to serve things faster.

But yeah, the implementation was or is interesting and has some implications that would lead to people, not getting traffic to their own sites. And for some reason, site owners dislike that.

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I could see that going. One of the, one of the stories which came across my radar, this is probably three or four months ago.

And I can't remember the provenance of this, where this comes from, but I have a memory that Google were deliberately massaging their search results to failure. Pages in an attempt to make them feel more desirable. That feels like it was about three months ago and it probably came off this website.

Cause it's one of the few SEO related websites that I deal with, but it just feels well, Andrew, Palmer's put a nice comment and let me just let me just put that up. He said was an attempt to persuade publishers to advertise in his opinion. Rob Cannes has said that personally amp has been a waste of time and that, that kind of feels like where I want to pitch my flag as well.

It just felt like a big giant corporation had said, look, you've all got the internet wrong. How about we do it our way it's quicker. Yay. Great. It's a bit quicker. I'm sure that's lovely. But at the same time, let's just pull it over into our ecosystem so that we can get all of the data from that we can gather whatever we want from that.

In the effect in the event that it wasn't as successful as they'd hoped, they then massage the search engine results in order to in order to make it appear more successful. I'm in such trouble with Google this week, that's get sued or something like that. But there you go. Jack, Rachel, you've sadly, if you're using bravery, you're going to shed a tear because you're no longer going to be going to phages adapting.

I hate have a passionate,

[01:02:07] Jack Kitterhing: like every time. So yeah, I went on lot line dash. I do consultation work have a few, a couple of teams that build websites for people and stuff. And every time someone comes to us and says, oh, we want amp. It's gotta be amp compatible. It's just a. Every time, it's a nightmare without any hesitation.

So now I say, no, I just say flat. No, if you want not go somewhere else.

[01:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: And the nice thing for you is you've now got, you've now got data to show that it's not big. Is it brave? Really? But nevermind. You've at least saying, oh, some browsers don't support,

[01:02:47] Jack Kitterhing: Chromium base browser though. People are going to mistake you and think it's

[01:02:50] Nathan Wrigley: chromes.

I like it. So if you deliberately misused the word chromium. Alright. Okay.

[01:02:57] Jack Kitterhing: Here's what misuse and it's true. It's crazy.

[01:02:59] Nathan Wrigley: It's true. But so there are a nightmare. You've had no positive experiences with them. My understanding is also they didn't actually make things particularly faster.

Anyway, they just caused additional work for people like you,

[01:03:12] Jack Kitterhing: They make it faster. If you've got a basic. Actually, if people have a basic blog, they have like just written content, some images, nothing fancy. Then it worked out pretty well. But as soon as people started getting involved in different things and page builders as well, you start getting involved in trying to make Devi amp compatible.

Yeah. Good luck with that. I tried once and I know we'll never try again in my life, unless you were at least seven zeros to the end of the number in front. Yeah. So I think between everything, if you've got, you're using 20, 22, you're using, you're just writing. Go for it. You're trying to do anything else then

[01:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: don't bother.

Okay. Yeah, I've got it. Rachel as a website builder, you stray into amp, or are you like Jaffe?

[01:04:04] Rachel Winchester: This is one of those things that I've been comfortably. I've been able to stay away from my as like when I build websites on my own, I use Elementor and as Jack just said, it's really hard to to turn elementary site to make that amp, what's the word?

The term

compatible,

I think. Yeah, but this is another argument to use the brave browser, which I've just discovered maybe a month ago. I've just been hearing about it. Yeah, I've definitely been using Chrome way too much, so I want to discover this new browser. All the new things that it has to offer, including lists.

[01:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: Just be mindful that if you use brave, lots of things will break because the default settings are, I think it's like they don't allow third party cookies and things like that. So you have to keep toggling things often playing, shall we say until such times as you get it to work, I'll just put the quote up cause this sort of sums it up nicely.

So Brave's posture is they are more privacy focused. Again, I can't speak to that. I don't know the technology behind that, but they say amp harms users. Privacy is pretty strident thing to begin with a user's privacy security and internet experience. And just as bad amp helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web.

So the project inside of brave is called a amp and this will protect users by halting the execution of amp, HTML, and sending visitors directly to web, to publishers webpages. So basically if you're using. Brave. I don't even think you'll notice if you've got this feature switched on. I don't know if there's a toggle for it, or if it's going to be default from now on, but you probably won't even notice that anything is unusual.

You just end up at the person's website, which I would imagine in most cases is more desirable. Anyway, so there we go. There's a bit of controversy for the first one, at least. Anyway. And then I'm going to throw this one at you, right? I'm on my high horse this week a little bit. Given, giving my my opinions on Google.

I want to know what your opinions on web 0.3 0.0 web three, whichever acronym is correct. I can't remember. The more and more that I find about web 3.0, the less. Likely I am to be interested in it. I, back in the day when Bitcoin was starting, I thought, oh, this is curious. This is really interesting. I quite like the idea of this and now I everywhere.

I look, I see things which feel to me like pyramid schemes, I see NFTs and people getting involved in all of that. I personally can't make any sense of any of it. And so it would seem do some of the people, because this is a great website, it's called web three is going great.com and it's just a list.

And it just goes on and on all ordered, literally on and off of things where it borders on. Sometimes it borders on criminality. People have hacked a blockchain and they've managed to siphon out loads of money. And then there's other things. People promoting crypto flick exchanges, like being unscathed, Putin regime information on users who don't need to, to opposition leader, Alex, Nevada.

I don't know if that's true or not, but the point is this website is full of the skepticism, but I really I don't know how well and you guys follow web three, but I'm going to open it up. I am staying away from all this. I like my web just normal. I don't want any of this stuff in my web go away.

Web three. What do you think? Am I being a bit of a Luddite? I

[01:07:58] Rachel Winchester: love websites like this, that, that poke holes and the big web three argument and show how I guess the execution of web three ideas isn't executed well because it shows us all the holes that we need to fix and all the problems that we need to see.

Moving forward. Cause one, three, I still am on board with the idea of decentralized apps, decentralized organizations and blockchain being used all over the place. I'm still on board with that idea. But the site is correct. There's a lot of horrible things going wrong and there's a lot of misinterpretation scams.

So the more of the, more of that stuff gets we shine a light on the sooner we can address it and fix it and work towards a better wipe three. Isn't it? Isn't

[01:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: that the point you say the word scams. And I feel that so many people are getting caught up in things that there is. I think it's really difficult to understand the technology underlying all this sort of stuff.

And it's oh, just go and buy something. It'll be fine. Protect it. Now you'll be fine. Don't worry about it. And then all of a sudden, oh, it's gone. Oh, I'm sorry. Claire, that wasn't as protected as we thought there was a real, I'm just going to put this one up. It was, I was going to put it in next week, cause it only came on my radar earlier today.

But when I put it up now it's on the verge. Did you see this? There's a beat. There's a a platform called Beanstalk. It's a cryptocurrency project and they lost $182 million in 14. I think it was seconds the other day because their rules were not broken. They've set up the system where they will lend you cryptocurrency.

So this guy borrowed a billion dollars in cryptocurrency, which gave him 51% of the compute power on the network. So then he decided to pay himself $182 million paid back the billion dollars and in the space of 14 seconds made himself $18 million. Genius. Wow.

[01:10:16] Taco Verdonschot: X 82 million.

He

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: borrowed a billion for 14 seconds.

He stole 82 million, but the debt on the billion that you borrowed in that 40, in that 14 seconds is the difference between the 180 and the 80 million. And it's all legit. There's nobody did anything wrong.

[01:10:41] Jack Kitterhing: We didn't think of that first.

[01:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: I know. I know. So there's that bit. This is that part of the puzzle, but it's just stuff like this.

How could this happen? If you went into a bank and somebody had stuck, you have to do it at gunpoint. They're a criminal. They've broken the law. Maybe this girl turned out to be a criminal, but they'll never find them. That's the. Yeah,

[01:11:03] Taco Verdonschot: Good luck walking into your average bank and even at gunpoint, get that amount of

was even getting

[01:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: to the cancer with some sort of, it's just, I guess my problem with all of this is that it's being promoted as if it's just it's legit. It's all been thought through. Don't worry about it. Bring us your money, bring us your NFTs, bring us your, and it just feels like a house of cards.

Increasingly it feels like a house of cards. And I followed the internet pretty closely. I have no idea really how that happened. It's a good story, but that should not be allowed to happen. And yet apparently it did. So this whole web threes. Obviously Rachel you're on the somewhat suspicious side, but not quite as suspicious, maybe as me.

What about

[01:11:54] Rachel Winchester: improvements need to be made?

[01:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What about you, Jack? Do you want everything decentralized? Do you want everything like that? Or are you happy with your HSBC bank account? Try and trusted bricks and mortar. That's what we want.

[01:12:06] Jack Kitterhing: I like the technology, but why I've never understood where cryptocurrency is.

Everyone wants to buy a crypto now to make a profit, and yet everyone doesn't want it to be the same as cash. Everyone says the banks shouldn't control it yet. I doing the exact same thing the bankers do in controlling the price and combining cryptocurrency for cash. If you're really into the technology, you don't buy a cryptocurrency to turn a thousand dollars into 10,000.

You buy it to be the future of being centralized money and no one follows it in that path anymore. So now it's just another big wall street, hedge fund. Absolute load of crap, basically. Can we say

[01:12:49] Nathan Wrigley: no, it's fine. Yeah, it really does feel to me as if the people who are promoting it very heavily at the moment.

Other people who have a great deal of interest in it working and being successful. And whilst I think the technology is fabulous, the blockchain is a really interesting and beautiful idea. Like it's beautiful, but it, we don't, I don't think we've got the chops yet to figure out that our assets are protected.

Go and use I dunno, some sort of repository for Bitcoin. The only way that I can see that being secure is to have it on a USB stick, which is air gapped and buried in a bunker on the six inches of concrete. Otherwise it's totally up for grabs. It would seem, and I don't want quite yet to live in that world, especially for people.

I dunno people like my parents who wouldn't want to get involved in any of that they don't, they're not interested. And I know it's not for everybody, but I do wish that maybe the rhetoric around it would be turned down a little bit. And yes. Anyway, I'm going to rename this podcast, the Luddites podcast for people with tinfoil hats.

Anyway, Taco, what's your thought on this? Maybe you've got an alternative opinion.

[01:14:01] Taco Verdonschot: Not really. I love a good discussion, but no, I, I think that, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency, I still feel to see its use Back in the day when crypto, when Bitcoin was just starting you were able to mind several Bitcoins a day.

And I know a friend of mine did, and he put them on a USB stick on the flash drive somewhere. And after moving three or four times, he misplaced that thing. It's still supposed to have about 30 Bitcoin on it, because that was what he could do in a single day back then. Another friend of mine once bought his his chips worth three Bitcoin at the time, there was about seven and a half Euro's that will be different today.

So the whole Bitcoin and crypto currency. I don't understand. I do think that for the blockchain there are, the underlying technology there can be useful applications and the only one I've seen in reality so far and that I really dove into is Gold's worth

[01:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: proof. Yes. Brilliant. Great.

[01:15:43] Taco Verdonschot: That's a oh, and I think Robert has a nice comments.

[01:15:48] Nathan Wrigley: But the famous tech podcast, Leo LaPorte has lost his password to his wallet. Yeah. And so as his so as his friend, Steve Gibson who mined 50, 50 Bitcoins back in the day, I actually bought a Bitcoin. I bought a Bitcoin for $27 ad. I bought a year's worth of VPN with it. It's that worth as of this moment, $38,000.

That was the most expensive thing I've ever bought. If I'd just not bought it. If I just leisurely not bothered that day, I could have had it. Yeah, you're right though. Did you hear the story about the guy in the UK? Who got in like basically on day one and he mined seven and a half thousand bucks.

Count that number. In fact, I'm going to go to the pre website and work out today what that is worth cause it's so jaw droppingly, horrific. Okay. So here we go at today's rates, this chap 7,500, he's worth $290 million, which is not to be sniffed at he lost interest because it it was a non, nobody was really going on about it seven and a half thousand.

And he he sent the hard disk to the trash with lots of other things. And then he employed people. Once he'd worked out, it was worth so much money to go through the landfill sites to try and retrieve the heartaches, needless to say he never found it. But yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It all just seems your word proof example was genius.

That was Sebastian, wasn't it? Yeah. I didn't wasn't there a. What proof thing did

[01:17:28] Taco Verdonschot: you, there's a connection where we're working with them to build an integration. And also Yoast to folk is one of the investors in

[01:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That strikes me as a really there's nobody losing out there. All you're doing is saying here's a piece of content that I made.

Let's stick it on a blockchain so that we can verifiably say no, that was the original one. That was the first one back away. And it strikes me that, legal firms or insurance companies or banks themselves could use it in that way. I just don't know. I'm not yet ready to let X to let me be the expert in everything.

I want expert, I'm quite happy to pay money to bank so that they can look after my money for me, because they're far better at doing it than I am. Like I said, that.

[01:18:15] Taco Verdonschot: Freely like that. My bank has a password reset. That allows me access to my account again.

Yeah,

[01:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: no. Oh. I drove over my USB stick.

It's in bits on the ground. Can I have a reset please? Unless you've remembered that remembered the log file. Anyway, there you go. That was interesting. Final drama of this week. Sorry everybody we've gone right off WordPress, but it's fun. I started reading this book and I'm going to recommend it.

It's called stolen focus and I'm going to open up a conversation. We've only got about five minutes, so we'll see where this goes. This is it's by a guy called Johann. And it's all about the whole book. I'm about halfway through it. So I can't speak as to where it goes. And it's about how, civilization, not, the entire human species, basically, who's got a mobile phone, how we are losing our focus, how we have this inability to do things which take more than a few seconds.

And the easy answer is one word, and it's either the word phone or Facebook depending, but I was reading through this and at the minute he's not presented any solutions. He's just going through the psychology, the science, the MIT researchers, who've carried out studies on how it affects sleep and all of that.

And I am guilty as charged. I have been trying to address this and I, I am succeeding to stomach. And I want to know how you guys are coping. Do you find yourself like doing, basically this, you S doing this all, and then realizing that an hour and a half has gone by, and you've asked that bit of, I don't know that DIY that needed doing all those, that laundry that needed sorting out it's this, honestly, there was so much that I got out of this hour and a half.

It was brilliant. I found one thing about Guinea pigs. It was great. You know what I'm saying? And so he's trying to explain why we do it, what the cycle, what the psychology is of that addiction. And hopefully armed with that. I will be glorious next week and I will be free in is this you, do you have this problem or is it, am I one of the only people who is going to sell this book to,

[01:20:39] Rachel Winchester: I definitely had this problem a little worse in college.

But I started I guess giving myself more strict screen time rules, just, close the laptop, put the phone away just be a person without tech for awhile. And I've definitely noticed in my generation and younger generations that it just, it, everyone thinks that they might have add.

And a lot of in a lot of people do. And a lot of people are getting ADHD type symptoms from using smart phones and social media too often. And it's hard to even get a proper diagnosis. But yeah, I think a good solution is just, is a cap on screen time. Yeah.

[01:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: That he makes the point that on average, a typical.

So he's talking about Americans, I guess the same would be true for Europeans. And I'm imagine other places in the world, you touch your phone about 2,200 times. Which seems ridiculous, but I bet the data is pretty solid. I obviously there's an aggregate. There's going to be people who are doing it much more and people are doing it much less, but man alive, that's a lot.

[01:21:54] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I think my phone keeps track of screen time and I'm afraid to look at it.

Brilliant.

[01:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Beautifully. That's the perfect analogy.

[01:22:09] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Only thing, it's one of the main reasons why I decided not yet to get a smart watch because I think those are even worse because it's so much easier to just have a quick look at your wrist and yeah. And get that distraction and see what's going on.

Whereas taking your phone out is something that I can suddenly do while in a conversation,

[01:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: just to give you some more context. So the 2.2 K thousand touches a day is quite interesting, but apparently if you are fully in the zone on something, and I'm sure Jack, as somebody that writes code, you can probably attest to this whether or not this number feels true or not.

Apparently a quick glance at an email that you might not even read. You just take your attention away. Apparently fully takes 23 minutes on average to get back into the flow state that you were in before Jack, is that nonsense? I don't know. Yeah. I

[01:23:04] Jack Kitterhing: honestly can't ask that because every device I have is in distraction-free mode because work is permanently in distraction, free mode.

I have no notifications, every notification to say board on my phone, my Mac book. I don't have any notification. I look at slack when I want it. I don't have the like on the show, yummy messages.

[01:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: Nothing.

[01:23:24] Taco Verdonschot: How are you still alive?

[01:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: We've totally got to the point where we believe it's like intravenous, right?

If it's not, if we're not plugged in all the time, then there's something wrong. And, but I think Jay you're onto something there I've switched all the notifications off. It honestly took me about a week to get used to that. I would be picking things up, expecting to see things there. Isn't and I've, this is, this may not interest you I've downloaded a month.

This is my home screen on my phone now. And it has a collection of text links and nothing else. And it's, I can't remember what it's called. It's called it's a launcher for Android. And so I've got like podcasts that music app, but it, there's nothing there to distract me. And they're the only apps I'm allowed.

Basically I'd want a podcast. I want a podcast thing with a phone on it and music, and that's all I want from my phone. But yeah, it's a fascinating book and recommended. It's called stolen focus while you can't pay attention. And I got to about the third page honestly gave up, but I thought I'd mentioned it anyway.

See what I did there.

[01:24:36] Taco Verdonschot: I like it.

[01:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: It's a dad joke. It was from the Almanack of dad jokes, which I will be writing during the next pandemic. But that's it. That's all I've got time for, unless you guys have got something you want us to throw in that I've missed.

[01:24:53] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah,

[01:24:55] Rachel Winchester: go ahead. Okay. I just I recently published a blog post our blog.

So I work for digital cube. We'd make shifter and shifters our main blog. So on this blog I've finally published the announcement for our residency program. So we are starting an internet art residency program where we'll invite artists to propose a project idea for us to work on collaboratively.

So an artist will come into digital cube and work with our team to execute their project idea. And while they're with us there'll be other opportunities for education and cultural exchange. So the artist really feels like they're adding value while they're a part of our team. So this

[01:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: is artists like canvas paint, not digital artists like that's

[01:25:53] Rachel Winchester: yes.

So the program will be to create internet art and internet art. We see art around the internet all the time. So sometimes it's hard to pick it, pick out what's exactly internet art and what's digital art or other kinds of art. But internet art is art that uses the internet as a medium. So if the website itself is the artwork,

[01:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: okay, this is fabulous.

Can I add this in for next week as well? Of course, I'm going to quickly stick it in as a caption. If I can. There we go. Add that. There you go. So there's the URL. Yeah. Yeah. So

[01:26:30] Rachel Winchester: any type of artist can apply but the program will be to execute an internet art project

[01:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: get shifted IO, sorry. Rachel, I apologize.

Keep talking over you, you finish. I'm sorry. Yeah, just

[01:26:45] Rachel Winchester: to address your question, you could be a painter. You can be a comedian, you can be a digital artist. But to get into the program, you have to propose an internet art.

[01:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: So intriguing, right? I'm going to scroll right to the bottom. Here's what you need to do.

You need to submit the following in a proposal, a short description of your project idea, a short bio links to help us learn more about who you are as an artist, such as website, recent work, social media pages, press releases, et cetera. And your answer to the question. Why we, why should we work with you?

This is brilliant. I'm going to start drawing as we speak. I'm going to draw a square and submit it. There we go. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to put that into next week and we'll talk about it on next week's show. Cause that's totally got me interested. That's really cool. Thank you, Rachel.

That's brilliant. Taco or Jack, did we miss anything from you guys?

[01:27:46] Taco Verdonschot: There's one more thing. Think deserves a bit of attention because it was announced this week and yes, this is definitely it. Yeah, I think as a WordPress community, we've been talking about supporting underrepresented groups a lot. I know Rachel you're involved with the WP women of color.

And I think that we have a lot of underrepresented groups that we should help step up, should help to speak at our events and work camp us is doing exactly this.

[01:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: It says to improve diverse representation at WordCamp us, our programming team has looked into the barriers that hold different groups back.

The largest of which is the cost of hotel and airfare or travel. The idea is that we can't cover these costs, but we can set up connecting points between the speakers and companies that would like to support them. These companies would be responsible for creating their own set of qualifications, managing any transfer of funds and working directly with the speakers.

And so on. I've got the URL on the screen, but it's if you're just listening to us on the audio, it's us.wordcamp.org forward slash 2022, and then all hyphenated support on the represented speakers. At camp U S and I'm pretty sure that next time Michelle is on, she'll be wanting to talk about that.

Thank you, Taco yeah. Yeah,

[01:29:26] Taco Verdonschot: just I know that a lot of agency owners and a lot of people from all the WordPress companies are listening every week to WP Builds. So this is caller calling upon them to join this program and to help fund on the represented speakers.

[01:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Yeah.

That's well, worth it. About that into next week's show notes as well, because I missed that one and I appreciate it. Thanks very much, indeed. Yeah. So wherever. Just to say that Michelle, who will probably be champing that page, I would have thought she's she said in regards to mobile phones, is it considered one touch?

If you have it in your hand all day long, she's asking for a friend, Michelle. I think that's starting out. I think you can class that as one. We'll give you a pass on that. That's fine. You've got no problem. Okay. The here comes the humiliating bit. Sorry. Jack, sorry, Taco. Sorry, Rachel. We have to do the way you've every week we have to do this thing so I can use it as Albemarle.

So position yourself in the screen. Give us a wave. Give us away. Oh, look, everybody's been so obedient and biddable. Thank you. That's it. We've done it. Thank you very much to Jack. Thank you very much to Taeko. Thank you very much to Rachel. I appreciate you joining us this week and hopefully we'll have you all back on at some point bye-bye for now.