This Week in WordPress #209

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 209 entitled rude worths. It was recorded on Monday. The 16th of May, 2022, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'm joined by some special WordPress guests. We have REM customers. We have Nat Miletich and we also have veto Paluch. There was a lot of WordPress news this week, firstly, and very sincerely, a sad farewell to Justin Tagalog.

He's been writing at the WP Tavern for many years and he's decided to move on. We also talk about the block locking feature, which is going to be coming in WordPress 6.0. And then we move on to the big story of the week. Is the sky falling in for the first time in its 19 year history WordPress's market share has actually gone south instead of north.

What does this mean? Does it mean it's all over for WordPress? Probably not, but we get into the weeds of that discussion as well. Then there's word, camp Europe. Who's going, what are we going to make of it? Why did we go and so on? And then last, but by no means, least not brings us a S E O piece. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting. That includes free domain SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello? Hello. Hello. Hello. We are on episode number 209 to keyless 209 of this week in WordPress. I am joined as always by some WordPress guests. Yes. Nailed it. First time. Got the direction, right? It's REMCOs how you doing? Rimkus good, sir. How are you? I am very good. RamQuest of Reese is joining us. He is a WordPress veteran and performance specialists scaling your WordPress plus WooCommerce sites and businesses.

You have had a bit of a change lately. Do you want to get into that or do we just leave it there?

[00:02:36] Remkus de Vries: We can get into it. Do we want to do that right now or? Not sure. I switched from working at a hosting company back to working on my own rebooting my my agent. And yeah, having a different focus in

[00:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: life again.

Yeah. Nice. And you've got a little bit of time to think about things, which is always a real nice thing. Yeah. That's lovely. Thank you for joining us down. I'm going to get it. Look at him. There he is. Look, it's Vito on the show for I had brown hair last time. Last time Vito was on the shelf.

How are you visiting?

[00:03:20] Vito Peleg: I had black hair.

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:03:24] Vito Peleg: How are you doing? Great. This is good to be here. Definitely been too long, man.

[00:03:28] Nathan Wrigley: It really has been too long. It's an absolute pleasure to have you, but veto is all everywhere all at once. He's the co-founder and CEO of atom, which I think honestly, veto, I reckon that when you were last on this show, it was still called WP feedback.

I think that's entirely possible. At a rim, of course, if you don't know about it is a centralized collaboration platform for agencies, how's all that stuff going. Is it still keeping you busy and excited?

[00:03:54] Vito Peleg: Very busy and even more excited where you're just about to. Close the second year going into a third birthday next week.

And yeah, there's all kinds of really cool stuff happening for the celebration and stuff. So definitely keeps me busy

[00:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: and you've just wrapped up. I don't know how many you've done now, but the after him summit, which is a sort of a side thing. How did that. That

[00:04:18] Vito Peleg: was brilliant. I even had Nat and speaking there.

I had a great session about a two-liter marketing and you were also supporting this year as well, Nathan, which I appreciate. You're welcome.

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was awesome. Oh, I'm so pleased to hear it. I'm also glad that it's

[00:04:33] Vito Peleg: over, you

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: know, how it is with this. I do know how it is. I've got mine coming up in the near future, but anyway, we'll come to that later.

I'm finally joining us for the very first time. We have Nat now I do apologize. I'm going to say that your surname is Nat Miletich, but I don't know because we didn't talk in advance if that's how you pronounce it. Definitely. Great. Oh, first time. No, I'm not. Miletich is the founder of Clio websites, which is a WordPress development and marketing agency in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

What's it like over there in Calgary at the moment? I'm guessing like the snow is cleared and you've got the green everywhere.

[00:05:14] Nat Miletic: Yeah. Yeah. Finally got rid of the snow and I'm a little tired at 7:00 AM here and I stayed up late watching my Calgary flames hockey game, make it through the next round of the playoffs.

So tired.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: So that's like the big thing, right? Hockey in Canada in the same way that like soccer is there.

[00:05:33] Nat Miletic: It's like football for you guys. Yeah. That, that's the big one for us.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: I'm glad that you managed to get to a seven in the morning. I really appreciate it. So there's our panel for today.

We're going to talk about the WordPress news. There's quite a lot, actually. There's a few stories. Normally there's lots of stories, but this week there's a few stories, but we'll go deep into each one of them. Just a couple of things. If you fancy sharing this and dragging your friends in, please do that.

We would love that. Go to WP Builds.com forward slash live, copy, and paste that URL. If you go there, you'll need to be logged into Google because. It's YouTube. So YouTube comments on the other hand, if you want to, if you're in our Facebook group, then you need to go to this pithy URL, easy to remember this chat.restream.io forward slash FB just rolls off the tongue chat.restream.io forward slash I

[00:06:28] Remkus de Vries: would record that as a soundbite and just

[00:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: rolls off the tongue.

Go there. Otherwise you'll come out as some sort of anonymous person and we'll get them. Jen, generic avatar, and we won't get your name a quick workaround. It's just to write your name first. If you want to do that, that will work as well. But please feel free to go and share this. We've got a few comments come in and already Cameron Jones.

He's at the opposite end of you. I'm not, he's probably. 11 at night or something like that. He joined us a few weeks ago, but his internet connection caved. So he didn't last very long, but he's coming back, which is great. Michelle for Schatz joining us from Tennessee. Hi Michelle. Thanks for joining us.

We've got Paul Lee who share Paul's comments, frankly. We all know what happened between me and Paul. No, thank you, Paul. Appreciate your joining us. That's great. Rob Cairns, Rob, I think is the most reliable. He gets the bachelor attending every week. Good morning or WordPress peeps, and may as responding to poll.

There we go. Elbow cough. I don't get it. Oh, my word. There's so many comments. Thank you all for looking there. We got a comment here, which I think has something to do with sports. Courtney Robertson saying, let's go Rangers. Is that, do you know anything about this New York

[00:07:46] Nat Miletic: Rangers? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a fan, but

[00:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's a brilliant way.

We'll hide that one very quickly. Thank you so much. Let's get stuck into the main event show. Let's talk about a bit of press see stuff that requires me to share my screen and I very rarely get sad on the show, but I am officially sad. I'm sad because Justin Tatlock has decided he's going to leave WP Tavern on.

I will basically be on able to do the show from this week forward because more or less everything that I want to say will have dried up because basically Justin's been my crush for the last 24 months or whatever it's been. I think he's more like three years, but yeah, in all seriousness, just in Tagalog, he came when Jeff Chandler stepped away from the Tavern and he, I don't know if you guys were listening or watching, I should say the the Tavern at that point and reading the articles, but he brought something completely new, which was like the developer chops.

And he was able to write really long in depth developer related stuff. And whilst I'm no developer. I could understand enough of it because he wrote it so well that it was of interest to me. And ever since then, it has been a deluge he's been writing. I would imagine on Agra, he's probably done one every 72 hours, including the weekends.

Maybe it's more than every 48 hours. He's done hundreds of pieces. I've enjoyed every single one of them. He manages to get people in the comments and he's revived w P T. In my eyes, I don't know what's going to happen to Justin in the future. But I would just like to shed a tear, a sincerity. I'm not being sarcastic and say, I wish you the best, Justin, whatever it is, it makes the point.

I love this before. Before he joined the Tavern, he used to he did a sort of degree in journalism or English, I think was the was the exact phrase with a sort of journalism component. So he had the right background to do all of this, but then also his other chose, his other career path was farming.

And he thought seriously about going back into farming before he started at the Tavern that reawakened his interest in WordPress. And we are where we are now. So just from me Don, Justin, thank you so much. I've enjoyed everything that you've written. And after that, gosh, it's over to you three in any particular order to heap praise on Justin.

If you don't hate praise on Justin, I'm boating you off the call. That's all I'm saying.

[00:10:24] Remkus de Vries: I have a post out that says I w I'm not a Huge fan of the Tavern, but that's mostly because I'm not the audience. At least I didn't feel like I was having said that I did appreciate the posts written and just as a point of view.

But I've always enjoyed Justin's writing, [email protected] with it.

[00:10:50] Nathan Wrigley: What was it? I can't remember what his original URL is. Yeah.

[00:10:54] Remkus de Vries: 2006 onwards when he started learning he shared everything and I appreciate that even more than just the writing, like the whole sharing thing he's done over.

More than almost two decades. We're closing in on now. Let's just say 15 years is a, is amazing. And I've learned a lot

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: from him yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that he wrote. We were, I was trying to find a half decent free membership solution the other day. And his members plugin popped up. He no longer runs.

It is its own. Now by member, press, I believe who we talked about extensively a couple of weeks ago for all sorts of reasons, but he built that and lots and lots of stuff, but yeah, you're right. Lots of contributions to the community. He's very giving not FITO, anything on that.

[00:11:48] Nat Miletic: Yeah, great. The articles are very in-depth and very well-written.

I, I hope that hidden in the WordPress community for sure. It's it'd be a loss. If he did decide to go farming,

[00:12:04] Vito Peleg: he came in pretty much when I started being a little more engaged in the community as well. So to me it felt like he was always here. And I really liked the approach and the personal touch to the writing.

It's not easily written like just a report or something. He shares his opinion. He shares his thoughts. Very human Human driven writing, which I love that is a lot of personality there. I also want to point out there was a really cool tip in this article because apparently a lot of people ask him, how do you do that though?

How do you write it? And how do you do all those kinds of things he suggested going into the national novel writing month, or just taking that challenge, writing 50,000 words in 30 days, we choose like a challenge. But but I think that's a really cool way of getting into and finding your voice.

[00:13:03] Nathan Wrigley: I I follow him on Facebook and every he's done it. I think this might be a third time. And every November over the last three times, he's written a 50,000. Basically a book. Yeah. And so you set yourself the challenge of however many words that is a day, but typically I think he was aiming at something like 2000 words a day.

You obviously you ended up with roughly 60,000 and then he did it. He was able to commit, 2000 words a day is quite a lot. And he would write about how his characters were developing and how he was satisfied with the way it had gone today. And he'd come up with some new ideas and yeah,

[00:13:39] Vito Peleg: 50,000 he wrote about writing 50,000.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And then he he also talks about, what the inspiration is in terms of, how do you actually get into this? And I find it quite. When I have to write blog posts and things, and I can identify with this. He's basically just saying, just do one word at a time.

[00:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Just do the first word, get started and keep going. I wrote that completely identified 50,000 words.

[00:14:11] Nat Miletic: I have a hard time trying to get a blog post out every month. So like 2000, 3000 words, so it's thousands seems

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to introduce you to to birth their AI in that case, which a veto knows all about might help you get over that, that 2000 word pump in a couple of seconds.

The other thing is, and I did want to mention this actually, because I can say for 100% certain that this is true. He says right at the end of the article there is a question that I get asked and then he says in italics a lot some of you probably already know what it is, and perhaps I've asked it in some variation for yourself and he says, does.

Dictate the content that we cover. And and he says, since it's the last day of my job, I was might as well, let the readers have a sneak peek behind the curtain. The answer is no, he doesn't. And I I, all I can say, I don't know what conversations Justin has had. All I can say is in my time doing the podcast there has been no constraints about what I could and could not cover.

Nobody's told me to do anything in particular or censored me after the fact for doing it in a particular way. So I can only confirm what I know about that. It sounded like REM you want it to chip in there. You are inhaling. Yeah, it was. I

[00:15:36] Remkus de Vries: know I was going to play devil's advocate and say that if that was the case, he wouldn't disclose it here.

Not now. Not ever. No, but I, that's the devil's advocate. I don't, that's not my opinion. I I I don't think Justin is the person to even consider working for an, for a, for an outlet where that was the driver or the controller part of it. Like I said the share knowledge Justin has shared over the period Cincy.

So this is probably 10 years ago, but at one point he linked to his very first forum post in in, in wanting to demonstrate where he came from and his very first question on the WordPress forums, which is publicly. And you can find it if you know his handle Essentially, it's just asking a random question.

Anyone asked these days and then from everything he learned from then, and this, I think this was 2006. If I remember correctly, everything he learned from them going forward, he shared, and I love that. I just, so whatever he does next, then knowing his handle, Brene shady it's very likely the farming will intensify, but he will be missed if that voice is no longer within the community.

Yeah.

[00:17:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. The one, one of the things that I really liked about is when he did like bits and pieces that were technical. So he introduced a theme that he played with or took a plugin to pieces and explained how it worked. I always liked the fact that he would explain it in two parts and the first part would always be here's how it works.

And here's what I like. And then he would very often move on to, and here's what they could have done better. And I, that's the wrong way to phrase it. His, I think he always used phrases. Like I wish they had done that. As well, and he would either point out something that he thought could have been improved about the implementation of the code or whatever it might be, but also just ideas, a suggestion for, oh, wouldn't it be nice you you did this in the future and I always thought that was really nice.

Got a nice comments coming in. Firstly, we've got Andrew past. I don't think Vito knows Andrew Palmer a little. He's saying, I think Justin did a phenomenal job of walking a tight line, but kept it real. There'll be missed in our bot. He may well rise again on other platforms. It's hard to say goodbye to this community.

Do you know if you read that sentence in the wrong way and put the comma in the wrong place? It really which is what I did. I don't know if you spot on that. I'm not going there. I'm going there. Amazing technical writing and also tough, critical notes while bringing up potential solutions says Dave Lutes.

Thank you very much, indeed. I've not met Dave. Very nice to meet your acquaintance. I just got to go back up into the comments. Cause there was some person that dropped in who says they're from the Northeast of England and I want to know who you are. Okay. Kane Mitchell. Nice to have you from the Northeast of England, where are you in the Northeast of England?

I am in the Northeast of England. I'm in Scarborough, which is why it's sunny.

[00:18:55] Vito Peleg: Look outside of your

[00:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: window. There's a guy called

He's waving a bummer. Very nice to meet you though. Kane and anybody else? That's new. Obviously there's a few new faces in here. That's really nice. Are we done with Justin? I hope not, but we're done with this piece, I think so let's move on. Okay. Next piece. All right. I don't know whether this is useful or not.

This is what this is Justin Tatlock writing on the WP Tavern. I said, I'd run out. This is probably it. He's telling us two days before he stepped down about a new block locking feature, which on the face of it seems really useful. The idea of being in the UI from now on, when you get six rolling out, there'll be an option.

There'll be a little padlock icon in the block options and you can lock it, which sounds great. It sounds just oh, that's a really useful feature. Wouldn't it be great if we could lock our clients so they couldn't edit this piece of content? Hold your horses. Because it locked.

Until anybody who logs in also goes to that icon and unlocks it. So really at the moment, it feels like it's a safety, it's a safety harness for you yourself to lock something that you don't want to accidentally amend. Whether, or, I honestly, maybe there's a scenario where you could accidentally delete something or, I don't know.

I can't really see that, but, or maybe it's just the building blocks for something else. The other thing is it's not nested either. So if you lock like a parent block, like a group block, it doesn't inherit the children don't inherit that you'd have to go and lock them. Or once at a time you've got the option to disect two options.

Really, you can disable movement so you can lock it in place. That's probably the more useful thing I would've thought. And then you can prevent removal so nobody can accidentally come in and take it out. Like I say, it's pretty, I don't know how useful that is just yet, but maybe it's the beginnings of things.

However, If you are a theme developer, apparently it is far more useful. You can build it in such a way that your theme could implement much more granularity and lock it down so that I don't know, only specific roles or specific users can unlock things. It feels like, yeah, it feels like something that we should have.

So I'll just, I'll drop it there and open it up to you guys. Is this useful, do you think this is a pointless introduction if it only does that right now, or maybe it's useful to introduce it in the hope that it'll get.

[00:21:27] Vito Peleg: I think that it's a matter of or generally in the WordPress project not many features, if any, are introduced for the use of agencies and freelancers, like that relationship between the professional and the client, because the main focus is making this like a self-serving platform.

And in that case, I think that's really cool for it, for someone that builds it and doesn't want someone else to play around with it or themselves. But there's definitely a room for a small plug-in. And I think I even mentioned this this first came out eh, that there should be a smaller kind of plugin that allows you to manage the permissions on the different blocks.

If you can edit the text, edit the images that was that's still to be built, but I think there's definitely room for that in the agency space. Generally I wouldn't expect. Agency agency related features built into core ever. It's not the focus, it was never the focus.

[00:22:31] Remkus de Vries: So I think it's the, I think that's a very good point.

I think the, but I look at, so yes, this is a nice feature for those who actually need it. Whether that's an agency that just wants to block, like you build your front page now in in, in, in in the block editor, it looks great, but you don't want them meddling certain things I can.

That makes sense. You can use this to lock down what you need to lock down. Like for instance, if you put in that query block there, and that does net, that should never change like that lock that stuff down. But I have a, I have another entirely different concern and that is we're focusing on the wrong things to add to the block editor.

I think we're still. And this is segwaying and one of the next talking points that we will have later on. But I think we're just focusing on the wrong things to add. There's so many other things that the block editor really needs in order to yeah like Vito says make a proper distinction between stuff that from an agency perspective is needed.

Stuff that is from an editorial perspective is needed stuff that is from a pure publishing perspective is needed stuff that is needed from a perspective of just grand UX stuff. There's so much broken stuff in there. I'm you, if you hear me slow down my words, because I'm filtering out the bad words and replacing them before I say them, which is not very easy for me to do if you know me in real life, but.

Can I say

[00:24:08] Vito Peleg: shite, I can say shit,

[00:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: that's fine. You just did

[00:24:13] Remkus de Vries: a, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, but I'm seeing all these new futures and I know I'm taking it off topic, but the yes, great feature, but really, can we finally start focusing on making this thing smooth?

[00:24:32] Nat Miletic: Yeah. Yeah.

I think I think that the lock features more like a user focused thing, because I know in the block editor working with it, it's you tend to drag and drop things accidentally as well from time to time and everything breaks. So I don't even, I don't know if it's necessarily obviously there's a hook for it, but I dunno if it's really a developer slash agency thing or more like a.

Kind of experience type of thing. It's similar to Photoshop. Photoshop has something like that where you lock certain objects. So when you're moving things around you don't access, click

[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: and drop Marcus just said, oh, this is what we're saying. Those words, Marcus literally said the exact same thing.

That's so cute. Sorry. Carry on.

[00:25:19] Nat Miletic: I think it's, I think it's similar to that and I know personally. Dragged and dropped things in the block editor and fricking broke the entire page, not even knowing how I did it. So yeah, it's definitely needs some improvement from that side. So I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Is it the thing to focus on? I don't know either. I think from, if we were. Try to lock something down, probably more inclined to use advanced custom fields or something like that versus this thing. So I think it's more from a user kind of usability perspective,

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: but I don't know if this gets surfaced in the list view, the list view where you can see the stack of every every single block that, but on the page, on the left-hand side there, wouldn't

it,

[00:26:10] Remkus de Vries: I suppose the padlock would

[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: be there as well.

That's what I mean to seeing the padlock, just like you would in Photoshop when in the layer next to the next, on the far right inside, you got the little padlock and if you could see that this string of blocks, but also I do think it would be cool if you could, if it just inherited, if the children inherited it, that just strikes me as a really young

[00:26:32] Remkus de Vries: children to always inherit stuff.

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they do. They always do. And it would be, I think, quite useful to do anyway. It's there, it's common in WordPress 6.0, it's limited. It does what it says on the 10 right now. Don't expect it to do much more, but as Vito said, maybe it's not supposed to be an agency feature. It's more of a sort of user facing feature just so that you don't accidentally trip up and delete something or move something curious that moving was one of the options as well.

I would've just thought lock everything, but there you go. Okay. That was that now. Okay. I've been doing this podcast for since about, I dunno, like 2001 or something. I don't know. It's a while. And ever since I started with WordPress, there's been this line graph, this little line graph and it's user numbers and percentage of the internet using WordPress.

And it always goes this way, always goes north. It drifts occasionally very quickly. When I started with WordPress, I think it was in the 20 somethings. And I w you know, I thought that was pretty amazing. I'd come from Drupal, which was on about 7% of the time. And now is on I dunno, two or one or something.

So it's been going in a northerly direction up up, it goes until several months ago, somebody finally said 43% and, 50% felt like it was inside. Now I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen, the game is up. WordPress is now no longer a usable system. Everybody's going to stop using it because for the first time ever, we've had a drop in the user numbers.

It, I, if WordPress had a stock market price, it would be tanking right now. It's, I'm overdoing it. It's a tiny little drop, but Yoast, he does his he does his annual sort of market share thing. And here we go. Let's just one, the numbers. Is it not annual? I thought we did it.

[00:28:34] Remkus de Vries: No. He certainly does, but it's a more periodically I think.

[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I'll rephrase that. Periodically Yoast does his state of the WordPress numbers. And this time it's got a different title. It says it's shrinking by January, 2022. It was 43.2%. February stayed constant March. It stayed constant. So maybe we were already detecting that things were going in a different direction because normally it would creep up between months.

Then it went down 0.2 of 1%, which is, I don't know how many websites that would be March 43.0 may 42.9.

[00:29:14] Remkus de Vries: So that's actually the best remark you've made so far. We don't really know what the number is. Because if we look at the metrics of what this is of what the data set consists of, what this actually is collected from, it's a subset of the total installations.

[00:29:35] Vito Peleg: Isn't that the top 10,000

[00:29:37] Remkus de Vries: websites. Yeah. So 10,000, a hundred thousand, whatever, but whatever it is, it's always a subset. It doesn't say anything. Unless you have access to the wordpress.org API, and you can actually see downloads and combine that with sites

[00:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: installed. Yeah. So the, in order to give some sort of context to this, let's see what Yoast had to say about that.

So he has this paragraph underneath the numbers where he says, are we comparing apples with apples? And so he said that in previous years, the data had come from Alexa, which has been shot down. And so questions probably would have been asked where's the data coming from it, as it turns out the data, according to Yoast is the same data, because you're still able to access that data through some legacy API, which is still up and running.

So he, he claims that data is a direct correlation with what he was doing before and what he's doing now. So from that point of view, that's at least something, whether or not, whatever these numbers mean, but the more interesting point and the conversation which developed almost everywhere immediately after this.

Let's try to figure out why this might be. And again, I'm not entirely sure where Yoast, how Yoast drew these conclusions, but these were the two conclusions that he drew. And I'm going to quote, he said, it's honestly impossible to look at those numbers and not think what's happening here. Why is that?

After looking at a while, I'm coming to the conclusion that sites on Wix and Squarespace on average have improved their site speed more than WordPress sites, WordPress as a performance team now, and it has made, excuse me, it has made some progress, but the reality is that it hasn't really. Big strides, which in his opinion it should have done.

And then the second point is WordPress is full site editing project isn't done yet. Anecdotally more and more people have been having a hard time deciding how to build that site on WordPress or Wix and Squarespace have simpler tools, easy to use. And as they improve their SEO tooling, there's less and less reason to see.

Over to wordpress.com. Basically he thinks that they're being out innovated. WordPress is being out innovated by these proprietary platforms.

[00:31:56] Remkus de Vries: I don't know if I would call it out innovated because there's plenty of innovation in the block editor, but it's definitely not going fast enough.

Previously had to too. So it's too complex to start.

[00:32:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Welcome come to another piece by WP Johnny and a minute, which talks about that exact over complexity piece, but for now, what do you make about this? Obviously Vito, not, you're all in the game of WordPress. I'm talking about WordPress all the time.

It's been a very buoyant thing. In fact, I think to some extent, we've all got used to the fact that it was going to bust through the. Percent thing, it was never going to turn down. And you look at Facebook and you look at it had a similar, tiny inflection point recently where instead of the numbers rising for the first time the numbers dropped and it was the tiniest of tiny things, but their stock market, I think they lost something like 20 billion within a week because the sentiment it's swimming against it.

And I just wonder, is this a moment where we have to be cautious? Is this a moment where things might have changed our Wix and Squarespace and the likes of those? Are they finally getting their message through so that people given, I need a website they're no longer front of mind.

Everybody's got WordPress, let's use WordPress are other alternatives coming to the forum. We need to be concerned fetal. I'm going to throw that one at you first.

[00:33:20] Vito Peleg: So first of all, I think that eh, We should all look for a different profession because it's over right. The party's over. Yeah. When I was running the agency, I used to convince clients why they needed work breasts.

So I don't think that it was a, and I still think that is the case. The end consumer is not that educated as to what is the, or why they need this specific solution maybe more today than back then. But I still think that it's the same people still considered weeks even 10 years ago or so. So that's not really point.

What I do think is that it does signal to to what can become a trend. So six months over 16 years is not is not necessarily like a, such a major shift, but if we are not. Keeping if we won't keep our eye on this as a community, as a project and not things stops it from becoming Joomla really did happen before it did happen.

It did happen with Drupal or with other platforms in the past. We've all in our careers. We've all been through these cycles a few times before. We just need to make sure that we are ahead of the curve, which we are not at the moment to, and at least in terms of the perception even though there are innovation, there is a lot of innovation happening in the space.

The project itself is lagging behind. And I think that it has the, eh, the challenge of being this massive. It's very hard to pivot it very hard to innovate when you have so much so many websites already using the solution and making sure that you have backward compatibility and all of those kinds of things so that you don't break anyone's website, as you are trying to innovate.

And also fact that you can't push an update, you can't force an update. So when Shopify makes a change, they made the change. It's done deal with it. When Facebook makes a change, it's done, here, it takes it takes user interaction to, to implement that new change. And then. And they actually can they can force the entire update.

Yeah.

[00:35:50] Nathan Wrigley: It's imagine yeah. That they do it occasionally for security patches, but it's a real it's like guarantee, but not for new features. That would be the way to, that would be the way to set up a fire on.

[00:36:03] Remkus de Vries: So Matt has expressed that desire to have the version of weapons be as irrelevant as the version of your Chrome installation.

And I think that's a noble place to be in. But they've only the last thing I can remember is Jetpack had a serious security flaw and then they pushed out to everyone just because the

[00:36:27] Vito Peleg: risk was too great. We're here. We're talking about actually moving the product forward. That means that developers needs to consider this there's a whole bunch of other systems can't, don't need to deal with.

So I do agree that it's moving very slow and we are being left behind in terms of the, in terms of the technology, in terms of the user experience. That's the main, that's the main challenge in my opinion, and not so much if there's this feature or that feature, but the general user experience, the flow of getting the website up and running that can bite us in the ass really fast.

[00:37:04] Remkus de Vries: Ah just install fi the current version installed a. And just see where you are. You're in a mix between full site editing and all dashboard, and nothing makes any sense because there's beta features in your 5, 9, 3 of whatever, a 5, 6,

[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: 5

[00:37:27] Remkus de Vries: 0.9 0.5. Yeah. So there's stuff in beta that is in production.

That makes absolutely zero sense. Have you tried to add a menu?

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I have, I know where you're going with this. Yeah,

So the over-complicate piece we'll get to in a minute, is interesting. I, my background university was history and ancient history in particular. And one of the things that ancient history taught me is that, even those plucky, Romans who thought they were going to be around forever, they weren't nothing lasts forever.

And at some point something will, Google will disappear. Facebook will disappear. No doubt. At some point, WordPress will disappear and there will be a moment looking back. When you say, ah, that was possibly the moment where it did tip and we could see with 10 years hindsight, that was the moment.

And there's, to my mind, there is nothing to suggest that this is that moment. It's just an interesting talking point, isn't it? Because it will happen. It's inevitable, go back 20 years and look at, I dunno, expression engine he was doing really well. And where are we now? So it's just a curious thing.

And obviously if all we've got is the numbers. One of the things that, that I forgot to mention that Yoast actually carried on to talk about, and I should've mentioned this, I use the word out innovated. Amplified that a little bit, one of his things was that not only have they made it simple and easy to use on the Wix and Squarespace side, but he also said they introduce they've got really good chops when it comes to site speed and SEO.

However, as Vito said, they're able to roll everything out to all of their users immediately, and they're getting better and better at page speed performance. And then he goes on to talk about job of WordPress hosts and REM cause obviously that was a big focus where you worked previously was optimizing WordPress websites so that they were as lightning fast as possible.

So there's a bigger picture. Isn't that, if you go to Wix and Squarespace, assuming they've done their job correctly, you pay your money and it does those things. Whereas on the WordPress side, you pay your money for the plugins. You pay your money for your hosting, you pay your money for your caching solution and all of that.

And you got to figure it out together and probably pay the developer as well. The so many different parts to this, and I'm sorry, not we've totally excluded you from this conversation. So I'll rectify that now and just toss the microphone in your direction.

[00:40:05] Nat Miletic: Yeah, no problem. I think it's yeah I agree with you.

It's not like sky is falling type of situation, but it is a good kind of I guess point of reflection maybe for everybody just because obviously I think everybody touched on it. It's complicated, maybe too complicated. I know from, some of the conversations I have on Twitter with people is that you, people not, I'm not, and I'm not even talking about just regular kind of, a small business owner who wants to create a site or somebody who wants to create a site from scratch.

I'm talking about even developers that are looking to get started. It's very fragmented. Like you, there's so many different ways of doing. And it seems like no way is the right way, and that's confusing, whereas in with the other platforms, you sign up and there's only one way to do it with WordPress.

There's, five or 10 different ways to create a website. And while that's a good thing, maybe from a flexibility perspective or maybe for agencies or, companies or folks like us that have been working with it for years, I think for new people, it's very confusing, especially when you throw in the mix the whole hosting piece.

And yeah, like I remember when I first got started in on the Twitter community a couple of years ago, I was shocked how many people didn't know how to start up a new WordPress site? Like how do even. Learned the platform log in, create a site or create a free account to play around with it or local WP nobody kind of a lot of people didn't know even how to get started.

And then I said this is so easy. Like I can do a quick video, like 10 minute video, to show people how to get started. And then that, 10 or five minute video actually was two and a half hours. And then I realized, and then I realize, okay, yeah, I could see I do it all the time.

So to me it's a no brainer kind of thing. But as you're trying to explain it to somebody it's it was very complicated. And I think that's probably the main thing. Another thing is that for some reason, the young people don't think WordPress is cool. So I don't know why, but it seems like, there's not a lot of what's the word excitement, maybe, from younger people to get into WordPress.

And so there there's a few factors at play. I think I think, in my, from, in my opinion, Too many things at once. And whereas in these other platforms, a little bit more focused and Nathan, you forgot to mention also a Shopify same thing. They had a slight little drop there, their sheriff rights in the toilet as well.

And they're still growing. So even though they're just not growing fast,

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: The idea of growth, it always is curious to me in the, nothing can grow forever. Otherwise it would consume all of us and everything. So at some point it has to slow down. Maybe this is the point.

Maybe it's not, maybe it will speed up again in the next few months, I'm going to move over to the next piece though. Please keep your comments coming in. By the way, I can see there's a lot of commentary about this and we'll raise some of them in a minute, but there was a, an article which kind of went along with this.

I'm sure there were hundreds of these similar articles, but I'm just going to mention this one. This is WP Johnny who often writes he's good at like stirring things off. If you like, he's good at putting his own stamp on it and expressing an opinion and his opinion essentially is that basically.

Complicated. It's difficult for inexperienced users to use. It's expanded much farther than it used to be. The users typically want something. They don't want to hire a developer. They're happy to give 20 or $30 a month to a host, to a company like Wix or Squarespace, get everything done.

I love this phrase. That's how the core WordPress itself and third-party ecosystem, radioactively mutated into something like an octopus. Just the idea. It is really complicated. And I read the article and then I went back and I looked at WordPress and I was thinking about full site editing. And I was thinking about menus, like you were saying, REM and I did think, okay.

I have to apply a lot of effort to get through this. I'm going to be here for quite some time. Never used WEX, never used Squarespace. I've no idea what their UI looks like, but I'm guessing that over years they've made it. So it's as simple as possible. It's still not perfect. Either. Not perfect. Yeah.

[00:45:07] Remkus de Vries: No, I don't think it is, but it most certainly has a lower entry.

[00:45:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So here's what WP Johnny says. So basically he thinks it's over complicated in all the different ways. And to some, I wonder that WordPress is having an identity crisis in both devs and bottom users, jumping ship devastate the bloat and commercial grime. The users hate the complexity and confusion.

We fall into the point where new bond devs are using WordPress, not out of a personal preference, but because there's so much money in the market and users, likewise are choosing WordPress because of the number of devs and active development for it. Because otherwise they'd rather choose something easier.

Something that doesn't have to be learned. So

[00:45:49] Vito Peleg: I think think that there is an oversight in this idea because basically 46% of all websites are being built by agencies or freelancers agencies by professionals. Real businesses don't want to mess around with their website. That's just the fact like, eh, the same way that I don't want to mess around with payroll, I pay someone to do it.

And so that, that is not going to change almost half of the website. And that means pretty much 150,000 websites. Every 24 hours are being launched by web agencies and freelancers. So that's not going to go anywhere. And the even more of the basic DIY type of websites, if we're looking at that percentage, I don't know if that's a, if this is a proper stat, but I imagine that those, that you have less of them on the top 10 million websites in the world, because a website is not just about creating a website, it's about getting the website to work for you to get the traffic, to get the to actually let it work.

And if you're just going to splash a week's website, a sweatsuit Squarespace website on your own, you probably don't have the know-how or the skills to get the website from that point over to the top 10 million out of more than a billion or a one and a half billion websites that are on the internet.

That is I don't think really much relevant to this discussion. What I do find interesting with that 10 million stats that we saw in the previous article is that it means that the agencies and the freelancers are moving. Eh, because the top 10 again, are not going to probably not going to be the ones that are done by people that on their own.

So the fact that the Squarespace have gained and I'm actually seeing this with Adoree as well. We have quite a few people that that are coming expecting a Squarespace. They believe to use it. So Squarespace or Duda or eh, web flows as a pitcher. I mentioned here on the chat, which makes perfect sense.

And. Let's say 3, 4, 5 years ago, WordPress was the only go to solution. Now there's a few other places that are there in terms of developers. I don't agree with that without it be Johnny's approach too much there.

[00:48:22] Remkus de Vries: Same

[00:48:22] Nathan Wrigley: area. Yeah. Okay. Let's just get some of the commentary in.

So Andrew Palmer makes the point that 455 million websites WordPress suggests his percentage is of that, but oftentimes it's stated as the top 10 million websites. And then maybe in reply to that Cameron Jones, the metric looks at the top 10 million websites. It's inherently flawed as it relies more on the strength of the business.

The website is for any real measure of popularity.

[00:48:50] Remkus de Vries: So this is my whole problem with the whole thing. There are key points that we can take from it, take from that both Nat and and veto have highlighted a couple, but the whole thing is about looking at data. That we know is flawed. It is not complete.

It does not paint the right picture. It is eight indicator. It is not the indicator. So it is everything. This whole thing is just, it's almost just hearsay.

[00:49:20] Nathan Wrigley: So the end, in agreement to you, then Peter Ingersoll would just say, oh, this guy's not folding it. Don't worry about it. Thank you. I

[00:49:29] Vito Peleg: didn't ask about what was mentioned here, as you were reading this article, Nathan, is that there is an identity crisis and for sure that needs to be rectified and clarified for all of

[00:49:41] Nat Miletic: us.

Yeah, for sure. I'm trying to do, trying to be too many things. And I posted about that on Twitter as well. It's just, and there's very interesting comments and replies to that in regards to the market share. And I think Rimkus, I agree in terms of Having the, good data, but this is the same data we've been tracking a few years.

So these articles that are following this market share have been using the same type of the same metrics all along. So we've been following the graph, using the same data. So it's not like the data set changes all of a sudden it's the same data set it's, but yeah. Is it getting the full picture?

Prob probably not.

[00:50:28] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Would argue that as it matures the audience changes. So that same, like essentially what Vito just said that who that 10 million is actually changing in itself that skews, whatever we're using as a percentage.

[00:50:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm just going to speak to some of our guests, because it would appear that the chat on the way that you can't see is we can all see all of your comments streaming by.

And it appears that for REM cousin, Nat, those comments of frozen for one reason or other, the only thing I can recommend is that you refresh the page. Drop your right back in and me and Vitol hold the Fort. We won't be hysterical. No need to look fresh as well. Yeah, you refresh and REMCOs can tell us if it's fixed.

Any module I'm seeing everything coming in so I can put things back on the screen, but hopefully somebody needs to make

[00:51:33] Remkus de Vries: a comment.

[00:51:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Maybe they will. I'm going to share some of those comments. They're the ones that I can see because there are absolutely loads. This is obviously like whether or not it's just nonsense news.

It's an interesting talking point because I do like the idea that everything at some point has a moment of ascendancy. And then obviously there's declined. People have written whole books about such things. So where did we get to gots to. Can't remember there was something about elements or here Elementor is going in having an all in one fixed solution that fixes that issue for them.

It's so much easier to plan when you have cash flow,

[00:52:11] Vito Peleg: even though it's also WordPress. So every new elemental cloud website is considered in part of the stats.

[00:52:16] Nathan Wrigley: I can't remember where, so is in one of these two articles, apparently the element or numbers continue to go up. So that increase was, but yet the elemental share just kept going up.

Whereas the worker share,

[00:52:33] Nat Miletic: they were saying that the element or mark or popularity is driving up to popularity of of WordPress, which makes sense. And yeah, it definitely did a new cloud element or that I tried it a few days ago does install base kind of word breasts implementation that has the background of, has the dashboard and everything like that.

It is vanilla word. Yes. I would

[00:53:05] Nathan Wrigley: say as well, I walked

[00:53:07] Vito Peleg: in a mental and just put it in, the three bills acquisition.

[00:53:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's what they

[00:53:14] Nat Miletic: should have done instead of the block editor. And in my opinion, I know it's not a popular one.

[00:53:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's have a few more speaking to Remco at this point.

This is Peter again. I think the biggest recent issue is the 2022 theme and a default install, too much focus on FSC for the general population. Yeah. It was a curious choice that wasn't it having edit site.

[00:53:36] Remkus de Vries: That's an interesting way to describe it. The curious,

[00:53:40] Nathan Wrigley: you can know me. I don't like to, I like to tread very carefully on the middle of the wall.

[00:53:47] Remkus de Vries: I'm going to use the word again. And it was a shite decision.

[00:53:52] Nathan Wrigley: And then what this episode's going to be.

[00:53:56] Remkus de Vries: I have to give him a name.

It is actually hurting. Yeah.

[00:54:03] Nathan Wrigley: That I you're agreeing in a sense with WP Johnny, then aren't you, whether it's complicated or it's just confusing. Your point is that I guess Ram, because maybe there's just too many new and difficult to figure out off the bat, things that go with it. We'll come to a solution to that in a minute.

There is

[00:54:22] Remkus de Vries: literally no flow and every single thing you want to have implemented in your site is you need to figure it out instead of, ah like when you go somewhere and you see your input screen, you don't have to think about

X that's, what it should be. It's more away from it as you can possibly be.

[00:54:52] Vito Peleg: It's like the Facebook ads. It's lucky. You don't know where,

[00:54:56] Nathan Wrigley: what you're looking at. I literally have no idea how to use that. Every time I go in it's there's 14 new thing. Even the old things have got new names and I don't know what to do.

It's a bit like Google analytics there's you might use leave me alone. Okay, so this is an interesting point from PM. All about, like the cool thing, everybody likes the cool thing. They haven't got, people love Webflow, especially if they are designers. I confess feature. I've never so much as even, I don't think loaded up their home page.

So I don't even know really what that product is, but I see that word everywhere. And I'm presuming it's popular, easy to use slick marketed well, and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:55:40] Vito Peleg: That's the key. That's the key there. Which, which really makes sense because if the target audience is designers, you want it to be slick.

Did you

[00:55:49] Nathan Wrigley: think right? Is it never really occurred to me until just now, but do you think that the likes of our that we are, do you think that we were born into an era where technology was hard? You like technology broke a lot. Things had to be . Oh yeah. Basically. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, people like you get a bit cross about things technology just broke, you expected your computer to crash.

Quite a lot. Things needed to be fixed updates needed to be applied. Whereas the current generation, the iPhone, he just works and you just click buttons. Everything is just simple. It's look at it. It never breaks. Even if I Chuck it in some water, it still keeps going. That kind of thing. So there's just this disconnect technology works for you as opposed to you having to tweak it and work against it.

And I wonder if that's maybe why to Peter's point something like web flow, if it really is slick, that's what they want.

[00:56:48] Remkus de Vries: There's plenty of products that are, that grown like exponentially, just because it looks great. Yeah. Like I would even argue that a flywheel hosting started because it looked great.

Cause it was. Essentially created for designers,

[00:57:09] Nat Miletic: what flow does have another advantage, which is the deep performance and not, and bogging things down with a bunch of JavaScript libraries and things like that. So it is a little bit faster. So w the UI is nice.

I've tried it as well. I do the platform. The UI is really nice as well in terms of designing websites, but also at the end of it, you can export your entire code base, out of it and make modifications to it that way as well. And then the other thing is that it's it's faster, technically it's faster because it doesn't bog you down with unnecessary things that you may or may not need.

I think that's the biggest kind of advantage of it right now. Couldn't

[00:58:00] Nathan Wrigley: come one of you three or all, three of you just out of interest, just as a totally crude metric. Just go to the work word com EDU website and look at the attendees list and just quickly scan the pictures. The CFIP buddies, young other, any young people.

So for

[00:58:17] Vito Peleg: NFTs and stuff.

[00:58:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Basically, if they've got gray hair, just discount them. I'm just wondering, I just want to now when I go around word camp Europe, I know that both Rimkus and veto, are you going nuts? I'm

[00:58:33] Nat Miletic: not going, unfortunately. Yeah. It's way too far for me. Yeah.

[00:58:35] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to go around with that in my head.

Now I'm going to go around. Is everybody the same age or older than me? We'd have that stop very likely look at me. But but I'm curious now peaches got that. Staying on this very quickly. Paul Lacey, the numbers personally don't bother him. They aren't, we don't need to panic at all.

But I do think it's significant as it goes into. So what does it matter? Yeah, that's right. He says, honestly, that's what a curmudgeon is. Yeah. But what it says to me is that the product itself is not as engaging as it was, and there's more there and that's more. Something to be concerned about.

Honestly, there are so many comments about this particular story. I don't know where to begin. And so probably I'll just raise a few quick ones. What have we got here? This is Paul. Again, Matt is trying to compete with Wix and co and the process forcing through a roadmap that doesn't beat Wix and then makes it subpar solution for building custom sites.

Peter, again, so much talk about WP should do this and WP should do that, but who, what is WordPress open source development by developed by contributors on many levels, trying to keep millions of sites running whilst improving. I noticed that. Devendra put something in. He was replying to Tada tumbler.

Yes. Devinder tumbler is a new simpler WordPress that's the hidden plan has another of a conspiracy theory as it calls open. Bali is either owned by automatic or Audrey capital. I don't know which is it an automatic thing? And then finally, I'll just put this one up. One issue with web flow is similar to elements or creative designers should not be let loose on the web because the result could be vanity display.

Often that's often neither, neither accessible or useful. Boy. I knew that one would keep us going for a little while. I feel like I felt like I needed to take a cold shower and calm down. But instead of doing that, let's it got you excited? That'd be fairly excited. I quite like talking about this kind of stuff.

I think it's fascinating though because for such a long time, that conversation has only gone in wander. And it's like nobody put any statistics together that felt like it was going in any other directions. So even if it's a nonsense and we're talking about something we should flip, it's just a, it's an interesting,

[01:01:00] Remkus de Vries: even if it is nonsense, if the key takeaway here is by the project leads that something really needs to happen.

I see. I was,

[01:01:14] Nathan Wrigley: I could literally see the swear words. Just disappearing.

[01:01:21] Remkus de Vries: I'm horrible. Sorry.

[01:01:24] Nathan Wrigley: Hysterical.

[01:01:26] Remkus de Vries: No, but if the key takeaway is oh crap, we need to change something here. We really need to do it now, then I'm all for whatever interpretation of that number gets you to have that change because dammit, we need that

[01:01:40] Nathan Wrigley: change.

Okay. We all talking about it and everybody else is talking about it and no doubt that message will have got somewhere at some point. So yeah let's see how that goes. This is a tiny bit of self promotion. I apologize. The idea that it's too complicated, that WP Johnny mentioned obviously it would be nice if it was less complicated.

And one of the things that which may make it less complicated is if you had somewhere to go to learn things. And of course we now have this WordPress project called the learn project and it's it's user created content curated by the team. You can find [email protected]. I believe if you go to wordpress.org, it's like the second or third manual long.

It's obviously quite important now. And I had a podcast episode this week on the tough and with Courtney Robertson, who was one of the key players putting that together, essentially. Raising it, if you are interested in that, if you want to go and help people to learn about WordPress, so it's less difficult going over, listen to see what Courtney says and how it works, how you can get your ideas heard and help out in that regard.

Okay. I said, I'd probably miss one out. So I am probably going to miss one out. Let's go to this one. Instead. WordCamp Europe is just around the corner. REM curses go in vetoes, go in. I'm curious. I know that's not going so you maybe, I don't know if you'll be able to participate in quite the same way REM cause what's your what's your reason for going this time around?

[01:03:12] Remkus de Vries: No. My mic just went you're muted. Okay. So th this is called the 10th WordCamp Europe. And my reason for going is to tell everyone there that no, it's the eighth.

[01:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. I know where you go with this.

[01:03:44] Remkus de Vries: And there, there have been two online events and I don't count them. So yeah, no, all joking aside. It's a, it just the same reason as I actually started it.

[01:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Can I interrupt and just make that point REMCOs is one of the, how many of you were involved in that first one, but you were certainly one of the founders of WordCamp Europe.

So that's an important sorry.

[01:04:08] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. So the whole reason was to have a community event that connects. And under the umbrella of teaching and learning and all of that. But that, that is, that has always been my, a prime reason to go. And that still is the case.

[01:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you are not going to a particular Tor, you're going just like more community than other things.

[01:04:37] Remkus de Vries: I would say the last the last couple additions I have maybe seen two talks per day. I'm mostly about the hallway track.

[01:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: That's nice. I think I think that's nice veto. What about you? You've obviously got you've got your actor, rim hat on. I imagine when you go in hoping to meet people, meet and shake some hands and all of that kind of stuff.

Is that a big. Or are you going to be doing like, Rimkus just no talks, just hallway schmoozing, networking. Cause I'm speaking. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Oh, I actually,

[01:05:18] Remkus de Vries: I actually have to go. I have to go to a couple as well because it's not announced yet, but I'm emptying the parts

[01:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: of course. Oh, that's great.

So yes, I veto, I apologize. I totally, what, it's not that I'd forgotten. I just didn't say it. You're doing a talk. It's very much lined with your business mission anyway, isn't it? You know how to get websites built more quickly? What have you, but once that talk is done or prior to that talk, are you going to be like sitting there watching everybody else's talks or do you see this as a great opportunity to meet new people and shake hands with those that you already know and all of that we're

[01:05:55] Vito Peleg: also sponsoring.

So I'm going to be at my booth, eh, for most of the time and looking forward to the parties in the evenings and stuff. Last time that I was, there was one. Yeah. Eh, and

[01:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: don't remember much

[01:06:12] Vito Peleg: me. I don't remember what and part of the mornings, I also wiped out, but but yeah, pretty much what we did back then is going to be what I'm going to be focused on meeting our users, which last time that I was there, we were in that.

One, 200 users now we're in 7,000 and then and then now it's going to be more about the, a meeting users, meeting partners reconnecting after a few years away with all of those with with COVID and stuff. And yeah. Partying in the evenings is going to be like what we did three to five parties a night.

That's the goal?

[01:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: I have to say veto, obviously. I was there last year. Was recording, which is why I'm going this time. I'm recording podcast episodes for the Tavern, if anybody, by the way, he was listening to this would like to become a guest on the WP Tavern podcast. And you have something that you would like to share.

Feel free to reach out. My email address is [email protected]. And that'd be curious. Yeah. You know where I am a veto will. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. You too. All right. And yeah, I'm going to be taking my little thing I showed this last week or this little fabulous record. And that's why I'm going to go, but obviously there's a sort of social angle for me.

I'm really keen to just hang out with some people who are, like-minded where I live lovely part of the world, but it's not like the middle of London, there aren't so many technical things going on. In fact, if I was to count the number of people who are into WordPress in my local area, it's me, I think basically.

So I looking forward to all of that. Not do you ever go to these events? You have to word camp us.

[01:08:08] Nat Miletic: Yeah, no, I haven't actually yet. So I somebody mentioned that was funny. I think it was Marcus. Yeah. Build build WordPress sites for years and never been as actively engaged in the community.

Honestly, two years ago. I didn't even know any of this stuff existed. Looking forward to go to one, because I got more involved in the community, I'd say during the pandemic. I would like to would like to check one out

[01:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: for sure. Oh yeah. It's such a nice thing. Sorry. I did careful though. I was laughing because of a Paul, Lacy.

He says you got cane in your local area. He's you're right. But I didn't know about Cane's obviously, then just like me thinking there's only me. So there's me and Kane taken on the world. Why should we be careful? they're addicting. They are addicting. They are really are addicting yet.

[01:09:03] Remkus de Vries: And said this at many work camps, but you come for the software and you come home with.

[01:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, that's nice. A nice way of doing it. Just totally right. It's nothing to do with WordPress, more medical side of things. Does that veto you bothered about that? Are you thinking a bit on the old COVID side? That's in the back

[01:09:26] Vito Peleg: of my head? I was at cloudfest last month and there was.

Loads of people that came back with COVID luckily I managed to avoid it. But it's definitely still a concern. I think that and I know that the team are focused on making sure that it's going to be a safe event and everyone's going to be wearing masks inside. So it's easy for a lot of us to think that it's over, but it's not, and it can still happen every day.

My wife is also pregnant, so I'm cautious about bringing it home and all those kinds of things. Thank you.

[01:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I didn't know that. That's great news. Stop the podcast now and talk about that. No, the the thing I did an interview with some of the organizers of this particular word camp, and here's a quick rundown of what's happening.

If I, if memory serves all meals outside, all socializing outside. Common do we watch the presentation basically go out? So everything's on the outside, it's Portugal, it's fine. Run the same event here.

[01:10:41] Vito Peleg: Like the sponsors eh, track kind of experience that, that is something that happened in, in cloudfest as well, because a lot of people exactly like that just went outside and the whole, and the sponsor's area was empty most of the time.

So hopefully that's

[01:10:59] Nathan Wrigley: also thought of, yeah. Do you know what? I didn't even ask that question when I was talking to them that didn't really occur to me not being a, not being an advertiser. Yeah. That would be a shame. Wouldn't it? Because if it was just empty, Yeah, I guess it will be, ventilate, but take your mask essentially.

And my understanding is, as of this point, Portugal just require you to be either proof of being COVID free or that you are inoculated up to the whatever requirement it is in your particular country. But okay. Oh Kane, just me and you look, no other WPP is here. Either local people are married. Just think I fixed princess.

Yeah. That's funny. KA Kane let's hook up. Let's go and have a beer and fix some princes together. That would be good. So that's WordCamp Europe. It's happening in a couple of weeks time. I believe you might be able to still get tickets. Because the attendee list seems to be getting bigger and bigger each week.

We are all most our time. We've got. Couple of minutes left. Firstly, I'll come to this one, right? We're on the non-word Pressy stuff. If that's all right with you, there's a chap. He's very clever. His name is Bruce Schneier and he does all sorts of things in the it sec it security space. He's an academic.

And what he doesn't know about it, security basically I honestly think is probably not worth knowing and he throws out articles on. This week has just caught my attention because we're all here. We all are. We're all doing things like this. We're all doing live streaming and we've got various different pieces of technology switched on, but he carried out a study on any, he doesn't actually go into which bits of kit he was actually testing.

But you know how now you've got everything in your bedroom. You've probably got a camera in your kitchen because you're, you've got a zoom call and all of that kind of stuff. You're working from home and all of that. And you switch off the camera and that is pretty clearly. Everything goes away.

Camera stops working. You may even go as far as clicking, the mute button turns out you might be, you should maybe need to be a bit concerned because having polled quite a few bits of software, which claim to have switched the mic off, actually, they're not what they're actually doing is just stopping the feed from reaching the other participants of the call.

So the feed is still being sucked out of your microphone. It's going to their platform that may be a continuous stream. It may be a stream, which is only on for a couple of seconds just to establish whether or not things are really happening, but that. That bothers me because honestly, you've no idea how rude I am about my guests.

As soon as this is finished, 10 minutes from now, I'll be cursing. Oh, that REM Cassie comes on my show and he swears

that's right. Son of a thing. And but that, honestly, it sounds like a nothing, but you've got, okay. Let's assume that the Google devices and the Amazon devices and the apple devices, which are in your bedroom, let's just assume for a minute that they're playing nice. All of the stuff that you're saying in your kitchen and your bedroom is actually being sucked out, even though you believe you've clicked.

Let's

[01:14:29] Remkus de Vries: not, let's not assume let's look at the data cause there's so many research has have come out that it actually historian there's people from Amazon have come out that are their literal job is to listen to stuff that's being recorded and kept on serving.

[01:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: I tried an experiment a little while ago, and this may be absolute rubbish.

But I tried to experiment a little while ago where I've only got one Amazon. Sorry, not Amazon. I've got a Google device in the kitchen. That's the only place where Google can listen in my house. I suppose my phone, but the phone was not in the space. I went into the room and I didn't trigger the key word.

I didn't say the key. I'm not going to say it because everybody's things will go off. I didn't do that. And then I started talking about holidays in a particular location and blow me. Guess what happened?

[01:15:22] Remkus de Vries: I don't think I need to guess.

[01:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. But I was thinking, no, that's not right. That could be a total coincidence.

Maybe I actually triggered it and I didn't realize that you searched it. No, to be honest, I didn't go into that. I just did a quick anecdotal thing and then noticed what happened over the days to come and it wasn't dramatic and it wasn't like I was deluged with it, but a thing which I'd previously deliberately chose something that I got no interest in.

So I can't say one way or the other, maybe I triggered something. Maybe I said that word beforehand. Maybe. I don't know, but it bothered me and I'm a little bit more distrustful of IOT than I was in the past.

[01:16:00] Remkus de Vries: So it could just as well be your phone. For starters, the there have been a lot of people doing various experiments like yours and the results quite often are.

An increase in that particular topic in the advertisements that you see, I have done it. I have seen it, but I also see people very vehemently denying of its actual possibility. But I also seen whistleblowers people who work at those places and said, yes, we are. So it's, I'm just gonna, I have been assuming for the last I don't know, four or five years that they are indeed doing that.

And I act

[01:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: accordingly. Do you have any stuff like that in your house? You guys

[01:16:53] Remkus de Vries: home parts only. Yeah,

[01:16:55] Nat Miletic: I have.

[01:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: That's the apple one, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:16:59] Nat Miletic: Okay. Yeah. I have the Amazon one as well. I haven't noticed that. I've heard anecdotally, I haven't really paid much attention to it. It's hard to say whether it's.

Yeah, I haven't done any experiments like you have Nathan, that'd be curious to try that, things that you were thinking about or that you want to buy or a trip you want to go to you, even if you don't search for it, you might be steering your website visits in that direction as well.

Anyways. So it's hard to say it's very hard to isolate, but at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised. The whole mic thing, the article was interesting because I didn't think of it that way, but I did notice some of the platforms like zoom and I think Ms. Teams is does give that indication, even if you're muted is Hey, you're muted.

If I cough or sneeze or something, it's Hey, you're muted. Do you want to unmute and sneeze out loud or whatever. So I did notice.

[01:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: It tells you that you're muted and so must be listening for you. Yeah. We're on a platform called restream at the moment and REM, because what you're saying that if you moved it and then made a loud sound, restream was able to say, hang on, I'm going, gonna, I'm going to write our letter.

[01:18:19] Vito Peleg: You can try just clapped and it tells you,

[01:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: oh, you see I'm surveilling everybody.

No, this sort of stuff really bothers me. It really bothers me. I'm my attempt. My attention is so easily captured. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that. Called lost focus. I recommended it to Paul actually. And he seems to be reading it at the moment. I think it's called loss, no stolen focus.

And it's a really good read about how, just little things like that can just add up to a complete lack of ability to do anything. Just because you're constantly being

[01:18:54] Vito Peleg: Concept of these tools listening or stopping the feed. That makes sense because you're engaged, you're inside a conversation.

So if you're muted, then you just don't want to disturb the call and say you're still here. He's still engaging. That makes sense. Cause once I shut it down, then it shut down. So with zoom and restream and all of those kinds of services, I get it. It actually makes perfect sense tools or this perception of Facebook listening in and the Google are listening in what really is interesting there, if you know that.

If you dive in deep into how the advertising algorithms work is the answer is a lot more interesting than this conspiracy. The answer is that none of us are special. And someone at your demographic in your area that has pretty similar interests to you has probably looked into something similar during this time of year, in previous years.

So the point is that they have so many data points. On us that they know because I've been on WPBS show today that because Lev Chris was on that if he builds and then straight after went to see Ariana Gunda, that out would probably be advertised with Ariana Grande de ads.

[01:20:16] Remkus de Vries: I can promise you a lot of things.

And one of those is that will never

[01:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: happen neither.

[01:20:27] Vito Peleg: Yeah. That's basically how they find out about the

[01:20:30] Remkus de Vries: oh yeah, for sure. So I know examples of where somebody said, I didn't look for that vacation. And then later found out yes, his wife did, right? No, but

[01:20:40] Vito Peleg: at their age group, absolutely.

[01:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: You know what I was curious about that though that on the face of it, that seems to be a really solid argument for it all being okay.

But the more I think about it, that's a really solid argument for it all being not okay. Because if everybody can be boiled down to some sort of, user profile or what have you. And I realized that there's a lot of complexity to that. I am afraid of my ability to go onto any of these platforms.

Cause I'll just buy everything, they going to show me irresistible adverts. It's oh, I need that. And I want that. And I want that.

[01:21:19] Vito Peleg: So I see this as a really positive movement in advertising. I'd much rather see an ad that I'm interested in than being sold. Something that I have no interest in an order.

And it just takes my weight.

[01:21:31] Remkus de Vries: So yeah, in the locations where I can not block because I block everything else in the locations where I cannot block, for instance, Instagram app on my phone, I will actively go in and say, no, I don't like this. Or yes, I am seeing this too often. And the quality of ads that I do see is improving.

It's, it's an evil thing. I don't want it. I would rather just pay them a nominal fee per month and, have it solved that way. And I will never click on anything that I don't care for, but if I see something, I absolutely don't care for I. I I don't understand how the Instagram algorithm works for ads because I got

[01:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: tickets. Don't you all the time. That's no, I

[01:22:19] Remkus de Vries: got sort of women's lingerie yesterday. So I showed my wife did you, were you on my account? She goes, no, I go, okay. I don't know why. I don't know why this is happening,

[01:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to say, I haven't thought this through. So as I, as the words, exit my mouth, I'll probably think you idiot. Why didn't you say that? I would rather have adverts that I'm not interested in because then I'm not interested in. Whereas I'm not going to, I'm not even going to stop. I'm going to see adverts for a Ferrari.

It'd be like , or Ariana Grande day tickets or whatever women's laundry. Whereas if you show me like a nice, cool guitar, I'm like, ma I'm going to dwell on that little thing at the logo of that. And so I think there's maybe a merit for screwing up your ad preferences. REMCOs go in and say, I like all the ones that you hate and see how that works out.

So I,

[01:23:28] Remkus de Vries: this is con this is conflicting because I find that more annoying.

[01:23:35] Nathan Wrigley: All the other, you might as well have the ones you like, yeah.

[01:23:39] Remkus de Vries: It's the one platform where I actively engage with ads and I don't engage with ads anywhere else period.

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a thing called you block origin in my

[01:23:51] Remkus de Vries: brief browser. Just, yeah, I've got brave start

[01:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: with that. And it's good.

It's doing some weird crypto stuff though. Isn't it? They're trying to flog me a wallet coming over it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That one's done. We've solved that problem. Let's go to this last piece, which which didn't come from that's right. We have solved the world's problems. That's going to be the name of this episode with a four letter word beginning with S a P appended to the end.

So Nat you've sent us an article it's called importance of initial ranking re-ranking and historical data for SEO. Why did you raise this one? This is what peaked your interest about

[01:24:29] Nat Miletic: oh, I've been geeking out over this blog for days and days now, and I didn't expect to at a read it and they think, cause it's probably like an ebook length type of an article.

But yeah, it's just very interesting data about a case study that was done in the SEO world in terms of increasing like topical relevance of websites and. Yeah, I just geeked out and then I started reading more and more from this guy, Corey and watched a few of his YouTube videos as well.

And it's just mind blowing stuff. I love charts. I love SEO. I love the technical SEO. So this to me was like, I just,

[01:25:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I'm scrubbing through this article for the first time. And there are charts. There's more charts than you can shake a stick at. When I see charts. I usually want to soar a leg off.

Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. I just, some reason charts never worked for me whenever I was doing my like GCSE maths. It was like, show me a chart. Nathan's going to fail. But okay. If there's nothing really to dwell on about that one, I will simply include it in our show notes today. And obviously it's got the recommendation of Nat go and check it out.

A deep dive into some,

[01:25:52] Nat Miletic: Yeah. SEO, technical SEO, content creation and things like that. I think, for me, honestly, the word breasts platform, one of the main benefits is, the the SEO aspect of it, being able to create content easily, being able to use that from an SEO perspective.

So if you're interested in any in SEO and technical SEO do check this out. It's very interesting.

[01:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much, indeed. What we've hit our allotted time. There was probably more that we could have said. I feel that we could have delved into a lot of those more carefully, but. We still got three and a half minutes.

You could say loads of swear words in the next three and a half minutes. If you like, I'm off.

[01:26:41] Remkus de Vries: I got five languages I can use be surprised.

[01:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know the swear words in all the languages? Not all the

[01:26:47] Remkus de Vries: language with quite a few. All

[01:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: the five. Oh, that's probably,

[01:26:50] Nat Miletic: what's usually the first thing you learn in Tennessee.

[01:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, there we go. So thank you. thanks for joining us once again. Thanks for having me. I really nice to have you on. I hope you'll come on again. Thank you. Thanks for the return veto again. I hope that you will come on at some point in the near future as always. Thank you for the deluge of comments.

Really appreciate it. There was loads and loads coming in today. I just haven't read through it appears to me that I suffered from the same problem, although it didn't look like it at the time. I think quite a few of the comments. It's people are mentioning things that don't really make any sense to me because there's no comment that it hooks up with.

So apologies if I've missed something important in the comments, but I'm right guys, the quite humiliating moment for the three panelists where I get them to raise their hands and give me a wave all at the same time so that we can use, there we go. We have to just keep doing this for three or four seconds and we're done.

Thank you very much. We'll be back next week with some different guests. We're going to be later. Next week. I've got to go and have somebody poke around in my mouth with a big metal stick. And I can't do that whilst this is happening. So it's going to be two hours later. So it's going to be four o'clock.

I could do it from the dental chair. That would be from probably make the difference. You got left before me. Damn. Okay. We'll be back next week. Take it easy guys. Thanks very much for joining us. See you later.