This Week in WordPress #211

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 211. Real world events at last, it was recorded on Monday. The 30th of May, 2022, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I am joined by three lovely guests. First off we've got Kathy Zant. We're also joined by Vito Paluch and Daniel Olson as always. There's lots of WordPress things to talk about.

The most important, is the fact that WordPress 6.0 has just been released. So we talk about the high level items what's been changed. What's been included, what's been updated. We also talk about the fact that word camp Europe is happening very soon. In fact, it's happening during the course of this week, three of the four panelists will be there, myself included.

So we get into what it is that we get out of real world events. Do we go with an agenda or do we just wing it? When we arrive Jeff? Who started WP Tavern is looking for a new job. And then we mentioned some deals in the WordPress space. And then we finally wrap up by two pieces, the first one about doc dot go.

And the fact that they may, in certain situations be selling your data to Microsoft. And finally, in California, it may be possible in the future for parents to Sue social networks because of their child's addiction. 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. Very nice to be with you once more.

This is episode number 200. And what is that? 11? Yes, 211 of the WP Builds this week in word pressure. We've got a fine panel today. We're going to be talking basically about WordPress 6.0. I imagine quite a lot and also about WordCamp Europe and various other things, but let's kick it off by introducing the panel.

First. Stop caffeine. Are you doing very

[00:02:31] Kathy Zant: well? Good to

[00:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: see you guys. What time of the day is it where you are Catholic? Cause I always feel bad when we have north American guests on and sometimes it's absurd.

[00:02:40] Kathy Zant: It's 8:00 AM.

It is a holiday though. It's a , but I'm up at 6:00 AM every day, no matter what, I have a dog who is just like time to go.

[00:02:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's not good. So bad then. Let's introduce Cathy properly. Shall we? Kathy is the product manager at cadence WP. She also works with the iconic and orderable teams at Stella WP.

She's worked with a number of brands in the WordPress space and often teaches security for eye theme security webinars. She's also a speaker at the upcoming page builder, summit and cough. Who would be advertising anything about the page builders? Me it, so we'll talk about that a little bit later.

Kathy before we crack into it. I, for some reason it's possibly about the whole orderable thing that you've got going. I know it's a thing and I know what it does. Can you just give us the, like the elevator pitch quickly about that? Because I genuinely have, it's passed me by.

[00:03:45] Kathy Zant: Yeah, it's a WooCommerce related plugin.

That's basically good for anybody who is doing local delivery. So basically restaurants it's really great for them, but if you're doing like high-end types of things where you're not shipping and you have local clientele, like jewelry shops, things like that, it works for that as well. But yeah, it's a growing plugin here at stellar and it's pretty exciting to work with the team.

It's a developed by the same people who do I conic. So it's UK

[00:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: based. Yeah. James is James Kent. James camp. Yeah. Great guy. Yeah, really nice guy. Okay. That's fascinating. I'm guessing that it took off pretty well during the pandemic when everybody was suddenly ordering food and, instead of going out, so yeah,

[00:04:31] Kathy Zant: just the last few months it's really ground.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Nice. We'll well, I'll have to get somebody on the podcast to chat about that. Let's move on. Let's talk to veto. Hello, Vito. Oh, good to be here. Yeah. Vito you've seen veto before. He's been on the show loads, although he was on loads and then he just thought I've had enough of that.

And then he took about two years off and then he said that he's back he's on loads again, which is great veto. If you don't know, he is the co-founder and CEO of atta rim. W you can tell us about that in a second, which is a centralized collaboration platform for agencies. I noticed that the birth of things is not on there.

Is that intentional, or did you just decide not to mention,

[00:05:12] Vito Peleg: Bertha is also like a project that I'm involved with, but mostly Andrew is taking the reins on that front. What I'm focusing on, Adoree him and growing that, but the we're both co-founders of birth as well.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: Just give us a quick elevator pitch for after him.

What does it do? Who needs.

[00:05:32] Vito Peleg: So it's a platform that helps a web agencies and freelancers to collaborate with their clients and their team. The idea is to systemize and automate a lot of the back and forth. A lot of the redundant communications that prolong the delivery of projects. Usually a standard of projects takes between three to five days on our own.

But when a client joins, it takes four to six weeks on average. So Adelaide tacos, this huge gap of more than 400% increase to the project delivery and reducing it to something that is a lot more reasonable under 10 days. Also,

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: you're going to be tackling similar topics at WordCamp Europe, which we'll get to in just a moment.

But yeah. Anyway, thank you for coming on once again. And finally a brand new face not to WordPress, but to this particular show we've got Danielson, Daniel I'm Daniel. I don't think he's where he normally is. Cause if I'm right, then you don't do you, are you in Japan? Normally? Have I got that totally wrong?

[00:06:29] Daniel Olson: Usually I'm in the greatest city in the world. No offense, but Philadelphia is my home. But today I'm in Portugal.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: I am a company that's in Japan. Is it? Yes. Got

[00:06:40] Daniel Olson: it. So I work for digital cube and digital cube was founded in Kobe, Japan. I call it the sister, city of Philadelphia. It's kinda got the same spirit, the little underdog, the little brother of New York, little brother Tokyo.

There's a lot of similarities there. So we it doesn't matter where you're from Tokyo, Philadelphia, Japan. Yeah,

[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: Scarborough where I am I going to read you? I'm going to read you a bio anyway, cause it's nice to get the full Monte. So there he is. Daniel. Daniel is the chief innovation officer at digital cube, a company headquartered in Japan that creates products and services for WordPress in its communities.

He leads the early feature development by testing new technology with his team in Philadelphia, he enjoys collaborating with every facet of digital Cuban its partners from the lab works agency team at home and abroad to help him design stickers for word camps. That's cool. As design is very much part of our culture.

He's a web developer AWS Superfund. Whoa. They're hard to find a JAMstack advocate of design thinking in and curious about AI. I'm curious about AI for all the wrong reasons. I'm curious about what is going on, but anyway leave that, but very nice to have. Just tell us one small, for those of us who are going to become quite jealous during this episode where are you right now?

[00:08:04] Daniel Olson: We're in, or I'm in a Gaya. I'm not even in Porto, but I am in in Portugal getting ready to go to work camp Europe and I am so freaking excited. You guys have no idea how long I've been waiting for this. I wanna, I want to explode. It's I'm ready to go. Let's

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: go. The list of attendees has been getting longer by the day.

I I've been scouring that list of attendees just because of, the kind of thing that I do. Every day it gets 10 longer or, and it's truly massive now Kathy was telling us, Kathy, what you shared before about the numbers for what come us? That's common knowledge is it?

We can say about that. Okay. Yeah. So it would appear that word camp Europe, which we'll talk about in a minute, it's a free for all so long as the venue is on the capacity, I guess that's the limitation. So there's thousands and thousands of people going, but Kathy just told me, and I didn't know that the limitation for work camp at us is six 50.

Did you say attendance?

[00:09:03] Kathy Zant: Yeah, yes. And they've said it's because of the venue. Okay. It's going to be held in San Diego this year. But the curious thing is, I worked on word camp Phoenix, and we had about 650 attendees word camp. Miami is usually about 900 attendees. So we'd camp. You're a WordCamp us.

It's going to be even smaller than those

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: cities. I know. I didn't work out us is traditionally the, the second biggest, wasn't it? It's a giant thousands of people. So what a change that will be anyway, WordCamp Europe. We'll talk about that in a moment. Just a few little comments before we begin first things first, if you feel like it.

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However, if you're in our Facebook group and you want to make comments, that's fine too, but there's a little bit of a Kluge you've got to, if you want. Express who you are and give us your avatar and all of that. You have to go for the episode, pithy URL. You have to go to chats.restream.io forward slash Facebook falls off the tongue chat.restream.io forward slash FB, not Facebook FB.

I got it wrong. I got it wrong. Go there. And then you can, you can make some comments, which a couple of people have already started to do. Firstly, Cameron Jones joins us all the way from Australia. I don't know, 11 at night. Thank you for joining us, Cameron. Very nice to have you with us. Rob Cairns is joining us as well.

He's a viewer, Maya. We're going to see you in the next few days. I'm certainly hoping shows. She says, what does she say? She says, Hey, Rob, lovely to see you. Vito waiting for you in Porto. It's going to be nice. Seems that everyone is traveling to Porto as chat is very quiet. Yeah, it is a little bit quieter than normal.

I wonder if that's true. Let's see what happens as the show goes along, Maya, make that change, go and share this with all the places and see if we can drag some people in. Okay. What do we got for you this week? A couple of things happened this week. This one seems to be quite a big one. There's a, there's this piece of software called WordPress, which we occasionally talk about.

And every so often they change the big number at the front. So far it's got to six and It's a big deal. It's called Artura. I never, apart from the fact that Matt Mullenweg is really into jazz, I don't quite understand the language here. I'm just being picky. It says that this this release of WordPress is influenced or inspired by this particular musician.

And I don't quite understand how software is inspired by a jazz musician, but there you go. That's how it's done. And and it's massive. There's an absolute boatload of new features. Let's start on this page. We're [email protected] forward slash news. Just go to work by Presta Oregon. It's going to be right near the top.

What is inside? We've got a few things which really did need fixing, raise your hands. You've tried to use Gutenberg and copy and multiple blocks on, of delete things that go between blocks. My hands are both up. That was impossible. You basically deleted both the blocks and it didn't work. And now you can do that, which is really nice.

There's a whole new set of key strokes as well. So for example, this one, I've not tried out, but if you enter two square brackets you can access can have access to recent posts and pages, which I thought was nice. What else have we got? You've got custom. You can create custom buttons. It says and add new buttons and it will take the risk, the styles, which is nice.

So you don't have to build them all from scratch each time and you can make tag clouds. Is that still a thing? Does anybody do tack lounge? I thought that was like a flash based thing, but then you go you can make tack clouds as well. There's a whole load of stuff done in style. Switching. We'll look at an article in a minute from Courtney Robertson, but that you can basically switch styles through one user interface setting.

So that whole thing is going to be a load easier. And we've got some new templates for wait for it. This is quite nice authors, date categories, tags, and taxonomies, which is really nice. Also the whole pattern thing is taken off patterns now appear when you need them in an even more places. It says like in the quick inserter or when creating a new header or footer.

And obviously if you're a theme developer, the theme Jason is where you want to go and fiddle with those. There's a whole load of other stuff as well, better view list. I couldn't quite work out what had really changed that it looked a bit bluer, but apart from that, I didn't really notice too much in terms of block locking.

You can now lock blocks so that other people they can access them and they can edit them if they please, but at least there's a little warning saying this is locked, which they can then get rid of improved performance they claim. Although I don't quite know what that means. I didn't delve into the weeds there and in accessible.

Improvements as well, 50 updates, specifically focused on enhancing the accessibility of the platform I could go on, but I don't want to, I want you guys to share your experiences because everything seems to be happening at once. There's WordCamp, Europe, WordPress six has come out. All of this is going on at the same time.

WordPress was 19 the other day. I haven't really had a chance to play with WordPress 6.0. So I'm hoping some of you have, so there it is. WordPress six. What do you think you like it?

[00:15:03] Daniel Olson: To me it's

[00:15:08] Kathy Zant: yeah, it seems like a smaller update to me actually then five, nine was it seems a little more. Guess the expectation five dot O the old makes you want it to expect this big change, but it seemed just a lot of under the hood changes and nothing really overtly changing in terms of my experience of using WordPress.

[00:15:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's finessing a bunch of things. Isn't it like keystrokes and under the hood stuff like accessibility and speed and performance, the there's a couple of like I said, the sort of ability to refine the user interface in terms of editing texts about that is basically what I use Gutenberg voice to write texts.

And occasionally in certain Lincoln, very occasionally in certain image, that's what I use it for most of the time. So little things like that are in irritating. And being able to do that will save me a bit of time. I'm hoping that at some point WordPress's editor is as good as something like Google docs is for editing texts, with it's ability to collaborate with other people and all that, which is coming down the wire at some point.

But yeah. Good point. Nothing massive. Yeah. WordPress 5.0 was a bit massive. I did wonder because Matt's got to do his thing at the outward camp Europe. I was thinking there's a lot going on for him to talk about, it's 19, he's got a massive event going on and we're press six, just came around.

I was thinking, whoa, that's a lot. It sounded like somebody else was going to speak when Kathy did. So whoever that was go

for,

[00:16:44] Daniel Olson: no, Kathy, would you mention it's not a huge update? I think it's all for ness. Like I think it's really subtle, but when. In my experience, creating products. I think the best experiences that people have using your product is when you take something that you're familiar with and you make it better, not give them something new.

It's Hey, I know you love my product, but here's something else you have to learn or here's something else you have to think about rather than, Hey, here's something that you depend on every single day like that, that the bracket, you mentioned Nathan, the double bracket command that is like something that's becoming more common in some other applications or like you user experiences where you can search easy access to information like reducing friction.

I think 6.0 is like a whole bundle of just reducing friction. Like just making it a lot smoother. The performance stuff. There's probably a treasure trove of stuck in there that you could go and look into, but you're not going to like detail at all on that page. Cause it's not that fun to talk about.

But what was something that people were upset about with Gutenberg performance accessibility, like really making the code, like perfecting it working on it because when five rolled in it was like a systemic change. Like everything about how we build on this open source content management system is changing.

We're not developing themes anymore. We're doing something different. So 5.0 is like getting kicked out the door a little bit when we were already halfway out and then 6.0 is I don't know, just getting comfortable outside if you want to use an analogy.

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Daniel not had you on the show before.

I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on the whole 5.0 6.0 thing. Do you think that the block editor should have been thrown into core or should it have been. What were your thoughts? Now I feel it's mature, but there seem to be so much friction at the time that 5.0 came around and so much yeah.

Stress and worry about what that was going to do and how it would all work. And a couple of three years under our belt now with all of that, but looking back, what's your take on leash bitch, but it I've been a plugin until maybe some point, like now when we got the full site editing capabilities and we've got this increased reliability, it's more performance and so on.

[00:19:11] Daniel Olson: Great question. And if you guys want to see a train wreck, go look at my talk at word camp, New York a few years ago, where I tried to like really capture this idea. But it was not ready to talk about. But what kind of inspired me was changing the way that I worked was going from monolithic applications to developing microservices, using pieces of things, but not just that technique, but really using that ideology of like, how do I build my application?

I'm only going to use the things that I need, why I'm going to make them more, easier to replace or lighter or make this application more performance. And I look at WordPress and I think, there's a lot of stuff that's bundled in there and it's a very complex application and there's tons of like really talented developers working really hard to make it all work.

And at the time, like I will say I was a little naive in thinking that it was that simple having spent more time looking at. I changed my tune. I think that WordPress is awesome. I think the technical, like stuff they have in there, the tooling for the developers is actually really great, but doesn't get a lot of attention just because it's not something that we normally talk about.

It's there's so many cool little NPM projects that are better in word, wordpress.org that I would love to see, people talk about more that people showed me like the WP ENV package, which is super cool. But looking back what is this big change? I think that WordPress itself should be more modular.

I think that we should be able to pick and choose in that talk. I talked about. Three versions of WordPress, basically like a bill, a BYO, and it's just a config file. You can anything, that's like a dependency of what you need to do. Just like any NPM package kind of use this file and add what you need.

That includes plugins because at the same time I was using composer, which was like my introduction of, Hey, I can use a config file to install the plugins I need and the themes and deliver it to other developers and use source control. That was really cool. But when I was thinking about WordPress, I'm like, I want WordPress, like ultra light.

I think I called it WordPress outline. And cause I was like getting into Linux Alpine at the time. But that to me was like, that's what I need. I need two to choose what I want. But then that kind of is in WordPress. So I'm all for radical freedom. If you want that classic editor and someone's willing to support it, make it an option.

If you want the Gutenberg. Make it an option, but like for most users, they don't know that. So just give them the standard version and the developers they'll get their own and then there's something else. And there's something other flavor it's I think software. That's the beauty of software, but WordPress hasn't fully embraced it because it's monolithic.

But if you really dig into it, it's actually not, it's not that it's not

[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: that simple, you know what, you're the second person, I think it was David Bisset last week was talking about a WordPress light by the option to have a kind of like slim down version with, I don't really even know what it meant, because I didn't really get into the weeds of it all, but yeah, it's a curious idea.

Yeah, like version and veto finally, WordPress 6.0, obviously all of your clients are using WordPress actually. Is that true? Is that a WordPress specific thing or could you use it for any kind of business

[00:22:48] Vito Peleg: two weeks ago? We're now available for every website in the world. Really exciting. Thank you.

And it

[00:22:55] Nathan Wrigley: was like, I knew that I should ask that question. But most are still using WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. And what do you make of this six point? Oh, does it cause for your customers who are obviously building sites for thousands of people, presumably this is a bit of a pain point.

Oh, here we go. I saw a lot of comments this week and I used to do this and I don't anymore. I used to wait a couple of days or till 6.1 or six point, whatever came out. I've given up on that now and just hit the button and pray with which hasn't bitten me in the back yet. And Rob says he's updated 320.

I'll put that comment on. He says, he's got 325 sites. WordPress 6.0 with no, no major issues. 325 minor issues, probably wrong, but moment. If Rob, you got hundreds of sites, your customers presumably have veto. That's a big moment.

[00:23:53] Vito Peleg: Yes. And we tried to prepare for this as well, like using a using 6.0 for a few weeks before it was released and just trying to figure out if there's anything that we can do or that we need to adapt to.

But I think that like Kathy was saying, and I agree with them as well. It's it's, it doesn't feel like a point over release. Cause as soon as we heard there is like a point or release, it's okay, let's clear some time in the devil, let's make sure that everything is working and but then it's just a, it is a point something, like a, it's a point 10 five points.

That's that would make more sense just the, like the definition of it. But I also I also know, I don't know if this is really the driver, but I also know when it comes to the naming conventions of these things. A lot of times it's driven by other reasonings, like WordCamp Europe is here.

Camp after a few years that he's physical. So it would be great to announce a new version that is point something. So we actually bond build up a few things ourselves and we're releasing 3.0 at word camp. We were like taking that same opportunity for that for that announcement, at some kind of an event like this.

So I think that might have something to do with it because I don't feel that it is such a substantial upgrade. It is a bunch of small even bug fixes or w when you build the roadmap, you have the rocks, if you put like a jar you have the rocks and then you have the pebbles, then you have the sad.

These are just a few pebbles in there and some water, it's not no rocks that I'm feeling in this.

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: It looks like it looks like widespread opinion is that it hasn't broken a lot. I certainly didn't hear the clamor of this as broken anywhere, and I frequent all of those places.

Thank you for some comments coming in. Hello, Elliot. Nice to have you with us. One concern that Peter. Hello, nice to have you as well. I'm concerned that he has with 5.9, 6.0 is making the block theme and a better editor. The default for new installs. It's okay for devs, but maybe not so great for new users.

Yeah, I got to say that took me a bit by surprise. When I first saw that the fact that all of that theme stuff has gone and where. Got to point sorry, if you've got 20, 22 installed as the default, if you just doing a vanilla install, then all of that has changed. It's what? Wait, what's going on?

And if you're slightly familiar with WordPress enough to do just some damage, that kind of stuff did feel a little bit like, should we toggle this on by choice? Speaking of which Daniel May says an option to install for the block editor or classic would be AC you can, if you like Daniel, I'm sure this, there is there is a fork of WordPress called classic press.

But there's no toggle. It's just the tiny mice editor. There's no, Guttenberg in sight as far as I'm aware. So you can go that route. If you. Okay, that's just show another article. I just want to give props to Courtney, lots of people, as you'd imagine spent a long time writing up. What what was good about WordPress 6.0, and I just stumbled across this, up on this one.

I thought it was quite a nice one. So I'm going to share it. It's godaddy.com forward slash garage forward slash what's new in WordPress six. All of it separated with hyphens, as you imagine. And she does a really nice, long, deep dive. And for example, the stuff that we mentioned, you can see the style switcher here in operation, various different things.

You can just click a button and the whole site changes, which is really nice. We mentioned the templates. We mentioned that, but

[00:28:00] Vito Peleg: how useful is it? Like how many style of your website,

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: I was thinking. I would imagine most people will settle on something, but I, is it useful for that playing period when you're just trying to figure out where you want to land and you've got the red variant and you've got the blue variant and you maybe show it to the clients and, oh, look, we can go for this one if you like, or this one.

I agree. I think you'd be maybe not all that useful once it's once the site is shipped. Yeah. What the Christmas theme? Yeah. Yeah. Invokes snow button king. Yeah. I

[00:28:38] Daniel Olson: mean go to go to like targets. Before right now probably it probably looks all summer themed, right? The little

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: touches of it.

Yeah. I guess it's nice to have it there rather than having to switch out a theme or a child theme or something like that. You've now got an option to just hit a button and that kind of stuff can be changed. I don't imagine that I'll use it a great deal, but there it is. We mentioned about the fact that the inspector, what is it even called the inserter?

And the list view has been tightened up a bit. I'm having more luck. I've got to say recently dragging and dropping things before it was like throw a coin in the air and see if it ends up where it was supposed to be, or if it just ends up at the top of the page, but now I'm getting there more or less, a hundred percent of the time.

So that's quite kind of quite nice. So anyway, go and check out. Courtney's article. She's done a great job. Writing up all of the bits and pieces, right? We've been delaying the subject. We're not going to delay anymore. We're going to talk endlessly about WordCamp Europe because it's happening. It's the biggest thing in WordPress since well, since 20, 20, the beginning of 2020 previous numbers, we had 3000 people at the one in Berlin.

I'm very much imagining that we're going to have similar numbers. We've talked about that a little bit. I'm I've decided to go veto your go going Daniel. Like he's important, but he's not going to bother. He's just going to stand outside and he's off Lewis. He's going to, can you show us, oh, look at that.

Look, let's make it big. Oh. You've gone. Deaf. You've gone. Yeah, there you go. I muted

[00:30:28] Daniel Olson: myself, so I get full signal right here, but like right here, it goes, if I drop out, I'll just don't back on. But, so here's a little view. Porto is awesome. So Porto is that way right now I'm actually in Gaya where I heard that they filmed fast and furious any fans out there.

But yeah, I feel like I'm a CNN reporter right now on the scene.

[00:31:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's a crucial thing I would want to know is in degrees centigrade. How hot is it? Don't tell me Fahrenheit. That's a meaningless number.

[00:31:08] Daniel Olson: I have no idea, but right now it's cool. Like the air on my skin feels great. I could stay out here.

But earlier it was a little hot. It got like kinda muggy. I felt like I was being steamed cause it rained earlier, but the weather has been wonderful. It's been like the same temperature as your skin. That's like the perfect way. I don't know what, like you

[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: guys like, but I will take that any day of the week it's happening.

So it kicks off on a, I want to get this right. It's the second to the 4th of June. If I got those numbers that's right. Isn't it. It's a place called the super Bock arena. It's important, Portugal, lots and lots of people. There's tons and tons of fabulous talks. You can see the schedule page, I would imagine, but I'm not a hundred percent certain that it'll all be available on WordPress DTV after the fact whether or not it's going to be streamlined.

I don't know. The venue itself is huge. It's like imagine taking a football and I say full soccer ball and just like slice in the top third off. Making that as a building, that's what it's like. It's like just this perfect dome. And I'm so beautiful weather glorious stuff, and I'm going to be, I'm going to be for the whole time, more or less inside a room with no window

interviewing people. But that will be, that will be fun. I'm going to enjoy it and make the most of the evenings. So Vito, why do you go to stuff like this? Like the last time that I was with you in Berlin? You were launching what was then WP feedback? It was definitely in the beginning phase.

And you were on a mission to make it known, which I think it's fair to say you succeeded at what's the angle this time you're going with a team you're taking just you. Are you going with like loads of pamphlets? Is it schmoozing? Is it speaking? I know the answer, but tell us what's going on all of the

[00:33:08] Vito Peleg: above.

Basically this year when we went back then I that was my first word camp, Europe experience. And. Which we were just launching the company. And I made a point for myself in terms of speaking in public that the holy grail is to get to speak at WordCamp Europe and now it's happening.

So I'm excited about this. I've done a bunch of WordCamps throughout or, the online ones and even back in 2019 where it was through possible just the smaller ones and like building it up to this. And it only took about 250 other talks to get to this. Eh, so I'm really excited that this is finally happening and we're also sponsoring this time and we have a booth which we never had a real booth at camp before we were sponsoring, but usually it was really smaller.

But now we have a proper booth. And so there's some exciting things that are happening in there. I'm going, it's going to be myself and Alex from my team, Alex, you met Alex in London. Yep. And so we're both coming together and of course there's loads of friends and now it's more about And reigniting the relationships that we were sustaining for the past three years and with existing partners with I haven't seen Kathy's is worth camp, a U S so I wish you were coming as well.

And so that's really is I feel that it's going to be more of a friend's party than then how it was back then, where I was, I needed to get myself known now I feel eh, there. It's just going to be more about meeting the people that we're hanging out with.

Eh, oh, I'm going to see pitcher there as well. And yeah, so there's partnerships, the sponsorships there's speaking, eh, meeting our users and. Just hanging out, having fun, just parting with our WordPress

[00:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: people. Can I drill down into that a little bit more? Firstly, how's the talk gone going?

How are you doing with that? Is it all, does it keep you awake at night, that kind of stuff? Or are you pretty sanguine about it?

[00:35:35] Vito Peleg: Yeah. Cool. With this, we had to deliver the session like a couple of weeks ago already. So that's already done with, and I might rehearse it a few times, but I talk about this stuff all day long anyway, every day for a few years.

It's just going to be the slides are more of a guide. To just talking about it freely. Yeah.

[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: Eh, okay. And also from a business point of view, obviously you go in there and, you want to make it worthwhile. What are the sort of the metrics that you've got in the back of your mind, whether you've written them down on a spreadsheet or whether it's just okay.

Anecdotally, I would like to walk away from that event with this thing that's happened. What are those specifically? What I learned at first,

[00:36:21] Vito Peleg: I was in the first few events, I was thinking of like, how many users can I get from this event? But now it shifted.

We're not, I'm not looking to get specific users there. It's more about meeting our existing users. But but when it comes to. Acquisition or business. It's more about partnerships. That's where you can really do those things. Eh, in a really magical way. Cause you can find users everywhere, but to have a sit down with the folks from stellar or the folks from this hosting company or that thing, that really doesn't happen as often as as a, as it can at these events.

Hyper-focused on on partnerships and as well as meeting our existing users mostly. And if someone wants to demo, we're going to be there as well.

[00:37:18] Nathan Wrigley: That's nice. Cut yourself a little booth there. Stella's going to be there. What's D do you know, I know Kathy, sorry that you would like to go, but it's not happening at this time.

What the team are doing this time around? Is it a little bit like what Vito was saying? You just trying to re-establish connections with people that you've already been as customer. So you're on the, you're on a mission to subscribe some more people to your plan.

[00:37:41] Kathy Zant: Yeah.

Of course stellar is a part liquid web. There's hosting, there's a number of different services beyond just plugins that stellar can help people get together. And for us, it's about relationship. All businesses, relationships, you have relationships with your customers. Being able to see what other people are doing.

I in cadence became a part of stellar because relationships that occurred at word camp us a couple of years ago. So those types of relationships where, organizations can work together for the greater good of everyone who uses WordPress and each other that's what it's all about. So we do have a team of people who are going to be at WordCamp Europe, and they all have my, meeting link.

I'm like, if you know of anybody that needs to talk about cadence or orderable or iconic hook me up, I'll be there virtually. I'm really hoping some of the sessions can be live. So I don't know if are they live streaming?

[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I don't know either to be honest, I hope so. I hope that's a feature of it all going forward, to be honest, because the sort of.

The difficulty in doing that is so modest. I can't see really see, you need a camera at the back of the room, which is already there to film it anyway.

[00:38:59] Kathy Zant: Exactly. Yeah. And I'm sad. I'm going to miss Vito's talk, which really liked to see it. So I, if I have to wait a couple of months before it to get N-word camp TV, or word, press TV,

[00:39:10] Vito Peleg: and then it might be going live.

But but then I looked for it cause some people asked me for it and I couldn't find any details about it. So

[00:39:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:39:20] Daniel Olson: Yeah. So I'll if you give me your phone, I'll live, stream it from your own phone.

[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's the cottage

[00:39:26] Daniel Olson: industry,

[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: that's it? That's literally all you need. The quality doesn't have to be super, I guess there are things like the closed captioning, which might be, you kind

[00:39:41] Daniel Olson: of have to like the acceptable, what is Maya most advanced, yet acceptable. It's like a live, you, but. We just decided that. So like maybe we could, I don't know, just Twitter support that.

Or could you

[00:39:56] Nathan Wrigley: find a service that does well, you can just video the screen where everything is on with all the clothes caps. Cause it's got the video of the speaker, hasn't it. And all the other bits. So you could actually just video that and you'd get the whole thing all at once. There you go. There's the

you've got to speak really fast and see if I'm saying Daniel, what about you then? I know that obviously you're going, we were being silly earlier. Similar idea. Are you going with a particular gender in mind or is it just a social what's the big plan?

[00:40:31] Daniel Olson: Rule for us as a, we don't do too much like sales at word camps for us it's really just, we want to connect with the community.

Like we've been a part of the community for so long. I hovered around WordPress for most of my patients. But some of the people I work with literally, translate it word, press into Japanese and found that some of the first word camps in Japan and created these, it's like Japan is the second or third largest install base of WordPress.

So for us, it really is connecting with

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: wait, hang on. Say what? Say that again. Japan is what,

[00:41:09] Daniel Olson: the second largest user installation base of WordPress. It was second for awhile. You can check the stats. I think it's German now.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Amazing. Yeah.

[00:41:22] Daniel Olson: Yeah. And really the whole polygon. Thing was what was the first language translated from WordPress English?

I believe it was Japanese and I believe it was my team from what I've been told, I wasn't there. The history of WordPress in Japan, it's been fascinating to me all about community, super, super strong community. And then being introduced to that. Like there, it changed my perspective on what, like we're actually doing and the whole like open source movement using partnerships as a way to develop new capabilities.

It's just you gotta be there. You gotta be there to like ricochet ideas off, your collaborators and maybe get inspired by something new or hear something interesting. Or you never know what you're going to find at work here. I literally walked into the first ever time I went to work camp.

I walked up to a booth and I was like, this looks pretty cool. Hey, do you want to go grab a beer? And now that guy is a hero, beachy Kobe, our CEO. So going to work camp can literally change your life. You never know when you're going to get, oh, that's

[00:42:36] Nathan Wrigley: brilliant. Do you speak Japanese?

[00:42:38] Daniel Olson: I'm studying. You're studying.

Yeah. I got a called on the spot the other day. Cause I've been saying thank you in Japanese, like a lot, because in Portuguese it sounds very similar to Japanese, to me, especially when you're studying. Definitely is every day. So over to got though obrigado is thank you in Portuguese. is in Japanese. So ADI got though is throwing me off everywhere.

[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: That's all I'm hearing. We've got the the live streaming Peter says would be great because. There's a lot of people who would like to view this content and don't have the time or the budget. So I'm going to put Daniel in charge of that. I don't know, by whose authority, but Daniel is in charge of live streaming.

And on one hand, he's going to translate into Japanese during the caption. And then the other hand is going to be doing the English captions. Mostly keyboards too, like too difficult. There's Peacher peaches dropped into the chat as well. And she's saying that she's going as well Peacher in answer to your question.

When am I going? I'm going tomorrow. I'm going to arrive there at about five in the afternoon. I believe it is something like that. And then who knows probably. Find people to to go and have a drink with or something like that. Anyway, the reason that it was all mentioned was because on the post status website, we have this lovely piece, it looks like it's from the the word camp, Europe website, but it's not, and it's all about making the most of word camp.

And so we've had three different opinions as to what they're doing there. Oh, I should probably say what I'm doing. I think I already did. I'm going there to interview people for the WP Tavern podcast. So I'm really looking forward to that. A couple of things that you might like to take into account.

Firstly, I do think if you are going, it is quite good to have a bit of a plan of action. It's all very nice to to just rock up and look at the schedule as you walk through the superblock arenas door, have a bit of a plan. I can't see that backfiring too much. And so here we go.

Networking's obviously a good one. There's going to be a big hallway track, although I don't know quite how they're going to call it that this year, because it's all out solid. It'll have to be the outside track or something like that. This is why, when you said it was raining Daniel, I was a bit dismayed because if you're not, if you're not watching at all, you're basically outside.

And I was assuming it never rained in Porto at this time of year. But there we go pay attention to the w CEU social media. This is something that, keeps you on top of what's going on. When. Make a sort of, to do list of things that you're that you'll have occurred to you during the whole thing, and then follow it up when you return home engage with the sponsors.

I'm sure that Vito and Kathy can con okay, let's have this conversation. How different are you, how different is the experience with the online stuff in terms of sponsors and the in-person stuff? I'm guessing that the engagement. Is like completely radically different. I'm guessing that the online sponsorship of things like the page builder summit is just a different beast than the one where you go in do live.

And Vito, you mentioned that you're getting a booth. I presume you're expecting to be fairly busy there.

[00:45:59] Vito Peleg: And I think so. I hope so. I'm not sure. Let's see how it goes. You never know, to be honest with these events, how it's going to go. But but I have a feeling that it's going to be rather busy.

Again from our point of view, it wasn't so much about about getting leads or users from there, even though it would be nice. Of course, I'm not gonna object to two new new users coming on board. But it's more about making the appearance given out of this, like our notebooks over there and and just hanging out really.

That was the thing I felt that it's been a few years. Since I could have apart from the other activities that we're doing with the community, I didn't have much opportunity to give back if you will. So the sponsorship initially was done just on that notion. And then when we realized that there's potential for other things, then we started thinking about this from another point.

We, Nathan, I'm not going to be confined to a booth after we everywhere. Anyway.

[00:47:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, they guidelines about if you're in the sponsor's area, you've got to stay within I can stay, but I'm going to say

[00:47:19] Daniel Olson: yeah,

[00:47:23] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. WP hobbies, asking who the sponsors are. It's broad and rich. There's absolutely loads of them. If you go to the sponsor pages, europe.wordcamp.org forward slash 2022 forward slash sponsors. So many, there's absolutely loads and they're the big companies that you've heard of.

So for example, Google and jet pack, and what have you. And then you've got all the sponsors element or Molly Yoast. You've just mentioned Bertha GoDaddy Pro all of these companies and they're sponsoring different levels. So there's the big ones they call the super admin sponsors. And then you get admin sponsors.

I don't know what you get. That's different. Maybe you just get more space or more people there. Editor sponsors after party sponsors, who will be in charge of the after-party, which I only found out today finishes at five in the morning. What's that about five. I can barely get to 11 at night.

Honestly, I'm just going to sit in the corner, I think, and talk rubbish offer sponsors, then you've got small business sponsors, charging station sponsors, and then you've got institutional support, which is the city of Porto. So there's loads and loads of sponsors. And I've no, no insight really into what they get for their money, but I'm presuming the higher up on that page.

You are, the more you paid and the more you're expecting to get out of it. I would have thought, I don't really know. Courtney is in the airport. No. We were just talking about your Courtney on your wonderful article. And there you are. Are you at the Porto airport now? Courtney, if so, good luck finding your hotel.

I hope that all is easy and I will be there at some point tomorrow. Safe travel. Oh, airport, us side. Maybe not airport Porto side. Who knows? Okay, let's go to the next. Alright, bit of WP drama, probably little while ago, there was quite a lot of annoyance on the.com side of things because they upended their pricing model.

Now, this is in answer to that. If we read this article, we find out that the people in charge of releasing the pricing and making the announcement, they feel that they misstepped. And I think he even said something along the lines of what did he say, Martin, who is sorry, Dave Martin, who is the C E a wordpress.com CEO.

I can't find the quote now, but he basically said, look screwed up sorry about that. Because they reduced what you could get and so on and so forth. So they've now come out with this new tier. It's the $5 tier it's called a starter plan. And. That's pretty aggressive pricing. Let me just run through what you get.

You get a custom domain name, you get the ability to take payments. You get I think that's six gigabytes of storage. So it's enough for most websites with lots and lots of images. And what helped you? What have you all thought Google analytics has been thrown in? But you're not, you've not got access to the WordPress repo.

You've not got access to premium support or premium themes and you can't sell things with WooCommerce. Although it does say you can collect payments, I guess that's subscriptions and things like that, but $5 a month that's pretty aggressive. I would have thought, I don't know what you guys think about this eating the lunch of other companies, but it seems like a pretty good deal.

[00:50:55] Kathy Zant: I just had an intuitive head that I feel like this is this is a plan that's perfect for. First of all, it's going to challenge some of the businesses that do budget hosting, but I really feel with that, that collecting payments is going to be a good alternative to the growth we've seen in sub stack, where we've got a lot of people who are writing and, there's, there seems to be a very high premium placed on free speech over there.

But sub stack takes a percentage of everything that, that's collected in terms of payments over there. And so I've been watching for a solution that would be on WordPress, where people could be paid for their writing, where there isn't that percentage. So if you do grow, you get to keep more of your money.

And I think something like this would be a great opportunity for someone who is looking at maybe a sub stack, I'm going to wordpress.com being able to be paid for their writing, for their journalism, and have rock-solid hosting over there.

[00:52:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't really made the connection with that.

But sub stack apparently is going absolutely bananas. Isn't it? There's people signing up that left right. And center it's really taken off and this would work for that. Wouldn't it? Like you said, you get to keep your own revenue. I ideally, on this WP Tavern article, anything about what the fees are for those payments taken I'm presuming it's a direct connection with something like Stripe or something like that.

I don't know which case I'm guessing it will be the normal fees, whether or not wordpress.com take any of that isn't mentioned but Cameron in the comments points out. There's some somewhat massive Achilles heel to this. And I feel that the days of this, I thought the days of this was gone, but here we go, you with the starter plan.

You, have ads. They will be ads put into your website. Now, let me see if I can find the quote about this, to the new, to start a plan in solves some customers. No, I can't find it, but it's definitely there. So how frequent those ads are, how much space they consume? I have no idea, but you just have to know that you don't get a complete free ride.

You are not on a vanilla WordPress site. You may have secured your own domain, but there will be some ads in there. If I can find it, that would be good. But I can't now at this point, but that just seems like a little bit strange in this day and age I've got to the point where if I'm paying any amount of money to anything, I'm thinking of Netflix, for example, I am fully not expecting to see ads on Netflix, if I'm paying for it.

And then the same with this, I know it's cheap. It's $5 a month. It's not a lot a year, but still, but maybe that's the way they can justify.

[00:53:50] Vito Peleg: I think that, or I know that the ads as a revenue stream for workers.com has been something that helped them grow substantially over the years. Eh but I do agree with you Nathan, that today, if you're charging for something then I think that's like a big. Even pushy. I think there's other places, ways to do it.

I think that you were talking about Stripe and stuff like this. There might be even another 2% or something like this that is being taken taken beyond the Stripe eh percentage as well. This is something that does happen in other in other software at the lower tiers or the free tails, eh, even inside our own ecosystem that you get, something has been taken like one to two more percent are being taken eh, from every transaction.

And I think that can supplement the ads just as is, because they're both relying on traffic. If you have no traffic to that website, then ads don't matter, I've traffic to the website. Then you can have sales where you can think of percentage from I think that could really supplement that, but as it really, it's weird to see nowadays in our website,

[00:55:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Especially, if you put the. Then, yeah, that's right. If you're putting the ads there in order to monetize it, but if you're not putting the out, obviously, with platforms like Google and so on, you don't really get to know what the ads are that are going to be on there, but you chose that block.

That's where the ads are going to go. And so on it just say, I found the bit, it says the new starter plan solve some of these customers issues, but it's still partially subsidized by advertising customers on this plan. And the free plan will have ads displayed on their site, but we don't get any insight into how much or how often and how big this is different than the legacy personal plan, which was full $4 a month.

But is. Ad free. You used to get accustomed domain and so on and so forth with that as well. So that's quite interesting. It doesn't however, include the legacy one doesn't however, include Google analytics. One thing worth noting is if you were on a plan, you are still on that plan, unless you've ceased to go for that subscription, you will be kept on it and you'll be grandfathered in.

So if you're on what you consider a better deal from a couple of years ago, you can just keep going with that. But yeah, cheapest chips, any thoughts on that, Daniel?

[00:56:25] Daniel Olson: I'm going to use another analogy, but the way I think about websites is this is your real estate on the internet. Like it's your little slice of the moon or wherever slice of real estate that you want.

And you can do whatever you want with it. As long as you're, playing back. And to me, that's like building, buying a house, buying the land and then the builder coming and putting their sign on, like the side of your house

[00:56:52] Nathan Wrigley: actually happens. Yeah. But

[00:56:56] Daniel Olson: I think that you you they'll find customers who are completely fine with that have no problem at all.

I would never be okay with ads in my site. If I was paying for a service, I'm paying you a premium for something and paying you to not inject ads into my website. Give me the option for that at the minimum. Once I start paying you for free, go ham, advertise, whatever you want, I'm not telling you anything.

So I feel like that's the line and, they'll find customers who are completely fine with that. And most people are, I think, people would just want to show their content or make a revenue from it and do it very easily and passively just Hey, you know what I'm going to do this week.

I'm going to put all that stuff I wrote on a site and maybe three months from now, it's getting some pretty good traffic and I can buy a coffee with it, or I don't know. But you should be in control of that. So it could be a good thing, a bad thing. It really depends on who you're talking

[00:57:57] Nathan Wrigley: about.

It's not for

[00:57:58] Vito Peleg: us, like we're not for five bucks a month,

[00:58:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's not really. Yeah. Good point. Okay. So there we go. That's the news coming out of wordpress.com that felt like the WP drama story of the week. Let's move on to the next one. This is nice. We've been talking about WordCamp Europe.

This is a story again on the Tavern. This is Sarah. Who is writing all of the the majority of the pieces at the moment, because we're in that transition phase they've put out a job application because just in Tagalog has gone elsewhere and Sarah's taken taking the reign.

Shall we say? I did see those a couple of posts from guest authors, but she's doing a great job keeping the fires burning. And this is just to say that the community team is removing a lot of the red tape around regional work. Applications now me not being somebody that's ever tried to organize a word camp, a application.

I really fully understand it. But my understanding is that in the past, if you wanted to have a regional one, say, I don't know Northern Europe or Eastern Europe or whatever it may be, you had to go through quite a lot of hoops in terms of there had to be already established ones in various cities around the local.

And then you had to fill out some paperwork, which was quite onerous. And apparently that is largely moving away. The bottom line is it's going to be easier to put on regional WordCamps and I feel that at the moment, it was a big decision for me, just from the COVID. I don't need that decision.

That was a big hurdle for me. And the idea of going fairly far away on a plane was, I had to really toss that around in my head. And if there's more local ones it's quite likely that I'll probably favor those. Because it's just much more easy. There's less friction I'm in the same jurisdiction.

I know what I'm getting into in terms of medicine and all of that kind of stuff. But there we go. So that's going to be coming down. I don't know exactly whether that's happening or if it's just been mooted to happen, but yeah. Making WordCamps bigger word comes, regional word comes easier to put on.

Like we should probably get done maybe on, he knows all about this. But yeah. Okay. Anything about that? Or should we move on?

[01:00:24] Daniel Olson: Okay. Any, did you guys have any plans to go to work Asia back when it was a thing

[01:00:31] Nathan Wrigley: before. Yeah. Yeah, no I had no plan. I know Peacher who's in the chat. She she was like, good to go.

She got the ticket up. She may even have been speaking and it all crumbled very quickly. Didn't it. And do you remember the story at the time? It all happened so quickly and it was just pulled from word come central and the message went out. So no, but I wouldn't rule it out, but the it's the COVID thing for me.

I've got to weigh all that up cause of the family and stuff.

[01:01:03] Daniel Olson: I think ha had, has anyone been to work camp? There's only one word camp. North Korea.

[01:01:12] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. You broke up when you said that word,

[01:01:15] Daniel Olson: a word camp Nordic.

[01:01:17] Nathan Wrigley: No. Yeah.

[01:01:19] Daniel Olson: So I was really lucky to go to that one. It was in Finland Helsinki and just a shout out to anyone out there who has the ability to make that happen again.

I would love a word camp Nordic sometime in the future, it was one of the coolest I that whole region.

[01:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was so cool. Really. Literally cool. Was it like minus 40 degrees also?

[01:01:44] Daniel Olson: It was so cold. Went swimming in the Baltic, like gravel iceberg and floated it for a little bit,

[01:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: one extreme to the other Porto to WordCamp notice.

Anyway, if you're curious about putting these kinds of events on, hopefully things will be a touch easier for you. Okay, so let's move to I see an I'm raising this one because I would like I would to just raise awareness, Jeff Chandler, who many years ago started WP Tavern and basically kept it going for years and years, he stepped away from that just in Tatlock, came in, wrote a different style of article.

And then a little while ago, I'm going to say about 18 months, but I could have got the timeline wrong there. Jeff relaunched is a WordPress is WordPress business, I guess is maybe the right way to put it with a site called WP mainline. He's been doing it periodically since then. And he's written this update this week.

It was on the 26th of May. And he's basically saying that he hasn't really been able to keep the momentum going for a whole variety of different reasons that you can read on the blog post. And so what he's going to do is he's going to turn WP Maine. Into more of a side gig and less of the main thing that I think when he launched it, he was hoping it would turn into, and he has put himself up for hire.

And Jeff has been around the longest time writing about all the things, talking to all the people, more or less single-handedly did WP Tavern for years and years, and probably knows almost every body. He's basically saying he's keen to, to be a part of a team. He wants to take on some, to be an employee.

And he's laid out what his job description is a curious way of a way of doing things. And I don't think many people could get away with this, but I feel that he's one of them, cause his name is just so well-known. So really this is just. Jeff, good luck. Hope that that this piece gets out there and that people start ringing your phone and contacting you with all the methods that you outline on there.

Cause yeah, I think you've certainly put in many years with a work and good luck anybody want to chip in there?

[01:04:06] Vito Peleg: I don't think he's going to be very hard to find a, another place if as a content writer for a WordPress he can apply for the Tavern. They're looking for a writer.

[01:04:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Maybe that's good timing. I don't know. I don't. I dunno what the, oh, I don't

[01:04:25] Vito Peleg: It's very hard to find that dedicated in the quality writers in the WordPress space. I'm sure it's going to be, eh, it's not going to wait for long.

[01:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: Let's have a look. There's a few little comments in here. this will help Washington DC having a word camp. This is Courtney again. Getting accommodation within city limits was extremely prohibited. I'm not quite placed where that was in the conversation that we were talking and yeah, peaches talking about word campaigns.

She was a speaker and it was all canceled a few days before that was in that time. Wasn't it Peacher where nobody really had any insight into whether COVID was going to be a thing with the benefit of hindsight. That was probably the best decision they could have made. But at the time it did feel as if it was all a bit rushed.

Didn't it? And history shows that it was probably the right thing to do. Okay. Quick. Paige wellness summit. If you're into summits and page builders and WordPress. We've got a summit it's called the Pagebuilder summit. It's on the 20th to the 24th of June. You can go and join the wait list.

I don't need to say anything more. We'd love to see you there. And right here Kathy's going to be presenting there. Yeah very grateful for you doing that page builder, summit.com com and sign up to the list. All right. Let's throw some deals at you.

You're doing this one, I'm saying you, and you mentioned earlier that it was Andrew. That's largely talking about both of these days, but you've got one. Now this is bound to WordCamp Europe, right? 50% off of.

[01:06:02] Vito Peleg: Yeah, 50% off during work cap Europe, Andrew is going to be there as well. Stephanie Hudson that has joined us on the team as well.

And yeah, and this is like our way of giving back to the community while also riding the wave at the same time.

[01:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: So this is 50% I'm I got that right. 50% off. Yep. Exactly percent off during

[01:06:29] Vito Peleg: the time that was, we got a discount we've ever did on on Bertha. And it's been it's been growing steadily since we started about six months ago or so.

But because Andrew and I actually. At a conference and we became really good friends at work gap Europe back in Berlin. So we thought that would be a nice thing to do here.

[01:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: That is cool. And it looks like there's a cop eight. I don't know if this is still correct at the time of reading this out, but there's still some lifetime deals around eight, apparently.

So there you go. Okay. Yeah. 7 0 6 or something like that. Anyway, that's there. The other thing that I wanted to mention is if you're a user, if you like sort of Photoshop, scouring the internet for cheap Photoshop alternatives, because you don't want it to pay you for the Adobe fees, I can highly recommend the affinity products.

I really liked them and they are cheapest chips. Anyway, I can't remember what the numbers are, you pay once and it's yours. I think you probably have to pay if it goes through some sort of major point release or something like that. I don't know, but I've had them lying around, perhaps the ages use them all the time.

As far as I'm concerned, they're probably good enough for anything that I would ever need to do. They may not have all the features of Photoshop, but there's Photoshop rivals there's, they've got protocol designer, photo, publisher, and then they've got a bunch of atoms as well. It's 50% off. Maybe go and have a look, see if that's for you.

I can highly recommend it. And also WP social ninja. They rats put their prices up. So I'm just letting you know that if you fancy securing that on a deal. So you're not getting a deal as such. You just getting the old pricing, which is going to go up in the near future. But I don't know when, but it's worth mentioning.

All right, we have WP drama. Now let's just do wider internet drama. This is naughty. This is quite naughty. I've been using.dot dot. I got rid of Google on almost all of the things about, I don't know, six months ago, something like that. And I decided that.dot go would be my search engine of choice for a little while.

I've now moved on. I'm now using one called K a G I, which if Dan maybe is to be believed is actually created by the guy who founded managed WP. But I don't know if that's true khakis cool because their whole premise is as soon as they come out of beta, you're going to have to pay. So it'd be like a hundred bucks a year or something like that, but they promise not to track you.

And another company who promises not to track it was docked up. Go for it. Turns out that they've been allowing Microsoft trackers. They have an agreement with Microsoft. Now, gotta be clear. Apparently their search product is clear that they're not tracking you. If you search for things on their search engine webpage, if you're using a browser, no, this is their this is their sort of search engine app that they've got.

You can install an app on mobile platforms. There it is. You can see it on the. And if you go to certain properties, Microsoft trackers will be able to target you. Now, this is a bit of a PR disaster. I feel if you're a privacy focused company who basically say, literally we don't track you, and then it turns out that they track you what do you do?

The CEO kind of got into the, into it and basically Fest stopped right away and said, yep, we're doing it. Yup. Yup. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Sorry. But to me it feels a bit naughty and I love it here. Search engine dental, summarizes it as such in short, the company that promises not to attract you ever is actually tracking you sometimes.

I'll leave it. I'm just going to drop that mic drop up to you. What do you make of stuff like this? This just seems like such a ridiculous play on their part.

[01:10:35] Vito Peleg: I agree if this is your like USP, why do you like, how does this even make sense? And it seems like there was like a proper negotiation, a deal that was struck around this.

It's not the something that was just like overlooked. So that's, that really is a sneaky and sleazy. I feel, Y, w you add one thing, you're the privacy blocks. You

[01:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: have one thing, but also it's the fact that they got caught because somebody, how it is, it's the internet somebody's gonna falling down.

So it was literally somebody, and I guess they got, they call them out on social media or something like that. They captured the data because that's what people do. They go around. And, they live it in their bedrooms, just capturing data and seeing, oh, wonder. And they caught them on it. And okay.

I would get it if they actually came out and said two months ago, do you know what we've signed this great agreement with Microsoft, it's enabling us because they're paying us tons of cash. It's enabling us to do all of these great things on the search engine side, but they didn't, they just decided to shut up and say nothing.

That's the bit that's things. And I feel actually, this is enough reputational damage for me to stop using them altogether

[01:11:55] Kathy Zant: software. So much about trust. Business is so much about trust and this breaks the trust, right? Because this is their, this was their one thing. This was the thing that they told their customers that they were going to do, and that they were going to honor and they broke trust.

And that is extremely hard to recover from.

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Stay with Carnegie or go back to Google and at least with Google, you know where you're at, they're just going to sell everything to everybody and track every single thing that you do.

[01:12:30] Vito Peleg: Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

[01:12:33] Nathan Wrigley: I checked this out for. Okay. How much Google track you though?

It's not much of a thing, but to me, it's a thing. I went into Google maps the other day, because I don't know if on the phone, you can actually download maps so you can go in and you can say, okay, I want to get all of the UK or a bit of the UK and you click a button and it downloads it.

The bit that I found a bit where it is, despite the fact that I'd go in out of my way, not to let Google have anything there. It was, it said, suggested map. Why don't you download porn? I was like, no how did she even know? What was it, what was the thing that I gave away? And so I clicked, yes. I'll download pause.

Cause that's why I'm here in the first place. Google's argument would be that was helpful, right? Yes. It was helpful, but it annoys me that it was helpful. And it annoys me that you knew that you were going to do something helpful. You shouldn't

[01:13:28] Vito Peleg: have known a good assistant predict what you want.

Like it's it doesn't, you don't need to even ask. It's just

[01:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: anticipate. I know, but I didn't want to be told he wanted done. Anyway, there you go. So doc gone says Andrew Palmer. Yeah. Nice. I

[01:13:48] Daniel Olson: don't know if I'm so surprised by this article, just fundamentally how DuckDuckGo works and I could be completely wrong.

But. Isn't it just a curated

[01:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: wrapper of being well, my understanding is it's an it's. No, my understanding is it calls through the Google API. I think it's the Google search, but just pushed through a different interface. So both of you, and I probably need to do figure out what, which one of us is selling.

True. I

[01:14:14] Daniel Olson: have looked into it a little bit and it is you do get the Bing link in your search results. Okay. So my. They're there like a curator of information using some other data broker, which is Microsoft. They're getting the data and they're just not sharing it, but it turns out they are, but it's like they are, but where'd you get the data from anyway, probably Microsoft.

So I could have probably just assumed that you were going to give them a little something,

[01:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: try you this khaki thing. K a G i.com. Give it a go for me. It's worked perfectly there. They don't have all of the wiz-bang stuff. There aren't the extension so that it automatically just thinks you have to go into a setting in your browser of choice and set it up so that it will become the default search, but it seems to work.

And I do the promise that if I pay, they will keep their hands off everything in the future. Of course, two years from now, we'll we'll be having the same story, but Carnegie cells anyway let's hope not right last piece for today. I don't even know what to make of this story.

This is. This is about Facebook or social media search engine journal again, California. Now, forgive me. I know nothing about American law. So whether or not this is ever going to become law, whether or not it's just going to somebody suggested it might be a good idea, but apparently, so the story says, California bill allows parents to Sue for child's social media addiction.

In other words, if you can basically prove that your child is exhibiting signs of addiction and it does go into what that means. I don't really understand what the technical. So I'm just going to read it out. And I quote, the bill defines addiction as a preoccupation or obsessive with our obsession, with or withdrawal or difficulty to cease or reduce use of a social media platform, despite the user's desires to cease or reduce that use, which causes or contributes to mental, physical, emotional, developmental, or material harms to other users.

So that was easy to say, wasn't it? This, you are going to be able to go out and Sue the social networks. I don't know what to make about this part of me says, hooray. This seems like a really, especially when it comes to children, the other part of me goes, oh, I don't know. I would imagine that would be very hard to do, but it's curious that we've got to the point where, people are saying, look, this is fully an addiction, an actual addiction, and we need to tackle the people who are causing this addictive.

To exist. So again, I'll drop the mic and then throw it out there. Maybe you totally disagree thinks it's stupid. Maybe it's the most sensible thing you've ever heard. Don't know.

[01:17:01] Vito Peleg: I have some thoughts around this. First of all, when it comes to the addiction part of it, it's designed to be addictive.

It's there's a there's UX studies. There's there's really intention to make you stay inside the platform, which is objective. That's the whole point from a business point of view. So they did it, they got it. They're working as expected. Now I'm, I don't want to be in a kind of like disrespect or I think, but it sounds so amazing.

Yeah, I can imagine things to do.

[01:17:40] Kathy Zant: It's California as a former California. I lived there for nine years. This is how things roll in Cal. When I was a little kid, I remember people talking about how television was addictive for children and you shouldn't be sitting in front of the T don't sit too close to the TV.

And so now it's just the phone, right?

[01:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: Moral panic.

[01:18:02] Kathy Zant: Why are we blaming these companies? Social media. Yes. It's I totally agree with what Vito said. It is designed to be addictive. They want you on the platform as much as possible because they want eyeballs for their ads, television, in the day back when you know you, weren't supposed to sit in front of it for too long designed to be addictive and to get your eyeballs on it for as long but media itself.

This is just an endemic thing within media, news is incendiary and trying to get you worried and fearful so that you're watching CNN more. There's all sorts of media associations that are trying to get more eyeballs, trying to get more clicks, try that. There's all of these things that are the problem.

But when do you give up being a parent and teaching your child that this is a thing and start blaming a company. This is where I shake my fist at California. After living, there was like, why are there so many rules? And it's the parent's responsibility to teach the child because this is part of our reality.

Now this is not something that you can like the state's going to protect you from. Although I will say that legislatures that try to do these types of things in order to push the envelope in order to like open things up and make things more visible, things that are done in secrets, can't really change.

I, California just likes to be, they like to do this to really push that envelope and get things out there. And it, an actual application of law doesn't really make much sense. I do think this is a good talking point for parents, especially us who understand what's happening with the media to get the word out that this is a problem.

But it is up to parents to teach kids, to use social media, television, CNN, responsibly, and to be more discerning with their media use.

[01:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: I I share a lot of what you said there, I guess the piece of the puzzle, which for me is a bit different from the tele is the fact that it's just there, right?

It's just, it's literally on your hand, and we've got talks about all sorts of wearables that, at some point maybe combined with glasses. And so it's not even, you haven't even got the friction of taken out of a pocket, just there all the time and the sort of the way that it interrupts your attention span and a little, which is innocuous, it doesn't it's a being who cares, but it can knock half an hour out of your day because suddenly you read that incendiary thing that gets you angry and send you off reading news articles.

And I think. I think the other pieces is that it's designed by incredibly intelligent people who as Vito said, it's the point is to make it as engaging as possible. And I think they've really succeeded and they've finished turn all the dials up to 11 of making you want to come back.

And, but also distorting all sorts of realities, that beautiful is this, that normal? Is this that successful? Is this, and that's the bit that troubles me is that I, social media came along at a time where I'd already learned how to be cynical. And I think that children who are handed a phone at the age of whatever, 6, 8, 10, whatever that might be.

Develop that ability to be cynical and they haven't developed that prism to be critical and have a sort of slight editor in their head going, no, that probably isn't true. Is it? And they're just there. They are just, it's a fire hose, just shoving stuff at them all the time. Anyway, that's my piece.

Sorry, Daniel.

[01:21:51] Daniel Olson: Oh, I have a, I think that this is a very important issue and not to get like a little dark, but look at the data. I'm not going to say my opinion on it, but just look at the data. And I, this is like a guest, but I would guess that the amount of kids that hurt themselves per year is more than when social media did not exist.

I think that the rate at which things like have affect kids have effect on kids and their mental health is dramatically more dangerous now because they have access to that heart. So it's this can be a very serious thing if you leave it on. Like kids are kids, let them be kids. If they got their own network and they got access to all their friends and it's all that content great.

But don't give them access to the world. They're not ready for that yet. There's a reason why there's age limits on, driving. There's a reason, not just because they're small, your brain is underdeveloped. And we've learned a lot as humans about neuro-plasticity and like how your brain develops over time.

And it grows until you're basically either you got a brain disease or you die. Think of how much growth your brain goes through from day one to day zero. Like it's no, it's too much. I think it's too much of a burden to ask the kids who use it responsibly. I think you need to help them.

I think you need to show them and support them and use it in a way that adds something else to their life. Like social media should be a, the sugar on top. The soccer game that you went to, and nine of the 10 hours that you spent with your friends that day you were engaged and maybe you spent 30 minutes uploading some photos to social media so that they could get them or like your family and, abroad to get them.

I think we've come so far from what social media is. It really can be so damaging in so many ways. So I think it is very serious. I don't know. California's take on it. You're right. California is goofy with they're so extreme. It's like wild. Like I don't want to know about all the California rules on every item that I buy.

Cause they're always printed on everything. So I think that they have an interesting, they're taking it seriously and that I appreciate that, but I don't know the way to fix it. And I know that it

[01:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: is a serious problem. I think that the curious thing for me is that the is when Facebook, particularly Facebook I think is just the, it's the biggest target.

So it's the easiest one to mention is when the feed became algorithm. As opposed to it being timeline based because you will remember Facebook in the day. It was just a litany of here's my meal. Here's what cats, but they were all people that you knew, there were people whose names literally collided with you in the real world all the time.

And then the algorithm came in and it turns out that the algorithm is tweaked to to push more engagement. That's the job of the algorithm and the more engagement dial that they tweak, just so happens to put incendiary stuff in, because that is what gets more engagement and give them the choice.

So given the choice going down, let's do the algorithm for delight to make everybody's lives much more delightful, or let's do the algorithm for profit. They're a business, right? Let's we'll just we'll do the profit one because it just gets us more money. And I think that's the bit is that the algorithm is just such a.

You

[01:25:28] Vito Peleg: had a channel about like the nice thing of the day, or rightly I look up. Why did it take off?

[01:25:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I mean it did during the pandemic and then we just, me and Michelle just got fed up doing it.

[01:25:42] Vito Peleg: No, but I be like, people like to see this

[01:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: stuff, oh, you're right. But here's the thing, which I think is that negativity, that forums.

Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean, but it's the same reason for example, that we have a, I guess in the UK, we have guidelines about what content can and cannot be put on the tele, right? Because it's just deemed under law that certain things are, there's a watershed, you can't show a certain type of content before nine o'clock because probably that's not suitable.

And this whole debate, I think, has yet to happen. We have to figure out what these algorithms doing. And I do feel a bit, I do feel a bit unsettled when I see a bus stop full of children and not one of them is talking to their neighbor. They're all to. T, literally they might be talking to the person, the three down through the screen.

It's weird. We all need to go out and put sticklebacks in Jamaica. And the more men jump off bridges into rivers and things like that. Just

what could possibly go wrong. That's it, we didn't solve that, but it was fascinating doing it. I realized that we've run out of time, so I'm going to kill, kill it there. Just to say, firstly, I'll see you soon veto. I will see you soon. Daniel. Thanks. Both of you for coming on the show, Kathy.

Unfortunately, we won't be seeing you this time around, but I hope that I managed to get one of those 650 tickets for us. If I can manage it and come and see you, then Daniel, this is new to you, but it's the slightly humiliating wave that we'll do at this point. Would you mind waving your hands, veto and Catholic and we all say, I know it's very humiliating.

That'll do thank you very much. Thanks to all of you that came into the comments today. Believe it or not, we will be back next week, despite the. It'd be quite tired from WordCamp Europe, but new guests next week. Take it easy. Thanks guys. Thank you.