This Week in WordPress #228

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 228 entitled the other Nathan Wrigley. It was recorded on Halloween, which is the 31st of October, 2022. I'm joined this week by myself, Nathan Wrigley, which is strange. Also by Michelle Frechette, by Daniel Schutzsmith and Gabriel Koen we're here to talk about WordPress and we certainly do that.

There's a few new modes. There's one new navigation mode for the site editor, which is an interesting interpretation of what WordPress might look like for full sight editing in the future. And McCarthy's got a demo of the new distraction free mode, which will be coming to Gutenberg very soon. We talk about the Black Friday deals page that we've got going on.

There's a few sponsorship slots left if you fancy it, but it's worth bookmarking for the upcoming madness and also the awards ceremony, which we're doing, which is a bit of fun and a good way of raising money for Big Orange. Christina Deemer did a podcast episode with me this week over on WP Tavern, all about how the web is viewed by people with cognitive disabilities.

It was really fascinating and opened my eyes a great deal. There is a diversity scholarship for Word Camp Asia, which you may like to apply for, and then there's various other things. We had a submission from Elliot Salby. He wants to tell you about his new plugin, which enables you to implement cloud flare's, turn style.

It's a kind of recapture and he's got a nice free plugin to enable that. And then we also get into how. Pig vomit helped to identify who surrendered a meteor. What more could you ask for? It's all coming up next on this week. WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage 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/WPBuilds.

Hello? Hello. . Good Michelle, Or don't look at Michelle. Hello everybody. That very nice to have you with us. Very nice to have you with us.

It is, I'm already giggling. It's Halloween. I don't even know what that means cuz in the UK it's really not that big of a deal. Some kids go out a bit and knock on doors and things like that, but I know that in the US it's really massive. So it's a Halloween anyway, so hopefully we'll bring you some cheer in a in a moment when she's gonna do the big reveal.

Normally before the show, , normally before the show we have a little bit of a warmup where we talk with each other and discuss what we're gonna talk about and so on. And Michelle has refused to, You have a drum. Drum

[00:03:14] Daniel Schutzsmith: go. Drum roll.

[00:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there's no sound effects. I wish I had a drum roll. That's a shame.

But she's not showing her camera. No.

[00:03:23] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: Daniel or Gabriel Brown. But could you put just you and me on the screen for a moment,

[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan? Oh, can I do that? Yeah, I think I can. Yeah, I dunno. Let me, Yeah, I think so. Yeah. All right. Are you ready? I Oh, Lord, that's Okay. All right. So anybody who's listening to this. No, that, I'm guessing you're trying to be me . You can protect our other

[00:04:00] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: guests though.

[00:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle's wearing a, Michelle's wearing gray wig and she's she's robbed whatever that is to make herself have a bit. Oh, Michelle, I think that really funny.

Thank you for doing that. Oh, that's brilliant. I'm not gonna be able to speak for the next moment or two. I'm gonna bring everybody else back in

[00:04:18] Daniel Schutzsmith: the other .

[00:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: That's the best thing. Ever happened to me? No human has ever tried to look like me ever before Michelle. I appreciate that. I've been like

[00:04:31] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: for two weeks since I thought of this.

I have not had a day where I haven't laughed hysterically. I can't even see who these glasses cause they're bifo, but my other

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: are too. I swear. That is absolutely genius. Thank you so much. I appreciate it a lot. All right, Let's see what we got. We got a few comments coming in. It's time for spooky, spooky WordPress.

Hello. WordPress Pee says Rob Cairns. Thank you very much for doing it. Doesn't get any spookier than me dressed up as you . And he says that he's dying here. He's obviously enjoying that. Hysterically funny. Oh, I haven't introduced everybody. I got totally derailed Michelle by that. Let me introduce everybody I know.

Introduce our guests. Introduce our guests. Okay. Let's introduce our guests. First of all, I need to introduce Michelle Ette, AKA Nathan Wrigley . Nathan is the Director of Community Engagement at Stellar WP at Liquid Web. He's been called the bus, the busiest woman in WordPress by Modern at Word Camp US 2022.

I'm gonna just go normal now. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of underrepresented tech.com. Creator of WP Career Pages, the president of the board at Word Big Orange Heart, or Director of Community Relations and [email protected]

Co-host of WP Motivate the lovely new podcast that she's got with Kathy Zent, podcast author, business coach, and frequent organizer, a and speaker at Word Camp WordPress events. Michelle lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer, and you find out more by going to meet michelle.online.

I am not gonna get over this. There's no way. But I'm not gonna be choling throughout this episode. More silliness in the world is a good thing. Now wait a minute. Wait a

[00:06:17] Daniel Schutzsmith: minute. I said I was a

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: right. Let's try and let's try and wrangle this back together. Oh, first of all, I think you should, everybody should go and share this. Let's just say that at the start. Go to, I already go to Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is, and share out WP Builds.com/live. We need more faces in to see the silliness.

This is going to be great. Okay, so our next guest is Daniel Schult Smith. Hello Daniel. How are you doing? I'm. Yeah, very nice. From sunny Florida, we're gonna we're gonna look at something Daniel created this week and later on in the show, Daniel is the team leader at Paneas County Government overseeing all of the public facing websites and interactive experience experiences, rather to help the public get the information they need easily and intuitively.

We're not working. He enjoys giving back his time to the WordPress community at Word Camp, and he's a meet up organizer as well as the producer at the WP Minute and contributor to post status. Busy man. What's the, There's a lot of producers.

[00:07:31] Daniel Schutzsmith: Man will come

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: for you. Anyway, absolute pleasure to have you with us once again. Thanks for having me again. You're welcome. And somebody new. We've never had Gabrielle Cohen on before, but. Here is Gabriel. Very nice to have you Gabriel. I apologize. Gabriel, it's not normally this riots. That is a good one to be on.

I think Gabriel is the vice president of technology at pmc, where he leads engineering, DevOps, data and privacy. He has been a user of WordPress since version 1.2. Good grief. Wow. And now runs WordPress for some very recognizable brands, including, wow, Gabriel, Rolling Stone, Billboard Variety, and the Hollywood Reporter.

Confess, I've not heard of the Hollywood Reporter, but the other one's man alive. Gabriel, it's like royalty on the show today. What's,

[00:08:18] Gabriel Koen: It's pretty insane. It's even for me, having been here for a while, .

[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's amazing. WordPress 1.2. This is, yeah. Fantastic. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

I hope that you enjoy it enough to come back and you too could dress up as me if you if you want that opportunity , I'm sensing it for the next Halloween . Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So typically at the beginning, we just go through a few comments there. Who, what have we got? We've got, Oh, quite a few. Thank you for mentioning them.

Rod Ken says he's dying. Peter Ingersol, thanks for joining us, says that he's he found that hilarious. Dennis from Maine. WP says that he he thinks that's very awesome. This , Bob Donn or Bob Wp. This will haunt my dreams for many nights to come Man alive. There's no sleep to be had tonight after we've seen this from anybody is there and a few other people just saying hello and various other things.

Jamie, I don't think we've come across Jamie before. That's very nice to to have you from Rockville. What does MD stand for? Which states? Maryland. Maryland. Maryland. Okay. Okay. Makes, makes sense. Hello Bel Gray. Hello from Belgrade, from my alarm. And we'll pause it there. This is, oh, I've got a pinned message.

I don't know what's happened there, but it seems to have a messy pinned. Hi Paul, Bob, something on the screen. Paul.

[00:09:44] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: Paul Lacey's with us now, and I wanna know if he ever dressed up as you when he was your

[00:09:48] Nathan Wrigley: co-host . No, he did not. No. And he didn't commit to the bit. There will be a new rule, Michelle, and the new rule will be not to not to dress up as Nathan ever.

Can I just say it's

[00:10:02] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: not easy? It's not easy being Nathan Wrigley. My, my head itches like crazy right now. It's not easy

[00:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: being me. Michelle, I'm glad that you've discu. Yes, thank you. It is, You're welcome. Not easy being me. I'm gonna go off and have a little cry in the corner if that's okay.

[00:10:17] Daniel Schutzsmith: I just noticed you also have the ponytail there in the back on camera, right?

Yeah, just the real

[00:10:26] Daniel Schutzsmith: thing. Oh, that's, yeah, that's big.

[00:10:28] Gabriel Koen: But still

doesn't

[00:10:30] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I looked like gand because the like. Big white wig. So yeah, no, it's poy tell just like you,

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the, Oh yeah. Anyway, let's get on with the word pressing show. Okay. Oh no. Before then, I've got a few little silly things up my sleeve.

I might as well just share them with you at the beginning. First off, I dunno if you've noticed, we've we've got ourselves a sort of little background here. We've got ourselves a bit of a pumpkin background. Yeah. Okay. That's all good. But then I thought to myself, what could I do to make myself a little bit more, I don't know bit more pumpkin or something like that.

So here's the first one. Give, gimme, gimme your marks outta 10. Which one should I stick with? Should we go for the moon throughout this episode? That's it's all right. What about this one with two hideous looking pumpkins on either side and That what now? Okay. There's a YouTube video we can play in the background.

And sometimes it actually brings the ads in as well, , which is kinda interesting.

[00:11:32] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: It's either a ad though.

[00:11:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yes, it was. There was there, which should be really funny. Or we could go smaller video. Just here. That one like that or just being a little bit cheeky here. I hope nobody takes this in the wrong way.

There's this chap that he, honestly, he just doesn't leave me alone. This look, he's just pestering me. And what are you, what's going on? Way? Hello? Who's this fell? Hang on. He's just popped away for a. It was that little shock just, there he is. Make him go away. , Let's go with the, let's go with the YouTube video and hope we don't get our Wix out at some point during the during the show.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's share the screen and get on with the show properly and talk about word pressy stuff. First things first. This is us WP Builds. If you fancy just subscribing to the stuff that we do, you can fill out this little form just here and we'll keep you updated on our newsletter when we produce podcast episodes.

The thing which we've got going on at the moment is we've got this Black Friday deals page where we're starting to list out all of the Halloween, which will probably end by tomorrow, but all of the Black Friday deals if you scroll down, we've got these sponsored slots at the top you can see Goad WS form, Stellar and Gravity forms.

They're the ones that are sponsored as so far as a couple of slots remaining. And then if you go down here, you can click search and you can filter basically find all the WordPress deals. We, Ty, we've got quite a few, already, some of them will run out in the next day or so, but many of them carry on through Black Friday.

The URL is tremendously hard to remember. It's WP Builds.com/black. Let me say that one more time. WP Builds.com/black book market might be useful at some point in the future. Also, if you're fancy winning an award, I know there's the other awards going on. The actual legitimate awards, which Davinder is running.

We are gonna run our little rival award. The sort of the weirdness with this one is that basically if you give 20 bucks to Big Orange, Screenshot your donation, then come over here and fill out this form. I will guarantee that you will win a category. You just have to name your category and I will a hundred percent guarantee that you're gonna win it.

And we've got a few in at the moment. We've got the best form plugin that begins with Ws. Guess who's gonna win that? That'll be Ws form the best word. Press CRM named after Groundhog Day. That'll be won by Groundhog crm. So get yourself involved. It can be found on our website. It's WP Builds.com/awards.

And really it's just a bit of a gimmick to raise some much needed finances for big orange jobs. I was waiting

[00:14:14] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: to do mine, but mine is gonna be the podcaster that looks the most like Nathan.

[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: I know. And and the sad thing is I have to allow you to win it . I know. Can I get my, I've all been in

first

[00:14:28] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: Can I pay extra to get a photograph in with that ?

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Paul Lacey says, Best Nathan Wrigley Impersonator Award. Perfect. Perfect. I like that. Yeah. And look, here we go. Adam warn the other great , the author Nathan, and regularly. Yeah. The world needs two. Okay. Anyway, that's available. Go and make use of it.

Word pressy stuff. Let's get on with it. First things first. WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding, wrote a piece on the 25th of October entitled Gutenberg Contributors Explore a New Brows Mode for Navigating the Site Editor. I dunno what your thoughts are, Gabriel, Michelle, and all three of you, let's just say that.

I just think it's getting to be a bit cluttered. The, there's so many different modes. There's so many different places where the ui is, can be, especially with full site editing thrown into the mix. It feels like there's a million different places and for me at least, I think we probably need to put the breaks on a little bit and try to figure out what this whole thing.

Look like. I'm not saying it's not usable. I totally think it is, but I think it probably could be easier, if we took a leaf out of successful things like Elemental where everything's, the UI really hasn't changed that much over the time cuz they hit it out the park first time.

But one thing that's being mooted and it's not necessarily going to happen, is the idea of this new brows mode. There's a little video here which might give you a better indication if you're watching it rather than listening to it, essentially you can see what's going on, but there's a panel on the left hand side.

You click the design menu and you can decide what you want to edit. You can, pick a particular page or you can pick a particular post type and what have you, and then you enter into the editing of that. And then when you're done you save it away and it goes full screen so that there's less distraction.

Personally, I think this has got a. Got legs. I really like the idea of a menu down the left hand side where everything lives. That seems like a sort of sensible approach to me, rather than having it in pop up bits, pieces all over the place. But yeah. Curious as to what you guys think. What do you make of this?

[00:16:40] Daniel Schutzsmith: Yeah. My, my take is, it's good for the future for sure. Where I get wondering about things is that we're like double menuing things. So we have the normal WordPress admin menu that's in a little bit further and a little bit more condensed. And then we have this menu, which I love, which this menu could take over for that.

That'd be awesome. But the separation of the two is what I always. At least folks on my end getting confused. That is you're going for one menu to a completely different looking menu. So yeah, I'm, I hope they keep evolving it. I think it, it has legs for sure to keep going.

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: If you had to, if you had to pick.

This width that we're looking at on the screen, which is, I would say it's roughly two x the normal admin menu in WordPress. Would you prefer a wide menu like that, or would you prefer to stick with the narrower one that we've got?

[00:17:33] Daniel Schutzsmith: On this one, I don't, from what I remember, I can't actually move it.

Yeah. Like the distance of it. So I prefer one where we can

[00:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: actually move it. Oh, okay. So you could resize it and yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, I I feel that the admin ui that the menu down the left hand side was probably a really good size when screen real estate was a big issue.

But now it feels like everybody's got a monitor, which is significantly bigger than it was 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago and something like this, which is big, cuz you could, I don't know, it just gives it a bit of space to breathe the menu items in this particular video. They're not crowded out by anything else, but, Yeah.

That's a good point. Thank you Daniel Gabriel or Michelle or Nathan?

[00:18:15] Gabriel Koen: Honestly, my thoughts are very similar to Daniels. Like it's it is a pretty cool view. I could see it being useful to a lot of people. For our sites, I don't know how much use it would necessarily get. I, that's one thing that I like about a lot of new features they introduced toward press like this, where you're able to at least filter them out if you're if you're never going to touch it the risk to me is there's just so many ways to get to all of these little pockets and you're in half leg in one world and half in the other, and that gets a little weird and confusing.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I would completely agree. Michelle, what about you?

[00:18:57] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I won't use it, but I just, I'm stuck in the way that I learn things and. Stick with the old ways. And the only place that I really struggle with the UI is on mobile when I'm trying to troubleshoot something. And I'm not near a computer, so I don't know what this looks like on mobile, but I would think it would feel like a nightmare to me because I couldn't access the menu very easily

[00:19:19] Nathan Wrigley: in That's a interesting point.

Yeah, that is a good point. I, by the way, Michelle, I literally cannot watch your video. It's just cracking me up. She's really named herself on the screen. The other Nathan Wrigley. I'm good enough episode. That's right. Yeah, we just, we'll just mute. Is there any way to kinda freeze it or just actually put an old picture, traditional Michelle on the screen?

No, I don't think so. Okay. So it, it's an interesting concept. I would really love it though if we could decide on a thing. To me this feels like a good thing. I like the look of it. I like the width of it. I like the space of it. I like all of it, but I do wish. All the heads would collide and we'd just get one thing, which we could then yeah.

[00:20:02] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I think one of the things that we need to remember though, Nathan, is that everybody who's using WordPress isn't coming from the same user experience. That's a good point. And the same, the same user needs. And so for some people, this, if you're if you're a blogger and that is what your entire site is dedicated towards, something like this would be much easier to use than, or maybe much more geared towards you than somebody who's building an e-commerce site, for example.

So I think that it's, it really brings into the fact that we're trying to reach more people and make WordPress more accessible based on needs.

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Looks, looks nice to meet. We'll see, Let's see where it goes. But very much at the moment, it's not muted to be a thing. It's just here's a, here's an idea.

Let's see what comes of it. However this is going to be a thing. Let me just pop the screen back on. This is a video. So I'll, I probably will just play the video if that's all right. And it's it's Anne McCarthy who has been on the show several times. And we all know what Anne's busy doing.

She's working with automatic, she's succumbed out and helping build out Gutenberg and full sight editing and all of these kind of things. And she got so excited by something that she saw that's coming out in the next version of Gutenberg. I believe it's 14.1, but I could be wrong about that. And it's called Distraction Free Mode.

And she shot a video and I really like it. I've gotta say it's pretty. It, it does not great grandstanding about it. But essentially if you look at the moment, you're looking at a typical WordPress install. She's got content which she can edit on the screen, the menu on the right, and the menu at the top.

And what she does is she clicks on the menu at the right, and you can see on the screen there's this thing called distraction free mode. This is the new thing. And once you click on that, every bit of the UI disappears. And by that literally all of it. So that's it. You, if you start to edit the text, you don't get any options.

There's no kind of like left line, right line, bold, italic, nothing. It's just distraction free. And then if you wish to come out of that mode, or you wish to interact and edit things in a different way, what you do is you hover your mouse towards the top of the. And and it comes back, but you have to hover at the top again, I've no idea how this would behave on mobile, but I like to write in an environment like that the Mac apps that I've got and things like that that I use for writing.

I always choose to make everything go away if I possibly can. I would imagine there'll be a subset of people who would find this incredibly useful. But Michelle, aka Nathan, you you said you wouldn't be using anything like this. You, it's not of interest to you? No.

[00:22:45] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I usually either write directly and I'm just so used to the, I don't, it's not a distraction to me to have everything else on the screen.

But the other thing is I tend to write in a Google Doc first, and then just paste it into WordPress and so

[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. Fair enough. And when

[00:23:05] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: you're using, when you're using Google Docs and you're using the markup there, that it translates like it should, I've never had problems with hs,

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: anything I've never experienced that joy.

I know it's supposed to do that, but every time, and I do it on a regular basis, I do it at least once every two weeks. I copy and paste a Google doc cuz David Walmsley and I, we do the podcast every two weeks together and he helps me with the show notes and we collaborate in Google Docs and it's always a hot mess when I coffee and paste it.

So I don't know what we're doing wrong. All the headings are exactly as they should be, but I have to go through it line by line and correct, correct the mistakes. So maybe it's some weirdness going on that I've got on my site and nobody else is experience, but it's hot.

[00:23:47] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I'll probably have those same problems today since I'm dressed as you.

[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. What do you think, Daniel, what do you think, Gabrielle, do you think. The one thing I,

[00:23:56] Daniel Schutzsmith: So you said we can't make things like bold or italic

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: when we're doing this. That, that's the impression I got from watching it. If you watch so I'll just scan to a bit of the video if you like. When she's, So here for example, she's in the middle of typing.

And you can say there's nothing, there's no, there's not, there's no way at all to I dunno what would happen if she highlighted the text. Maybe something would, It's like

[00:24:19] Daniel Schutzsmith: the, it's like the Hemingway way of you just keep writing

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: it. . Yeah, that's it. But I guess if you are, if you're like an author or something, it might be good to have that distraction free approach.

But yeah. Sorry, I interrupted. Distraction free

[00:24:32] Gabriel Koen: modes. They distract me. Ironically, it's and I'm not even saying that to be funny, but like the lack of kind of chrome in ui. It freaks me out. I don't know what to do. I panic.

[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. Okay. Yeah.

[00:24:49] Gabriel Koen: But the fact that it exists, like I do know people who like full screen editing experiences and it's okay, it's harmless to have that feature.

[00:25:00] Nathan Wrigley: Adam in the comments makes the point that he thought that this was already a thing. And I think one of you before we clicked go was Daniel, you said that. Oh. Crikey. Look, we've run out of video and we now got some, Yeah, we definitely had distraction

[00:25:14] Daniel Schutzsmith: free before, but I think you were pointing out there was still some.

User interface

around

[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: it, right? Yeah. It was the top toolbar, wasn't it? You could put that in, but this really is like a, another step into the dark. Courtney has always is mind of knowledge. Thank you. She says she thinks shortcuts will still work but no toolbars to

[00:25:35] Daniel Schutzsmith: display. Hey it'll get people to, to figure out

[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: shortcuts.

Very learn the keyboard shortcuts. Yeah. And there's a lot of them. And Adam wants to know. So Courtney, this is, I'm batting this straight back to you. Is there a keyboard shortcut for activating distraction mode? I wonder. I don't actually, there was thing was there, there was a little keyboard showing next to her.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, so you could just toggle it on and off as you please. It really just feel for, to me, like people are doing long form writing who are sitting down for, to do something for a good hour, two hours, and they just don't want to get distracted by things. But anyway, it's coming to a WordPress near you fairly soon.

Gutenberg 14.1, I think. But you can try it out if you like, by downloading the Gutenberg plugin. So this this, let me just pop it on the screen. Again, we're back on the tavern. Sarah Gooding writing. I dunno what you, I dunno if we'll dwell on this particularly long, but the Web Almanac produced this giant report every so often.

I believe it's, is it every year? I'm not sure if it's annual or biannual, but it's huge. It's 700 plus pages of data all about the state of the web and it's absolutely massive. One of the subsets of that they deal with is CMSs. And we talked about the stuff about the growth of WordPress and so on and so forth in the way that we have done in the past.

But one of the things that Sarah picked up out of the report, which I didn't pick up on, I confess, is that it would appear that a lot of WordPress websites are losing out on search engine rankings because, Images are lady loading. That's a new thing. Lazy loading in a way, which doesn't doesn't conform well to Google's standards.

We've got core web vitals and things like lcp, last content paint and vanilla. WordPress should handle this pretty well. There was a bit of a bother at one point where everything got lazy loaded, which didn't work so well. So now Gutenberg has these, sorry word WordPress has these istic, which try to figure out is, should this image be loaded right at the beginning in order to get on the page asap?

But it would appear that we've got a bit of a misma in the loads of plugins would be, are affecting the way that this is working and incorrectly tagging things so that they don't get loaded, so that they load later and then it screws up your search rankings. So anyway, I just thought that was interesting and I thought I'd raise it.

I dunno if you've come across this before.

[00:28:11] Daniel Schutzsmith: No, I mean it sounds like it was originally a core issue, but now they're saying it's still showing up for some reason and it seems that they think there could be plugins that are doing that. Yeah, it was fixed in

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: 5.9 from what I understand. 5.9. You're right. There it is. Yep. So I also

[00:28:28] Daniel Schutzsmith: wonder in the cross section of like how many folks are Stone 5.9, that account for that 54% they're saying that are still

[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. Yeah, it says prior to WordPress 5.9 WordPress, default of lazy loading imple implementation was causing LCP performers slower LCP performance. So it was fixed shipped with a fixed in 5.9, but then it would appear that plugins. We've, I imagine at some point most of us have come across a plugin which handles things like this.

You might get some sort of image smushing plugin, which cuts the images off to your CDN or something like that. And then that it's gonna be loading them from different places. And maybe it's loading them a bit. It's putting the L lc, sorry, the, yeah, the LCP tag on in an inappropriate way. So just something to be mindful of, really.

If you've got an a webpage and you notice that is failing on your sort of lighthouse scores and things, it's probably worth looking at. Gabriel, anything? Should we move on? Yeah,

[00:29:27] Gabriel Koen: I found this one really interesting. It's hard for me to imagine how lazy loading would be impacting something that would affect lcp unless it's doing something horribly wrong, In which case, it doesn't really seem like a I don't know how to put it, a WordPress core issue, unless it's WordPress core causing the bug

Yeah. Which and but also even if you're, like the main thing that would be lazy loading on a, on any given page would probably be the primary sorry, I'm saying this backwards. When you're loading an article or loading a homepage or something like that, your largest contemp page is usually going to be something that's above the fold, like your primary image on there or something like that.

So to have that affected by lazy loading seems like either something's wrong with the structure of the site which is a good thing to flag, but a, Error that points you in the wrong direction. Cause the error is pointing you towards, something that might be happening to, to your primary content, but maybe it's in your secondary content.

And it's not very obvious by just going Oh, largest content, full paint. Here's the biggest element on the page, that looks like it's okay. I, I dunno I found this one really interesting just for that regard. It almost seems like a red herring in some ways. But it definitely made me want to learn a little bit more about what they might be seeing in in their raw data.

[00:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: In this direction? There's certainly a lot of information. The page that you can go to is almanac dot http archive.org. And you're looking for 2022. It's absolutely massive. It really does cover absolutely everything. It paints a very rosy picture for WordPress in general, but obviously this is one sort of minor little tweak that needs to be fixed.

And I'm guessing that the clients that you are dealing with, Gabriel, they want things to be a hundred percent perfect. The likes of Rolling Stone and Billboard and all those publications, they're not a hundred percent perfect. Yeah. . Okay. That's good to know. Oh, that's great.

You're just like the rest, everyone thinks . Oh, that's brilliant. I feel much better already. Okay. Okay. Interesting. I just wanted to,

[00:31:54] Daniel Schutzsmith: Just wanted to mention that this is my favorite article because I am a WordPress bug. Oh, .

[00:32:01] Nathan Wrigley: If you're listening to this, not watching it Daniel has put I don't know what that is, metal straws on this translucent

[00:32:09] Daniel Schutzsmith: string metal,

[00:32:11] Nathan Wrigley: translucent metal.

He's really, Yeah, he's gone for it. Translucent metal straws to make himself look like a bo. Perfect. He's antenna. Antenna. Yeah. Yeah. Next week I'm gonna be dressing up as Daniel, and then halfway through the show I will change to Michelle. I'll just have one of those like outfits I can just rip off and be, See you in purple hair.

I, yeah. Maybe I've overcom committed Bob, by the way, every week. We do we find the title from what we've said during the episode and it becomes the show title. So Rob's saying the show title this week has got to be the other, Nathan Wrigley. Okay, We'll stick with that unless something else comes.

[00:32:56] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I com.

I committed so much, I wore a t-shirt for you, like I wore. An industry T-shirt. I don't wear t-shirts. Oh, I didn't

[00:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: know that you Yeah, but look, you're missing the car. The matching cardy. Michelle didn't do quite enough research, I didn't realize. Oh very much appreciated. I'll never Good cardigan. Yeah.

[00:33:18] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: To be fair, the last time I spent time with you was in Southern California.

[00:33:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, there was. I was in a t-shirt only. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on. The next piece. Do you know what this, There's a, there's some episodes of podcasts that I record and, sorry, this isn't supposed to be a self promotional piece.

It was just, I recorded it, It came out this week. And so I'm mentioning because of the issue that it touches it's an episode for the tavern. It's called Christina Edema on making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. And this was one of those moments where you realize how utterly.

Utterly what's the word? How Ill educated you are because Christina, in this episode, I believe it's probably about 40 minutes long, something like that. She schooled me for that whole entire time. She told me about things that people experience on the web, and I just didn't know. I'm familiar with the normal the sort of screen reader scenarios and things like, But she goes into all sorts of ways that people with all sorts of different cognitive disabilities are impacted on the web.

So one of the things that she mentions quite freely is her autism. She had late diagnosis of autism and she finds that certain things on the web make it more or less unusable for her. So that's visual. She described if things flash or flick. To you or me, it's a, perhaps an annoyance to Christina.

It's No, I cannot look at that. Which I found fascinating. I didn't know that was a thing. And then she mentions not just autism, she mentions a whole tranche of different things that people have to contend with. And so it's just a really fascinating episode. The long and the short of it is, it's, there's more to accessibility.

I'm gonna put it under that umbrella than screen readers and people who have site impairment. So it was just a really interesting read. Sorry. Interesting. Listen, I don't suppose the three of you had a chance to listen to it. I don't know. But it was really interesting and I know this is right in your wheelhouse, Michelle, so I just thought, Yeah, I'll hand it over and see if anybody has any thoughts on this.

[00:35:31] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I think it's so important that we remember that every, that who we designed for, who we're creating websites for, is it just like us? And that we, that there's a huge wider audience out there. And that if we want them to consume our content, to buy our products or our services, we need to make sure that our sites are fully accessible for those people for whom there are other issues that what we face ourselves.

So as I've gotten older, I've discovered I don't like gray print, I don't like tiny print on a website. Because I've got my bi focus on and I'm leaning in like that old lady on that one meme, that's Can, can't see anything. And that's just because of age, right? So there's so many more things to consider.

I I'm thinking about what Christina might have thought about Flash. Remember when flash was a thing and every site started with this big old, like whatever. And marquis that scroll and all of those other, problematic things that, that we've had over the years. Parallax came and left.

Remember Parallax was like, Ooh, cool, we can scroll over images. And I don't see that on any sites anymore unless they're, two or three years old. So it's very important to remember that there's a wider audience than what we are thinking of when we design.

[00:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And to me, one of the things that I had to clarify right at the outset was, could you just please tell me what cognitive disabilities.

Actually, what does that phrase even mean? Because in, in my mind, I've got a rough idea of what that might have meant. It turns out it was totally, I had this tiny little target, and it turns out that the bullseye was a whole lot bigger. There was so much more in it, so she mentioned her own autism.

She mentioned people who the web is just very confusing, choices that, to me seem straightforward. And the paths that, especially in things like e-commerce where you go down a path and then you get the upsell and the subsequent down sell and all of these kind of things, to me it can be a bit irritating and a bit boring to go through that process, but it's not it's not an impediment to carrying it out. It's just I have to go through, jump over the hurdles , whereas the description that she offered was that some people, this is a complete no entry sign.

As soon as they hit those hurdles, that's it. It's I'm backing out. So please go and have a listen. It was really interesting. Daniel Absolut. Gabriel, I'm sorry we've caught you out, but join it. I had seen

[00:37:57] Daniel Schutzsmith: her presentation at work camp us and caught myself nodding my head a lot because she was also talking a bit about the way we write for the web and being able to make it so that people can be able to really understand what you're talking about, removing jargon, all those things.

And that's what we did at Pinellas County Government. Is it's taken us almost two years to do a website redesign, but the bulk of it wasn't in design and development. It was actually rewriting content. And, making that content up to date so that it could be at like a seventh or eighth grade reading level basically.

And past

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: accessibility checks. Okay. And remove jargon. Daniel, we had, I, Dan Daniel wanted to and I'm very happy to show that the website that he's been working on. Can we just go through a little bit of what you just mentioned? So this is the website, It's co it. How do you say that word?

Is it Pinellas County or

[00:38:51] Daniel Schutzsmith: Pinellas? Sometimes Local.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: Say Pinellas. Yeah, that, that was where I was going. So pinellas.gov, So p i n e l a s.gov. This is hot off the press, right? You launched this earlier in the WebBook? Yeah last weekend.

[00:39:04] Daniel Schutzsmith: At this past weekend, but the weekend before. Yep.

[00:39:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So could you describe some of the little bits and pieces that that Christina in that podcast episode would've been talking about you?

Yeah. So you modified like the way that you wrote, you described Yep. The

[00:39:19] Daniel Schutzsmith: way that all the different pages are written are written for a lower grade level, basically. We found a lot of our pages were coming up under a collegiate type of writing. And immediately you're alienating folks that are trying to get to the information, trying to digest it quickly.

And so in government too, people usually just wanna use a service. They want to get in, get out, They don't wanna sit on these pages and read a essay about something . So it's really just, redefining those things for them. The other key thing is there's no animation on this site. We're not using, we're not loading things in or flying things around.

There is like a little help you thing screen that comes in the bottom left that you'll notice. Yeah. But that's the only piece that's might be a little bit distracting to someone. And that's all consciously on purpose, same thing with videos. Videos aren't auto load.

You have to click on it to actually load them. So it's all, completely done on purpose so that we wouldn't be distracting.

[00:40:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the, I think it is a tendency, isn't it, for people who write, is that they want their language to be potentially flowery. And sometimes I get the impression, there's a little bit of how well can I almost I want this to be poetic and really brilliant and I want to use lots of complicated words and so on, but that was the antithesis.

There you go. I just used the word antithesis, that, that was the opposite here. You really tried to keep the language as plain and simple as possible. In the podcast episode, this doesn't mean much to me because I don't know what 10th grade means, but Christina said school. Okay. Middle school level.

Okay. She said that's where she would prefer website text was pitched at oh, 10th grade, right? That's, that seems to be what was in my memory there. But the point being don't go for like university level lots of crazy synonyms for things which can be described in much more easy, less flowery language.

Yeah. Wike

[00:41:15] Daniel Schutzsmith: says, I'm pretty sure it said somewhere in there it's like an eighth or ninth grade, somewhere in there.

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: I could be misremembering that easily misremembering that. Yeah. Yeah, she mentioned autoplay of videos as a complete No-no. That really does, Yeah. Cause the web to be a horrific experience for lots of people.

But another thing that she mentioned was that the guidelines, the guidance around this topic that they're really not firmed up yet. She said they're getting more firmed up firmed up. She says cognitive disabilities are amongst the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility, best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad.

Category, however, recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency. And then I've linked to them at the bottom of the post. So if you are designing especially in Daniel's case where you're designing a public utility kind of website, I'm guessing that you don't really get a choice about whether you do this or not.

You've just got to you've gotta give that a bit of thought. Gabriel,

[00:42:19] Gabriel Koen: one of the things that, that I love about Christina is talks about accessibility and how to make your sites better for users is she really does a good job of drawing a line between like useful features and useful ways of using things that are also accessible to, I brought, group of people and that also.

Makes it a little bit clear that there's a lot of people with a lot of different types of disabilities. And and your, to your earlier point, Nathan, it's it's not something that you think of every day. Like you think of, someone in a wheelchair or someone who can't see, or somebody who can't hear.

But then it's broader than that. And I don't know, I feel like accessibility in general needs a a better PR campaign because when you really dig into all of the things that make a site more accessible and better for folks with disabilities, it's better for everyone. It's a better user experience.

It's absolutely better for people who might have broken their wrists or just someone who's, as you were saying, Daniel, who's just trying to get in skim information, . And it feels like by calling it accessibility or by saying, it needs to be with WCO standards or whatever, it almost gets to this point of being other.

Rather than just being something to make websites better.

[00:43:44] Daniel Schutzsmith: And I think it makes, what developers don't realize a lot too, is I think it actually makes development easier, , because there's really defined things that, how you're supposed to actually write, that, that piece of code. So

[00:43:56] Nathan Wrigley: did you have Daniel, for this particular website, did you have any, So I'll just pop it back on the screen.

Did you have any legal hoops to jump through? In other words, did you have to prove that you've done certain things or was there, some metric by which it was judged as Yeah, that's complete in as much as we can be complete? Yeah.

[00:44:15] Daniel Schutzsmith: The measurements and it's WIC wicker double A, the measurements on that Yep.

Is really. , like some of them will, some tools will say it one way, some tools will do it another way. So what we did is take the difference between a few different tools. So we looked at X, we looked at aim, which is another one and site Improve. And then just keep evolving from there. So we're up at least to, wic, A two, the w a double aa.

The Holy Grail would be aaa, but almost no one gets that because of different things that are already being brought on there, different types of scripts and.

[00:44:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. So it's paneas golf.golf. I'll put the link in the show notes when we put this out tomorrow.

Yeah. Fascinating. And how was it built? Daniel did, Dare I ask, what was the what was the underlying structure? You custom theme? Are you using blocks here? What's going on? Yep. It's a custom

[00:45:12] Daniel Schutzsmith: theme built off of oh gosh, it's called Pico Strap now. It's a kind of bootstrap derivative. But everything, all the content is just blocks.

So most of it's core blocks that we've really just re-skin with css and a few custom blocks as well. .

[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Well done. Anyway. Bravo. Yeah. Good. Good job. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's really nice, isn't it? Isn't it just, Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Okay we'll move on. So next one is just wanna give a bit of a hat tip if you are thinking of going to Word Camp Asia, the first word, Camp Asia.

So close to having the first word, Camp Asia. Yeah. And then Mr. Naughty Covid got in the way and it all got mouthful, but it's happening again 17th to the 19th or February, 2023. And there is a, I dunno what the right word is, whether it's scholarship, I think is the word. Oh yeah. It says, There we go. There is a word Camp Asia Diversity Scholarship, which is available to apply for, And I'll just quote, in an effort to realize Word Camp Asia's vision with, collaborated with Word Camp Central to bring the word Camp Asia Diversity Scholarship.

The aim is to make the event truly a welcome experience and who qualifies? The scholarship will be awarded to someone who, and I dunno if it has to tick all of these, but. Boxes is an active WordPress contributor, project contributor has never attended any flagship word camps before. And by that I think they mean US and Europe requires financial assistance to attend, is part of the underrepresented demography of open source contributors, and is interested in bringing their experience to grow their local WordPress community.

So I'm guessing if you've satisfy all of that, there's a bonus point. It says, if you can share your contributor's story it'll help us to understand, I don't know exactly what what's on offer in terms of dollars, amounts of money or whether or not they've just booked your hotel for you and get your plane ticket for.

I'm not sure. But if you if you know somebody who would desperately love to go and satisfies all of those criteria, you can go to asia dot word camp.org and click around. But I'll put the link in the show notes. So more, more important stuff. Very nice.

[00:47:34] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I love it. If you, and if you read at the bottom of that list, it does say for more information, you can see what you work in US has done with the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship.

The difference being that this is open to any gender as opposed to women in non-binary.

[00:47:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Thank you. I didn't notice that to be honest. . Okay, so the Kim Parcel Memorial Scholarship. Okay, so that's that. , just in a spirit of being a bit fun this week, I decided to to put out a tweet.

And I don't wanna dwell on this particularly too much, but I thought this is quite nice. Every so often I get very I get very heartened by the word press community. I love it. I love the, the way that we're generally speaking, we don't have too many battles, although, sadly there was a piece which came out, which I'm not gonna cover this week, cuz I only just found out about it.

Where. Really wasn't the case. More on that next week. But I put out a tweet, it was a bit of a silly tweet, and I said, Sim silly question who? And it's got to be a singular person. Sorry, Tao. He thought that was he thought only one person was a bit ridiculous. He worried like dozens of people who in the word press space over the last decade.

Yes. 10 years. I said has inspired, interested, encouraged, fascinated you most. It's kinda like the way back machine, I said, and I was really chuffed a bits, there was absolutely loads of people who chimed in and just said nice things about each other. And Michelle, I noticed your name got swept into this.

Somebody, I can't remember who said that you soccer

[00:49:07] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: in India.

[00:49:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, that's really nice. Anyway, if you want to, I'll put the link to that tweet in the show notes. I just thought it was a nice way of, you never know. It's just very sweet. Michelle, how did you feel on the back end of somebody that you didn't anticipate was gonna do that, doing that?

It must have made you feel pretty nice, right?

[00:49:24] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: It made me smile for sure. It was very heartwarming. It

[00:49:28] Nathan Wrigley: made me feel good. Yeah. Okay, I'll link to that. Yeah. I didn't mention sadly ha little violin. At least I don't think it is. But you can now go for the alternative. You can do my doppelganger if you wish.

Next thing, quick deal. We mentioned this last week, but I'm gonna keep mentioning cuz I think it's quite a good one. Ninja tables, if you want to get this, they've got a lifetime deal at the moment. I'm not gonna dwell too much on what the plugin does. It displays tables, but it displays fairly complicated tables and it can do things like shop consume ACF fields.

You can even display stuff that's from a Google sheet. So you can just put stuff in a Google sheet and it'll create a nice looking table on your website. The reason I'm saying it is cuz they've got a lifetime deal. It's one of these ones and having bought one of their lifetime deals in the past from these guys that I actually think it's something, they do support, they keep updating it.

I've got the fluent forms one and they do keep updating it. So anyway, there you go. It's on offer. It's ninja tables.com/discount dash. Huh. Yeah, that's right.

[00:50:35] Daniel Schutzsmith: Why are tables so difficult? Always? I dunno. I'm being true. They are. I don't . Yeah. We started by making, our layouts with tables years ago, but now do

[00:50:47] Nathan Wrigley: you remember that?

Do you, were you part of that hot mess? Oh, part of that? Oh, I was so glad when somebody said to me no, you got your CSS now. I was like, what is this? Voodoo? And then displayed how you could separate everything out and yeah, tables was horrible. And then you had beautiful things like Internet Explorer five and six, which just did whatever they wanted with everything on the website.

Yeah, it's nice though. There's a demo section on this website where it shows you the power of what it can do and Cool. One of the nice implementations is you can. It's like a shopping cart almost, not a shopping cart. You can make a shopping experience where you can list all of your products and you can add them into the cart by, by you could add five of one particular item and two of another and it'll stick it into your WooCommerce website.

It's powerful. It's really good. So I think worth nice, worth looking at. Nice. Peter Ingersol, Sorry. Missed your comment there, Peter. He said exactly. I dunno what bit of the conversation we were at that point. It would be great if UX tied to accessibility was part of something like web vitals with this.

Oh, that is interesting. Where a score where folks are obsessively focused on trying for a hundred. Ah,

[00:52:02] Daniel Schutzsmith: Site improve, does something like that. They have a zero to 100, but it's a closed like St. Bri, we gotta get. Pretty expensive license

[00:52:11] Nathan Wrigley: to use that stuff. Okay. Yeah. So this comes, this comment,

[00:52:15] Gabriel Koen: I a hundred percent agree with it, but it also frustrates me because there is a lighthouse score for accessibility.

But again, like it, it's a separate bucket and it's I would go the entire way, Peter, I would like make the accessibility score a set of individual scores that are part of, the main score, for example, rather than being in a separate bucket altogether. Yeah. Rather than being in a bucket called

accessibility.

[00:52:41] Nathan Wrigley: So your inten, your intent there Gabriel would be that it was all rolled up into one and all of the bits and pieces that we're now worrying about with core web vitals, it was just thrown into there and it affected your search engine results in a really visible, highly obvious. Yeah.

Something like that. Yeah. I, that is such an interesting idea. Thank you, Peter. , I don't know why I hadn't thought of that before. And also Gabriel I confess, I didn't even know it was buried in there. Whereabouts do we find that? Is it part of is it buried in Chrome somewhere or a Chrome based browser?

Yeah.

[00:53:21] Gabriel Koen: I just I don't know all the different ways you can see it, but if you're running a a Lighthouse test in Chrome within the browser Dove tools right after you run it, you'll get at the very top, you get a summary of four different scores. And one is your performance score, one's seo, ones accessibility.

And I can't remember the fourth one, .

[00:53:45] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that the, I don't normally like the expression ambulance chasing, that kind of thing where lawyers go after the low hanging fruit of things, which should be a certain way. And they're obviously not the, I re chatted with Joe Dawson, who is very much into accessibility on the web, and he was saying that he feels that will increase, There will be lawsuits drawn up perhaps somewhat disingenuously, but in the end the fact that these lawsuits are beginning to happen will make us more aware of this as a thing.

Although I don't like the idea of ambulance chasing lawyers the idea is that maybe two or three years down we've become so habituated. To, to making it part of our builds that it's just habit. And those tools that you just mentioned, Gabriela, are common to everybody. Yeah. Mark's

Hello? Mark. Mark West he's only just ch Yes, you are seeing Goble. There is a second. Nathan Wrigley. And frankly, she's far better at being me than I am. . It's

[00:54:58] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: really hard to tell us

[00:54:58] Nathan Wrigley: apart. Yeah, so similar calling it usability rather than accessibility for scoring might help though with those afraid or otherwise not interested in accessibility.

It's an interesting point. Usability, accessibility us. I'm trying to juggle in my mind if I prefer one or the other, but yeah. Anyway, There we go. Yeah. Thank you. Anything else to add to that or should we. Keep going. Okay, let's crack on. Regular listener to this show is a chap that just lives down the road from me.

Elliot Sby he lives in Briton, which is about 20 minute drive. And it was really nice actually. I needed to go to Briton to go to the hospital the other day and I had no idea how to get there or what the car parking situation was like. So guess what I did. I tweeted Elliot and said, What's the car parking like?

It was really great. It was immediately forthcoming. So anyway, the WordPress community in the real world, he's got a new plugin, which he asked if I could mention I'm more than happy to. He goes by rely wp. That's his that's his website. And Mark was on the show the other day. Mark West Gar from WS form that we've just mentioned.

He has built this into his own plug-in solution. He's got Ws form the form solution, but it's a simple CloudFlare turn style now. Put in the comments if I say any of this wrong please. But CloudFlare turn style is a bit like recapture Google's recapture in that it enables you to put in the way of form submissions an obstacle which the users have to go through.

We've seen the which one of these is a sheep? Can you see a motorbike in any of these pictures or, and it gets more and more ludicrous to the point where in some, on some occasions, I genuinely have no idea what I'm doing. There's also invisible recapture, but I'm not entirely sure how that works.

But CloudFlare of come with their alternative. And so Elliot has decided he's going to build a free plugin, and he said in the comment to me, it will always be free. And he doesn't intend to have any kind of upsell thing. Hat tip there. Bravo. And it can protect forms such as your login form, registration form, reset forms, all of the, normal word pressy stuff, comment forms, but also it will protect your checkout form in Woo commerce and so on and so forth.

It works with the following form plugins. WP form fluent forms, contact form seven gravity forms, formidable forms. I suspect he didn't put Ws form in because Mark's already done it. And then it also supports other things like Elementor Pro Forms, Mail Chimp and various other things like body Press.

. A lot of work. Elliot, thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

[00:57:50] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I know Elliot was with us at the beginning of the show. I don't know if he's still with us watching

[00:57:54] Nathan Wrigley: or not. Elliot, I suspect to go to the, he's probably had to go to the hospital in Briton. That's where all the cool stuff happens.

No, but thank you. I just think that's really nice. I confess, I don't know what would make the cloud flare solution. Superior or more desirable than the Google solution? I dunno if it implements things in a sort of slightly different way. Oh, he says he's still here. Look, there he goes. Yeah. Yeah. Elliot, why is why is Capture done through CloudFlare a good idea as opposed to Google's recapture?

Is there some metric that we just don't know about? I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on that. Maybe one of Youth three knows. I don't know.

[00:58:35] Gabriel Koen: I think some people just don't like a over reliance on one vendor services. It took me ages to realize that Capcha was a thing outside of Google's

[00:58:45] Nathan Wrigley: recapture implementation.

Yes. Yeah there's one called H Capture I believe as well, which offers a sort of similar service. Is there any I don't know if there's any sort of GDPR stuff here as well. Does it phone home and send data a I don't, I have no idea to be honest, but Elliot let us know. But Bravo, it is called Simple CloudFlare Turns Style.

It's there, it's free, it's available right now, So go and grab it If you fancy something along those lines. Yuki doke. Okay. I think we've ended the WordPress stuff, if that's all right with you guys. We've still got half an hour, so I just, I want you to watch this video. I'm so sorry to anybody who's listening.

Every so often you come across something on the internet and you watch it and you just think what just happened? This is so cool. Did any of you guys watch this yet?

[00:59:38] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: Just with you at the beginning, before we started?

[00:59:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I'm just gonna describe it, right? So it's idio where somebody's on a mobile phone and you can basically see an image and it looks like a, I don't know, it looks like a, some sort of space agey sort of thing.

But I'm gonna click play and just watch what goes on. Check this out. So she essentially, I think it's such a, he starts to pinch to zoom and goes in and goes into a picture, a tiny little picture in that frame, and then just keeps going. And in that picture frame, there's a whole nother world.

And then in that other world, you keep zooming and you find a train, a tiny train, and then inside the train is a camera, in the lens of the camera is another world, and then inside that other world, right? Mysteriously on this island, miles away from anywhere is like a little temple. And if you zoom into one of the windows in the temple, There's like a picture on a wall somewhere.

And if you go into that picture on the wall, there's a lady holding a book or something. And then if you go into there, it's like an ocean scene and what the heck . It just keeps, Isn't that amazing? , don't you think that's cool? I just think that's absolutely phenomenal. Gabriel's put a link in my little show notes here.

Is that a similar kind of, Yeah,

[01:01:05] Gabriel Koen: it just so happened this person was nominated for one of the Jam stack awards for best personal website. And she did the exact same thing in CSS as her webpage.

[01:01:18] Nathan Wrigley: It says to me I'm trying to view it and it says, Hey, resize your browser. But I can't like how it's supposed to look.

Yeah. It was a Lynn and Tonic. What a great a great url. I can't look at that one, I'm afraid, but I will post it in the show notes and anybody see. Yeah. Anyway, for anyone.

[01:01:42] Gabriel Koen: It's not you. It's actually a really neat to, really neat. Yeah.

[01:01:46] Daniel Schutzsmith: If you resize the browser, it does the same thing, in other words.

Very

[01:01:50] Nathan Wrigley: cool. And you can use so can, Are you guys getting a good experience with that then? Can you see something that I can't see? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It may be that I'm using Brave and there's all these sort of other things. Let me just try. I don't wanna resize it, drag. Let me try, let me re There you go.

Okay. Let's have a look, so what do we do? Do, Can I do I pinch ?

[01:02:14] Daniel Schutzsmith: What? It's you gonna, you gotta literally resize the browser.

[01:02:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. I think you can

use

no .

[01:02:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's wild. That is so cool. Oh, that's genius. So basically the operation of resizing, the browser has the same, it's not quite as deep, is it? It's not going to the kind of level that, that we had a minute ago. Oh my Lord. Is that as far as it go? Ah, that is astonishing. Wow. CSS is awesome.

That's the beginning. Is it? Okay? Oh, I see. I got in halfway through. I got to about here, didn't I? . That is absolutely phenomenal. Isn't it scary how clever some people are? Man, alive. That's good. Okay. Yeah. What a bunch of genius Elliot's come back in and given us some commentary about his plugin.

Let's see what he says. Woo. Yeah. This is

[01:03:19] Gabriel Koen: what I

[01:03:19] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: thought it was. It's, you don't actually have to complete a caption.

[01:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: With the turn sales, it says is in cloudflare's own words, turn style confirms. They are real with no visual puzzle. Totally transparent. Okay. So you don't have to click buttons and say, This is a plane or what Have That's good to know.

Turn style always preserves the privacy of web visitors on your site without sacrificing effectiveness. Unlike other capture options, we never harvest data for ad retargeting. Okay. So maybe there's the, maybe there's the pitch about it. Thank you for letting us know. That's great. . Okay, great.

What do we all think about ? What do we all think about Twitter this week? That's gonna be the basis of the next five minutes or so. I dunno if you saw, but Fairly wealthy chap apparently called Elon Musk, and he decided this week that he was going to spend something along the lines of $44 billion, which is my understanding is that's quite a lot of money.

And he was going to buy a social network and he chose Twitter. And the controversy goes on. We all know the controversy. We've heard about this. This is an article on the Verge called Welcome to Hell, Elon where we lay out the case why it's not gonna be as easy as basically hiring a bunch of engineers.

The principal being that owning a social network and running a social network is about the frailties and weirdnesses of humans as much as it is about having a platform and dealing with the the rage and the hate and the controversy and all of the things which end up on a social network.

I'm gonna just put my hat into the ring here and just say if this thing troubles you and you think, I don't really, I'm not really sure what I'm gonna do with Twitter in the future may I suggest that you looked at something called Master Dom? It's a open, federated social network.

You can find it if you just Google Masteron about a year ago, so long before Elon decided that he was going to purchase Twitter. I was starting to have thoughts around this anyway. I wasn't quite sure. I wanted to be advertised that quite so heavily and I wasn't so sure that I really liked the algorithmic way my feed was pushed to me and I really had no conception of how stuff ever got there.

Anyway, Mastodon is a bit different in that it's, everything's chronological. So rewind to 2009 with Twitter what is what was most recent. Recent is at the top, scroll back. So if you haven't used Macon for 36 hours, you know that if you stop scrolling at 36 hours, you've seen everything that you would need to.

So I have an install of it. I would just like to say that you don't need to come to my install. You can go to all the other different installs, but the installer I've got the intention would be that it, we would keep the conversation around WordPress. It's makes sense. You can find [email protected]

Say that one more time. WP Builds.social, which is a. Strangely, I didn't realize you could get a.social until I bought it. And you could sign up there and it's free. I'm gonna keep this service going for as long as people would like to make use of it. But I just thought I'd just show you what the experience looks like.

So this is it. This is Masteron. I've taken away the stuff which is private messages, but you can, it's a, can you see? It looks a bit like what did you call it? Tweet deck or something. Is it tweet deck? So there's an option to have it as in this way where you've got different columns and various things.

So you can bookmark things, you can have a home feed here, which is showing all of the things from people that I follow in or, and in order to follow somebody, if you don't follow them already let me see if I can find an example. Basically next to people is a little icon with a plus, and you just click the button and you begin following them.

Notifications appear in a column. You can move them to the left and move them to the right, as you might expect. And then this is everything that's happening on my instance of Master Don. So this is the local timeline and you can see that it's me. And look, there's Bob and Gina and various other people.

And Anne. So this is all the, this is all the public stuff on the local timeline. This is the federated timeline. So this is all of the other master on installs that I federated to, and you federate by just basically following them. So I don't know where these come from. This is this is one called wandering.shop.

Somebody set up a master on install called wandering.shop, but there's absolutely loads of them. This one's called Master on.social. I think that's probably the biggest one, the most popular one. And they all interoperate. So if you fancied setting one of these up for yourself, you don't have to federate with anybody else.

You could just have it as a closed box and just have conversations with people who joined it. So you could set it up for your family or your business and nobody could join if you chose not to allow them in. The other option is if you go into preferences, you can turn off that kind of interface and save it, and then you can go back and it looks a lot more like Twitter.

It really does look up. Quite a lot like Twitter, doesn't it? And it's just, there it is. It's one thing after another. It's got a few nice little features. For a start, there's a 500 character text limit that's quite nice. If you upload an image, you can add accessibility related things. You can add metadata to it.

You can also have it so that images are not shown by default. They're blurred. So if you writing something that you believe might be sensitive to other people, you can blur the image out and then somebody has to click on it to engage it. And you can also decide how you want it to be listed to followers only mention people only, and so on and so forth.

It, I just really like it. I imagine most people are not as concerned as I am about things like Elon Moss taking over Twitter, but it's just a nice option out there if you fancy join in this one. What are your thoughts on this? I know, Michelle, you are sticking around on Twitter, aren't you?

You're really happy at least.

[01:09:40] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: At least for now, right? So I think one of the things to remember is it's in, it's interesting where you wanna be as an individual, but remember that an entire ecosystem is also using Twitter right now. So where are your customers? So even if don't like the way things are going, but all of your customers are there, do you stay there so that you can still continue to reach your customers through your.

Maybe not my personal Twitter, but through my business Twitter accounts. And adopting an, adopting a new platform like Bason doesn't necessarily mean you've left the old one right away because you have to figure out where people are migrating to and meet your customers where they are. So it's not a cut and dry in a lot of texts.

[01:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's quite interesting. So here's a chap who who works with WordPress a bit. He works with the uk I think it's the Ministry of Defense. He's called Kev Quirk. And he's got a CSS framework and he's very giving, he's got a, an instance called Foster Don for as in free open source software.

And he over there, I really amazing if you say on the screen here, he's got 19,000 followers. Over on Macon, and I actually thought those kind of numbers couldn't exist yet on Macon. I'm sure that there's people who have lots less sorry, significantly less. There's probably a bunch of people who have significantly more, but it did make me think, Actually, do you know what, maybe this has got legs.

Maybe there is a sort of ground swell. The guy who is the lead architect of the platform, which again is free and open source, it's called Eugene. And he has said that over the last few days, I think they were on something like 50 or 60,000 new sign ups per day. And as a result of that, his instance of Masteron, which is I believe masteron.social, he's having to get a load of new hardware and pay for some new hardware because of the, the burden of the server being pinged quite as much as it is.

But yeah. What do you think? I,

[01:11:38] Daniel Schutzsmith: for me, it's kinda a wait and see, see what happens. Part of, the appeal of doing Mastodon is that we can start over. I don't know if you're getting away from whatever you might be trying to leave on Twitter though, so it all depends, to me on a lot of the things that, that, that are concerning on Twitter, more around the the, looking at the content and having, making sure that, the right folks are getting flagged for what they're putting up and stuff

like that yeah.

[01:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What about you Gabriel, have you any thoughts on this? Do you do much social? If so, I

[01:12:23] Gabriel Koen: don't really do much social these days. As Michelle can probably tell you, , she's always Did you get that thing? I tweeted

[01:12:33] Nathan Wrigley: And I'm like, Oh, yeah, that go.

[01:12:35] Gabriel Koen: But I think this is neat. It's I like the idea of having more of a democratized approach to social media.

And I like how for people who do want their own network, there's still a way to federate with a larger community with this. But it also just seems like you're trading out one set of problems for another. And also like the traffic thing is interesting. If you think of this, if it ever gets close to the scale of Twitter, even circa, 2010 and you're running a local server, And you're pulling in federated data from other servers do you sudden, does everyone suddenly have to run like an entire farm of servers to power their own network just to handle the integration with other sites?

Like those are the kinds of questions that come up for

[01:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: me. Yeah, and I guess the answer would simply be it scales, doesn't it? It's a bit like a successful WordPress site. You're gonna, you wouldn't really wanna put that on affordable hosting. Yeah. As the sites that you build, Rolling Stone and Billboard and so on, they're probably on, it's like kind of bulletproof hosting that can consume the amount of.

Requests that come their way. The same would be true of this. I've just got it on a really simple budget host because it doesn't really need any more than that. But the thing that I like is that there's no algorithm on the feed. It's just chronological. And I've discovered that's really cool because it just shows me what I'm anticipating to be shown.

There's no, like, how did that get there? And the other big thing is it's comp, it's obviously completely ad free. And that to me is quite a big bonus of it as well. I've not got like this every fourth or third post or whatever it might be. Is that sponsored? Was that a sponsored thing?

I just saw? I can't, I'm not sure. Oh yeah, it was sponsored. All of that's gone. And I, and for that reason I really like it. The other thing is the only thing, my understanding, the only thing that's searchable is hashtag. So if you want to search things, the only thing that you could search for is hashtags.

I, I dunno if that's true or not, but somebody told me that was the case. But anyway, yeah, it's it's cool. Bob says, Bob WP says it was a small amount. Oh, is this your Twitter? Exodus, but increasing. Interesting. My unfollows were up this morning, 18 out of 22 actually closed their account.

Ooh, wow. Okay. Small amount in relation to my number of followers, but more than usual. So 22 people that you, that were following you just a few days ago, have actually left Twitter on a permanent basis. That's interesting. Yeah. I'm not there yet. There's also interesting to know, there's a bunch of cross-posting tools which are freely available online.

So if you post on Twitter or in Mac. Immediately, and I really do mean like within a second then it's been put onto the other network. So you can do double duty there if you wanna stay on Twitter. But you're fancy doing the interface in Macon. You can do it that way round as well. So yeah, there you go.

Some weird kind of phrases instead of tweeting you toot. Which sounds a bit ruder if you ask me. It does . Yeah, but it's the elephant analogy, Master on Yep. Anyway, here we go. Righty. I've got one more piece and then it's probably time to knock it on the head. And that is to say that pig vomit.

I, I'm never gonna say that sentence ever again, am I pig vomit toxin is the key to marsh and meteor, right? Mystery. What more is this to say? Turns out that a while ago, quite a long time ago, about a hundred years ago, a meteor fell from outta space, right? And it was picked up and sent into a university.

And I quote by a black student who witnessed it. Ever since then, nobody's been able to figure out who the person was, who handed it in until the intrepid. Where is she? Oh, where's she gone? There she is. The intrepid doctor, a O'Brien decided to take small chunks out of the meteor, right? And and have a look at what was inside of it.

, you can't make it up, can you? It turns out that a toxin, which makes pigs vomit. Was present on the meteorite. So she determined from that, that it must have been in some kind of like river bed or something, a time when this toxin was highly, you know, just in the environment. There were two or three dates when this disease, this pig vomiting disease occurred.

So from that information, she was able to narrow it down to these. Find people. These are, it's gotta be one as four. She reckons so they a bit of sher. Sleuthing. . You

[01:17:40] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: just never, No

[01:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: idea. You just never know. That's right. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. Have any of you guys got a pick of the week or should we knock it on the head?

Nothing

[01:17:49] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: that rivals pig vomit.

[01:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: No. Nobody was gonna be able to eclipse that one. Let's be, no. Have you got any plan for Halloween? Do you do anything special where you are? In the uk it's really not that, but it's like for little tiny kids, the adults don't really get involved, I hope.

Think.

[01:18:07] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I'm just going to, greet the children at the door dressed as you to give them

[01:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: candy. . I was gonna ask you, Michelle, how long is that? Is that outfit coming off the minute this is finished recording or? My, my head .

[01:18:22] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: I is so itchy right now. It's all I can do not to be like scratching like a dog with

[01:18:27] Nathan Wrigley: please

Yeah, I was gonna wonder if we could have a, a Twitter feed for the rest of the day of Michelle going about her day dressed as me. . Very

[01:18:38] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: well. The problem is, my challenge of the day is that I am in meetings straight after this, right until two 30. So while I can. The wig. I am still gonna have five o'clock shadow, what up

the day.

[01:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle, all I can say is at least you can stop looking like me. I have to maintain the look for the rest of my life, sadly. So was very, a very funny joke by Winston Churchill. I won't say it now cause it's a bit inappropriate, but it was something along those lines.

[01:19:12] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: My offer to you, Nathan, is if you, if your wife would like this wig or your children, I'm happy to send it along so they too can look like you

[01:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: No. But that's very kind. Thank you. The, oh wait, we could

[01:19:27] Daniel Schutzsmith: auction it off for

[01:19:31] Nathan Wrigley: one US cent. Let's start the bidding there and I'll buy it cuz we know that's as high as it's gonna go. Thank you very much. Anything happening to you today or this week? Daniel or Gabriel, have you got any plans? Anything you wanna.

[01:19:44] Daniel Schutzsmith: No after that website launch for pinellas.gov, I'm trying look.

Reality.

[01:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just take a sit down. Gabriel, anything happening for you this week? I'm just looking forward to

[01:19:56] Gabriel Koen: handing out Candy tonight. .

[01:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: Aww. Yeah. That's my big plan for the week. Yeah. So does anybody do treating, Sorry, tricking, is that still a thing? Do people actually carry that out and does it get to the point?

Things get broken and damages onto property and stuff like that. Cuz that was a bit of what hap got happening in the UK is that if you said trick belts, there was quite a lot of damage that got done. And maybe if you

[01:20:28] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: broken pumpkins and if you're a particularly evil person, you may wake up tomorrow morning with toilet paper in your trees, but Oh,

[01:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[01:20:36] The other Nathan Wrigley - a.k.a. Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I haven't seen too much of that in the year. Recent

[01:20:39] Nathan Wrigley: years. The trick is to just fill up on suites, isn't it? And have a boat boatload of them by the door and then you avoid all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks to everybody who made a comment. Really appreciate it. It was lots of you today. That was really nice. We'll be back next week. I dunno who it is off the top of my head, but we'll have one of our co-hosts, but also some fine word pressy guests. So thank you to Daniel Schult Smith, thank you to Gabrielle Cohen, and thank you to Nathan Wrigley AKA Michelle for sure.

That was genuinely hysterically funny. I really appreciate it. Now , just before we go we have to do this little wave thing, Daniel sorry Gabriel. I'm really sorry about this. If we didn't, you didn't get warm . Essentially we all wave and I use it as the album up, but wait for it. I don't know if this is gonna work.

So what I was thinking was, could we all, I'm too short. Yeah. So yeah, that's it. Could we all now align your head perfectly and give us a wave there, , and now your humiliation is complete. Thank you so much. Next week. Week. Take it easy. Bye. Bye.