This Week in WordPress #231

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 231 entitled A Cleaner Greener Web. It was recorded on Monday, the 21st of November, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I am joined today by two guests. I'm joined by Jess Frick and also by Katie. Keith. It's a WordPress podcast. So what do you think we're gonna talk about?

WordPress 6.1 0.1 has been released. It's a maintenance release, and we discussed that very briefly. We also talk about the Black Friday deals that are upcoming and the fact that we have a page with well over 200 deals on it, tech layoffs. They're happening all over the place. Is WordPress Immune?

It's a tech industry, but are we immune? Given the nature of the kind of work that we do online? meetup.com has raised some eyebrows because of an accessibility overlay that they have implemented this week. Pocket Cast has a new block. We also talk about a lovely little project, which enables you to change the color of your WordPress admin.

We also get into the fact that Stellar WP has open sourced a few of their code libraries, and then we spend quite a lot of time talking about Twitter, masteron, and WordPress. 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 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 there. Good evening. Good Mor. Oh, hello Cameron. Good morning. For you guess it's the mor. No. Is it not late at night for you, Cameron?

Is it the morning? I don't know. Anyway. Hello? Hello. Hello. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Whatever it is where you are. It's very nice to have you with us. We are. This week in WordPress from WP Builds. We talk about the WordPress news each and every week. And each and every week we have a different arrangement of guests.

And this week we have two fabulous guests. We have one person who has not been on the show before, but before we get to Katie, we'll go to Jess Frick. Hello Jess. How are you? I

[00:02:39] Jess Frick: am good, Nathan.

[00:02:40] Nathan Wrigley: How are you? Yeah, really good. Thank you. Jess. Jess has been on the show loads of times. She is one of the co-hosts.

She's comes back very frequently and I'm really grateful for that. She is the director of operations for Pressable, which is a managed Word press hosting company. She's an ice tea coner, and a proud member of the post status community. Is there anything we need to add to.

[00:03:04] Jess Frick: I'm also a member of the make WordPress hosting team.

[00:03:08] Nathan Wrigley: Ooh. I dunno. I know that's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. A guitar player possibly looking behind you.

[00:03:14] Jess Frick: Yeah, there's some guitar. I do have some new elastic pants because we're in the date, we are celebrating Thanksgiving on Fri or Thursday. Yeah. And it's this celebration where you just eat entirely too much Turkey and stuffing, and I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm hoping to gain at least a few pounds, .

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. That's good. Do you basically eat Christmas dinner? Do you have is Christmas dinner, is it a repeat of what you eat at Thanksgiving?

[00:03:45] Jess Frick: No, some people will do the same meal. Okay. The traditional giving meal is Turkey. But I do know some families that do like brisket instead.

I don't know that, anybody's gonna come to your house. It's. A problematic holiday to begin with if we're gonna get real. But

[00:04:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. . Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving, if that's what you say. It's when

[00:04:10] Jess Frick: we, it's when we took over the country, so Yeah.

[00:04:12] Nathan Wrigley: About it. Yes. Yes. Let's not get into that debate,

No,

but you

[00:04:18] Jess Frick: know what? Back to my elastic pants. I am looking forward to getting fat

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, let's, we'll have you on in a couple of weeks. We'll see if you are any different. And we're also joined for the first time. This is very nice. It's always nice to welcome a new person to the show. It's Katie. Keith, how you doing, Katie? Good. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you Yeah, of course.

You're very welcome. You can see by Katie's little label the moniker under her name that she is from Barn two Plugins. She's the co-founder, in fact, and director at Bar two plugins. She's originally from the uk and now living in Sonny Maloka, there's no way that I'm jealous about that. Katie has built a remote team that puts Lifestyle First, while also focusing on providing quality products and excellent support.

Bantu specializes in building unique WordPress and WooCommerce plugins that don't exist anywhere else in the market. And I've gotta say, I love the name and I love the reason for the name because it's I was expecting it to be this extraordinary tale, and it was, it's much more pedestrian than that.

Tell us why It's called Barn to Hoop Plugins.

[00:05:23] Katie Keith: We lived in barn number two when we founded the company. So Great. It's a barn conversion in a national park in England. So not the most tech location and very different to our modern apartment in New Yorker where we are now. But oh, I

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: read that as Melaca.

I'm so sorry, me Yorker. How how did you come to move there? What was the reasoning for upping sticks and getting out of the uk? Apart from like the laundry list that I could give you , but what were your reasons? ?

[00:05:54] Katie Keith: Yeah, it was part, partly the weather. Being, having a WordPress company obviously creates freedoms that most industries don't provide.

Our team was already all over the world. Moving was very easy. Work wise, the complicated bits for things like visas cuz of Brexit and our daughter's school and having to move her school accommodation, usual things. But actually work was very easy to move because anywhere we've got the.

And the internet is 10 times faster here than

[00:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: it. Oh, there's just another thing to add to the listen than the faster internet. Yeah. Yeah. . It's not nice to have you here. I just, it's just so nice to see a bit of sunshine out the back of your window. We haven't had sunshine for many a day. Now we're here to talk about the WordPress stuff.

Just a couple of bits of housekeeping, if that's all right. Before we get into that, firstly, I'd appreciate it if you regularly join the show and you feel like sharing it, you can do that. The best way to do that is probably to share it on our website, WP Build. Thank you, Jess. Look at that pro. Yes. Why have I never thought of that before?

Go share the stream, WP Builds.com/live. If you go there, you'll need to have a Google account to comment, because it's YouTube comments. Or you could go to Facebook group, which is WP Builds.com/facebook. But if you do that, then you've gotta go through one little step and that little step is this.

You've gotta go to your top of the top of the stream. The weather information about it is, and there's a link in there. It's chat.restream.io/fb. And if you click on that, then we will see your avatar and username. If you don't, you'll be anonymous. That's fine. You can be anonymous. Some people get over that by just writing their name at the beginning of the comment.

So it's up to you how you want to do that. But thanks for joining us today. Let's see, we've got a few nice comments. We obviously mentioned Cameron right at the beginning. Cameron's, Cameron joins us, but it looks like he's going to bed fairly soon because it's late. Just wrapping up some work before I go to bed.

Goodnight Cameron. It's . That's a great way to start the show, isn't it? Hello and welcome and goodnight Cameron. Good morning, says Rob can. Thank you for joining us, Rob. Please appreciate that. Peter Ingold joining us from chili Connecticut this morning. It's great, isn't it? Peter joins us every day and gives us a little weather update.

He always tells us what the what the temperature's so chilly this morning. Yes, I can concur. It's exactly the same for me. If you do fancy, putting a comment in would really appreciate it. We try to get as many of them on the screen as we possibly can. Let's get to it, shall we? Excuse the self-promotion, if that's all right.

Just for a moment. This is our website, WP Builds.com. The fancy subscribing to what we do. Podcast episodes like this that we put out. Just go to this page and fill out this little form here and you'll be all sorted. We'll send you two emails a week. Very unlikely to be more than that. We've also got a Black Friday deals page.

If you go to this page, which is WP Builds.com/black, then there are there's some sponsored slots at the top, which are now all filled up. So I would like to mention these companies quickly, if that's all right. Gravity Forms WP Manage and Ninja WP Engine, stellar, WP Ws form and Goad. And if you go beneath that, you can search and filter and currently there's about 215, 220 different word pressy things on there.

Search and filter for the names. Let's have a look. I wonder if we, did we put a barn two

one

[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: on? Let's see if we've got a barn two on the, yeah, look at that. 50% off is what's happening later on in the year. So go to that page and it's got all your Black Friday goodness on it. But that's it for the WP Builds promotional stuff.

Let's get into the news. First of all, there's probably nothing to add to this, but I'll just talk about it anyway. WordPress has got a new release releases WordPress 6.1 0.1 is a very minor release. There were 21 bug fixes for the block editor, 21 fixes in core. Nothing really to say other than if you are running multiple instances of WordPress please go and update your vanilla version of WordPress so that it'll be, Hey Jess.

Just quickly, do you do that stuff for your customers? Do you update their WordPresses for them or do they have to do that themselves?

[00:10:20] Jess Frick: So at possible you have the option of staying on the previous version, which would be 6.0 point, whatever. It's currently three. Yeah. Or you can stay on the latest stable release, which will be 6.1.

But then you also have an option to select beta, which means as something new is released, you have the opportunity to test it. So you can actually test that candidate right now on Pressable. Or you can just stay on the stable release. And then when that is released we will automatically update you.

[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, do you do like a whole bunch of testing on the, like the beta one so that just before it goes stable, it's obviously been in testing for a little while. Do you test it on like a suite of different things just to make sure your architecture's all sort.

[00:11:09] Jess Frick: We do our best. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, we are a small but mighty team but we certainly wanna do our part.

That sort of stuff works great when everybody kind of pitches in and just, makes sure that there aren't any known issues, but testing every per mutation, it's one of those things that I wish we could do more. Yeah. Yeah. But I think we all feel that

[00:11:36] Nathan Wrigley: way. Yeah. Let's throw that to Katie on the plugin side of things.

How do you have to do an awful lot of testing? Do you have like typical arrangements of things? Cause obviously if you are a Woo commerce plugin company, you're gonna be testing on the latest, stable version of not only WordPress, but presumably WooCommerce as well. You have to keep all of that in hand.

Is that something that you're very.

[00:11:58] Katie Keith: Yeah, it's so important and things do sometimes significantly change. , I think a minor release, like this particular WordPress one, I wouldn't anticipate any problems with any of our plugins and you could, you just know sometimes, but we have automated testing to make sure we use a tool called Ghost Inspector.

Oh yeah. We have a suite of tests for all of our plugins. So that we have a multisite with, for, with a site for each plugin, with all the things that we guarantee compatibility with. So we can update WebPress on, on this multisite and then run all the suites of tests to make sure that no fatal errors are generated or anything like that before we do a release.

Declaring the compatibility if that's needed. If it's a major version, it's

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: ghost inspectors, that tool where you can do really complicated things, like it'll fill out forms and then assess whether or not the email came through and all of that kind of stuff. So it's much more than just, I don't know, a quick test.

You can run a whole. Suite of different things to check. Yeah, you can test

[00:12:58] Katie Keith: quite complex stuff. If you wanna test the WooCommerce checkout, for example, you can totally fill in the checkout and that sort of thing. You can create users. We've got tests in the front and the back end. So for example, with our WooCommerce wholesale plugin, we actually create users with the wholesale role in the admin to make sure nothing's broken that will prevent that process.

And are they assigned to the correct user role? Do they get their wholesale discounts? And then we delete the user dynamically at the end of the test ready for the next time we run suite. So you can be quite clever with it, although it's time consuming to set up and maintain the tests as.

[00:13:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think I tried to set it up once and just it, I realized it was more complicated than anything I would ever have needed.

So really for me, I just need, is it up or is it down? That's all I need. So for that, yeah. And there are simple tools for that and much more straightforward. Yeah. Anyway, WordPress 6.1 0.1 has been released. I don't, I've not heard of any problems, so go and get updated. That's good.

[00:14:00] Jess Frick: On that, I just wanna mention one quick thing.

Please do. As a helpful reminder to everybody PHP 7.4 officially goes EOL on the twentie. That's today.

[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, we got a week. Okay. Yeah we've

[00:14:14] Jess Frick: got a week. I can tell you that we are still going to be maintaining seven four on our servers. We're not forcing everybody to go to P H P eight, but that is a huge jump.

And so when you've got people making that huge jump, even the tiny minor release could. Cause some weirdness that you might not be expecting. That's one of the permutations I was talking about. Testing the jump from PHP seven, four to eight one, and then you're also putting in 6.1 0.1 and there's just a lot of a lot more room.

I don't think anything's gonna be a problem for most places. It won't be, but if you have some seriously custom stuff going on yeah, and, not everyone maintains their plug-ins like Katie and team. So you also have to watch out for perhaps lesser maintained plug-ins too. Test on

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: staging y'all and do it live.

Say you can pressable and a load of other platforms. You can just, you can press a, basically a staging button and you'll get a staging website and from there you can test it. So just to be clear on that it goes, end of life is in a week more or less. And that simply means that it's no longer gonna be supported.

There's gonna be no more security patches or anything like that. Basically it becomes a bit toxic at this point. It'll work, but if somebody discovers a vulnerability, and I would imagine that there's quite a lot of vulnerabilities that are just sitting there waiting that people know about, the bad guys.

And they're just I would imagine there's a bit of that going on, waiting and then as soon as it's gone, end of life, off we go, we'll start

[00:15:56] Jess Frick: exploring you. There are still people running 5.60 yeah. And there are known vulnerabilities for that. And definitely depressing. Yeah. Some other hosts are still allowing people to do that on, manage WordPress.

Instances, which is another thing. So you've got a lot of complexity in there. Yeah.

[00:16:15] Nathan Wrigley: How long did you say? 7.4 is gonna be available and Pressable for, do you just flip everybody over by the end of the week or

[00:16:21] Jess Frick: So? Automatic actually made the decision to provide support and patches as needed for the foreseeable future.

We don't have an end date, but I can say it's definitely not gonna be before the end of the year. , Merry Christmas. Update your

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: PhD. 4th of December. Come. Yeah. . There's a whole load of people that contributed to this as I described it. Release, putting their names, the list there. I haven't got time to go through them all, but thank you to anybody who made a contribution to this release.

The next version of Word Press, which will be 6.2, isn't due until next year. So from that side of things, you can have a little bit of a holiday. Okay. Let's move on to news. This was a piece switch was released this week. Over. From Master wp, which I always think has got the most featured images.

I don't know if they get somebody to paint these or not. I just think they're brilliant. It was Rob Howard and he posted a piece called Will Big Tech Layoffs Hit WordPress Companies. Now, I'm guessing it doesn't really matter where you are in the world at the moment. The economies are let's say they're not the same as they were three or four years ago.

Things are companies are struggling in tech in particular the sort of the rise after during Covid for a lot of techies where things went more and more online that kind of, that stuttered and has fallen and now we're into a period of high inflation. So it's harder to borrow money and lots of these big tech companies are starting to.

People off and Rob's posing the question, do we think that this is gonna happen in the WordPress space? After all, we are in the technology space. He's pretty sanguine. If you read the article. He basically thinks that WordPress is possibly a lit a bit more immune to these kind of fluctuations. And there's a bunch of reasons he pauses for that.

Something to do with the community, the fact that it's just a different makeup. Not everybody is out to make money as fast as humanly possible as they raise on Detra, but also because I guess the website is one of those things in a business which you're gonna clinging onto right until the end. So he makes all of these points.

I gotta say I'm not that really noticing people shouting about laying staff off. The only company that I can think of in the recent past as Rob describes, was Elementor. Who, oh, I'm gonna say about three months ago, something like that laid off 15% of their workforce. And I think a lot of those were in marketing and those kind of roles.

So it wasn't necessarily the tech side of things. But have you noticed anything, Jess? Have you noticed to slow down? That

[00:19:08] Jess Frick: was also right after the acquisition of Strat.

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's true. Oh, literally it was like three or four days afterwards, wasn't it? There was a real sort of, yeah.

[00:19:17] Jess Frick: Yeah. So they had just absorbed a whole bunch of new people and then they laid certain people off.

Yeah. Just because of the way that they were structured. Have I seen it? Yeah.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Is

[00:19:29] Jess Frick: there any no. Not here. But, I. I'm looking at both of you and I'm like, man, both of your bosses are terrifying. I hope you don't get laid off

I have to wonder how much that plays into it with the WordPress situation. How many of us are self-employed? How many of us are in these tiny companies where losing a body is huge? . Also in the WordPress space, you have these behemoths. Like, how many people does GoDaddy employ?

I'm not saying that they're gonna lay people off, but I'm saying there are much bigger companies and I couldn't tell you if they're gonna do it. I could tell you automatic has absolutely no plans to lay people off. However, comma there are some roles that they've decided to put on hold.

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: So less hiring. But no firing as a result. Yeah, because the hiring was a real feature of the pandemic, wasn't it? The tech companies were hiring handover fists, the likes of Google and Facebook, and now Facebook is, I think, was it 11,000 people they laid off a couple of weeks ago? That is such an eye watering number.

11,000 people. I dunno what percentage of the company that makes up, but it's essentially Mark Zuckerberg. And you know what, there's not a lot about Mark Zuckerberg that I think is fabulous. I don't mean that on a personal level, I just mean I'm not that big of a fan of some aspects of Facebook.

But I think he, he confessed to, to that very personally and very well, he said basically, it was my fault I made the decisions. We hired too many people. We grew too fast. I didn't anticipate a slowdown, but yeah, and Jesse, you make a point, which Rob actually makes, which was that I, another reason that he thinks we might be slightly more.

Immune to these kind of layoffs because in many cases we are freelancers, we're running our own business, and we might very well know our customers personally as opposed to being like a faceless organization and that can, I think, certainly make a bit of a difference. Katie, anything slowing down over there?

No. It's Black Friday coming up and also it's probably just accelerating, but have you noticed a sort of slowing down of. No, it's, I

[00:21:44] Katie Keith: think it's not a coincidence that is element that has done these layoffs famously within the WordPress press space, because they're one of the best known for having taken huge amounts of venture funding.

And they have the startup model as opposed to the large amount of small companies in WordPress that are bootstrap and so on. They just hire when they can afford to do it from their profits, for example, which is what we've always done. And that feels a lot less vulnerable. So if people that had to please their funders, they might struggle to get more funding.

If they need it for the next phase, then they're more likely to be doing layoffs. Particularly with things like marketing where it's more, it's like gambling. You don't know it's gonna definitely have that ROI do you, if you invest in marketing stuff. So I think it's not a coincidence. And the fact that elementary have done this doesn't really say anything about the small bootstraps WordPress C.

[00:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it's certainly interesting in all aspects of the economy, everything seems to be getting more expensive, so I imagine all of us at some point will be tightening our belts a little bit, whether that's, food buying things at Black Friday or plugins, themes, blocks, whatever it might be.

We'll just have to wait it out and wait and see. But I'm hoping that what Rob is prophesying is true. I'm hoping that the WordPress ecosystem is a little bit more insulated from this. If anybody's got any comments about that, please feel free to put it in. Oh, goodnight Cameron. He says he's going to.

That's so nice. He comes in here for five minutes and then he says goodnight as he is leaving . It's lovely. You have such a soothing voice though. He's just yeah, I'm, I'd be very surprised if both of you got to the end without snoring, the Lullaby podcast. We haven't had that quite yet.

It's, it is, yeah. Michelle Che's joining us, she says she's late, but Hello. Hi, Michelle. Nice to have you with us. Okay. Let's move on to the next bit. Oh, by the way, that piece was called Will Big Tech Layoffs Hit WordPress Companies, and you can find it over at Master wp. Next piece is over on WP Tavern.

This is just to say that if you are intending to go to Word Camp Asia or not, then they have released their first round of Speedy Wellbeing that they've released more speakers since I first got sight of this. But the first little round has been organized. So essentially you can now start to see who it is that.

Excuse me, they're going to be listening to and yeah, head over to the website there. They've also got themselves a nice little wahoo, which I think is quite cute. One it's so cute. Yeah, it is cute, isn't it? Three of them on a boat which is really nice. I don't know where the venue is.

I, I see the name of it. And actually there's a little video down here where you can see parts of what the venue's gonna be like. It looks. Like really genuinely amazing. I dunno if it's gonna be near the river, but near YouTube? Yeah, near the river. Oh, is it, are you going Katie?

[00:24:44] Katie Keith: No, I didn't get a ticket. I was gonna bring my entire support team, which is six people plus me, and we couldn't get tickets. But one of my team will be there. And interestingly, they say they've announced the first round of speakers, but one of my team is a speaker that, so he gets a free ticket, luckily, and he's not on the list, so they must be releasing them into stages, even though they's already decided.

[00:25:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, typically I think they just do it so that there's, cuz I, I guess if you release all 40 at once, you dilute the impact. Whereas if they do them it looks like they're doing sort of eight at a time. Then I guess those people get a bit of, get a bit of coverage and that feeling of being a bit special, which is quite nice.

Yeah. So the first eight Don probably chosen them all. You gen you literally couldn't get a ticket. Did they sell out that fast? I have no memory of them going like really quick. I know the word can five.

[00:25:37] Katie Keith: Yeah, it was ridiculous. So I was on my computer ready and I got to the form where you at and they, had tons of information like your your pronouns and your dietary requirements and that you were vegan and all this.

And by the time I'd done that for seven people, the tickets had gone. It was really disappointing. Yeah. So stop saying how nice it's gonna be. .

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be, it's gonna be so bad, Katie. The weather's gonna be terrible. Have you seen the speakers ? I I actually, so this is gonna sound really bad, Katie and I dunno if there's something we can do about this.

I actually have a ticket. , but I don't think I'll be going. And that wasn't because I bought a ticket and then decided not to use it. The, I applied to be a media partner and you get a free ticket, but there's no compuls it's sponsor. Exactly. So I, maybe I should think about giving that away to somebody such as yourself.

Yeah. And put it on,

[00:26:32] Katie Keith: Twitter or post date or whatever's acceptable these days to last

[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: time at Word Camp us. I can't remember who it was. Maybe Jess can remember. In fact, it may even have been you, Jess. I don't know. Somebody put together a, like a Google spreadsheet, didn't they? Where there were people I was David Bassett.

Oh, great. Okay. Maybe he'll do something like that again. Maybe I could do something like that again. To marry up people who were, had a ticket but weren't gonna go with those people who wanted to go, who couldn't, because that was bonkers as well. But that was only 650, whereas you've got several thousand.

Jess, are you going?

[00:27:05] Jess Frick: I'm not, it's sold out in 10 minutes.

[00:27:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you were there as well. You had that exact same problem. If you are thinking of going, it's the 17th of February to the 19th Bangkok, my understanding is that there'll be live streams. I hope that's the case so that you can watch these things.

I know that's more the normal than it ever was before maybe you could just watch it from the comfort your own home, Katie. And you don't go

[00:27:32] Katie Keith: for the talk, although I will obviously watch my team member doing his amazing talk. Yeah,

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: you go for that one. Yeah. Okay.

[00:27:39] Katie Keith: You don't go for the talks apart from

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: that

Okay. Fair enough. All right, let's move on. Let me just share the screen one more time. Key Doki, right? This next one, someone

[00:27:49] Jess Frick: asked, I don't know the venue for Athens. Do you know the venue for a. No for Word camp. You, we've got a

[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: comment. Yeah.

[00:27:56] Katie Keith: Thank you. And they've announced it yet cuz I would've booked accommodation already if they had, if it was like a hotel.

[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: I take you going to that one then what about you for that one? Jessie, you gonna be going to Word Camp Europe? . Gosh, I hope so. Oh, okay. That's good. There's a better be

[00:28:12] Katie Keith: tickets . Yeah, just twist

[00:28:14] Jess Frick: my arm. Oh no. Go to Greece to hang out with WordPress friends.

[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if the, whoever you are, by the way, Facebook use, I'm sorry, I can't see your name.

And I'm not logged into Facebook at the moment, so I can't even go over to Facebook and look. But yeah, I don't think we know that. We just know that it is in Athens. Beyond that, obviously somebody knows because they wouldn't have announced it was in Athens unless they'd secured the venue. But I think it's, is it Angeline?

Is it. I can't remember who's organizing, who's the lead, but certainly they're on Twitter and what have you. And Michelle says, I want to go to Greece. Yes, I think so too. That would be lovely, wouldn't it? . All right, let me swap over to this article. And I dunno what to say about this apart from the fact that it's disappointing.

Let's put it that way. Was that you, Jess? Was that your si ? It was me. Oh, okay. Let's do this some service. So meetup.com raises concerns with new accessibility overlay. This is on the tavern. Sarah Gooding wrote to this piece. Now, I am not an organizer of WordPress meetups. Never have been. But I have an understanding that if you want to be in an official WordPress meet up I think one of the constraints that you have to Honor is that it has to go through meetup.com.

I could be wrong and forgive me if I've spoken out of turn, but I do know that meetup.com does power the sort of the event management, the ticketing side of things, if you like, for WordPress meetups and as concern this week. And hes Has tweeted that she's, I'm gonna quote, I'm super disappointed at meet up, adding an a y so like overlay time to look into event calendars for WP A one Y meetups.

We still have to be on meet up to get events in WordPress admin, but we don't have to market those pages as the community team explored Meetup alternatives. And the reason she's crossed is because on the meetup.com website, there is one of these accessibility overlays. Now the promise of these overlays that essentially with a click of a button, a copy and paste of a bit of JavaScript, you can make all of your accessibility problems disappear.

As we know, the world is not as straightforward as that. And Amber Heinz has spoken to me at great length amongst other people, Joe Dawson and so on about how these things are just. Not the solution that they promise to be lays make things worse. So it's a little bit galling for to Amber. The very thing which WordPress has got to use to organize these meetups has an accessibility overlay and somewhat bizarrely, it's a bit meta.

This, the overlay is all to do with the accessibility settings. , so you can't make it up. If you're looking at the screen, you can do it there. It went away for a day or a series of complaints from the community, but it then came back again apparently, and it's still there right now. But I think really what Amber is trying to say is for the moment, is it possible that we use something else, even if it won be displayed in the WordPress admin as they currently are.

Jess, you side turn Thoughts?

[00:31:40] Jess Frick: I don't know that accessibility is something where you wanna cut corners. Just fix it at the source. Fix the website. Yeah. If you know you have accessibility problems, go ahead and just fix the whole, like it's the things that need to be changed are not going to impact your message or delivery that much.

And if at all. And if it does, then I think maybe you need to ask why. I don't think there's any, mal intent with these things. I think it's just a lack of understanding and education and I think there are a lot of solutions that are selling a quick way to become accessible to, avoid a lawsuit or whatever.

And I, I don't know that they're really considering what that means. Everyone. Yeah. I was I did see that, Angela, Jen offered to reach out to meet up and hopefully they can figure something out, but it's just, it's, I think we're gonna see more of it until everybody understands why it's important to just make your website accessible.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: , I guess there is probably quite a big load of infrastructure behind meetup.com and the Sarah makes the point in the piece that maybe it is literally, as you said, I say just its app whilst they fix their underlying architecture. And I don't really know the state of lawyering that's going on in terms of accessibility at the moment, because I know there's legislation.

Obviously over here in the uk it's gonna be slightly different, but broadly the same I would've thought as it is in the us. But in my chats with Joe Dawson, he was pretty convinced that the ambulance chasing. Are going to get on this fairly rapidly. In other words, they're gonna employ teams of lawyers to just go out and try to find websites, which by law have to be accessible but are not accessible.

Put a lawsuit in front of them, not for the purposes of necessarily making things better, but just because it's lucrative which is hardly the motive that we want here. But the, it sounds like Sarah is thinking maybe these overlays are being used as a stop gap, just so that meetup can say, Nope, no lawyers here.

We've done something whilst we do the real thing, it's not good enough, but it's maybe what their excuses would be. Katie, any thoughts on this?

I think you might be on mute. Katie, I certainly can't hear you anyway. Katie's talking but we can't hear her. Try again.

[00:34:35] Katie Keith: No.

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: Is that, yeah. Oh, there you're fine. We can get

[00:34:39] Katie Keith: you maybe my Crisp Daily allowance ran out

[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: or something. Oh, okay. Yeah. . Yeah.

[00:34:43] Katie Keith: Yeah, so I agree it should be fixed at source, but that doesn't help the WordPress communities concerned because nobody within the WordPress com community has any influence probably about what meetup.com do.

So they still need to answer that objection as to whether they can use something else temporarily. But also in terms of the the ambulance chasing lawyers, it's interesting that the Cookie Law and GDPR and all of that came in a long time ago now, and I've never heard of anybody be prosecuted under any of that legislation.

No. So I wonder. I'm not sure the legal profession's actually caught up with websites cuz they could have very easily got a lot of people for not complying with the cookie law, for example, couldn't they? And I don't think they have done.

[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we'll have to see Joe's impression I should point you to a podcast episode.

I recorded a podcast episode with Joe when we were, when all of us, all three of us were in San Diego. And and he was saying that it's not really begun, but it's beginning and there is some fairly lucrative low hanging fruit, shall we say. There's a lot of companies with deep pockets, so it may be that I, maybe it's more aligned to that, but just the specter of it is quite interesting.

Maya, hello Maya. She makes a comment. Developers and designers need to be aware of the inclusive coding and design, in addition to using real people to test final version instead of using auto tools, which are quite inaccurate. So if you got any thoughts on this, it sounds like the people that. Wanna be getting in touch with, certainly from this article is Amber and h.

Her Twitter handle is, Hey Amber Henz. But also you mentioned right at the bottom here it was Angela Gin, who's an aian. She has offered to contact Meet up and I'll just click on that. I haven't actually looked on that link. Let's see where it takes me. She's on Twitter as Angela s gin. So you could maybe contact her and lend her your support and give her your opinions.

Anyway, me top.com with overlays. All right, let's move on. Now, this is just for me. Basically there's . This is you couldn't have made something better. This is WordPress have released a block, a podcast block like . Okay. Me and a handful of other people, there's quite a lot of us. Were podcasting automatic a little while ago.

I have no idea when, but. Couple of years it feels like they bought a podcast player. So that's an app. You can use it on the desktop. You, sorry, that is to say in a browser. I dunno if they've got a desktop app, but you can use it inside of a browser. You can use it on Android and and iOS and IT for my money.

It's the best podcast player that there is. It just does all the things and it synchronizes so that if you're listening on one device, it'll, carry on the other device and all that kind of stuff. They got bought by Automatic who then very recently open sourced all the code base, which was very cool because it was a paid for thing.

So they took a commercial product, bought it, and then just totally open sourced it, which is a bit great. And then this week they have released a podcast player block and sure enough, go into your version of WordPress, click on ad and start to type pocket cast. And there it is. You get a lovely, you get this icon and you fill in basically one field, which is your RSS feed.

And you're done. You have podcasting on your WordPress website. How cool is that? It's like the barrier to entry for podcasting is basically zero with something like that. So I know this is probably a bit self-indulgent, but I thought this was cool. I don't k to you podcast or if Jess, you do something, but I think it's cool.

[00:38:38] Jess Frick: It's extremely cool. I like it a lot. Yeah.

[00:38:44] Katie Keith: I like all the embeds. You can embed so many different things and they just work straight away and it makes your site a lot more professional. When you

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: use the. When you when you start to scroll down the list of things that you can embed, it's actually pretty impressive, isn't it?

Some of them, I'm scratching my head thinking, really? Is that service still going? But maybe it is. Maybe it's a hangover. Anyway, fabulous. Really great. Go and go and check that out. All right, let's move on. I'll come to this one in a minute actually, cuz it's quite a long and in depth piece.

I've got that lined up for now. But let's do something a bit more frivolous. This is just a bit of fun, right? This is great. This is called wp admin colors.com and it's colors spelled in the American way without the you. So WP , A D M I N C O L O r. So you know, if you go there and you're British, you think it doesn't work Wrigley, that's cuz it's spelt differently.

And this is just a really nice little tool if you don't like the default pallet. Of your WP admin? There's a several options, isn't there? I think there's, what is it, five or six or something like that? Color choices that you can choose. But this little website, it's got one job and it does it brilliantly.

You click go create, you've got to give it a, you've got to give the scheme a name. So I'll just quickly do that. WP Builds and here's all your options. So you can change the menu text and you can see in real time it's updating. So I might make that nice and black. Let's have the base menu nice and white.

I'm already starting to prefer it. What do the highlights look like? Let's go for like horrible, bright red. Ooh, no. Oh yeah. Sorry about that was a bit jarring, wasn't it? But you, there's just like seven or eight. What is there? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 things to fill out. You then click generate color scheme.

It takes about a half of one second. You then got two things to do. You've got to add a style sheet into your theme, and you need to copy and paste this tiny little snippet into your functions PHP of your theme, and then you're done. Your WordPress admin will look nice. Now, I know it seems like a bit, I know it's a bit of a nothing, but at the same time, I thought, wouldn't it be nice if you had clients and you could very quickly brand it to their colors, they've got purple or whatever it is in their logo, you could make it just look exactly like their version of WordPress.

I just thought that was really cool. What do you reckon? Do you like this guys?

[00:41:10] Katie Keith: I think it's good for people doing sites on behalf of clients because it can, they can brand it to them rather than WordPress. And I think agent, there are lots of plugins that do this already, but I quite like the way that you do it on the browser and then you put it in your theme or child theme because it's not installing another plugin on the site.

It's just that bit lightweight

[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: and tiny bit of css. Yeah. It's really great. . And I just think it is quite a, it's a nice little thing. There's there's a lot of plugins which go to great lengths to to make the dashboard look completely different. This is not that, this is just colors, so it's not changing font sizes or you could obviously do that.

It's not changing, removing menus or anything. Like some of those more all encompassing plugin sos just colors. But I think it's, I think it's jolly nice. So there we go. And

[00:42:02] Katie Keith: if it makes you feel any better, they spell customized in the English way for some reason.

[00:42:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Look at that. So they spell colors incorrectly and then they spell customized.

Correct. Oh, I'm gonna get in such trouble. They spell customized differently than you would imagine. Yeah, that's true. I haven't spoken that maybe that's just trying to, all that matters is consistency. I would that's, yeah. It failed horribly. We're not looking at this website anymore.

Let's go to this one. This is a new plugin on the block. There's a company that had it's a plug, I believe I've not used it, but it's called CSS Hill, and it pops up a little panel in your WordPress website and enables you to drill down into all of the CSS on your website and make changes on the fly.

And I think it's theme in. So you can do it on theme. I don't quite know how it works. But anyway, they've got a new tool and it's called Animator, so you can find it at css hero.org/animator. And it looks, now, I don't really know whether we wanna be getting into animation. I dunno if that's the direction of travel that the internet wants to go in.

There's all sorts of reasons for that, the environment and accessibility and so on. But if you wish to do some of that complicated stuff, then this is like a timeline based tool. Imagine something like I don't know, Camtasia or Logic, or, one of those video editing tools, middle Cup Pro or something.

It installs a timeline. You drop things onto the scene, onto the Canvas, position them, give them instructions like, rotate when a certain portion of the browser has been brought into view. And it does all of that. And you can see here the website itself is making quite a lot of use of it.

Look at this, it's quite. Quite fun really, isn't it? Look at that. It's really nice. I'm scrolling up and down and there's a sort of cube, which is, or a square, which is moving depending on where I've got it in the window. And just lots and lots of fun stuff like this. Very sa but I dunno what your thoughts are on whether the web wants all of this.

To be honest. My feeling is that if we want lean websites, which Google likes, maybe some of this stuff is a little bit superfluous, but then again, on the plus side, it does look blooming excellent when you see it. So any thoughts?

[00:44:23] Jess Frick: I'm not saying that Kinta uses this, but I don't think Google has any problem with what they're doing and they have plenty of animations.

[00:44:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting point. Yeah. As

[00:44:34] Jess Frick: an aside I hate how much I love Quinta's website. .

[00:44:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I hate how much you love it. . Are you drawn to stuff like this though, with the

[00:44:43] Jess Frick: I'm really not, but I think the way that they do it is very well done. I think sometimes when you've got these parallax things like bouncing out at you, it can be just a little challenging, especially on mobile.

But the way that they do it is just very subtle and it's specifically with graphics and I don't know that it really causes accessibility issues, but perhaps, I don't know. I need to print their website.

[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: You're right. There's not really any content. There's no text based content or anything like that, which is being interfered with here.

Is there, it really is largely just I don't know, background logos and rectangles and squares moving about. So yeah, maybe there is a place for it.

[00:45:26] Jess Frick: I've seen it done well. I've seen it done not so

[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: well. Yeah, just look at that though. It's really like I'm just touching the mouse wheel a tiny little bit and that little thing is detecting my movement there.

Yeah, it's really nice. Css hero.org/animator. Your thoughts? Katie, do you put this sort of stuff on your barn too? Plugin? Website, very

[00:45:49] Katie Keith: minimal. I think with, as with any tool, it's about how you use it. So if you are picking out relevant things where an animation actively adds to the user experience, for example, drawing attention to your main calls to action or something or the main products features to make, jump off the page or something, then fine.

If you're just adding things for the sake of it without thinking about how it fits with your message and the focal points you want to draw attention to, then it can be a bad influence by making it too easy. So people just need to use it appropriately to enhance what they might have done anyway.

[00:46:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really good point.

I guess if you need to be a developer to do these things, you'll probably have some understanding of, you're in that career, that is your job to develop websites. So you've probably got some insight into what works and what doesn't and when it becomes distraction free, I guess as with things like page builders, because it creates the ability for anybody to do this kind of stuff.

You, I wonder if there will be a desire to put animation on everything because it does look great, but it may ize the experience. It looks like a solid tool though. I dunno if they've got a Black Friday offer or anything, but Yes sir. It's CSS hero dot. Forward slash animator. You can go and check that out, right?

Michelle? Michelle, I hope is still in the comments. She can maybe spread some light on this as well. This is a piece over on Stellar wp. Stellar, WP have released open source libraries for advanced WordPress development. I confess that this goes a little bit above my head. I don't really know what. What and how anybody would make use of these things.

But they have released so far, their engineering team has released three major projects so far, I guess applies that they're planning to open source more Stellar WP course is behind lots of. Properties in the WordPress space. So for example give WP and the events calendar and things like that, and some of these are taken directly out of those products.

So the first one is Stellar WP db, which is a library which wraps around the WordPress database class to provide modern objector orientated interface. It also catches database errors that WordPress wouldn't other. Sorry, otherwise doesn't, they've also released w stellar WP slash Schema which as they say has taken largely from the events calendar.

And this is an API for people working with custom table definition. And they've also got something called Slick, which again is lifted from the events calendar code. And this tool allows for, it says here, consistent execution of automated tests on local and continuous integration environments. What they're not doing, let's be clear, is they're not giving you the code for the events calendar.

And, it's a subset of the code for a difficult problem that other developers might have to tackle and therefore re, come up with their own code. And what they think they're basically trying to say is, we've done some of the hard work and it's fine. We don't, there's no particular commercial benefit, but if you want to benefit from the things that can do it, yeah, there we go. And there's a little explanation as to why they're going into this, so that's nice. Any thoughts on this? What a good

[00:49:18] Jess Frick: group of people.

[00:49:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Isn't that nice? That's pretty cool that they did that. Yeah, that is nice. I mean it's, I guess I don't really know where the sort of, the whole GPL thing stands.

Could you have gotten this anyway? I'm really not sure, but perhaps not. Perhaps there's there's some benefit in them wrapping it up in this way that I don't really understand.

[00:49:38] Katie Keith: You wouldn't know to, would you can get the code for the events calendar that easy. It's gpl, it's open source, but you wouldn't know that they'd done this project, so that's a good point.

Yeah, think and you'd probably have to extract it from the other stuff in the plugin. It wouldn't be relevant to yours. So I assume it's useful for developers. That's not. Feel. It's also interesting to see, cuz obviously Stellar are require, have acquired quite lots of WordPress plugging companies. It's interesting to see them pooling resources in this way and sharing them in a centralized way.

So these, for example, early libraries contain stuff from Give and Events calendar and they'll probably add things from Learn Dash or whatever in the future as well. And so I suppose it's interesting to see that project progressing and how they're contributing.

[00:50:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really nice. Yeah. Anyway, thank you Stella, WP.

It's a nice little endeavor. We'll come back. Back to this in a minute, this Curious looking website. Let's go back to this one. We were talking about Stellar WP just a second ago. We seem to have drifted back into them. This was a really longing piece. I'm just gonna put it on everybody's radar.

I don't know if you two want to contribute to this because I don't know if you've been involved in buying or selling WordPress businesses in the past. But this is Tyrell who was on the show a little while ago, and and it's his, about his perspective. He was working for the events. And he was involved in the acquisition by Stellar w Oh, liquid Web, I should say by Liquid Web fairly recently, not that long ago.

And it's just all about his perspective on how that all went down. He had a curious perspective because he was not allowed allowed is probably the wrong word. They made a decision that they wouldn't tell the events calendar team that they were going to be acquired, even though they were in talks to acquire.

And it's about his thoughts on that and why they made those decisions and what it was that they were looking for in a purchaser, what kind of red lines did they have in the sand for what they required before they would sell. And it was the usual things. It was things like, we don't want anybody to be laid off.

We don't want their working conditions to, to change. And It seems that has in fact remained remained true. So it's a long article. It goes into all sorts of different angles, but it was really interesting. So either of you been involved in, dare I Ask in acquisition talks at any point, and are you allowed to discuss it?

And if so, I'd be curious to know what you what you were into. I was

[00:52:18] Jess Frick: working for a liquid

[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: web when that happened. Did you know that this was all going down? Cause it sounds, from what Jack was saying as if there was a, certainly on the events calendar side of things, they made a decision to keep it quiet essentially to protect the anxiety of the employees there because, if you know that your boss is trying to sell the company.

I guess that brings into your mind all sorts of questions about whether

[00:52:46] Jess Frick: or not you remember I was on Chris Luma's team and Chris Lema ran the acquisitions for them. With their various plugin acquisitions. So we did know. But it was all, we didn't get details until everybody did.

Yeah, it's just, there were certain things, obviously being in the manage WordPress side of the house that we knew were coming, we just didn't know the specifics. And it's worth noting that, yeah, they acquired the event calendar plugin and then they later acquired the rest of modern.

[00:53:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I'd forgotten that piece actually. I had forgotten that's the way it happened. Yeah, that is interesting. But it was it was nice seeing it from Zach's point of view, cuz obviously he, he felt a bit like he was the man in the middle. He was, he knew what was happening.

He knew that his team were gonna be affected, but he tried to, he had to basically do two jobs at once. He had to do his day job, writing the code and all of that kind of stuff. And then in the evenings had to go and tackle this whole acquisition thing and make sure that all of the red lines were not crossed.

And, yeah. Sounds so far to be like a and

[00:53:57] Jess Frick: I just wanna high five everybody on that team because I remember it's a huge culture shock start, going from your cool little like startup plugin atmosphere to this behemoth where you have, a thousand. and I think that they all did a really good job with it.

[00:54:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. They were saying that their team was distributed so much like Katie's team and that was one of the things that they were wanting to keep because they're all over the planet and, but Liquid Web apparently has an office and office, I think multiple. Oh, okay. But is it, the idea was that we don't wanna scare our employees, we want them to be able to work in a company which has offices, but they're not gonna be obliged to use those offices.

And that seems to be the case.

[00:54:47] Jess Frick: My team was always distributed. Oh, okay. So they had distributed teams, but yes, they had offices in San Antonio and and Michigan and

[00:54:57] Nathan Wrigley: throughout. Okay. So Katie, Acquisition talks. Yeah. Is this happening over at bar? No, I don't mean not

[00:55:04] Katie Keith: really. People approach regularly which is really interesting.

Including some quite high profile people in WordPress. Often out of the blue people I've never had any contact with will suddenly get in touch and I'm like, God, you are famous. But at the main for the foreseeable future, I'm happy. It's important to me actually to be the owner. I don't particularly want to work for somebody else again cuz a lot of the acquisitions are the founders stay I can't imagine being an employee again.

[00:55:37] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. That's really interesting. So you built this business and nobody's gonna hold it, hold you to it, Katie, but at the moment you, you have people coming to you so offering to get into discussions about it, but at the minute your doors are closed to those discussions, you'd rather just keep it going and grow it yourself.

[00:55:56] Katie Keith: That's cool. Exactly. Yeah. And I enjoying what I do and I'm not of an age where I'm looking to early retire or anything like that, and yet I am of an age, I'm not sure I'd want to start a whole new venture separately. Because a lot of other people, they sell and then they start a new project like just environment for example, that's sold learn two liquid wear.

I'm not sure I've still got the energy to start again in that way. So for now I'm in the right place. But it's interesting to know that people are out there and there's been talk of the wave of acquisitions dying off, but I think it's still active for people that want to go in that direction.

Yeah, that's,

[00:56:35] Jess Frick: so what I'm hearing, Katie, is you just need two more zeros at the end.

[00:56:38] Katie Keith: Yeah. , , there's always a number, but the number is higher than the company is worth. .

[00:56:44] Nathan Wrigley: I I always, I'm always desperate to know what those numbers are and I never get, get to find out. Cuz for obvious reasons, people keep that stuff quiet, if they release it to the public, then I have some understanding.

But I have, I genuinely have no idea what things, for example, like the events calendar was worth. I remember several years before they acquired it I had a podcast with, I think it was Scott Kingsley Clark, and he was working on the events calendar team at that time. And he said, we've got 50 employees.

And I nearly fell off my chair. I was thinking, how can a WordPress event calendar plugin, how can there be 50 people at work there? And he, patiently explained what the majority of them did. And I thought, man, alive, it's such a big, 50 people put all of those in a room, actually.

They show a picture.

[00:57:33] Katie Keith: I think about elementary, it's, that's staggering how big some of the companies are. And you never know till you interview them. Or you go to Word Camp and you see all the T-shirts and you're like, oh my God, I never knew it was such a big company. Yeah, because a lot of the small ones are just as high profile.

[00:57:51] Nathan Wrigley: Go on, Jess. Thank you.

[00:57:52] Jess Frick: I was just gonna say, I think a lot of people don't realize how much there is in the event calendar. If you don't use it, you're like, oh, it's just a calendar plugin. This is my, been a paid subscriber for six years prior to the

[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: acquisition. Yeah. This was my era.

I simply thought it was a simple, straightforward plugin for doing events. And so when he said 50 people right at the beginning of the interview, I was slightly flabbergasted. But but then I don't know what. What a company, a successful plug-in company with 50 employees. I dunno what that number is.

Even I don't know how many zeros it's got. 1 billion. 1 billion. Yeah. Katie retire now. Yeah, I might retire for that. . Yeah, I was gonna say you'd be a full not

[00:58:35] Jess Frick: are you kidding? You could take my kid, have the dogs .

[00:58:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But we'll see. We'll hold the thought. But it was nice reading that story cuz it gave you an insight from both sides and it was it all seems to have gone according to plan everything right from the checking out the code to making sure that the employees were happy on the other end.

Yeah. Really nice story. So I should say where that is, that's on the free dotcom site. And the piece is called Dual Perspective Al's Firsthand experience with WordPress. Acquisitions as a buy and seller. So you can go check that and read all about it. Okay. Where did we get to? Okay, so this is at propo of nothing, but I thought this was fun and I'm interested in your take on this, Jess.

Especially from the environmental side. I did an interview this week. It's not yet out, but it'll hopefully be coming out on Wednesday on the Tavern with Hannah Smith. And I dunno if any of Hannah Smith. She was very much in the WordPress space and she's now moved, pivoted a little bit.

So she's still involved in WordPress, but her her main interest is now the environmental impact of the internet and websites. And having done that interview, it really was a bit of an eye-opener into the footprint of use of the internet. And I'm gonna butcher this number, but I think she said that if the internet was a country, Maybe it was a country, maybe it was an industry, I can't remember, but it was like the seventh worst polluting country on earth.

Just the internet by itself. Forgive me, I'm sure I've got that wrong, but it was something eyeopening like that. It was like, what? And that does sound familiar. I

[01:00:23] Katie Keith: think that quite

[01:00:24] Nathan Wrigley: close. Yeah. It was something eye watering. Anyway, the point that I kept making was look how clean that thing is.

Look how like harmless that phone is. Look how sterile it is. And the same with my computer in front of me. You just switch it on. It's not like a car where fumes start to come out the back and you'd be insane to put your mouth anywhere near that. My computer is benign. It's not doing anything, but of course it is.

Every moment that it's on, it's consum. All sorts of things. And then this website came on my radar. I just think this is fabulous. The person who's running this website, and forgive me, I failed to recognize I haven't got your name, but the website is at solar dot low tech magazine.com/power.html.

That's a lot. I'll say it one more time. Solar dot low tech magazine.com/power.html. This website is alive only when it's sunny in Barcelona, . Cause it's basically connected directly to a solar panel. That solar panel. If there's enough sunshine in the sky, the, it will power the website and it will start to charge a battery.

But then if there's a prolonged period of bad weather, it will then start to consume the battery and once the battery's dead, so is the website. It will, as soon as the sun comes back out again, it'll charge the battery. It'll then automatically boot its little server up from nothing. The website comes back online and it, so it only stays online for the period when it's sunny.

Now it looks curious, the color scheme, I dunno if you spotted it, there's like half blue and half yellow. When it's sunny, the website is more yellow than blue. This yellow line goes up towards the top, and if you catch it on a really sunny day, it's all yellow. As the line progresses towards the bottom, that's when it's going into its low power mode.

And it probably will switch off. But I want get to a conversation about this, about the power consumption of the internet. And I guess I'll ask ask Jess first, working for a hosting company, is this something that crosses your radar? How much do you make much of a connection over at Pressable between the environment and sourcing, like from a renewable source, your energy need?

[01:02:51] Jess Frick: Yeah, I work for hosting company, but my Twitter handle is renewable because almost 14 years ago when I joined Twitter, I was still working in the renewable energy industry. Huh. Yes, this crosses my mind all the time. It still does. And sustainability is very important to me. I'm still, keen on everything that's renewable.

One thing I do wanna add to this though, and I love this website there's actually been a movement in the WordPress community to work on sustainability. So for those who are already in the make, WordPress. Slack channel. Go to the sustainability channel, which is new, brand new. But then there's also a new website, our sustainable wp.org.

That's o Can you

[01:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: spell that for me? Was that our

[01:03:45] Jess Frick: o u r, like our, like it belongs to us. Our sustainable wp.org.

[01:03:54] Nathan Wrigley: Hey, I'm gonna see if I can get that to work right. I'll

[01:03:57] Jess Frick: just put that on the screen. And that's intended as a starting place for community initiatives to improve sustainability in WordPress.

[01:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: That is such a low, like you I'm gonna try and describe the site. There's no images. There's a white plain background. I can imagine The CSS that's being used to generate the site is minimal. There's a, there's an image there that I can see, but it's probably, so this just by itself is a really interesting Yeah, really.

See

[01:04:30] Jess Frick: now you make a dark mode and now we're

[01:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: really talking. Yeah. Good point. Less, yeah, it's

[01:04:35] Katie Keith: clean and modern looking as well. It's it's a nicer design than the solar powered website, for example.

[01:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the guy with the solar powered, he's just using the available fonts, isn't he? Whereas they've obviously got some nice fonts in here, so that's

interesting.

[01:04:49] Jess Frick: But, then you start talking about like the energy use of the internet. Do you go all the way back to the creation of computers that use the internet? Like it's really hard to gauge whether that is, an accurate statement. But I can tell you that our power use obviously is significantly higher.

[01:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: The the person that I was mentioning, Hannah Smith, she was the person who wrote the article on make.wordpress.org, which got me interested. And she, in that article, mentioned the fact that this Slack channel had been created. It's probably just a handful of weeks old now. I imagine there's not too many people.

So if you, if this is something which is of interest to you, you could probably make your voice heard. And Hannah was making the point that they literally don't know what to do. I don't mean that from an ignorant point of view. I mean that from the point of views. They want ideas, they want people who are interested in this field to come forward and suggest things.

I was thinking I dunno what you think about this. You may just think this is absolutely bonkers, but I thought, wouldn't it be nice if in the WordPress admin there was some something. Like how Yost have their red green, sorry, their traffic light symbol for how your page is doing in terms of its SEO and what its potential could be.

And if it's red, that's bad. And if it's green, you're doing better. I did wonder if something like this could be connected to a website. Now, obviously it's gonna be difficult because you don't know what kind of way you're hosting company, where are they getting their energy from and so on. But it could at least say, this page is just gigantic.

What are you doing? So rather than it being an seo, green, red, whatever, it would be a metric of how much energy it's taking and how many lines of code are having to cross the wire compared to what it could have been. You know it, I bet this one that you, we were showing a moment ago I'm imagining that they've gone to great pains to reduce the amount of.

Html that's there, unnecessary divs is just unnecessary information that don't need to travel the wires. So that was my little idea, some kind of thing inside the WP admin, which would give you a just an indication and then imagine that you could, I don't know, hook that into your hosting company.

If Pressable provided an api, which said, okay, this page is producing this much. We know that for a fact. I could see that. I also thought, wouldn't this be an interesting niche for a freelancer? Wouldn't this be like a curious thing to say, I am a sustainable developer. My site will be as lean as possible.

Your environmental impact, whilst there's some, it's gonna be much less because I really take care of all of this. That's my thoughts.

[01:07:46] Jess Frick: One thing to add there, the Green web foundation.org actually has a directory of hosts. There is a member of the Make WordPress hosting team Javier Kasra, who just released a plugin called WP Sustainable.

And the plugins purpose is to tell you more about sustainability of your hosting company and the CO2 generated by your IP address. And I actually have a note to get our servers registered because he's calling the green web foundation.org. And we're not listed on there yet, to get listed you have to fill out certain things and, self report various items.

And I'd love to see more hosts adopting that. It's just, it's on my backlog. I'm not there yet, but, these are the kinds of conversations we need to have so that everybody can come to the table. To start doing things.

[01:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: So is this the one you were mentioning? That's the one.

This is the one. So it says, check the sustainability from your host and company. Yeah. Okay. So this is

[01:08:53] Jess Frick: curious. I would guess most hosts are not going to be

[01:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: shown, right? It's more a question of, because Yes. Ah, this is really interesting. But isn't it one of you've gotta start somewhere, right? If you put this out and two or three hosting companies sign up it's another metric, isn't it?

As to who you should choose. And presumably, pressable and all the other companies would wish to be a part of this if they could if they could look, if they could be viewed favor. From it. Yeah. That's really interesting. Boy, Jess, way more about this than than I was anticipating.

This is great. . I'm gonna add

[01:09:31] Jess Frick: these. You're going after one of my loves

[01:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Katie, any thoughts on this? I'm sorry we've excluded you from this somewhat.

[01:09:39] Katie Keith: No, that's fine. You had the right guess for that topic. Excellent. Yeah, I suppose there's two angles to the sustainability of a website.

One is the hosting and the green energy. And the other, as you say, is the how lightweight each page is, the elements on the page. So with your idea, Nathan, I think that does sound like a good tool with the traffic light system. And of course there's fairly direct relationship between the greenness of a page, keeping the images small, for example, and performance.

Obviously people are motivated by their own self-interest often and selfishness and things, and one of that is improving the performance of their website because of the impact on SEO and customer experience and everything. So you could somehow package all that together, couldn't you to, because it benefits the environment and the performance side of things.

Yeah. So I think that would be a good project for somebody

[01:10:32] Nathan Wrigley: to do. Yeah. It's curious, isn't it? Because performance, there's two there's like a seesaw in effect that, you can throw resources at a website. So that it's performant. In other words, you just spend your way into being the best cuz you just throw CPUs at it and all of that.

And then there's the other side is you just take all the things out that are not needed there. And yeah, highlighting that, that's probably the best way potentially of doing it for the environment at least anyway would be interesting.

[01:11:02] Katie Keith: Yeah. You still need good hosting. Yeah. Powerful hosting that is also green, but also you wanna take away as much as possible and optimize and everyth.

[01:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: What did you say, Jess? Was it called the Green Web Foundation? Is that what you highlighted? Yeah, the,

[01:11:16] Jess Frick: it's the green web foundation.org. They have a directory on there. Like I said, it's, you're probably gonna see a lot of other organizations not showing up as green, and it's just because they haven't registered yet.

[01:11:31] Nathan Wrigley: So it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a badge of anything yet, but it might be in the future. Yeah.

[01:11:36] Jess Frick: I think it is positively if you have someone and you're like, okay, they've already done the legwork. . But I think as with so much in internet in general, but certainly the WordPress community, we've got a ways to go.

Yeah, and this is, I'm glad to see the conversation starting.

[01:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: I feel it will be a really important thing. How things just, they're just crest in importance at certain times. If you went back three or four years, everybody was droning on about core web vitals. It just was the thing, right?

Everybody was talking about it. And then other things become the focus of the moment. It, I feel like this could be the focus of the next moment. And what I said earlier, I do, I really think you could make a decent niche as a freelancer in being a sustainable developer, or at least, as sustainable as you can be.

And you can go into those client meetings with the knowledge that what you're saying is true and your website's gonna be lean. Thank you Jeff Winchester for making a comment. He says, this goes back to the previous discussion on whether we put animations and videos. in our webpages. Yeah, it does feel like that, doesn't it?

It does feel that there's definitely a compromise there if you're throwing in all these animations. I have literally no idea what the environmental impact of the website that we saw a minute ago with no animations and almost nothing on the screen, just text and a white background as opposed to the CSS animation one that we saw a minute ago.

I have no idea, but I'd love to know, I'd love to know how much carbon goes into the environment, what the difference is between those two. Because a bit like you, Jess, I am shockingly worried about the state of the environment, and it does seem like the internet, that's our wheelhouse, so we can at least do something about that bit.

[01:13:25] Jess Frick: It also goes back to what Katie was saying, do you really need another

[01:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: plugin? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Right now, let me see where we got to. How much time have we got? Yeah, a little bit of time. Okay, so we'll do this quickly. Firstly oh. Don't mean this to sound self promotional again, but I'm gonna say it anyway.

If you over the last week or so, if you have have been troubled by what's been happening over at Twitter there's a thing called Master Don, and it's a free open source piece of software Ally WordPress. It's a little bit like that. You can install it on your own server. And the more people that do that, the broader the network becomes, the bigger masteron becomes.

So we have a server, it's [email protected]. You can join there if you like. But it really makes no difference. You can join hundreds and thousands of other servers. It's now, I think, 7 million users strong. I think the statistic that I read on Twitter, funny just before we started this conversation was that they had 127,000 people sign up in the last hour.

I dunno where these metrics come from to be honest. But anyway, the, it is growing and it's growing and be, I think a lot of people have decided I'm gonna try it out, dabble in it a bit. Some people seem to like it more, some people definitely don't like it. But if you're into this you can sign up for our sign up for anyone you like.

But the reason I'm mentioning this, there is a WordPress connection here, is that it seems that quite a lot of the WordPress developers have got really interested in this as well. And they're trying to figure out ways. Connect the Social Network masteron with their WordPress website. So I'm just gonna raise a few articles that I saw this week.

The first one, this is by Mike McAllister. And he talks about the turmoil in WordPress and so on, and he's put together this idea of something which he's calling open press, where essentially you use WordPress as the background for connecting to something like masteron. So in other words, you could use your WordPress website as the tool to publish to your social network.

So you wouldn't have to go through any third party, you wouldn't have to use something like Buffer or anything, pay a subscription fee. You just go directly from your website to your masteron install. And so he's thrown together a UI of what he thinks it would look like and what the different screens would be like.

He hasn't built it, he's just saying, this is what I imagine it would look like. So it's a social network. Attached to your WordPress website, and you could connect it to Macon. And so people could follow you on your website. They could put comments on your website, and it would all get Crosspost over to Macon because unlike Twitter, it's not a world garden.

So he's done that, which I think is really interesting. And then a whole bunch of other people have started creating stuff. This one is called Activity Pub. Turns out that Activity Pub is the tech stack that Master Don is built on. I don't really understand it, but it's a protocol going on in the background which means that you can federate and update all of the content.

So think of it a bit like the Secret Source that makes Twitter happen, that will Activity Pub is the secret source that makes Masteron work. So there's that plugin, which you can install on your WordPress website. It's beta software at the moment, and it means that you can connect, if you start posting stuff on your website, it'll go to Masteron and so on.

So it's connecting. All of those dots. We have another one here from Tom Finley. He's connecting his WordPress website to the Fed averse. I'll put all of these in the show notes if you're interested. And there's another one here, and I forget who wrote this one, I'm really sorry. But they use three plugins in combination with each other.

One activity pub, which we've just looked at, one called Curiously Web Finger and one called Web Mention. And so he goes into the way that he's implemented on his website. Anyway, the long and the short of all of this is it seems like there is a little bit of a ground swell of WordPress developers who would like open source social networking to connect with open source CMSs, AKA WordPress.

And I just thought it was really interesting, although almost impossible for me to explain. So I do apologize for my rambling. What do you guys think about all of this? Are you getting off Twitter? Is there any part of you which has been. Alarmed into rethinking your social networking. I know that once you're there and you've got your following and it's all established, it's very compelling to stay, isn't it?

[01:18:03] Katie Keith: I have a bit of a confession, which is that personally, I literally joined Twitter like a month ago. ,

[01:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: just when it all happened, .

[01:18:12] Katie Keith: I know. And it was a total coincidence. I was a total Twitter virgin. We had the bomb to Twitter for years, but we don't do a lot on that. And that's for the company. My husband, Nady slash Business Partner's been on at me for ages, cuz I'm the one that.

Does these things and gets out there more in the community and all of that. He was like, you need to have a Twitter profile. That's where another place people are talking that you need to be on. So I signed up for Twitter and then everyone does a big exodus, which apparent is because of the acquisition and not because I just joined, ,

there's no

[01:18:44] Katie Keith: so yeah, I'm new and learning it and everybody else is like hating it and moving on.

So I'm probably not the best person for no. Any real opinion ?

[01:18:55] Nathan Wrigley: No. What do you think then, Jess, does any of this, does it trouble you that we have a social network, which seems to be, people often call it the town square, the online town squares where a lot of things take place, especially technology.

Twitter and WordPress seem to have a real nice binding effect. There's a lot of people on Twitter talking about WordPress and and now we have some curious decisions being made, let's say by the senior management which kind of make me a bit worried.

[01:19:26] Jess Frick: Yeah. So I'm on Macon as well. I also, started getting active again on Tumblr.

There's a number of different options, places for us to go. I find Macon very interesting, but admittedly, like I said I'm a month away from 14 years on Twitter. Yeah, I learned about WordPress through Twitter. Yeah. And it's just, it no, I learned about WordPress elsewhere, but I started really using it and I got my first job in the WordPress community through Twitter.

I've got people that I've known for years that I only really talked to over there, and so it absolutely breaks my. That things are getting so weird. But I think that Macon has a lot of promise. I think it's not gonna be for everybody. One of the things that I really love over at Macon is that people that run servers have their own roles.

Yeah. So certain things that might be allowed in one area are not allowed elsewhere. And I think from Yeah, that's right. Business perspective. I think a lot of businesses are very nervous about putting too much into Twitter.

[01:20:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, it would appear certainly from a an advertising perspective. My, my impression from everything that I've read is that the advertising revenue of Twitter has declined.

And if that's the case, I think it was already not a profitable company. So it's gonna be, I presume, less profitable. Yeah, you're right about the rules. Each server sets up their own rules, I should say. If you sign up for a service, so let's say you sign up for the one that I've got going, that doesn't lock you into that server.

You can still communicate with everybody else, but there's no there's no algorithm. So it's not pushing things at you that you don't want. There isn't any kind of algorithm like that. So when you first join your. Completely empty because there's nothing to show you because there's, it's not like we've gonna stick something from Kanye West in there, or now Mr.

Trump's back on, that kind of thing. They can't because you haven't told it what to give you. And it's only when you start following people that you can that you can start to see things and then they slowly but surely come in, you can also follow hashtags. So I'm following the hashtag WordPress and that's now getting pretty busy.

There isn't a day goes by when there's not dozens of comments on the WordPress hash WordPress hashtag from all sorts of different places. And what's quite curious as well is I'm actually colliding with people that I definitely have never come across before. So that's a really nice upside.

You're right about the rules. I've set some basic server rules. I essentially copy and pasted the rules from another instance, which I thought they're fairly sensible defaults. Basically, it boils down to be polite and if, if you can manage that we'll all get along well. But it does mean that I can, if I wish to boot people off, I don't see that's probably gonna happen.

But you can block people. You can, say, I don't want to hear anything with this word in it, so it's fully featured. Anyway, there we go. Do you think it's

[01:22:48] Jess Frick: better for sustainability that we have one behe of Twitter or 50. Little

[01:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: masteron servers. Yeah. So I dunno how many are, but there's thousands of masteron servers now.

So the load, it sounds like the load would be spread out, but it doesn't really work that way. So if you are on my server has to be switched on and working for you to be able to communicate with all the other servers. So it's not if mine goes offline for a bit, it just that information travels elsewhere.

No, they all need to be going at the same time. So from, it's not particularly sustainable from that point of view, but you can migrate. So if you disagree with the rules or you feel that, you've been hard done by over on one server, you can download your your you can download your account.

My understanding is it doesn't bring the messages that you wrote along, but it will bring your followers. So if that's important to you, if you've spent years and you've got 10,000 followers, they will all come across. But I don't think the messages that you previously wrote will, but I'm sure there's some tool or other online that can do that for you.

But it's more, to me, the idea that, so let's say that it goes really p shaped over at Twitter, it feels at the moment as if there literally is a single human being in charge of everything over there. Now, that's what it feels like, and I've got no opinions really about that person. But I'm sure a lot of people would find him objectionable.

Maybe a lot of people would find him not objectionable, but the, at the end of the day if he can just say now Twitter is going to behave like this, we're all gonna have to put up with it. Whereas over on Masteron, it's up to me how my server behaves. If I want to make it incendiary, I can make it incendiary.

If I want to enforce politeness, I can enforce politeness. And in that way, hopefully people will be attracted to the one that. Suits them best. You also get what's called a local timeline. So because mine's hopefully gonna be more about WordPress than other things, that may be something you might be drawn to it because WordPressing stuff is going on in there by default.

You can look at that on the local timeline. Sorry, I'm drowning on about it. But I think it's, I really want it to succeed. I think open anything is yes, better than closed anything. And this is open. So that

[01:25:11] Jess Frick: to me is where democratizing social.

[01:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really. And who knew, right? Who knew that six weeks ago that it was gonna take off essentially?

Jess, if you'd have looked at my master on install six weeks ago, it was pictures of cats. And that's not a joke. It was literally pictures of cats. Just one big scroll of cats. That's all it was. Cuz all the people who were somehow getting in there were doing pictures of cats. Now it's everything. , it's literally everything.

It's like Twitter, but quieter. There isn't a subject that isn't being discussed on there. It's pretty phenomenal. That's awesome. Sorry. No.

[01:25:52] Jess Frick: Sorry, Katie. , come on in. The water's fine. Okay. Yeah. Learn a, learn another social

[01:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: network. That's right. She's not got a lot to lose. That's the good thing, right?

. Yeah.

[01:26:04] Katie Keith: Yeah. I'm just waiting to see, because I think, as Robert Kaser said in a comment, it may, the dust might settle and Twitter that has a lot of momentum and built up. A lot of people's objections are based on principle and outrage more than anything practical, I think. So it'll be interesting to see if people get used to it and things settle and but yeah, I might join Master Don if everybody seemed, if it, I'm not much of an early adopter, so I might just wait and see what

[01:26:35] Nathan Wrigley: happens.

No, we were, we've worked that out from your recent stuff.

[01:26:38] Katie Keith: It's interesting what you've said about sustainability because each owner of a server has, makes that decision. So the WP Builds server, you could choose to host on Green energy and couldn't you? So in theory and presumably, is there a way of you telling the people that might sign up for the server that it is a green

[01:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: server?

Yeah, so it, because it's open source, if you wish to, you can do anything with it. You could, somebody was, there's a 500 character limit on a post. So what is it on Twitter two 80? So it's more or less double. But if you wish to, you could just go into the code and make it, I don't know, 10,000. You could write essays on there.

It's just, it's up to you. The default is what you get. For most people it's absolutely fine. So yes, you could make any kind of rules, anything you like. And I imagine that is what's gonna happen. I imagine now that there's interest in it and people who are experience coders, which I'm really not, if they if they find it of interest, they'll start going in tinkering with the code and fork.

Mastered on and making it into, I don't know, sort a different setup. Anyway, there we go. Thank you for your comment, Rob. That's really nice. He says he loves Twitter. I think it'll sort itself out and we just need to take deep. I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. So do I mean, I don't want it to fail. I hope so.

[01:27:51] Jess Frick: Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. We were told that it was gonna go down this weekend and I was like checking every morning. Yes, it's still live.

[01:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: Did you see the proposal for a WordPress based social networking, your site, your profile, your content? Yeah, so that was open the one that we mentioned ago from Mike McAllister Open Press, but there's also Alex Kirk has a plugin called Friends, which has been out for years and basically does what Masteron does in WordPress, but, and it interconnect.

Different WordPress websites. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. That's it. We've run out of time. I'm really sorry. There was probably some more things that we wanted to cover. Katie I do want to give you a chance. You did write in the show notes that you had something that you wanted to say about bar two's, bits and pieces for this week.

And I'm sorry I haven't given you a chance, so go for it now. I'm sorry to have used up all the time.

[01:28:41] Katie Keith: Oh, that's okay. It was mainly that it's Black Friday week which we haven't even touched on amazingly. And like all the WordPress companies are doing Black Friday sales, of course, aren't they? Yeah.

Interesting week. Hopefully every. It'll be interesting to see how it compares to previous years actually, because of the economic climate and all of that. Yeah.

[01:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, I can tell you that there's no shortage of offers on like I said, we've got our page where there's 200 plus WordPress offers, so every company seems to be in on it.

I remember when we were in World Camp world Camp us Jess, your stall was deliberately not doing, they, they had the anti gimmick. You were doing things very differently. How are you doing a Black Friday thing or are you doing things differently over there this time as well? No,

[01:29:32] Jess Frick: black Friday, we're not doing Black Friday because we expect most of our customers are gonna be busy.

But here's the thing, if you need good hosting, reach out and we always have a deal

[01:29:43] Nathan Wrigley: for you. Nice. That's a good answer. When's your one running from Katie? Is it happening soon? What was the date again?

[01:29:51] Katie Keith: We're doing an early bird sale now. But the main big sale starts Friday to Monday, basically.

[01:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So this Friday through Monday, so you got the weekend and what was the, what was it again? Was it 50%? Possibly,

[01:30:04] Katie Keith: something like that? Yeah. Yeah, it's 25% just for a few days for people that can't wait. But the main sale, which most people would wait for, it's 50% from Friday to Monday, which we haven't done for years.

Most people do 30 or maybe 40 at most, but we are doing

[01:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: 50 this year. Let's see how it goes. I think, yeah good luck with all that. I hope it works out well. So that's bar two, the number two yes.com, not T wwl or t barn two.com. Also, you can go to pressable.com and find out. Managed WordPress hosting from company that Jess works for.

Thank you so much, Katie. Thank you so much, Jess, for joining us today. I hope that you feel that you wanna come back. I know Jess is probably booked in for a few more already, but Katie, if you wish to come back we'll sort that out with you at some point. Yeah, definitely. Now the humiliating bit.

Katie, I'm sorry about this. We have to raise our hands cuz this is the, this is what we do, the image. Can you give us a little wave, Katie? Yeah, that's it. That'll do. That's it. That's fine. Thank you very much to those people that joined us live. If you're not joining us live, you can still put a comment [email protected].

Search for episode two three on, and we'll see you next week. Take it easy. Bye. Thank you.