This Week in WordPress #241

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 241, which was recorded on Monday, the 13th of February, 2023. This episode entitled Tiny Plastic Chairs with No Cushions. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'm joined today by three lovely guests, the first of which is Michelle Frache, but I'm also joined by Chris Budgett and Dominika Milkshake.

We're here to talk about WordPress, so that's exactly what we do. We spend a lot of time at the beginning talking about Word Camp Asia, which is happening towards the end of this week. We also touch upon the sad news that GoDaddy have had to let go of up to 8% of their staff. We then get onto WordPress 6.2 beta, which has been announced and tell you how you can go about testing that.

We also talk about the WP Community Summit. It's happening in 2023. Michelle has applied and you can too. We also talk quite a lot about AI generated images. Chris in particular has got a lot to show us, including hundreds and hundreds of avatar pictures of him. The page builder Summit is coming around next week, and so we talk about how you can get into that and then a little bit more AI about creating webpages. Is it going to get rid of all of our jobs? It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the 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% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/WPBuilds.

Hello? Hello. If episode number 241 of the WP Builds podcast, I've just had a total catastrophe. I went to fill up my pint of water. Oh, it's now all on my lap. I'm sitting in a pint of water for the next hour and a half. Brilliant.

[00:02:28] Michelle Frechette: At least it's not hot coffee, right? . Oh, you couldn't

[00:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: make it up. I mean, this is just a smooth floor and I just tripped. I dunno why. Anyway, at least it didn't my computer. So I'm still here and I'm joined by three lovely, lovely people. We're gonna talk about WordPress a lot. But before we get to that, let's have the introductions.

Firstly there, it's it's Michelle Frache. How are you doing, Michelle? I

[00:02:53] Michelle Frechette: am well, thank you. How are you?

[00:02:55] Nathan Wrigley: I am, yep. Honestly if, if you'd asked me 30 seconds ago, I would've said fine. I think now the answer is wet, soggy, soggy, soggy is how I am. Yeah. Let's do the official introduction to Michelle Lowe.

We know it's, we know it's a good one. Michelle Frache is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web. She's the, she's called, she was called the Busiest Woman in WordPress by Matt Mullenweg. We were there. Word Camp US 2022. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

She's the founder of Underrepresented in Tech Korea of wp. A pages president for the board of Big orange chart.org. Barely started. Director of Community Relations post shut.com. No, I, I'm gonna do it. I'm getting through it. Co-host of the WP Motivate podcast, co-host of the author, what are you? Yeah.

Audacity Marketing podcast author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at Word Camp Event, WordPress events. Michelle lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. Look behind her, you can see them and you can learn more about her at. michelle.online now I'm gonna take a drink.

How are you, Michelle? All, all good. ?

[00:04:10] Michelle Frechette: I am now . I'm, I'm headed to Thailand today. And oh, we, we'll talk about that a little bit later, but I finally got my passport, so it's, it's been a heck of

[00:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: a week . So not jealous. Michelle. There's no bit of me which wants to go to Sony, Thailand. I wanna stay here in dreary England.

Oh, Lord. Yeah. We'll get onto that. We're also now Dominika, I'm so sorry. I have absolutely no way into pronouncing your surname, . May I ask in so, so that I don't butcher it. Can you tell us how to pronounce your name correctly? I'm so sorry.

[00:04:49] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: Sure. Dominica. .

[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I, I'm, yeah, I, I'm gonna record that Play on loop and try and get it.

It's not for my tongue, that one, but welcome. It's okay. It's

[00:05:00] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: actually when I, when I had my internship in uk nobody could pronounce it, so they used to call me milkshake .

[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. That's so much more straightforward. Okay. So we're joined today by Domin Yuka milkshake. She is the community manager at hosting her, she's a digital nomad on our mission to spread happiness.

Give us an insight into the digital nomad bit for a minute. Where have you, where have you recently been hanging out?

[00:05:29] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: So I lived in Mexico for three months, which was really, really lovely. Very, very nice and hot sunshine every day. I feel like whenever I have the sunshine, it's just like, woo.

[00:05:43] Michelle Frechette: Life is much

better.

[00:05:45] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: Yeah. Currently now I feel your pain, Nathan, because I am in Lithuania and we have very gray skies here. Yes. So I, I know what you are going through. Yes. But I'm flying to Bangkok tomorrow. So

[00:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: again, no jealousy there at all. Just let's see if they can do the full word. Camp Asia trifecta with Chris.

Chris, before we introduce you, are you going to Word Camp Asia?

[00:06:16] Chris Badgett: Only on Twitter. I won't , I'm gonna hold down the gray with you. Maybe there's

[00:06:21] Nathan Wrigley: another one. Yeah. Yeah. We're joined by Chris Badgett. He's our third guest today. Chris used to be on this show when it first started, you were on like dozens and dozens of times and then, you know, just sort of saw the light.

didn't come on again for ages, but he's back. If you don't know Chris, Chris is the c e o and co-founder of Lifter l m s. He enjoys using and contributing to WordPress. He's been doing so since 2008. He's also the host of the L M S podcast. Anybody who doesn't know what an L m S is, I guess it would be good to clear that.

What's an LMS and what does lifter. It's a

[00:06:59] Chris Badgett: learning management system. So for creating online courses or training based membership sites on WordPress, that's what Lifter does.

[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: That is what Lifter does. Yeah, that's great. Thank you and appreciate you joining us. I know that for some of you, it's pretty early in the morning.

First of all, if you are interested in sharing this podcast, the best way to do it is to go to, well send people, go to Twitter right now, this second and like in w People slash Live and then share it. If you send people there, then they can comment. That's perfectly fine. But they'll need to have a Google account cuz it's YouTube comments.

Another way of doing it, if you're in our Facebook group, you can do this, you can find the post over there. and in order to share your avatar name, Facebook require you to click a link. It'll be at somewhere, but it's chat.restream.io/fb. And if you do that, then we know who you are. Entirely up to you. Some people don't do it and they just write their name as the first part of what they're writing, but yeah.

Okay. Let's see. , I didn't, I I didn't expect anything less. Just so that, you know Dominica and Chris, Peter Ingersol every week drops in a nice short weather report and we always start the show with what the weather's like in Connecticut. I dunno how it began, but it it's, it's a thing. So the weather's like in Connecticut.

Nice for you to join us. Thank you, Peter. Hello. It's one degree centigrade, 34 degrees under sunny skies here in Connecticut. Temperatures will be well above normal today. Thank you. That's probably about,

[00:08:35] Michelle Frechette: that's exactly what I have here in Rochester

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me this, right, you American folk.

What is it with Fahrenheit? I mean, it's the most, is what we know. It's, it's most mental set of numbers, isn't it's, it's just like yard. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:53] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: It's the whole system. Everything. Everything is messed up in America. . No,

[00:08:58] Michelle Frechette: but only, but you, you Brits, you Brits made it up. It's called the Imperial System

[00:09:03] Nathan Wrigley: Miami.

I know. Absolutely. We check this out, right? We have this thing, and it's the only thing that we weigh it in is ourselves, and we weigh ourselves in stones. Stone stones, the number of stone. I mean, which stone? Who's got the stone that, you know, it's all measured by. I've no idea. Yeah, but we also used yards and.

we use Miles. Quite a lot of people who were educated, you know, quite a while back. They're measuring things in feet and inches, whereas all the young people are measuring everything in centimeters. We could go off a complete tangent and just We can agree on pints though, . Yay. Yeah, I've just measured out a my lap.

I know exactly what that feels like. Oh, dear. Yeah. Okay, let's get onto the sort of word pressy stuff, shall we? Very nice to have all three of you with us. I really appreciate it. Let me just share my screen. Okay. Some blatant self-promotion, just for a couple of minutes, if that's all right. This is WP Builds.

This is the website where we got all the stuff we produce, a podcast episode on a Thursday. That's usually an interview or a chat with David Worsley. David Worsley's Facebook account I think was hacked this week. So if you go to see David Wamsley on Facebook, I don't know what you're gonna get, but it probably won't be him.

The other thing to mention is that we do this show, it gets repackaged as a podcast episode and it goes out tomorrow. So on a Tuesday, if you wanna keep up to date with that, then stick your email into there and press the blue subscribe button and we'll, we'll keep you updated. We don't send out lots of junkie emails, we'll just send out the ones letting you know there's a, a new episode.

The other thing to say, , I am gonna see how many times during the course of this episode, I can say the words, page Builder Summit. There's one be and there's an advert right there next to me, Sally. Yeah, that's right. Somebody keep track, somebody keep track of the amount of times I say Page Wilder Summit.

There's two. Because it's on next week, it's starting next week, next Monday. It's from the 20th to the 24th of February, 2023. It's five days, the first four days of presentations. And the last day is more, more all about networking and things like that. We've got loads of great speakers. If you go to page builder summit.com, you can see who they are.

If you just sort of scroll down, you get a, you know, you get some more information about all of them there. They are lots of lovely fine people. And this is.

[00:11:29] Michelle Frechette: A good time to remind people that we will not have this podcast next week because you'll be

[00:11:34] Nathan Wrigley: doing page builder Summit. That's a good point. Yeah.

We won't be having this next week because I'll be doing the page builder summit. Yeah, that's a good point. Thank you, Michelle. Yeah, so if you, if you wanna attend, it's completely free. The only caveat around that is that you can watch the videos for the first 48 hours for free. And if you wanna keep them after that, we have an upsell.

Totally optional. But you get to keep all the materials and the things that the speakers have added in, you'll be told about it when you sign up. So, page BOLO summit. Dot com. That's three and that's the number three. Oh, isn't it? It's more

[00:12:06] Michelle Frechette: than, it's more than three .

[00:12:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is it? Oh, you actually keeping track.

[00:12:10] Michelle Frechette: Oh, that's right. You have to like sticks now. . .

[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: No. Anyway, I've been working hard on it, so forgive me for that. Couple of comments. Dropping in. Max is joining us. Hi Max. Nice to have you with us. He says hello everybody. We've also got two of, we got Lana Happy Monday she says. And Courtney. Courtney from Amsterdam.

Courtney, does that mean you are currently. In on route to to Bangkok by any chance. I'm imagining that's what's going on there, but I've been

[00:12:41] Michelle Frechette: following her online. She is on route.

[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you for joining us in the middle of your journey. That's amazing. Right. Let's get on with the word Pressy stuff for this week.

It won't surprise you to learn that. The first thing we are gonna talk about is Word Camp Asia. It is happening towards the end of this week. I think Contra Day is, what is Contra Day? Is it the Friday? You know it is.

[00:13:03] Michelle Frechette: Yep. Okay. Or Thursday? Thursday.

[00:13:07] Nathan Wrigley: Thursday. And then, Yeah. 17th. When is the 17th? . Okay. Yeah.

Well, we'll ignore the days. It's happening on the 17th and it's going on through to the 19th. It looks like it's gonna be a really amazing event's Friday, I think. Is it okay? Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I

[00:13:21] Michelle Frechette: lost track of what's what, ?

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's the first word camp that's been held in Asia of this magnitude.

Obviously there's lots of more local ones, but it was supposed to happen back in 2019 and 2020. Honestly, I've I f Sorry. 2020. Thank you. Honestly, I feel it was. A week before that, that the whole covid thing swept out of control and the, it got pulled. I was, I remember looking at social posts back then from some people who'd already arrived at the destination and they were having like a little bit of a vacation beforehand.

Whole thing got kiboshed went online and now the real thing is happening again. Michelle, it sounds like you are not going, oh, are you going? You are going, you're not going, you are going, you're not going. I can't decide. You did a post about it though. , what? It's called Michelle almost didn't make it to Asia.

What, what serious, what did you do?

[00:14:16] Michelle Frechette: I lost my passport. Oh. And had to get a new passport and expedited it with three to five, it says three to five weeks, and it showed up in four weeks. If it had been not been here by last week, I would not have been able to schedule a travel. So it arrived last Monday and I was able to book all my travel and I'll be getting on a plane in about.

Six hours, seven hours. And on my way through New York City to Paris to Bangkok,

[00:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: it feels like the passport is one of those objects that you take real good care of. And it goes in that drawer, you know, that draw that we've all got there it goes. What, like, genuinely where you're tearing your hair out, it's gotta be in that drawer.

What happened to the drawer? Yes.

[00:14:59] Michelle Frechette: As a matter of fact, it ha it had to have been in between two drawers and so I reported it missing. And once you report it missing, doesn't matter if you find it, which I did. , you still have to get a new one. I found it. I was like, oh, if I can only just use this one.

But yeah. So, but, but I, the bottom line is it still has my married name on it because I had to do it quickly. So I'll be traveling against Michelle Ames, which you all have seen before. But but I got my passport and I am heading out this afternoon.

I am

[00:15:33] Michelle Frechette: so speaking,

I'm speaking at Word Camp

[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Asia.

I know, I was gonna get onto that. Mm-hmm. , you are doing a bit of speaking. What's your, what's your presentation about? My

[00:15:42] Michelle Frechette: presentation is called Look for the Good, and it's about the fact that we've had three years of upheaval in WordPress and in our world, right, with pandemic, et cetera. And more than pandemic, there's been floods and Gores and all of these other things.

But the one thing that's really carried me through, and I think a lot of other people too, is that WordPress has become more tight-knit and that ev that because we were forced to go online to meet people, we've actually been able to grow our networks in ways that we might not have been, had things continued to be just in person.

Yeah, that's a good, good point. I've, I've strengthened relationships around the world for sure. Mm. Because, and met people that I didn't know before because everything was online. So yeah, I have a 10 minute, I'm flying all halfway around the world for a 10 minute talk and I couldn't be happier. . Well,

[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: that's, yeah, that's great.

And Dominique, you are going as well, right? Yes, yes. Tomorrow, yes. Tomorrow. Are you, are you there in like an official capacity? Are you going for hosting or are you going just to check it out? So

[00:16:44] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: I'm going, I have like three roles, . So I am going as obviously part of hosting, which is awesome and amazing and, you know, quite a few of us will be going.

So it'll be a very interesting experience and, you know, to, to compare it, you know, work camp work camp us Work Camp Asia, you know, how, how it'll be like, I am also going as an mc. So I will be the whole leader on Sunday. And I'm also going, and I am a little bit nervous about this but myself and Yvette from Yost will be leading marketing table on a contributor day.

and it's my first time doing that. So I am nervous and I told David that she will be the chef and I will be the sous chef.

because I haven't done it before. But it's, it's very exciting. So there will be a lot of things happening for me, and you know, I think it'll be fun.

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: and Chris, what can we say? You know, just commiseration, basically. , you know,

[00:17:58] Chris Badgett: have fun. I did. I had to spread my word. Camp love around. So I will be going to Europe and us.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you are gonna go to the European one. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be held in Greece later this year. And it looks like, well, Athens in particular, and it does look like it's gonna be a really nice event. Oh. So that's good news. Oh. You'll have to come onto the show and we can we can re re reprise this conversation, that you'll be able to say that you went, I actually forgot about this.

Well, not forgot, but forgot to put it into the show notes, but I'll quickly share it. I did a, a WP Tavern podcast episode with now Co takao about Word Camp Asia, and it's actually a really interesting conversation. She, she was just trying to explain how they're trying to make it different, but also trying to explain why it's so important for that part of the world to have this event, you know, for it to be a, a flagship event.

And and it's a, it's really worth listening to whether you're go in or whether you're not going. It doesn't really matter. It's just a good listen. And one of the things that she made, the, made the point of which I picked up on, was about how it can be. For folk to, to get visas for places like let's say Greece or the United States, if they want to attend Word Camp US or Word Camp Europe or something like that.

And, and so hopefully,

[00:19:20] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: especially the states. Yeah, I think, yeah. I actually, when I was coming to the States I got stopped at the border of patrol, border Patrol, I guess. Yeah. That's how it's called.

[00:19:31] Michelle Frechette: Customs

[00:19:32] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: and, and Customs. Yes. And I was questioned for an hour and a. Oh my goodness. I had to show that I'm, I'm working for halzinger.

They even wanted to see my bank statements that actually Halzinger pays and then like they kept asking the same questions over and over again, you know, the standard procedure. Oh wow. So I was like, oh my God. Do you really think I want to stay in the US ? No.

[00:20:01] Michelle Frechette: I, I won't take that personally. How about you?

[00:20:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's, yeah. Okay. Well that is, that's something, I mean, to be honest with you, I remember the paperwork that I had to go through for, for the US was, was on a scale actually that I've never had to do before. And I've been to the US several times, but it's really, it's really gone up a gear. Obviously Covid throws a lot of paperwork in your direction and you had to provide all of that proof that you'd been vaccinated and, you know, download official documentation in our case from what's called the nhs, the National Health Service.

But also there was all sorts of other documents. And I found it quite strange that I got all this documentation meticulously prepared. You know, I had it all in like this little folder so I could whip it out at the moment. And the guy the costumes to me just. It barely looked at me. It was like, I've just done all this.

You could at least look at it. But yeah, I'd probably have had rather had the easy ride. But yeah, so that was her point that it's incredibly tricky, very costly for people to make it over to that, those parts of the world. So that's a, a really important point. So go and check that out. It's podcast episode number 62 on the WP Tavern.

Okay. From good news to bad News. I think this is unequivocally bad news and we very rarely feature bad news, but I think this is worth mentioning. Okay. If you've been following on social media this week, oh. I have to say this first GoDaddy are, or GoDaddy Pro is a sponsor of this podcast. So you just have to full disclosure, you know, they, they help maintain this podcast, so that's important to get out there.

But tragic news this week f February the eighth, GoDaddy, C E o, Aman Bhutani, I think that's how you pronounce the name said that the global 8% of the global workforce will be laid off. I suspect that all the people who are earmarked to be laid off have already found out about that. But essentially it, for me, obviously not being on the inside of the GoDaddy team, I, I didn't see this one coming.

I just saw the press release and there it was, and so it was a sudden bolt out of the blue. I'm sure that all of us know a heap of people who potentially may have been caught up in this. I. Kind of immediately got myself on social media and tried to connect with people directly just to sort of see how they were.

And it's just hard, isn't it? The, the thing is this isn't just go duddy. It seems to be across the board, Google, Facebook, all these companies laying off significant amounts of people. I think in Google's case it was 12,000 redundancies, GoDaddy, I think it was in, in the mid five hundreds. So we're reporting on it, not with any, you know, delight or anything like that, but it's important to mention.

So, yeah. Have you got any thoughts on this? I don't know, Michelle Amika. Chris, what you've got got to say about this, whether you've noticed the tightening of the belts in your part of the world, in your companies.

[00:23:14] Michelle Frechette: Not here, not at, not at liquid Web, but at least not that I'm aware of . No, but things are, things are, you know, progressing as as normal.

There, but I will point out, if you are somebody who has been laid off, go to my website that I built, wp career pages.com and it lists a, there's almost a hundred different WordPress and WordPress adjacent companies there, and it just is a link to their career pages. Lifters on there, for example, hosting on there, for example.

So if, if they're hiring and you click through, you will see the the openings that they have. And usually every Wednesday I tweet at least 10 openings or 10 companies that are hiring with openings. I, I will be probably taking a hiatus this weekend next week because of travels to our Camp Asia. But go to wp career pages.com is a starting place looking for work because that's, that's why I built

it.

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: it's it's also, I've found the, the hashtag on Twitter, which in many cases gets cross posted over to Masteron WP Jobs. Hashtag WP Jobs seems to be a good one to follow as well, cuz people seem to be widely, widely used in that. Okay, thank you Michelle. Yeah, that's really useful. Wp career pages.com. Go check it out.

What about hosting? How's it all going over? Well,

[00:24:37] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: it's going really well. It's kind of the same. We, we are, we're definitely not letting people go and, and we are looking for people all the time as we're growing in different regions. So definitely check out our careers page and while we are at it, I just want to say, Michelle, how amazing.

I always admire you, how many plates you're spinning at the same time, , it's like, oh, yeah, I build this page and I do this marketing thing and I do this, and it's like, wow, like how many hours you have in the day. So it's amazing if you help out. Thank you people.

[00:25:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love Michelle can manage to, Michelle can manage to spin multiple pages and I can barely hold onto a glass

That kind of speaks, I'll tell

[00:25:25] Michelle Frechette: WP career pages was a pandemic lockdown project because I couldn't go anywhere on vacation. So I thought, well, I'll, he's spend vacation day to do something helpful to the world. So Nice, nice. It is the most simple website you'll ever encounter. It's basically a page, but it's just got links that are helpful.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: What about the l m s industry, Chris? I mean, I know that in the pandemic, well, I, I'm guessing that in the pandemic, the l m s industry kind of had a bit of an shot in the arm. I imagine it became way more popular. So that precipitous rise, which I'm guessing occurred, did it then lead to a precipitous drop?

Has it gone off the other end, or has it continued to grow?

[00:26:04] Chris Badgett: There was a, you know, a spike and then that particular cohort was a little more churn heavy. But the, the, the thing about the l m s industry that's interesting is it tends to benefit from challenges pandemics won. Also, when the tech, like the inflation job market stuff, it also puts pressure on people to do alternative streams of income side hustle.

Yeah. Or re-skill for change. Like, let's say courses about how to use AI and marketing, seo tech. So it's a, it's a robust industry, particularly when there's challenges, which is kind of counterintuitive. But yeah, that's, that's, that's where my head goes with the, with the layoffs that are happening in tech and, and the, the pressure from ai.

You know, Seth Godden wrote a great book called lynchpin. So how do you make yourself indispensable? So these are important questions in terms. You know, competing or, or leading or managing in a world of ai and also just in terms of what roles do tech companies look at when they do their first rounds of layoffs and stuff like that.

Just kind of coming into that with eyes wide open and how can you re-skill to make yourself more future-proof.

[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really interesting point, and we will be coming back to the whole AI thing in a minute. But d you've noticed this in the past, have you, this is a trend. When does layoffs in one industry, you find an uptick in l m s People suddenly they're, they need something to do.

They need to be busy generating income and creating courses around the knowledge that they've got. And WordPress knowledge is indispensable. There's loads of things that could be packaged off as courses if you've been into hosting or whatever it may be. Yeah,

[00:27:49] Chris Badgett: that's a, yeah, a hundred percent. And I, I just see a lot of people creating content and courses on how to deal with the AI situation or how to leverage it, like how to do SEO in a world of ai, how to do how to be a freelance writer in the world of ai.

How to, how to augment your writing with those things instead of being disrupted. So it's yeah, the innovation train continues. It actually accelerates,

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: what did you say? Indispensable, how to make yourself in. That was the ly the premise of this linchpin book. How to Make Yourself Basically On Sackable.

[00:28:24] Chris Badgett: Exactly. Yeah. It's a great book. Seth Good has written a lot of books, but that's my favorite one of it. That's a good

[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: one. Okay. Thank you. Courtney's dropped into the comments. Thank you, Courtney. Courtney, of course, does work for GoDaddy. The WordPress community has been amazing at reaching out to impacted team members.

Thank you. Folks. Yeah, that, that's good to hear. I confess, I don't know anything about those conversations in the background, but maybe, maybe there will be some silver lining for some of the people who've managed to find other work, either in me or already or in the near future. But yeah.

Thanks Courtney. And safe travels if you don't give us another comment. Okay. So that is indeed sad news, but it was important to mention it. Let's go onto something a little bit different. This is a bit nerdy. This is the WordPress proper news. This is that WordPress 6.2. Beatta one is. Open for testing.

If you know how open source software on the scale of WordPress works, then they don't just throw out new releases of WordPress randomly. Hopefully lots of people pound on it, volunteers pound on it, try to figure out what's broken make suggestions, and then it goes through this beater phase various iterations.

And hopefully at the end of it, when WordPress 6.2 does ship all of those bugs will have been squashed. If you wanna help, you can go to this article. It's, it's on wp.org. wordpress.org. It's just called WordPress 6.2. B2 one. It's explains how you can do that and it explains how you can get a version of, of the beater and how you can report back and exactly what they would like help in testing.

There's a whole bunch of new features rolled up into WordPress 6.2. Too many to talk about here really, and we've mentioned them loads of times in the past. Chris as a plugin guy This kind of stuff must be your bread and butter, I would've thought, you know, when you get a release of this, presumably to make lifter immune to problems when it first comes out, you must be pounding on this as well, I'm guessing.

[00:30:27] Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of our product philosophies is the WordPress way. So when, you know, as the block builder and it interface there innovates, we go lockstep with that so that we're just compatible with the future. So yeah, that we're just constantly, we have a bunch of new block stuff that's getting ready to come out that leverages a lot of these things.

But I will say I'm also super excited as a marketer for. what's coming next? Part three, where we're doing collaboration, which they mentioned in that article. I know a lot of people who use Google Docs when we really, it would be great if we used WordPress natively. Mm-hmm. from, from, you know, initial concept to finish content which a lot of people do, but I, I mean, I, I find myself using Google Docs a lot and I, I'm just really excited to see WordPress attack this issue of multi-person

[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: collaboration.

I would, I would have absolutely no hesitation in using WordPress for collaborative documents. If that feature was robust, I, I would probably start to use it in preference cuz of all the great things you can do with the blocks. But given any document that I need to share with people there's, there's just no chance that I'm using WordPress at the moment.

It's always gonna be, I think it basically Google Docs 100% of the time for me, and I've probably produced 10, 15 Google Docs a week. And if I could have those hosted on my own infrastructure and collaborate and use all the blocks and all of that, yeah, that would be truly brilliant. I've got a feeling it's gonna be a really difficult task to pull off.

[00:32:02] Chris Badgett: Well I just wanna say there's been some validation with that, with Aneal over at multi Dots. They have a plugin solution called Multi collab where they're already kind of innovating into this space. So it's, it's coming.

[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: My I guess my con my concern is for people who've got, you know, really budget hosting plans, I guess if you, you know, if you're paying a boatload for your hosting, you know, that call back and forth from the server is probably gonna be handled beautifully.

But yeah, I imagine it'll be much more difficult. So we'll have to see. There was an episode that I did with a guy called Steve Burge from Publish Press. He talked about this with me for an an hour or more. And yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot in there that will be a really nice addition. So go check it out, help with the project if you can.

Michelle, Dominica, anything you wanna add about 6.2 before we move

[00:32:53] Michelle Frechette: on? I I added it to this list today to look at for two reasons. Number one, I thought it was important. Number two, I just wanted to hear you say beta several times.

[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, great. Okay. Pedro Des Sonic. Paper, the summit. You've got two more tick marks to put down. , I'm gonna make you work for that. What do you say? You say beta, right? Beta. Beta, yeah. Beta. Orta. Beta. It's got a D the way you say it, right? Beta. Beta. Beta. D. Well,

[00:33:25] Michelle Frechette: beta. Beta. Beta. Yeah.

[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: Mean I took somebody in Greece and ask them, cuz it's a, is he not a Greek word?

[00:33:32] Michelle Frechette: I took Greek. Yeah, I took nine credits of Greek in college. So I think I know what I'm doing, but you know.

[00:33:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright. She's thrown down the gauntlet. Okay. Alright. I've got some research to do. Somebody go to chat, G p t and ask it. How do you say that word? And they'll probably write me a text prompt, which won't help in any way, shape, or form.

All right. It's actually

[00:33:51] Michelle Frechette: better. So like that's where we get the word alpha. No. Is it alphabet? It's, no, we get the word alphabet from that cuz it's alpha Beta, right? So none of us say

[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: it right. You're everywhere, all at once, and you're so smart. By the way, I watched that film this week. Has anybody seen that film yet?

Yes, everywhere. Everything. I haven't seen it, everybody all the time, everywhere. It was

[00:34:14] Michelle Frechette: wonderful. It's

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: really, I literally, it's really good, was transfixed. I, I, there's very rarely a moment when I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, trying not to blink. It was that good. And then I put my he really was my young son.

Well, he's not that young. He's, he's, you know, growing up put him in front of it and he had exactly the same experience. It was just like, you have no idea what's gonna happen next, and you have no idea what's gonna happen next. And it's just, you know, the fingers and you'll nev Oh, .

[00:34:43] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: Oh

[00:34:43] Michelle Frechette: my God. You'll never disgust the hot dog.

You'll never look at hot dogs or bagels the same again. . No, no,

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: no, no. It's a, it's a hot recommendation, but don't watch it if you've had a beer because you've got no chance. You're not keeping up with that plot. It's so good. Amazing. Anyway, there we go. That's amazing. Yeah. Really, really good. Let's move on, right?

Community Summit. This is over on WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding wrote an article, by the way, Sarah Gooding, she's a bit like you, Michelle. She manages to just keep. Pushing great stuff out. Truly amazing. Since Justin left, she's just managed to keep the whole ship pushing forward. So Bravo, Sarah. Thank you.

Perhaps the Sarah for sure. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. So she's got a piece, it was 7th of February, it's called WordPress Opens Applications for 2023. Community Summit. I confess, I've not even heard of this event before. And probably the reason for that is cuz it last happened in France, Paris, France, in 2017.

And it's an invite only event, but you have to sort of, you have to get yourself on the invite list and it's gonna happen for three days amongst, amongst the select invitees. And they're gonna really just toss around the idea of what WordPress is, what the community means. Michelle, I think you've applied right?

Because you're not busy enough. You've applied and I did apply

[00:36:07] Michelle Frechette: to attend and I actually threw a topic out as, as something that I could present there. So,

[00:36:13] Nathan Wrigley: and my, my remembrance is that this are bots with Word camp us, right? So it's, that's that three day event. And then immediately afterwards, prior, Okay.

Immediately afterwards. And dare I ask, what did you submit as your, as your chat? Yeah.

[00:36:28] Michelle Frechette: So, you know, I'm, you know, I love photography and the photography team is one of the newer teams with WordPress and, you know, I, I love photography seeing on the back here. I'm one of the moderators on the photography team, and I am actually, I'll be at I'll be staffing the table for contributor day at Work Camp Asia as a, a photographer there as well.

And so I submitted the fact that we need to grow the community library, that we have the, the direct photo directory as a way to, I don't like the word recruit people into WordPress, but as a way to introduce to people that you can get a badge and you can start that like feeling of being involved with the community and contributing simply by submitting a photo that gets published to the photo directory.

You can get your first badge ever on your wordpress.org. ,

[00:37:19] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: I actually profile actually saw your, I saw your question during the maths q and a. Okay. And we have a Slack channel in, in, in our company for like people that share pictures and stuff. So I share the link that people can upload their pictures.

Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully, fingers crossed people will do that, which is, it was just really nice, you know, your, this initiative with picture

[00:37:47] Michelle Frechette: That's wonderful. Pictures. Yeah. I love it. Yeah, it's all open source, so you agree to, you know, put your photo out there for other people to use without attribution and I've been using them, I've been using pictures from, from there and ac actually in my weekly roundup.

Now for post status, I choose a photo from the photo directory, put it in my weekly roundup on, on the post status website and give you know, attribution to who it was that contributed and link a link through to their WordPress profile.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you, Michelle. I just mm-hmm. , I'm gonna have to get a t-shirt made your so with a speedometer on it and it's just that, like, it's maxed out of the amount of things that you, you're doing.

It says on this post here in the past, the community summit was created to provide an opportunity of contributors to have an important discussion and open communication channels about their work in the future. A few proposed topics including streamlining contributions to components of guttenberg that are already part of WordPress core, the importance of performance, strengthening the contributor pipeline and so on.

And you can apply, there's a link at the bottom which goes over to this website, which is make.wordpress.org. Maybe Google or don't. You'll find out later. Apply to attend the 2023 Community Summit. And do, do like Michel. . That's the t-shirt I'm gonna make. Be like Michelle . . Oh my God. That's what be one A speedometer.

And then it'll say, be like Michelle. There'll be a great big picture of Michelle's head . It's gonna be brilliant. . I'll be on, I'm on

[00:39:24] Michelle Frechette: vacation. I'm on vacation that week. ,

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: you're not actually having a vacation. Don't try to fool us. You don't take time off. No, I do though. I do. Oh, do you? Okay. Let's move.

This is a really nice piece. The a, a chat that I confess I didn't see at Word Camp Us, but name is Alex Stein. Alex Stein has been awarded the first ever accessibility fellowship. It's the pieces over at the wp community collective.com. It's a press release dated the seventh effect. You see, this is the Americans again, look, this crazy dating system that they've got here where the month comes first and then you got the DA the day after that.

Who does that? The Americans is the answer to that. I mean, such trouble, dominika. I dunno what you've done to me. I you made me like this staunch anti-American guy on this episode. reign it in a bit. It's backwards.

[00:40:21] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: It's backwards exactly like who writes like this. It doesn't make sense

[00:40:25] Nathan Wrigley: like at all.

Thank you. I'm gonna start a new podcast all about that. He has been awarded the scholarship. But my understanding is in order to activate the scholarship and for for it to be sent in his direction, the the amount that's requested needs to be fulfilled. And so, again, in the show notes will be a link to open collective.com.

And you're gonna then go forward slash the w p ccc, which stands for the WP Community Collective. Now, you'll see down here are a bunch of things which are hoped to be financed. And this is the one I think that involves Alex, I hope, getting this right. And at the moment of the $15,000 which are hoped to be raised, we have a grand total of 1027.

So if anybody feels that they could dip into their pockets to make it happen for Alex, that would be really great. Any commentary on this? .

[00:41:26] Michelle Frechette: Alex is just, he is amazing and I'm really grateful to the collective for selecting him. For Accessibility Fellow. He gives tirelessly to help people make their websites and organizations make their websites more accessible.

And he does a great job. He does a lot through meetups and he's had other web, he's actually critiqued one of my websites underrepresented in tech so that we can make it better, and he does a great job. So I think that it's very well deserved.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: It says on the, the website here, Alex has been an active contributor in WordPress since 2016.

His personal experience as a fully blind individual gives him a unique perspective on the challenges that people with disabilities face using and working in WordPress. He aims to help everybody have the same. Access to information no matter what capabilities they are working with. And then there's a quote from Alex, which I think I'll read in full if you don't mind.

I am excited to have the opportunity to give back to the project that provided me with my start in the technology field. I cannot continue to give back at my current capacity without this generous program. I will help ensure WordPress becomes more accessible and I will fight to have the community as a whole adopt new principles that will ensure accessibility is the first thought, never the last.

Yeah. Really a truly great story. That's great. So I guess in order to make that a reality some of us need to dip into our pockets. Head over to that website there, Dominica and Chris. Anything to add to that? Well,

[00:43:01] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: I love Alex. I have met him and work camp the us. He's a really cool guy. He, he joined us on the contributor dinner we were organizing, and it was just lovely to speak to him.

And, you know, for anyone that comes new into the space and for any, anyone that is, doesn't have you know, some sort of disability, it's, it's very like it brings you down toner to earth to see how people other people deal with it and, you know, to take it from their perspective. So yeah, it's really amazing what he's doing.

I really appreciate that.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Thank you, Chris. Anything on that? I just want

[00:43:45] Chris Badgett: to give a shout out to Amber Hines who's in the picture with him. She's done a lot for accessibility in the community. I saw them both at work camp us and it's, it's just great to see this, this work being done.

[00:43:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really, really nice. Getting back to the whole date fiasco. Date gate is what I'm gonna call it. Peter seems to have some insight. He says the day month position switches a bigger issue than the attention it gets. You'll have to, you'll have to explain. All I know is that if the, if the number is less than 12 and I read an American date, it could easily be one or the other.

And I get totally, I get messed up by that. Thank you to Rob Cairns. Love the work that Amber does as well. Yeah. Credit too. Absolutely. Whole, whole bunch of people in the accessibility team. Mm-hmm. , I dunno if you've ever done this and, and for, forgive me, what I may, what I'm about to say may sound crass and I do apologize if what I'm about to say offends anybody.

But have any of you ever done that experiment where you sh you. You close off your eyes and you try to use the internet. It generally speaking, and me included in the, in the pages that I produce at WP Builds, it is a total catastrophe. You know, it is so breathtakingly hard. There's so many things which we love to see on webpages.

You know, they slide around here and they collapse over there. And, and a lot of it is just the anti antithesis of what I imagine people like Alex would wish for. Yeah. I did that several months ago because I had a podcast episode with Joe Dawson and we were talking about this exact thing, and yeah, it was really salutary.

It just, it made me realize just how closed off the vast majority of the internet is, and frankly, it's not fair. I'm sorry if that came out back to front or, you know, didn't sound right. No, I think it makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Alrighty, let's move on. Right? We're gonna get into the AI that we al , ah, that we always get into ai and thankfully you can be sure that this podcast is basically driven by ai.

That's what that's what Rob Pence says. This podcast is all done by chat gpt, do you know, chat, gp, whatever it is. Ch what is it? The thing behind chat, G P t G P T something. It's going from version three to version four soon, very soon. Yeah. And apparently it's gonna get a lot better. I don't even know what that means.

It's already crazy good. So on word wordpress.com, anybody using wordpress.com you can. Do the whole AI thing inside of some new blocks. Again, Sarah Gooding hat tip to her. She's written an article all about this, to be honest with you. She, she, I, I guess she wasn't really complaining about the, the, the implementation by wordpress.com.

It's more that the AI itself, she asked it to produce pictures of, of real living creatures. So dogs and cats and humans and all that kind of stuff. And typically when it tries to do those kind of things, at least in my experimentation, you end up with the fingers, like in everything everywhere, all at once.

And, but that's true, isn't it? I produced something the other day and, and it, I can't even like this, this, there was a collection of fingers, which literally looked like spaghetti, and there were too many fingers. But then if you looked at it in another way, there weren't quite enough. It was all very alarming.

And yes. Yeah. So the AI itself is in question there. You know, don't try to get it to produce ac accurate pictures of, of people. But when it comes to sort of scenes like the one that I'm showing on the screen now, I'm, I'm showing you a screen of what looks like a, I don't know, it looks like a fairytale kind of snow scene that a child might have put together for nativity project at school or something.

It's pretty good. It looks probably like the prompt. It says a snowy village with an ice skating pond, a small bridge, a library, and shop lit from inside. That's what it is. It's pretty good. Anyway, now you can do all of this from inside of a WordPress block on.com. It can also do text, so, As we do every week, let's open up the debate about AI and how it's going to kill us all.

Shall we ? What do we, what do, what do we think? I mean, this is cool. It's in, you know, it's in.com. Now you can obviously short circuit the creation process. I, I love this topic and I want to drill down really deep inside of this. So let's have all your thoughts.

[00:48:27] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: I think it's amazing personally. I mean, if we can make AI do all the boring stuff for us, then we are only left with fun.

I mean, this is the whole point. Let the robots work for.

[00:48:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, history shows that never kind of pans out, does it? The idea that , you know, if you if you look back at like documentaries from the 1960s, they were talking about the auto auto automation that was gonna happen and look how much time we'll be able to spend on the beach.

I think, I think we all work harder now than we ever did. The auto, all the automation didn't really make any of that go away. So I, I admire your optimism, but I I don't know, I don't know if it's gonna get rid of all the dull jobs in that way. But thank you. That was a good insight.

[00:49:20] Chris Badgett: Go ahead, Michelle.

[00:49:22] Michelle Frechette: I was just gonna say, I did a demo. I, I received a demo from Andrew Palmer with Bertha ai and so he was showing me how it works and all of these things, and he was using rock climbing as the. You know, the topic to introduce to lightning articles and setting of courses and things like that.

And then he said, oh, and it's even got this image creation. And so he was typing in prompts to do image creation for rock climbing. Only the knees of the quote unquote person climbing were bent, like the opposite direction. Yeah. I thought , oh, that would make rock climbing incredibly difficult. , I don't rock climb, but I can only assume

[00:50:08] Nathan Wrigley: it's when flamingos go rock climbing.

Yeah, exactly.

[00:50:13] Michelle Frechette: So I don't think we're in danger at this point of losing our jobs for those kinds of things. However, I think it's interesting and I think that there's lots of opportunities to use it. But Chris what were you gonna. .

[00:50:26] Chris Badgett: I was just gonna make a comment on what you said, Nathan, around automation and free time.

I think there's like a couple factors there. One of 'em is, you know, mechanical and and engineering related, but the other is economic. So when it comes to sort of the macroeconomics of inflation and cost of living and student loan debt and all these other things, I think the fact that we're busier than we ever have been is not just cuz the robots didn't help.

I think there's a lot of other factors going on there too, particularly in how money works in our society. So just throwing that idea out there. But I'm super excited, like do Dominica said with you know, let, have more fun. You know, like for me, I'm not necessarily excited when I need to go find a featured image for a post.

Right? Yeah. So if I can just ask the robot to, Hey, do it in this style. I need to look like this. . I tweeted something the other day where I was like, man, I wish Canva could do that. Cause that's kind of where we go to like create a standardized graphic for like a a post or whatever. I, I tweeted that on Friday and then I saw like today that now they have AI in Canva.

It's like everywhere. And it, and maybe I missed it, maybe it's always been there at least recently, but it's just happening really fast. But I, I, I think there is a concern, like, is there gonna be this musical chairs where all of a sudden there's no chairs left for the humans? And I think the answer is there will always be a place, but we're not really clear.

on what the endgame is here. Yeah. I,

[00:52:01] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's a brilliant analogy. And I think not only will will there be less chairs, but there'll be tiny chairs that are very uncomfortable to setting . Yeah. There'll be no cushions at all. . That's completely off the menu. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's, I think it's really interesting.

But you are right. AI is creeping into every single interface now in ways that I just didn't even think so here we, here we are [email protected] interface. I think if you'd have said to me even 12 months ago, , you are gonna be able to just type words and out will pop an image and alright, we can argue about whether the fingers are, you know, functional or whatnot.

But 12 months ago there was no expectation from me at least that that would even be possible, even in my lifetime. And now, now here it is. And you've got other industries which are also receiving, you know, similar things. So copywriting, I imagine SEO will go under this as well. It music is even a thing.

Google have launched this project last week where they can, they can create, I mean, it's music really. I think most of it sounded like the sort of stuff you would wish to listen to in or not wish to listen to in a supermarket, in an elevator . Yeah. I mean, it did that sort of thing, you know, and when you clicked on the toggle for Voices, it, they haven't got the language model in there, so it just created like this choir type effect.

You couldn't actually, you know, there were no lyrics or anything, but it, it was, it sounded like it, I guess, I guess my concern is though, it's, it'll be like death by a thousand paper cots. And I, I, I am definitely playing the devil's advocate. I don't actually have a sort of doom approach to this, but it's, it's much more fun if I do.

But the, just the notion. Tiny little bits of work disappear from the human domain and go into the AI domain. So, you know, the, the thing that you said, Chris, it's not fun to find a featured image. Nah, it isn't. But somebody had to do it. Mm-hmm. . And so that job maybe just sort of gets away. And honestly, I, if you said to me if I was an employer and, and I've got a big company and I've got a team of 10 copywriters and five illustrators, and somebody comes and says, do you know what?

We could be more profitable. We only need three illustrators cuz we can use AI and let's get down to seven copywriters because we think we can farm a proportion of this out to. to the ai. Let's just see how that goes for a bit. That's a very persuasive argument. If economics are the only thing that you are thinking about.

And so there go five jobs and then, then a little bit more and a little bit more, and a little bit more. And before you know it, we've all got chains around our necks and we're sitting on tiny plastic chairs and there's no cushions. That's the name of this episode today. Tiny plastic cushion chairs.

There's no cushions. Cushions. Yeah. I, I don't know. I don't know. It just, it's,

[00:54:58] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: it's, but nothing will replace the human connection. Like, look at us sitting here, like talking to each other, like, no AI can do this. I mean, even if they can have a conversation like we're humans and we have souls within ourselves, and that is the most magic and special thing about humans, and we will evolve together.

Like, just like a lot of people thought, you know, Like factories and whatever will replace people. But eventually, you know, people changed the way they work and, and there were new jobs created and now maybe all jobs will go away, but other new jobs will appear. So like, let's some positivity and Yes.

Comfortable chairs

[00:55:40] Nathan Wrigley: aren't there Comfortable chairs? Yeah. The upholstered furniture back in the room and we'll throw cushions all over it. Yes, I like it. Peter Ingersol has been playing with chat G P T this weekend. It's a incredibly good at writing code by the way. I confess I've not done it, but I've watched videos and talked to people who have, and it really does appear to do a pretty good job.

He said I, this weekend I use chat g p T to create code snippets that let me control aspects of the block inserter to work to my liking. So, definite thumbs up for Peter. It's obviously saved you a load of time and maybe some learning that you needed to do. Okay. With that in mind, let's pop the next story out.

Actually, I'm gonna sneak something in very quickly. And that is this website. I dunno if you've come across this before. This is called w p Cody. , we mentioned it a little while ago. This is, this is Sublimely clever. So what it can do all sorts of things for, for you it's ai but it allows you to not only create code snippets.

So for example, you can click here and give it a text prompt. Say, I would like to give me a function. And we did it live a few episodes ago. We typed in, give me a function to show all of the posts with the category of I don't know fingers. But oit, the first two posts, and you click go 10 seconds later it did it.

And Mark was on the call. And Mark is a, you know, he's a, he's a, he's a coder. He knows what he's doing. He had a quick look at it. He said, yep, that'll work. And, and it took seconds. But not only can it generate the code snippets, it can also explain. Code snippets to you in English. So you paste a code snippet in and you've no idea what it means.

And, and it just writes text. It said, okay, this function is to show you the posts with the category of fingers, but it's gonna miss the first two. You can also modify code snippets. So if you're taking something out of, I don't know, you've been on an internet search and you want it modified, but you're not sure where to do it, you can do that.

And it will also explain error codes as well. And yeah, I, I think we've made Chris so fed up. Look, he's he's decided, hello. Maybe Chris was ai. Maybe he's glitched out of, he's glitched outta the matrix. Look, he's just, just disappeared for a moment there. But that's, that's a really cool website, WP Cody go.

Yeah, it's, it is, it is that u r url, a perfect learning ground if you don't know if you're not sure, and you just want a little bit of reassurance or you want to build something yourself, but this piece of news hit me just in the last hour or so. So I, I'm genuinely not, I, I haven't read it properly, let's put it that way.

But pine grow, which is a word, well, it, it's a SaaS service. back look is the, the Matrix's return , we were saying you got so fed up with the conversation about ai. You just, just take a break, go and have a coffee. Thi this is a, it's a WordPress page builder. It's also a SASS app, but it allows you to create WordPress pages.

It's not like Elementor or, or Beaver Builder or whatever. You know, you don't drag things in, you have to interact with the code a little bit more. But this week they've launched AI integrated into their page builder, and when you go down, so it's explaining how it all works and what it's good for and all of this.

And then if you, you get further down, it tells you, okay, you've got to have your own API key, just like all these other services for open ai. So you've gotta pay for the, for the prompts and things, and then we get to the meat and the bones of it, and it's, so, it's things like this. Write the text, add a button.

For downloading the portfolio. And guess what it does on your website? It adds a button for downloading the portfolio and it goes on. There's loads more examples down here where it explains the kind of things that you can do, so it can wrangle the c s s for you. If you're not that familiar with css, it will do that for you.

It will also . So this is why I think maybe we need to be a little bit concerned because, you know, jobs and all that. Right at the bottom, you can generate the whole page. So imagine this, you say, create a detailed prompt for instructing AI assistant to build a beautiful homepage for the Smelly Pets website.

With Tailwind c s s, smelly Pets offers great grooming services and organic pet care products. The AI assistant comes back with your page. And at this point I'm gonna go and start a commune somewhere you know, game. I wanna join the commune somewhere. Yeah. Nice. We'll go. And we will never mention AI and I will never carry water.

[01:00:42] Michelle Frechette: Dominica will cut. . Dominica will join you as long as it started of the United States.

[01:00:47] Nathan Wrigley: Let's try, sir. Yeah, we'll get, we'll get the dates right. We'll use all the correct types of units for Yeah, yeah. But this is, don't you think this is amazing. So it, I really didn't get time to look at it and I probably will in it more and more of a deep dive next week.

But here's an AI built into a page builder where you can write texts to achieve what you want to achieve. And I just think that is utterly, utterly amazing. So I've now talked for ages over to you.

[01:01:20] Chris Badgett: It's like a DJ making electronic music. You know, you still gotta mix it. and and iterate. Nice. And, and then throw the party.

Yeah. Anna, I just wanna add to Dominique's point earlier, you can't send AI to a Word camp for you.

[01:01:39] Nathan Wrigley: true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, it's pretty stunning. You're gonna find [email protected] I, to be fair though, is that a

[01:01:50] Chris Badgett: beautiful page?

[01:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Right. To, I, I gotta say about Pinero now, I'm not a big user of Pinero. They are not in that space of click drag. It's perfect. They're, it, it's kind of more of a coders page builder, if you know what I mean.

I think you've, you are in charge of doing the, the, the creation of the CSS and all of that. So Yeah. That there is maybe that, but no. I agree. That's that's something else that they typed in. You see? Well, I don't, don't really know. . You can also explain the code, as we said a little while ago. Anyway, go check it out.

It'll fit the images Yeah. For you. Define blocks and make blocks. Editable just goes on and on and on. This seems, yeah. Pretty cool. It's stocks dot pine grove.com. Michelle, Damika, anything you wanna add?

[01:02:42] Michelle Frechette: It it's it's very interesting to watch and see where this all goes. For sure. Yeah. I totally agree with that.

I'm gonna be say it's infancy, but it's one of the, it's like what's that, that TV show or the movie Jack where like the little kid was, was Robin Williams in the fourth grade? Like it's, it grew up so fast, right? It's still in its infancy, but it's a fully bearded adult man. . Yeah, it's like a twilight

[01:03:10] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: baby.

Twilight baby grew very fast too.

[01:03:14] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally get what you saying. But speaking of ai, have y'all seen Chris bad's images he keeps throwing out there on Twitter, like no, he is a ninja. He's a ninja warrior. He's a knight of the round table. I don't know, like he, I think you're like flying through space in some of them, Chris, like you have shared some really amazing images.

[01:03:35] Chris Badgett: Is it, I imagine that's amusing Aaron Edwards imagine tool there. And I think that's, that's also an interesting thing, like what makes those good is two things. One, you have to train it, so you literally have to upload 30 pictures of yourself and then you have to have these awesome prompts, which is what.

Aaron's tool does. And then once you learn how it thinks, like how to do those prompts, you can start mixing and matching and come up with these crazy concepts. But the human is still there, like directing the

[01:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: show, you know? Yeah. , it's amazing. Can I, can we see some of these? Have you got any sort of line around that you could show?

[01:04:08] Chris Badgett: I, I do. Just gimme a minute to pu

[01:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: pull 'em up. Yeah, it's okay. Whilst you do that, you mentioned you can share your screen. There's an icon below the, we've never done that actually. Have we? I don't think we've ever had anybody else share the screen, so let's just, fingers crossed that it works. Whilst you do that, he was talking about using a plugin called Imagine.

There was a podcast episode that I did, I think it went out on Thursday last week with the founders. It's Josh and Aaron. Perfect. Here we go. Now it's, it's gonna go like recursive, like that. I th Oh, no, that's it. We got it. Great. Okay. Can you see it? Yeah, if you, I dunno if you can zoom in a little bit.

Oh, sure.

[01:04:55] Chris Badgett: Yeah. . So this is whoa. You look

[01:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: like you are a movie star. Check in, right?

[01:05:01] Chris Badgett: Whoa, . I actually had, there's like 600 of these, so . Wow. My, my daughter did this one. So ,

[01:05:11] Michelle Frechette: there's the Astr as I

[01:05:14] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: like the one with the hair and the beard, like the prince's hair. And then the beard. My

[01:05:20] Nathan Wrigley: mouth. My mouth is open.

I am in awe that this is, is amazing. This is truly amazing. Oh, see, see what's happened to me? Fast burgers. Oh. Swing from one side to the other. So tell us how this works. Again, you download the, is this a plugin or is this an online, is this like a SAS version of their.

[01:05:41] Chris Badgett: This is a imagined ai. So you so you basically have these models and then you can do a, i, I think I used all my prompts, so I

[01:05:51] Nathan Wrigley: can't do one.

Oh yeah, don't worry. But yeah, you, you type in something.

[01:05:55] Chris Badgett: But see he's got all these presets so that you can then you can do one of these presets, but then you can modify the language. Like the one where I look like the cowboy, I actually like modified that I said, told it to like, make me look more muscular and like a , right?

[01:06:14] Nathan Wrigley: So he could truly be what you wanna be.

[01:06:20] Chris Badgett: So yeah, this is but this is the beauty of it. The beauty of it is the prompts here. So like Aaron has finally crafted the prompts to, you know, really spit out something amazing. If you just try to tell it to do something on your own, it's probably not gonna come out that good.

[01:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: So you upload multiple images of presumably just you, if, if this is what you're trying to achieve, which is, I guess this service is really trying to get, give you back pictures of yourself. Yeah. You upload a whole ton of pictures of yourself. Then click those and, and it will insert the, the cleverly written prompt on your.

Yeah. And

[01:06:57] Chris Badgett: then it'll give you like six variations of that. So these are like, you know, this is Chris's Santa Claus, six different times.

[01:07:09] Nathan Wrigley: They, for those of you that are listening to this, I do apologize, this is so visual at the moment, but what we're seeing is just Ro after Rowe of pictures, which are clearly Chris, but they have that kind of Hollywood, you know, when you look at a Hollywood poster for something like the Avengers and it, and it's kind of drawn, but it's very accurate.

We're looking at a hundred different ver hundreds of different variations of Chris as Superman, as a cowboy as, I don't even know what that one was, but as a king, as an astronaut, , and it's just crazy. Do. So Chris, I gotta ask, when you got these back, when you started to see these pictures come in, what did it.

Honestly, what did it make you feel like? Was it like, whoa, you know, pretty, I like the Lion Lion. I'm pretty cool. the

[01:07:57] Michelle Frechette: lion felt doesn't look

[01:07:59] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: like a lion. Yeah. Like, doesn't look like Chris. It just looks like a lion. Yeah, that's

[01:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: true. . .

[01:08:04] Chris Badgett: I felt like it was a cheat code on being a graphic artist. Cause I'm not a great designer.

But now, now I can create these kind of designs, you know?

[01:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That is absolutely phenomenal. For those of you that are listening and not watching, honestly, go to this part of the podcast and have a little look. So this is Imagine, and it's spelled in a funny way, it's I M A j, J I N N. A, a gin in Arabic is like a phantom, like a ghost or something.

So they've kind of played with words there. Jeanie? Yep. Wow.

[01:08:40] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: Jeanie. These are great .

[01:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: They they really are, aren't they? And now I'm highly jealous. I'm gonna have to lay down the, what is it, 29 bucks or something like that to get you. Yeah, it's very, it's very

[01:08:51] Chris Badgett: cheap. You get like 300 or something for a $29.

[01:08:55] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna go and make myself for the first time ever look cool to my kids.

[01:09:03] Michelle Frechette: I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and do me as you Nathan

[01:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: about, I don't know, it's probably about two months ago. We had, it was Halloween. It was Halloween, it was h. Michelle came on the podcast, but her camera was switched off and we didn't quite know what was going on. And then when she finally put the camera, she dressed off as me. She'd got like a gray wig and got some glasses and put on a little beard, and it was hysterically.

I mean, I actually would've dropped a glass of water properly at that point, but I it was, it was really, really funny. So you could do things like that with this, couldn't you? You genuinely could. And maybe there's some concern there, you know, you could make yourself into somebody else, but whoa, they are super cool.

Mm-hmm. . Chris, thank you for showing us that. I'll, I'll add that to the, the show notes as well. And over here we've got. Rob Keirn saying, this is amazing, Chris. Yeah. It truly is really, really cool. Mark's AI persona was on the call. Yeah, indeed. And this week I trained chat gp, a chat G p t instance to provide tarot readings a lot less expensive than they those late night.

[01:10:15] Michelle Frechette: Oh, Megan, send me a link. I, I wanna know how my travel to Asia's going to go.

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: I, and I wanna know, right, because this will. This will seal it for ai. If the AI predicts correctly, what's gonna happen? We can all give up. I am calling it on the plastic chairs, . It's, you know, if it knows what's in the future, we, we are truly doomed.

But what fun, what's fun? But Chris, you threw something in the show notes just before we started the call because they're doing something else, aren't they? The guys behind, imagine Aaron and Josh are doing something else. So what you're looking at is a press release that Chris sent to me. So it's it's not a webpage, but what's this?

Do you know?

[01:10:58] Chris Badgett: I'll put the webpage in the pr in the chat as well, so you can pull that up. But basically it's a WP, I wanna make sure I say it right.

[01:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: Let's see here. Looks like wp.chat is the URL at least. Anyway, let me throw that up quickly. Actually, let me just, Boy, that site loaded quickly. Wow.

[01:11:20] Chris Badgett: It's basically a way to, to ask. It's, it's kind of like documenting the WordPress core code itself, and then it's going to, so instead of being trained on like chat G B T 3.4, whatever, was trained on the internet up to 2021, and it was, you know there was some human curation in that process as well.

This is specifically fo focused on the WordPress core code base, and it's laying the groundwork to be used within the WordPress community. So, for example, if I wanted to deploy a chat bot on my website that to help people find their answers of how to add some custom functionality on top of lifter LMS, or, you know, figure out some core WordPress function or something like that, it can, it can do it.

[01:12:13] Nathan Wrigley: Is it free to use? I'm, I'm literally typing in. It just launched

[01:12:16] Chris Badgett: today,

[01:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: so, oh, it's really hot. How do I, how do I add a chat bot to my website? I'm gonna put that in. I mean, obviously that's got nothing really to do with

[01:12:25] Chris Badgett: WordPress. It, it also shows the sources, which is cool, which I think you mentioned in some, some

[01:12:29] Nathan Wrigley: earlier tool.

We'll come on to that in a moment, but it's thinking at, at the moment. So this is WP Dots. Sorry, WP dots.chat. Yeah, I asked it a dumb question. I'm, I'm gonna play with that and see what I can come up with for Woo for next week, but that looks really cool. So it's for those people wanting to explore the word press code base, it does feel as if it's got a little bit of an overlap with WP Cody over here, but I guess you're asking it more open-end.

Questions, man alive. Aaron and Josh are on a train ride with this, aren't they? Mm-hmm. , they're just killing it with all

[01:13:09] Chris Badgett: of that. Well, you know, the, the interesting thing is like the, so sort of like we see in the search engines, it's like a, and just like the profile picture thing, that's like a whole niche that we were just looking at with my stuff.

It's like a arms race to see who's gonna win. Like chat G B T may not even be relevant a year from now. It could be something else. Or what's Google gonna do? What's, what's apple gonna do? What's Facebook gonna do? I think we're gonna see a lot of change happening really fast here. Yeah. And there's just a lot of players, like this is just so early days, even though it's been around for a little bit.

It's gonna evolve

[01:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: fast. So by pure coincidence, I did release an episode this week on WP Build it's episode 314. And it, it, although it says, imagine adding web website. See what I did there? Imagine adding websites to your web. Imagine adding images to your website with ai. I cannot speak. So I released the podcast with them.

It's Josh Daley and Aaron. Aaron, Aaron Edwards, and it's all about that. But this is about their WordPress plugin. So the bit that Chris just showed you about creating lots of avatars of yourself, that's not the same thing. This is about. being inside the WordPress editor, a bit like we talked about with wordpress.com a minute ago.

I dunno why I'm pointing all of a sudden, but I'm doing lots of pointing now as clearly this matters. , the, the whole, the whole premises that you get, I'm gonna stop pointing, stop, but hold the desk. Wrigley that you get a, a, an option to create these images inside of your WordPress block editor, for example.

You know, you're creating a post and you want a featured image. It'll do that, all that stuff for you. So go and check that out. But also go and check out double chat, WP if you want to explore the WordPress code base, right? We're sort of rounding out. Let's finish off with a few bits and pieces, as if we've had enough of ai.

There's more to come. This is exactly what Chris was talking about. This is the, the race, the headlong race to get. some kind of AI into our search. Now, I dunno if any of you guys have played with it, but over the last few weeks, towards the end of January Microsoft invested 10 billion into open ai.

And open AI are the people that are behind all this chat, G P T stuff with the express intention of putting it into their. Search engine. Now I haven't used that. I haven't seen how that's gonna turn around, but this piece, which I thought was really interesting, was how, how disruptive this could be. Now, I, I'm kind of used to the whole Google way of doing things where you go to google.com and you type in a search and it spits out link after link after link after Lincoln.

You know, there's a lot of work done to make sure that the link that gets to the top is the, probably the most useful link to you. I dunno what I feel about getting kind of chat-based response. You know, if I'm looking for a pizza place near where I live, I think the links is great. That's just probably what I want.

But if I want to know why did, I don't know, why did Hitler invade Poland or something like that. I want, I want a more narrative answer. I probably don't want a bunch of links and then I've gotta go to each of those websites. I probably want it just give me. Gimme the answer. And so that's where I feel this is gonna fit in.

So I don't know if you think this is gonna disrupt search. I don't know if you would make use of that, but let's just talk about that for a couple of minutes. Do you think you would use that kind of search if you asked it a question, you want the answer back, or are you happy with the way that links are being handled at the minute and the added?

I guess a good overlap would be back in the day when I started using the internet. Before Google, if you wanted to search something, you had to go to directories. So Yahoo was literally a set of lists of webpages and it didn't help you at all. You just had to go and find something that might help you and then go to it.

And at the time that felt like that's, that's what search is. Then Google came along. Oh, oh, no shiny. That's what search is. And so I feel maybe that's what's happening here. And is chat G P t gonna eat Google's lunch, discuss.

[01:17:34] Chris Badgett: I'll, I'll just say the other night I was making some, I needed a recipe for scallops and I just went to chat G B t because I personally have the disdain for recipe websites cuz of all the popups and, and, and the ads and everything.

And it's so hard to find the recipe. So

[01:17:51] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: I was just, you can send to recipe always. There's always a button. There's not one jump to recipe that's the best button. It's like the Netflix. Skip the intro. It's the

[01:18:01] Chris Badgett: same . My daughter actually just showed me that I, I didn't know I had blindness to that, that jump thing.

But I think it just depends on the search. You know how, like you do like an image search, a video search. I think AI is just like another vector of search and it'll, it'll get integrated within the results of the other search search engine result pages. . But I think it's more a question of integration than one disrupting the other.

Because I may wanna know what the best pizza place is in this town just by name, or I may want to google map it. I I may want maps or you may want reviews. So like, it's just, it's it's like a lot more a lot, a lot more, a lot more texture to what you're getting out of the output. That's, that's what AI brings to the.

[01:18:50] Michelle Frechette: So a friend asked, or a friend sent me a chat. G p t generated bio for me, which had me working at places I've never heard of before. So clearly didn't work there. I'm just imagining if you've, anybody has ever seen the friend's Thanksgiving episode where the two pages of the recipe of the cookbook get stuck together?

Yes. So the trico like bananas, vanilla pudding, meat, mashed potatoes, peas, and then like lady fingers at the bottom. I'm imagining that your, your scallops could be like, and then add vanilla and brown sugar .

[01:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: That, that episode was so good, if I remember rightly cuz it stopped with me. She was making a tri full and then she got to the layer of beef

Yes.

[01:19:34] Michelle Frechette: But Joey loved it. That's the thing he did.

[01:19:38] Dominyka Mikšėnaitė: Joey loved it. He finished everybody's leftover.

[01:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: So his character's so great. I love his character.

[01:19:44] Michelle Frechette: So yeah, so I think the thing about Chap G P T is just make sure that you read everything before you either implement it, post it, or click it.

[01:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think I, I honestly think Google are a bit worried about this though.

I, I think there is a transformation possibly waiting to happen and if, if a, so. I think we've all gone out to find pizza joints, right? We've all done that where we, we want the information to come back and obviously the interface for that is a map or something like that. A bunch of links, but I imagine, I imagine there'll be a transformation if you can go knowing that it will answer your question very specifically and give you.

A narrative answer back. So in my case, you know how do I make tacos or something like that, and it will give me right off the bat how to do it. But not, not a link to a website which tells me how to do it, but here's how you do it, then. That's cool. That was a stupid example cuz you can obviously find that somewhere else.

But, you know, tell me about moral philosophy in the, in the 17th century. I, I have no idea what that means. Then it might be able to give me something useful back and rather than going off searching for it, the you know, it will, it will do this for us. So with that in mind, and I've mentioned this a couple of times, so forgive me if you've heard this before.

I just think this product is really, really great. So I've stopped using Google and I've started to use. I've started to use another search engine and it's called Neva. I'm really, really happy with it. I, I definitely think that if you're, if you're into this, you should give it a go. It's not free. Well, it is free.

There's a free version, but the good stuff, I think comes on top of comes on top of $50 a year, I believe it is. So it's not a lot, it's. Less than $5 a month, but it's pretty good they're gonna throw that AI in. Because I'm in the UK and not in the us It hasn't been made available to me, but I've seen people playing with it and it does exactly what we've just described, but it annotates it with footnotes.

So if you, for example, say tell me about moral philosophy in the 18th century, it will say, okay, this bit of the text came from Wikipedia, this bit came from philosophy.com. This bit came. And so in that way you can see how the AI has built it up. And if something turns out not to be true, you know, the layer of beef in the lasagna.

You can go and find why the AI thought it was and you can then tell the AI that's not true. And so hopefully over time it will get better. Get better. But also, look, this is kind of cool. Look, it's sucked up my Google Docs over here. So inside of the search engine is all my Google Docs. Now obviously Google's got that right, but Bing doesn't.

But now this does. It can also integrate with things like Slack so it can find all of your Slack messages. So you can search for all of that kind of stuff. Insider here, it's really cool. It's called neva.com, N E E V A. And I think they're getting quite a lot of attention in the search engine community at the moment.

They seem to be popping up on all sorts of news outlets that I wouldn't have expected in the uk. So yeah, there you go. And that's all I've got. I have nothing else. I'm finished. It's not quite true. We've got a new part of this show called. Oh, I don't even know to carry on with this. Michelle. Should I do it?

It's called what's on Nathan's head.

And it goes like this, right? The other day I got a cupboard and it, it went there and it just so happens that when I looked at my picture, the top shelf completely aligned with the top of my head. So each week for the last few weeks, I've put something on top of my head and you have to guess, guess what?

It is, what is on top of my head. Have a guess. Come on quickly. Now it's, it's a towel. It's a cloth of, so it's not a towel. It's it's a bench. You're in the right, you're in a, no, it's not a bench. It's

[01:23:46] Michelle Frechette: a blanket. It's,

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: it's not a blankets, a blanket. It's okay. Give you a bit of a clue. Bit of a clue. It's a dressing gown.

[01:23:52] Michelle Frechette: It's, it's a jumper. It's a, gets it

[01:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: What? And I haven't said it in a while, but guess what the hoodie says on it? Hold on.

[01:24:08] Michelle Frechette: Oh my goodness. It says Peach Builder Summit. What a thought. No. Unexpected. Oh my God. .

[01:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Add, add more to the tally. It's a page builder Summit. Michelle gets the, gets the award for this week. I'm gonna finish off this episode. Dawning myself. No, I'm not. Forget that. It'll get wet if I put it there.

Right. That's it. That's all we've got time for this week. I have been hopeless at carrying water. This, I think will be called tiny plastic chairs with no cushions. We'll see. Well, we're not on

[01:24:43] Michelle Frechette: screen, so if you want us to wave, you gotta bring us back. No, I'm sorry,

[01:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle.

That's okay. We .

[01:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: There we

[01:24:51] Michelle Frechette: go.

So I think the fi, correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but I think the final tally for Page Builder Summit mentions came in around 227.

[01:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I think that's about right. You, you're, you are ai. That's, that's just bad maths. That is bad maths. It was way more than that. Join, join us short us of the page of the summit next week.

One more time. 200 and whatever. But thank you so much. Michelle Frache, thank you. Dominika milkshake, milkshake, milkshake, , and Chris Badgett as well. It would be lovely to have you back on the show at some other time in the future, but for now, you don't know about this. We all wait what we do. I'm so sorry.

It's so humiliating. I know. We make that into the, there we go. We make that into the show notes. We will see you next week. Thanks for anybody who gave us some commentary. Really appreciate it. Take it easy.