This Week in WordPress #278

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week In WordPress, episode number 278 entitled, entirely free of promotions. It was recorded on Monday the 4th of December, 2023.

My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined today by not 1, 2, 3, but 4 fabulous guests. I'm joined by Jess Frick, by Taco Verdonschot, by Tim Nash and Rob Cairns. It's a WordPress podcast, so what do we talk about? WordPress, of course, amongst other things.

We talk about the newly redesigned developer resources, and the fact that they are willing to have people test out those, and possibly suggest some improvements.

We talk about gender diversity in the WordPress community, not just at WordPress events, but also in WordPress boardrooms.

We also talk about whether sponsorship should be a part of WordCamps. How would that look? Is it a good idea? Will people reject it? That dominates our conversation today.

We also talk about Yoast, and the fact that they've had an update as have Pressable to their UI of the dashboard.

We talk about Bricks. Price is going up. So lock that in if you possibly can.

And then we spend a little bit of time at the end, talking about an AI tool which draws for you. It's really quite interesting. Sorry to those of you listening to the audio. It's really a visual thing, but it's absolutely remarkable.

It's all coming up next on this week. In WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than a hundred thousand merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www.omnissend.com.

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that was quick. Hello. Hi. Back for another episode of this week in WordPress. I was eating biscuits and bananas and all sorts of contraband whilst the music was on, but it suddenly shocked me. Episode number 278. We're back. We're gonna talk about WordPress. You can see I've got a lovely collection of people.

They're over there. I don't know where they're there. They're over there. 278. We've got a fine collection of people joining us today. I guess we'll just go through in the order that they appear on the screen. So just right next to me over there, we've got Rob Cairns. Hello,

[00:03:02] Rob Cairns: Rob. Good morning, Nathan and Crew.

How are you?

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm really good. Thank you. Rob is the chief creator of Amazing Ideas at Stunning Digital Marketing. He's a WordPress security expert. He's also the co-main co-moderator, I should say, of the LinkedIn Global Community Group. In his spare time, he's an avid reader and spend time with his partner touring around Ontario.

What's your, what's your book of choice? What kind, what genre?

[00:03:29] Rob Cairns: it depends on the mood. So the rule of thumb is I have to read two business books and the third book has to be a pleasure book. Right now I am reading a book about the legendary Ken Dryden and his law school class at Cornell. It's quite fascinating.

It's a different look. He was a NHL goaltender, but he was also a lawyer by trade. So what a story that is.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Interesting. I'm a history book person. I just love reading awesome history books. Yeah. Nothing else will do. over, further over. I wish I could just go right through Rob's story. Just keep going to the Yeah, that's right.

Tim Nash. How are you doing, Tim?

[00:04:12] Tim Nash: I'm okay. I've been promoted to the top row. Yeah. I think in all the times I've,

[00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I can only say it was an accident, Tim. Oh, I don't mean it. yeah. Thank you for joining us. Tim is a WordPress security consultant. So we've got, the top row is occupied by security consultants with one notable exception, the ugly gray bloke on the far left of your screen.

he is also a professional doom speaker, an occasional bringer of joy. You can find out more about him at Tim. Nash co uk. So I appreciate you joining us today. Very, much indeed. And let's go to the, the other row. I'm not gonna say bottom row. I just didn't I? it's the other row. The alternative row is starting over there.

There's, Jess, Rick. How are you doing, Jess? Never been better. Oh, that's

[00:05:06] Jess Frick: nice. Just kidding. I've been better, but I'm pretty close.

[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm pretty good, pretty close. nice background as well. You've actually made an effort, unlike me, who's in exactly the same scenario that I always am. Jess, as you may or may well not know, is the director of operations at Pressable.

They will get a bit of attention during this episode. She's an iced tea connoisseur, one of the 2023 make WordPress hosting team reps and a proud member of the post status community. I appreciate you joining us, and right over in the corner, over there, just out of a meeting is, is, Tako. How you doing Tako?

[00:05:45] Taco Verdonschot: I'm good.

[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Thanks for having me again. You are very welcome. Tako, as you, you may have noticed, is with Yost, if you've been to any WordPress events in the past, high chance, high probability that I can imagine Tacho or somebody from the Yost team was there and

[00:05:59] Taco Verdonschot: I'll be flying out to the next one in two days, so

[00:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it never stops.

Never. Where's that? in

[00:06:06] Taco Verdonschot: India Amid about. Oh yeah. First time India. So really looking forward to it.

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Tacho is the head of relations at Yost, which means that he's the manage, managing the support team and community team at Yost. He's also a polyglot translating, WordPress into Dutch. He's a community supporter in the WP community team, co-organizer of the WP Meetup at n Megan.

Which I think I got right. Father of two, husband of one. And I wanna finish that sentence off, but nothing came into my head, so I'm just gonna let it hang there and something of three, but I dunno what that would be. so we're gonna talk about WordPress stuff before we do that. Let's just do the ordinary housekeeping that we do each and every week.

If you're joining us, and you want to make a comment, please feel free to do that. This show is livened up enormously by those people who make interesting and poignant comments. Even those who le leave drab and dreary comments. It cheers us up anyway, and we thank you for that. the best way that you are gonna do that is probably to go to our live page, WP Builds.com/live.

Couple of options. If you are logged into a Google account, you can use the YouTube comments that's over on the side. If you're on a mobile, it'll be down below. but the platform that we use also give us a chat wi, which is embedded inside the video. I know it's 2023. You can do that. It's inside the video.

You click a little button, top it's a black button. It says something like, live chat or, something akin to that. Hit that. And you don't need to be logged into anything. If you happen to be joining us on Facebook, We need words, but apart from that, you've gotta do an extra thing.

You've gotta go to Wave Video slash lives slash Facebook. Otherwise they do not let us see who you are and you remain anonymous, which is fine. Do that, but you might wanna write your name in or something like that. We've got a few comments popping in. I appreciate that. First of all, Courtney Robertson's just popping up to say Happy Monday.

There was a, it'll only be me and Tim who get this. There was a great band in the UK in the eighties who were called the Happy Mondays. And they featured one of the, one of the people in the band was called Bez. And Bez literally got paid to do nothing. He was one of their best friends when they, made the band, they just said, yeah, come on Bez, you can be in the band.

And he just. Just was on stage with him doing nothing, and he got, he made a career out doing absolutely nothing. Anyway, there we go. Happy Monday to you, Courtney. she says bump Tacho to the end. Okay. I only can do what Courtney says, tacho,

[00:08:50] Taco Verdonschot: oh, be careful what you say, because she has, a lot of time to comment, so

[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: that's true.

Okay. Okay. Mike Cotton's joining us, he says, good afternoon from a cold, wintry Isle of man. Yep. Cold, horrible here as well. Mike, all star lineup says, Marcus, Burnett. And that background behind Jess is on fire. let's hope not. but yeah, Zack is joining us. I try to only leave drab and dreary comments.

Yes. Start now. let's see how many you can get before, before the end of the show. Zack will tell you, just, and Elliot, just down the road from me in Bridlington says It's wet and cold there. Yeah, it's exactly the same. Yeah, thank you. And

[00:09:31] Rob Cairns: it's white called in Toronto too, by the way.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: So there you go.

Northern, Hemisphere. We have this problem. okay, let's share the screen and talk about what we're gonna do today. First of all, apologies, there's gonna be a little bit of self-promotion. that's how we roll. this is our website. We are sponsored by the wonderful GoDaddy Pro and Omnis Send.

So thank you very much for their support. Really appreciate that. we've put together a new schedule page. We're doing loads of live stuff at the minute, and it was getting to the point where I was finding it hard to communicate when all of those things were happening. So I thought, let's get a calendar.

So a calendar we got. This is it. Basically, we're here today, this week in WordPress. Tomorrow we're doing a, we're doing a live webinar where it's the third in a four part series with a blue host all about their Wonder Suite software for onboarding you, when you are first creating a website.

So that'll be tomorrow. I'm joined by Jocelyn Hendrickson. That'll be at four o'clock uk time. If you click on it, it will show you the times in your own time zone. And then there's some calendar links, as well. But you can probably check it out. There's, Gato, GraphQL. I've got a webinar on Wednesday with Leo Lovich that's gonna be at three o'clock UK time.

and that's all about the Gato GraphQL plugin and how you can update content in bulk. It is such a cool plugin. It's a bit, it's a bit of on the nerdy side, but it's very, powerful and very, cool. And then the following, day. So that'll be Thursday by now. Again, three o'clock. Speed it up.

It's our seventh in the speed it op series with performance experts, Sabrina di Zan. If you fancy having your site inspected by her for free, gratis nothing, no money down, you can go here, WP Builds.com/speed and fill out this form. that form will enable Sabrina to know a little bit about your website and how much you are willing to give her permission to poke about.

And from there, we can stick you on the show. Honestly. She's brilliant. She's not only brilliant, she's very, nice, which, which is wonderful. It's wonderful to have her on. So yeah, if you want to know where all of these are, they're at the same page you're looking at now, WP Builds.com/live. And this schedule, I hear you say, where is it?

I heard you all say that. It's at WP Builds.com/guess what? Schedule. I try to make it as easy as possible. I know. there are the past episodes that we've done in the past and just to say that there's a few bits and pieces on our Black Friday sale. Thank you to WSS form, gravity form and checkout WC for sponsoring that page this year.

There's a few, long tail deals, shall we say, that haven't expired. You can see all of these ones. If it's on the page, it's still going. There's probably about, I don't know, 50 or hundred, something like that. So that's wp build.com/black. I feel like I should stop advertising now. I apologize to our panelists.

That's not fair, is it? But sometimes I'm Have a question,

[00:12:28] Jess Frick: Nathan? Yeah. On your, schedule for, as we say, schedule. Yeah. You have nothing next week or for the rest of the

[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: month? No, that's 'cause I can't be bothered to fill it out more than a week in advance. I was gonna say,

[00:12:40] Jess Frick: are you holidaying for the first?

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm just lazy. It really is. Really's as simple as that. no it's because the schedule changes quite frequently and so I don't bother putting it in until the week before. that's just the way I roll. If only you had some sort of calendar. If only I had some with schedule into a calendar. Yeah, I know.

It's a lovely plugin in, it doesn't work that way. It works inside the post type, so you get a little bit of metadata inside the post type and so I have to log in and create that post and all that kinda stuff. So I decided not to go with the Google calendar 'cause I've got too many overlapping things in there already.

And, anyway, blah, blah, blah. follow up question for you, Nathan. Yeah. Okay.

[00:13:20] Jess Frick: Yeah. Yeah. Can you add future events to your calendar using your phone?

[00:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no, you said to do it, didn't you? You had to go and drop it in. Okay. Do you want me to talk about this? Is this the thing you have to show 'em, Nathan.

Oh, okay. All, hold on. First of all, let me make the, let me make these logos go away 'cause it's getting right in the way of my head. There we go. This week I made the somewhat seismic decision after about. 80 years using Android that I'm fed up with posh phones in general, right? They just robbed me of my time.

I have, seemingly no guardrails on my ability to, not be beguiled by the phone. I see a phone and I'm like, ah, gimme the phone. I wanna play with it for eight hours and waste my day. So I bought this little beauty look. It flips open. And it's got numbers, actual numbers, what would you use those for?

Not a lot, it turns out, so it's got Android baked into it. I won't bore you, but it's got the tiniest screen. It's literally, it's the twice the width of my thumb and probably three times the height of, the, it's probably three times the height of the width of my thumb. what a great way of describing its dimensions.

Anyway, if only had we had some sort of universal unit of, measuring things that weren't related to my thumbs. It's probably about five centimeters by three centimeters. It's unusable for anything apart from, I don't know, sending one text at a time. So I'm going to see how life progresses without it.

And thus far it's been brilliant. I've really enjoyed it. Six days in and I've got no regrets. Apart from the fact that I want my old Android phone back, that's the room

[00:15:05] Tim Nash: six days

[00:15:05] Taco Verdonschot: in. Yeah, six days in has to be a, need to charge it already.

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: it, it lasts about 48 hours. Wow. yeah. 48 hours without using it.

I couldn't, the thing about it is right. I don't want to use it. And I know that sounds like an oxymoron. It's, but that is the enterprise. I wanted to stop using it. This thing, it, the other one's gone into a drawer, so I'd have to go and find it. The old one's gone into a drawer. It would still work.

I'd have to swap the SIM card out. But the, I don't have any interest in using this. It's boring. It's really uninteresting. And so it's working, but I'll repeat. You've talking about it for five minutes. Yeah, that's right. That's right. last week I had, normal colored hair. It has brought me towards grayness.

It hasn't. I've had gray hair for a really long time. Anyway, so if anybody is interested in joining me on that journey, we should set up a website and describe our journey. You, could set up a group.

[00:16:03] Tim Nash: Yeah. And then

one

[00:16:06] Nathan Wrigley: message every year saying what? Because you can't fit any text on the screen. Oh.

Anyway, there you go. That's my Ludite moment. Let's get on with the word pressy stuff shall, because that's why we're. First up, Nick Diego wrote a post, all about redesigning the developer resources and a call for testing. So this is really, for those of you who are out there in the d in the developer space, the content isn't gonna change.

It would appear that basically the content that you were looking at three weeks ago is gonna be exactly the same as you're going to look at in a year's time, word for word. But they've changed the design. it does. Look, I've gotta say to my eye, it looks a little bit nicer. Everything is a bit more spread out.

I dunno if you can see this image particularly well over on the left, the new, over on the right, the old, and as you can see, it's broadly the same, but the line spacing is a bit nicer. It's just a bit easier on the eye. I like it a little bit more. but yeah, it's a block, A block, paradigm. And Nick was saying it's one of the hardest projects that they've taken on so far because of its magnitude.

Obviously the developer resources have been going for ever and ever are men. And so there's a lot of content to, bring over and make sure that it all works and what have you. But yeah, I just thought I'd raise that as a thing. I don't know if anybody wants to add anything to that. If you do, now is the time.

[00:17:32] Jess Frick: Definitely check out the Slack channel that he references. because more than just the developer resources, he's working on so many things and he's truly building in public. God bless him. it's hard off designing a website with a small team, and instead he's designing it with the entire community and all feedback is welcome.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I'm guessing a fairly opinionated team as well. And I don't mean that rudely. they're, all in this, is what they do for a living, right? So they're gonna have exactly real strong opinions on the way it looks and

[00:18:02] Jess Frick: what happens. He's doing a great job, but definitely check out the Slack channel.

I.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. anybody else or shall we move on? I was just gonna quickly say it's

[00:18:11] Tim Nash: nice to see them, their iteration on the existing thing and not going, we should start again with a whole new hub system and build Yes. Another 'cause what you said, oh, developer been around for it really hasn't.

That's true. You are right. Always. The codex has been around for ages and still is around. Yeah. And obviously it's getting zero love and now that disparity is getting greater and greater. So it's nice to see things should get developed and refreshed and, made to look better. But it is nice to see that this is a, not a new project.

This is actually building on an old project or a modernish

[00:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: project. Yeah. Nick makes the point that it's a, it's a block-based enterprise. It's a custom child theme that sits on top of WordPress dot org's, parent block theme. and the only thing which is gonna be. Different in terms of design is the actual homepage where I, think they've decided to set things out slightly differently to get you started once you arrive, to make it easier for you to find the sort of direction that you're going in.

But as with all things WordPress, the, team, are willing for you to provide some help. There's, a lot of sections that need help. So there's the Block Editor handbook, themes handbook, plugin handbook. you can see it on the screen. I won't bore you to death of that. But, there are instructions on this page.

As always. The, you can see that this came out, it was 22nd of November, 2023. Nick Diego was the author. So if you go to make.wordpress.org, you'll find that fairly quickly. But as always, the links will be in the show notes, which I will publish tomorrow. If you're not, getting those, go to WP Builds.com, and click the little.

Put your email into the, field right near the top and you'll start getting those emails. Anybody else? Or shall we move on? I

[00:19:57] Taco Verdonschot: can't wait to see this design on other parts where we have the old design still, like some of the other handbooks, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's a lot nicer and it makes it easier to read, which is, valuable.

[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. I'm just having a look. See if, oh, no. That's all related to the width of my thumb, which is interesting. Oh, I'm, sad. This is the first day in many, years that Peter Ingersol hasn't joined us to give us a weather report. I, feel like I need to play some sort of, you, you missed it.

Where? Where's it going? He did he? I

[00:20:36] Jess Frick: can't see it. For some reason it didn't come through here, but it's on

[00:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: YouTube. I am so sorry. Peter Inger. Yeah. With your weather comment, I can't see it. It didn't come

[00:20:44] Jess Frick: through you that it's currently four degrees Celsius in Connecticut. Aw. after a foggy Monday morning, it will be mostly cloudy with temps warmer

[00:20:51] Nathan Wrigley: than average.

My life is now complete. I was fearful that something deeply had gone wrong in the matrix, but, we're back to normal service. Thank you. Peter. If anybody else is typing in comments that don't appear in the show, there's two reasons for that. A. It's not relevant to what we're talking about at the moment, but it would appear b, there's a possibility that it just didn't appear in the platform.

And if that's the case, I am sincerely sorry. I don't mean to, to exclude anybody. Okay. So there we go. That's the first piece. The second one is [email protected] website. It's one more article in, Marika Vandereck, who was the former, CEO of Yost. She has been putting out a series of articles, about all sorts of issues, but the issue, but they're really nice, they're really consumable.

They're not more than a few hundred words in most cases. And in this case, she's taken on the, the subject of WordPress events, but then moves into diversity of WordPress companies and. To make a long story short, go to WordPress events and the diversity picture, and we're really, talking about, she talks about diverse gender diversity.

She says we do pretty well there. You look around the room and it's encouraging, but then she makes the point that if you go into a WordPress company's board meeting it, that will probably be a very, different story. I don't really have the answer to this, but I'm just interested that she's raised this as a subject.

We obviously have Jess on the call, so might be able to lend some color to that, but making the point to cement things. And I know this isn't the WordPress space, but it does give you a broader picture out in the wider world of the 44 Fortune 500 companies, sorry, of the Fortune 500 companies. So obviously there are 500 of them, only 44 are led by women, which is a tiny, not even 10%.

And globally, women, according to this, are paid 20% less. than men. There are some links hopefully to back this up. So this isn't a proposal for how to solve it. This is just a Marika saying, this is a thing. I am somewhat con, I'm just gonna hand it over to Jess and see if you've got any opinions on this one.

[00:23:08] Jess Frick: I don't know anything about being the only woman in a room.

[00:23:12] Nathan Wrigley: what can I say, Jess? I feel bad

[00:23:18] Taco Verdonschot: for anyone who missed a sarcasm.

[00:23:23] Jess Frick: I will say, that is one thing that I've loved, about, I've been very blessed to work with employers that, have promoted women and listened to women and include women at. Every level in the company. Automatic is fantastic about it. even Pressable, we have two women on the leadership team.

there's only five of us, so it's, a good portion. my boss's boss is a woman, at my previous company, mostly women on the leadership team. I don't know that it's just everywhere in WordPress, but I think unfortunately it still exists in some pockets. and it's a much bigger conversation than I think we can have in two minutes.

But I'm really, glad that she brought this up here. And I'm interested in learning more about the mentorship program that she talked about later on in the

[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: article. Yeah, we can give it three minutes if you like. Would that help that likely to, you

[00:24:24] Jess Frick: know what, yeah. I was thinking like 120 seconds isn't gonna do a,

[00:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: its planning's gonna be, do you know what though?

It, is in, I know you made the point and it was, beautifully sarcastic. we love the sarcasm in the uk. Here we are, right? There's five of us, four of us are, males. And I, don't have the answer either. I, open the, booking system to, to all andry, but it does sometimes just fall this way.

And sometimes, especially with Michelle's help, Michelle Ette, she does a really excellent job of helping me to balance that. But it can be difficult and I'm not trying to, make, out that I couldn't try harder and things, but sometimes it does just fall this way. I feel that the words that have exited my mouth in the last 20 seconds are going to be career ending.

but I, what, I don't know what the answer is. certainly for this show, I try, but it, the dominoes just don't fall all the time. But,

[00:25:25] Jess Frick: you know what though, Nathan, you just said something really important. you don't want to say something that's going to upset people and everybody's so afraid of getting canceled or saying something horrible.

Now, you obviously don't wanna say anything hurtful, but I almost feel like that fear prevents us from having productive conversations that can become, teachable and helpful and help us progress forward. so I guess, I'd love to see us having this conversation more often because perhaps it can help people better untangle whatever thoughts they're having on it.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have experience, Jess, forgive me, I don't know the background that you have outside of WordPress. Do you have experience in, business away from the WordPress space? And, if the answer to that is yes, is it, has it been different?

[00:26:13] Jess Frick: Oh gosh. I've been in tech my whole career and yeah, absolutely.

I will say my most recent employers, that has not been an issue, but I have absolutely, been paid less than a male counterpart. I have not gotten jobs that I thought I should have gotten. I was featured, in a Women in Tech article by LiquidWeb, and I talked a bit more about my experiences with that, and I think we've come a long way.

but, again, I recognize my privilege. I've been very fortunate to work for employers where that hasn't been an issue recently, but I've absolutely experienced it elsewhere. And make no mistake, there are still plenty of people that don't wanna hear from a woman. They don't wanna work for a woman.

they may not trust a woman as much as they would trust a man. It's just. Something that exists. And I think as women, especially women in leadership, and I am in leadership, I've had to learn to work with that and through that.

[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: thank you for your input there. That's brilliant. I'm gonna let Rob and I let Tim and let, I nearly said Yoast there.

My, let taco my,

[00:27:31] Rob Cairns: 2 cents Nathan. first of all, what I'll tell you is I worked in the private sector, sorry, the public sector before. I opened my own agency and I worked for a number of women managers, directors, project leaders, and never had an issue. My, my whole philosophy all my life is, as long as somebody has the tools to do the job, it doesn't matter to me, where they are now.

You were talking about diversity with your, podcast. I've got the same problem. I try and make a point of my podcast being gender diverse as well as being culturally diverse. for those who don't know, Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world. the way we describe Toronto and its communities is the United Nations and that's not.

Exaggerating. It's that type of city. We have everything from Indian pockets to Jewish pockets to Italian pockets to you name it. So we're probably miles ahead of a lot of the other places with this whole diversity. And the reason I mentioned the background is that background carries into stuff like WordPress.

It carries into what you've been accustomed to and what your life has been. and I hate to say it, I think a lot of it is warn behavior and sometimes for the negative side of it. So we gotta break that down. But that's my take.

[00:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. tko, Tim, anything? Or should we move on?

Yeah,

[00:29:05] Taco Verdonschot: so for a while I jokingly said I'm the diversity hire on the Yost leadership team. because I was the only men in, a team of women for a while. and. That is an interesting experience because even then you would have people reach out to the leadership team and address me and ignore all the women around me, and they would think that I was CEO or whatever.

I, I've never been, I do not have any ambition to take up that role. so it, it's really, when you are aware of that, this problem exists and you pay attention to it, you see it in a lot of places. And the boardroom definitely is one of the places where, we see this a lot more still, not just in tech, but in society in general.

as Marika pointed out in our article and. I know that one of the reasons why Yost America sold Yost to New Fold Digital is because New Fold has, is a female led company. And that does something with the culture in your company. it is, it is different. If you have that representation in the leadership, it becomes easier down the line to say, Hey, look, that's our example and that's what we should aim for throughout the company.

And I think that is why it matters so much that we have that representation in, the boardroom, but also on a stage at a world camp because that representation is what triggers a next generation is what triggers others to say, Hey, this is achievable, this is possible. This is, An option for me. And that goes beyond gender diversity, of course.

And I think that's why, the underrepresented in tech database, run by Michelle and Ally Niman is a brilliant resource. If you have a podcast and you're looking for speakers that you maybe wouldn't find easily, yourself, they, they've just created this database of people who are ready to come on your podcast and share their opinions with you.

And it's

[00:31:46] Nathan Wrigley: brilliant. Yep. Michelle has joined us in the chat, so hopefully she'll add something to that. But Peach has also joined us in the chat and she says, no, ma'am, she got no in capital letters, ever takes my word for something I am an expert on. They always have to check. That's interesting. Tim, I dunno if you wanna round this one out or

[00:32:06] Tim Nash: shall will. I'm not the right person to round this one out. Okay. I'm literally, but I would, I would like to pose a question, which is, is it getting better? Yeah. I'll be making progress. 'cause that's the key, obviously when we're talking about numbers and figures and they sound horrible when you're talking about only 44 people in the, 44 women in the Fortune 500.

But it, is that better than last year? Is that better than 10 years ago? Is that better than 20 years ago? Are we making progress or, I think we're not, I think, I guess

[00:32:42] Nathan Wrigley: say again Jess. it got

[00:32:44] Jess Frick: consumed by, yeah. Yeah. I think we are, I think that's the right question to ask too. I think we are, when, I was little, I can remember hearing people say A woman could never be president.

They menstruate and they're too emotional. And now look at world leaders. we've seen women in these roles and sometimes they're outperforming, like I think that we absolutely have shifted.

[00:33:12] Taco Verdonschot: I think what's an interesting area to look at is, universities around the world, because typically you see that female students are doing better than their male counterparts.

And if they are at the university or in college, then why can't they in business? as soon as that sort of, that realization ends up with people who are in the old mindset of no men have to be leaders and strong and, you

[00:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: know, that's really interesting. I know that in the uk, and I dunno why I know this, but somehow I know this, that in the uk, in the late nineties.

So it used to be that, there was more or less parity in education outcomes in the uk. So it, it was for a very long time. If you go back in a long way, the, boys, for want of a better word, would outperform the girls. And then at some point that pivoted and it became more or less the same. And since the sort of mid 1990s, female, attainment has outstripped, male attainment, and that curve apparently is still going.

And I know schools they have to try to address that. That's one of the sort of things that teachers in the UK have to deal with. But it, makes a mockery of that statistic, doesn't it? If the, female cohort that are coming through are consistently outperforming the males and yet. We, have that kind of skew in the workplace that is peculiar and it does speak to something a bit more, a bit deeper rooted.

But in answer to Tim's question, I think Marika's article is pointing to that as a yes, it is getting better. I couldn't say about year on year, but it does seem certainly in like in, in events in that space. It's got better whether or not it'll continue to get better in the boardroom, we'll have to see.

But really, she's just raising the question. she says, I know, I'll just quote. She says, I know we can't change the world today and immediately put more women in charge, but it's good to stay aware of the lack of gender diversity in our boardrooms. And I strongly believe that we need to give more room to our role models on stage.

I love these articles, Maurika. I agree. I agree. Doing them every week and they're all about something really great interest. Bravo. Thank you

[00:35:41] Taco Verdonschot: very much. Super quickly on this, slightly related on this topic. if. You are, from an underrepresented, uh, group in tech and you are accepted to speak at a tech event at a world camp, know that there's a Yost Diversity Fund amongst other funds that can help you overcome financial hurdles.

So at least we tend to take away that barrier, to entry for underrepresented people.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: Tako has very helpfully put a couple of links into our private chat, but for some reason that my Mac has decided that it doesn't like the clipboard anymore, it doesn't want to be helpful. It wants to just use the previous link every time.

So I can't get them out Tacho, but if I'll have a quick read of them when this is finished. There's one on the, there's one on the New York, there's one on the New Sky News website, and there's one on the New York Times website. I will dig those out when my Mac starts to behave and I'll, it's the

[00:36:38] Tim Nash: software.

I just tried it as well.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So it's the software's not my Mac. Post to

[00:36:43] Taco Verdonschot: Nathan, if you want to.

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: Open them. Now I tack out. Let me show you my phone. This is a Slack free zone. Okay, boomer?

[00:36:54] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I take it. I take that as a badge of honor. Yeah, he does. I will endeavor to dig them out. Tim's telling me it's the platform, it somehow hobbles the ability to, copy and paste things.

Great. Thanks. Platform. We love you. but there we go. So I will link to Marika's article and you can have a look for yourself. That will be coming out tomorrow. Okay. This is the hot topic of this week. I feel This one is going to be the, if there is a trigger, it's gonna be this one. this is all about sponsorship at Word Camps and, okay.

The title says it all should. Kate roia, 29th of November. Posted on the make.wordpress.org website should we allow sponsored demo rooms or tracks at events? So if you've never been to a WordPress event, a track is like a series of events all happening in one particular place. So it would be like that room over there.

and a demo room is obviously another separate room. And I think what's happening here is we're trying to get value for the sponsors. I don't know if there's been like noise in the background from sponsors questioning the value they get out of those events. But clearly something, has, been the cause of this.

I dunno what it is, but the, proposal is, should we have exactly that and what would that look like? So let's first accept the premise and we'll accept that. Yes, we could go ahead with that. Then we've gotta figure out what that means and some suggestions on the screen. And there was a lot of comments actually, which were worth reading.

Could it be things like this? Could it be a standalone option? I dunno, like a, particular room, which is all by itself? Would it need to be part of the package? In other words, would you advertise it and say to the sponsors, if you go for this tier, you're gonna get 10 minutes on stage at the beginning of the event or the end of the event.

could it be an add-on package? So if you're a sponsor you could just beef it up, you could pay an extra thousand dollars, $2,000 and have that as a little add-on, should it be in a separate room all by itself. And so obviously. You can see like the brain. The brain immediately starts to think of all the ways this would be good for the sponsors, but all the ways this might not be good for the participants.

I don't know what the answer is, and because I don't know, I'm asking you for to solve it for me. Oh, Nathan.

[00:39:21] Tim Nash: Nathan,

[00:39:22] Rob Cairns: let me, jump in. So I am a auto racing fan. Particularly a Formula One event. So that's how the WordPress space, but we all know in auto racing, sponsorship is everywhere. It's on the cars, it's on the logos, it's on the track.

In professional football in Europe, you have sponsorship logos on jerseys we do in hockey in North America. We just have to give in and realize that sponsorship is an opportunity to make money, to save the cost of the word camps for the participants. And we gotta accept that, number one. Number two, I'm all for sponsorships, even going.

To the point of talk saying, this talk is presented by GoDaddy. This talk is presented by Yoss. This talk is presented by press ball. I'm in that camp because without money behind it and sponsors behind it, these events don't run. So anything that gives the sponsors value, I'm there. And I'm a, as a marketer, I'm even there even more.

So that's my quick and dirty in two sense work.

[00:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: I can only speak from ignorance, which is typically, the way, but I, am only ever an attendee, so I'll leave my opinions, to the end. But I don't know. Tim, you've been on both sides of this. Yes. Jess, you've been on both sides of this and so has Tacho.

So let's go to Tim first. Sorry, Tim, I interrupted. I've, I've been a,

[00:40:50] Tim Nash: an organizer, a sponsor, a speaker. And once for one time, I've been a just gone as a participant. It was a horrible experience. I, this is my default. you shouldn't, go to Word camps and just walk around and talk to people.

no. But as a sponsor, would I have been in the room and they said, oh, we can have, speaking slots. No, because no one's gonna come to a sponsored speaking slot because it's sponsored and they know it's a sales pitch. Plus, if our products are good, if our teams are good, if the people are coming there, we don't need that to be, we don't need that leg up.

It wouldn't work for us. So back when I was working as a ho for a hosting company, we, what would we do? Go and give a talk about how wonderful our control panel is. By the way, principles, control panels, lovely. You should see it in a little bit. It's coming

[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: later.

[00:41:48] Tim Nash: You know that demo isn't what people who go to a word count want to see in a talk.

They want to go and listen to a talk about how to use day PCLI, I dunno. Just something. So then you are saying, okay, we won't do a talk about, we don't do a talk as a sales pitch. We'll definitely do a real talk. People aren't gonna come because they think you are going to give a sales pitch. And as someone who goes to quite a lot of conferences in the past I've sat in sponsored talks, they are horrible.

And the worst ones are the ones that bait and switch you. You walk in thinking you are going to go and learn about something interesting and you get a sales pitch. Now, one thing that's brilliant about Word Camps is that we've had this effectively no sales pitch rule for so long that it means that you at least feel that they're being vetted.

Sometimes we over vet, sometimes, we've got this stage now where it's like you can't have branding in your talk slides. You can't do this. There, there's, we've gone too far the other way, but by doing so, we're guaranteeing that these are gonna be talks that are being given on merit. So I wouldn't wanna do it as a sponsor and I don't think I'd want to demo 'em.

That was away from my stand because if I'm, unless I'm coming with this, the hosters of this world with their 120 people who sort of swarm into the big events, I'm probably not there with a large team. I'm probably there with even the bigger sponsors that are there with a team of four or five people.

I've gotta rotate those people. Those people need to go to talks. Those people need to be doing other things as well as being on our stand promoting us. I don't have the resources to go off to do a demo room. So the demo room's no good to me either. At which point I'm like, this isn't really benefiting your average sponsor that much, but it damages the reputation of the word camp considerably by association.

Even if you managed to get it all perfect. We had absolute transparency. Someone won't believe that because that's how the world works. If you tell somebody you are being transparent that everybody just automatically assumed you are not, it's a really weird thing. so I just can't see it working and I think.

While it sounds like, oh, we're giving lots of value to sponsors, when you actually sit down and think about it, I'm not sure that there is that many sponsors who could make good use of it. In fact, the few people I can think of are probably the ones who are really small, who are coming with their, one with, sorry, mark, but wss forms of this world who is literally him turning up at a Word camp.

And he can probably afford to close his stand for 20 minutes if he knows he's gonna have a bunch of people in front of him to give a demo and he can give an active demo. but yeah, I just can't see who this is aimed at. Really deep down it feels like somebody's come along and went, that's what other conferences do, so we must we, we should try this.

And it's yeah, but that's not a good answer

[00:44:53] Nathan Wrigley: that, thank you. So had really contrasting opinions there from Rob. I. And from Tim, so both Jess and Ko, still currently representing, people who, companies who sponsor. So let's see what their opinions are. I feel that, will there be some heading on eggshells here?

Is it, a difficult circle to square on? Bet

[00:45:17] Taco Verdonschot: maybe. So I see that Jess is trying as hard as I was to keep a straight face, especially with the comments happening, on the side because there are a lot of opinionated people, watching today. so I think there's, like Tim said, there's definitely two sides, to this.

The fact that you walk into a work camp knowing that all the speakers are there because of their quality. Not because someone paid a crap load of money. To get them on that stage is extremely valuable. It, makes for an opportunity to have the better speakers on the stage versus the richest companies.

So I don't think that is something that we should ever, lose in our community, programs in our work camps, in our meetups. At the same time, realistically, especially talking about the bigger work camps, the people who can afford to travel to stay, to attend, to speak are those with financial backing, whether that is from their employer or an external, sponsor, but.

If you want to travel to a world camp Europe in a different country, in a different city, if you want to travel to a World Camp Asia, to a world camp us, that is a lot of money. And if I had to tell my wife, I'm doing this for fun, I'm not making any money, and I'm gonna spend two and a half grand so that I can give a 15 minute lightning talk on a stage somewhere in, the us I'd rather

[00:47:17] Rob Cairns: divorce you. tco

[00:47:19] Taco Verdonschot: there's, yes. There's no way. So realistically, a significant part of our speakers, and especially for the flagship work camps, it's different for local events. Yeah. But for the flagship work camps, realistically, a lot of speakers have already been sponsored. By their companies. And knowing that, and I'm in the lucky position that my employer pays for all of my travels to all the work camps that I attend, and I'm blessed every time because it is absolutely wonderful.

but should I decide to go to a world camp on my own, versus being paid by Yost, there wouldn't be a difference in the quality of the talk that I want, that I could deliver because I'm not a different person. So yes, if, sponsored means you're doing a sales pitch, first of all, you're doing it wrong because no one ever likes going to a sales pitch unless they invited you to pitch your product.

I. But the people in our space, and I love that you used, mark as an example, so I'll do the same. also as an extra shout out to Mark, because he is an absolute expert on building forms. Yeah. He knows incredibly much about everything that his plugin does, but beyond that, on how to build efficient forms.

If we talk to Jess, she's been in the hosting space for as long as I can remember. She is extremely knowledgeable about anything hosting and especially workers hosting. So the fact that someone pays together up that stage doesn't change the value that she can deliver to an audience. So there's both sides to this, and I don't have a final answer.

But as, a company that now has to report to, upper management, I can definitely say that including a speaker spot would make pitching, going to an event easier sometimes. that's interesting. That's the added value for me being part of a larger company. Sorry.

[00:49:48] Tim Nash: As someone who's worked in a company, not a much, much smaller company, we got our speaker slots knowledge before we got our sponsor slots knowledge.

So we would already know if we had a speaker going before we knew about the sponsorship. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So ha having a, got a sponsorship with a guaranteed speaking slot wouldn't necessarily have worked out at any point. In our logistics. So maybe it's just a case of having to readjust how you think about things, but it's, interesting, we, some in that room, in a much smaller scenario, we were much keener to have speakers than we were necessarily about sponsoring something because we knew we would sponsor it.

So it was more about, regardless of whether you had someone speaking, um, I think the other thing it really needs to emphasize is that sponsoring word camps is not cost effective. Normally for mo vast, majority of people, I imagine Yost makes, does not make money outta sponsoring word camps. They no single dime.

No. And I don't, mark, once told, was on saying that he did, but then every other person I've ever spoken to. Builds and everywhere. I don't think we've, you find a single person who's gonna say the sponsorship pays other than as a brand recognition tool, and that's obviously an intangible thing. so and that's a long,

[00:51:09] Rob Cairns: that's a long term play, not a short term play, Tim, a brand recognition tool.

And that's what we have to understand. it's like running multiple ads on tv. Like you watch a sporting event and you see a Coke commercial and they run 50 million ads. That's for brand recognition. I would say sponsorship is the same thing. The more you sponsor, the more your brand gets out there.

That's the only play, because I know anybody I've talked to, including Mark's a good friend, is they don't, people don't do as well at WordCamps as they think they do. They don't make the money. People aren't buying because it's a no salesy. I would

[00:51:49] Nathan Wrigley: agree with you. I'm just gonna add, quickly, mark Westco, unless I receive some financial, reward for this, I'm gonna take the word WSS form and the words Mark Westco out of the audio, when it's posted.

So get your hand in your pocket, mark. No you're not. No, I'm not. You're quite, but he knows, gonna be called canceling.

[00:52:13] Taco Verdonschot: Mark Westberg. That's right.

[00:52:15] Nathan Wrigley: That Westberg guy shows up everywhere.

it's just ridiculous. Jess, come on. Let's have your opinion on this.

[00:52:23] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Stop the straight face.

Be honest. I

[00:52:26] Jess Frick: think everybody's captured my thoughts. I think it really speaks to the motive of speaking at a Word camp. what is it to share information or is it to sell stuff? you know that there's already been some great points made about, the rule that we all know to be true at Word camps.

You're not supposed to sell from this stage. I have been to events where speakers do get their spots and gosh, if I'm to give my actual thoughts, they, they largely seem to be popularity contest things where, that person's friends all show up and it's taking away from other sessions from speakers that are there because their pitches were deemed wonderful.

I don't know that really anything is gained from these sponsored speaking spots, except for, again, being able to say that I spoke there. I don't know that if Pressable was given one because we bought it, I would probably make sure I gave that speaker spot to somebody. Who otherwise wouldn't get it.

are you taking away from somebody else? If you're able to add a whole nother stage, what, why wouldn't you elevate more people?

[00:53:47] Tim Nash: Now that would be a more interesting idea was to be, other than letting the, pressable pick the person, say, we'll sponsor the track. Yep. And we'll have the track branded up as, yeah, I don't have a problem with festival track.

But obviously that doesn't get you the benefits of being able to have your person, which is what this is all about. Lemme un see it.

[00:54:07] Jess Frick: Hey y'all. Yeah. Got some great speakers today.

[00:54:10] Tim Nash: Kim. Sometimes saying

[00:54:13] Rob Cairns: that comes back to what I was saying, like the track or even a talk. I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the sponsored and by the way, Jess, that comment about, giving away the spot is just what makes you a class act in this space.

It's

[00:54:30] Jess Frick: just, I feel like it would be the best thing for the camp. And that's, it goes back to that motivation. What is the motivation here? And I think all of us who have given our time, money, and energy to Word camps know that it's not an ETM machine. We do it 'cause we love it and we care about the community.

The comments

[00:54:47] Rob Cairns: are

[00:54:48] Nathan Wrigley: coming in faster. Yeah. There's quite a few comments. I raised some of those in a moment, but interestingly, Tim's

[00:54:52] Jess Frick: excuse me, I do it for the money.

[00:54:53] Tim Nash: Yeah. what I was gonna say was the first person, the first company that gives up their speaker slot to somebody else. and that, and make sure that quietly leaks out.

They are on for the marketing winning. Ah, Jess, you've just given

[00:55:09] Nathan Wrigley: it away. Yeah. You've given away the secret sauce. That's the way to do,

[00:55:12] Jess Frick: I don't think you've ever seen our booth. Yeah. that's literally what we do is we just

[00:55:18] Nathan Wrigley: money another company. Yeah. Yeah. I remember in, word Camp in San Diego you were doing something quite interesting with your, with the, booth that you had there giving things away.

Okay, so first thing, it's interesting that we ended up talking about tracks. Things like that. I wonder if this, I wonder if this could be a bit more of a Pandora's box that gets opened up. So it wouldn't just be that like, are there, and again, I'm, not asking, not putting anybody on the spot and saying we must come up with them now, but could it be just something wild and different, I don't know, some bit just before the closing remarks where the sponsors get to come up on stage and just, I dunno, giveaway stuff.

It's a bit like, it's more game show than it is speaking event, but it's just some bit of smet a bit funny, I don't know. But because of the mold of the way word camps are, it's hard to step out of that and think outside the box. But maybe this will promote, a difference of opinion. I did wanna highlight one of the things that I thought was interesting and it was in the comments and it was somebody that said something that one of you said was that it would be, hard to, it would be a bitter pill if as a sponsor you were competing.

In time with tracks where people had, gotten themselves there off the merit of their ability to talk about that subject. That would be a, that would be a real collision, which I don't think anybody would want. But let's see. And let's see what the comments are again, I have to apologize. It does appear that, the platform is not consuming all the comments, particularly from YouTube.

I'm so sorry about that. there's not much I can do about that. Oh my goodness. We did have a lot of comments. Wow. Okay. I'll just go through a few of them, very quickly. First of all, oh my God. Jess's decorations. That was good. thank you for that, Paul. sponsorship is great as long as there is transparency and it's clear what's sponsored.

Yeah. The transparency is a given, I think. And it's the bit at the end of that sentence, isn't it? What is sponsored? What fun, interesting ways can the sponsors get value out of it? Peacher says she's got too many opinions, can't fit them in the comment window. No, Peacher, I don't believe that for a minute.

[00:57:34] Rob Cairns: Very done.

[00:57:34] Nathan Wrigley: I

would

[00:57:35] Taco Verdonschot: definitely invite Peacher on, on the podcast someday because I know that she has strong

[00:57:40] Rob Cairns: opinions.

[00:57:41] Nathan Wrigley: She does. She's great. Jerome says he's a fan of the smaller events that have less costs, feels a bit more like community, but I also do like the bigger camps as well. It's difficult.

That is the problem here, right? It is, it's difficult. it's absolutely possible to create a go back to Picher to create a conference where speakers are fairly compensated. Okay? So there's another thing, right? Could you sponsor a speaker? And I don't mean you literally force them to wear a T-shirt, but somehow there is.

we, got 10 of the speakers here this year. We did that bit. Maybe that's happened in the past. I don't know. expenses paid, it's ethical and it's not a demo. Picture, would you wear a Yost T-shirt? Let's just see what she says to that. isn't it? isn't it good to demo in the hallway and then other people get engaged?

So that's like the track. That's the thing that we've got going on at the moment. good points. Tim says, Jerome, ba. Lots of people agreeing. There's too many, there's too many comments here. I do. Has anybody been at, 'cause I was concentrating on what people were saying. Has any, can you anybody highlight one of the good ones?

Yeah. Peter

[00:58:50] Taco Verdonschot: Ingersol comments. Peter? Yeah.

[00:58:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. This one, it's interesting to me how many word camp attendees mentions not going to speaker sessions because for them it's about the hallway track. Oh, maybe we should just have a hallway track

[00:59:05] Rob Cairns: event. You know what, Peter, that's interesting 'cause I've been at a couple and the last word, camp Toronto, we didn't have one during the pandemic and I think I saw one talk in two days.

I spent all time in the hallway track, so yeah.

[00:59:18] Nathan Wrigley: Fair comment. this is interesting. This is just, this is RA's point about paying the, speakers set up a proper merchandise store, where the profits of that go towards paying the speakers. Just raise the amount of the ticket a little bit. And I had an intuition, right?

I thought this was a good idea, but because I thought of it, it probably isn't. and it was that the, at the point where you buy your word camp ticket, you can add in a few extra dollars, an amount of your choosing, and that money is guaranteed to go to the speakers. So you just chuck in an extra $20 and that goes, no, it's a good idea.

So

[00:59:59] Taco Verdonschot: my question then, being a former Workcamp organizer is how do you decide where that money goes?

[01:00:07] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't think it through. I wish, I hadn't said it now.

[01:00:11] Taco Verdonschot: No, I feel bad. It's a legit idea. No. Okay. there's interesting logistics and politics to it.

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just nominate Mark West Guard to do that?

Then? Can he just do that? Yeah. Nice. Thanks. Mark. Mark's gonna decide who, who gets on that. No, I'm being, I'm the bit of levity. I apologize. I don't know. And again, there's the problem, right? That person, whoever shoulders that responsibility, there's an absolute channel for it to go badly for them, right?

maybe they'll do an impeccable job and there'll be no criticism and it will be perfect. But equally, there's bound to be somebody grumbling about the allocation of those funds. I don't know. a anything short of random and lottery is gonna be hard to, manage, isn't it? Yost of, oh, Yost have sponsored me many times and never once asked me to wear a T-shirt.

They're doing it wrong.

[01:01:06] Taco Verdonschot: no. This is by design. I, pitched before the diversity fund, and we specifically do not require people to tell anyone that they've received a grant from the Diversity Fund. and a lot of people still do, they add in a slide, in their deck where they say, Hey, Yos, the first fund has sponsored me, but they are not required to do so because, the, it was a term that I learned yesterday.

it was called, and I'm not sure can I say this? Yeah, I can say this, called poverty porn, where you look at people who have less than you and give them, money and then all go oh, look at us being awesome. And that's the last thing that we want to do. yeah, we would never ask Pizza to wear a Yost t-shirt.

[01:02:04] Nathan Wrigley: peach. Will you wear a WP Builds T-shirt? I'll give you a quid bargain. Oh, Nathan,

[01:02:12] Jess Frick: what are we gonna do

[01:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: with you? I know it, I am, I'm always keen to plumb new debts.

[01:02:18] Rob Cairns: just send her your old phone so that

[01:02:21] Taco Verdonschot: you can even That's right. it's all

[01:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: going wrong. You've gotta have humor. These shows require humor.

Otherwise, what else do we have? I know Peach very well. we, do, we communicate rather a lot, so I know she'll take it in good heart. Michelle Ette, of course, had a, fabulous initiative where she took, selfies with people and each person that she took a selfie with, she would then chip into a pot, which then got distributed amongst the speakers, in order to reimburse 'em for that.

Apologies, Michelle, if I've framed that incorrectly, but she said the money she raised with selfies last year made it clear how much, need there was there. I told all selfie recipients that their finances are their business and there's no need to publicly thank anyone. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the right way to do it.

Will you make it, will you make it Girls caught? Nathan, is that a T-shirt thing? I'm totally out my depth

[01:03:17] Jess Frick: now because girl bodies are a little different than Guy Bodies and there's cut Different Wait

[01:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Hack. We're not going there though. We're not. There's the title of the show. Even I can't go to that.

That's the title I've met My Limit. okay, so Intractable Problem feels like that. There is definitely more to be said about this because we've heard, opposing opinions. I think probably something needs to be done, but what that solution is and whether or not it upsets a minimum number of people or a maximum number of people will remain to be seen.

I guess we've gotta try something though. Haven't we got give something else a going. If the sponsorship is drying up, maybe that's where this is coming from. That sponsorship does dry up and it therefore jeopardizes the future of such events. then the whole thing is, less of a talking point and suddenly becomes more important.

We'll see. Okay. Thank you for your participation in that. I just wanted to raise this, I know time is short and we've got a few things to cover, so I'm just gonna raise this really quickly. Not really get into the story as such, but I just found, this was a really interesting piece this week. It was WP Fusion.

They decided, after many years with Active Campaign and various other CRMs, they were gonna switch over to a. A WordPress solution. It's, perhaps you've heard of them. It is called fluent CRM. It's a WordPress plugin, created by WP Manage Ninja. I had intended to talk about this rather a lot, but I think time is pressing, so I'm just gonna encourage people to go and look at it.

If you are an appropriate platform and your audience is growing and growing and it's costing you mooch, show Mocho moolah dollars, then WordPress might have your back. And there's a bunch of things just like fluent CRM that are mentioned in the article, so apologies if you've researched that one any of you for, but we're just gonna skip right on by.

a company that you may or may not have heard of before, Yost. They have got a, what the heck am I doing? Introducing this? This is pointless. We're gonna move over to our sponsor slot now. it's not, I promise. It really isn't. we've got a new iteration of Yost, SEO. You've all heard of them.

Yost, obviously been doing this work for ages. We're on 21.6 now with, the thing which is hot at the moment, generative ai. I could read the bullet points, but what's, what is the point of that? Let's just hand it over to Tacho. We can explain it. Give us all the hotness.

[01:05:49] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. a while ago we introduced, AI as a soft launch, which means that if you activated the feature, you could already, generate titles and meta descriptions, for your post pages.

Using AI and, it worked out really well. And, so we've removed the beta label and it's now full on in the yo zero premium plugin. which means that you no longer have to worry about writing those pesky, little meta descriptions. but you can have AI as your sort of co-author, to help you come up with a nice angle based on the post that you've written based on the page that you've built.

it will do a few su suggestions, and then you can of course, tweak and finalize and make it pretty inhuman. and as of 21.6, this is now also available in our WooCommerce SEO plugin, which means that you can do the same for all of the a hundred thousand products that you have in your, in your online store.

generate title, metal description, but also specifically for social media. So if you want to have a different description for Facebook, which can be a very good idea because there's usually a different audience on Facebook. so you can tailor your, description for Facebook to that audience, and our AI can help you do that.

the thing that I'm most proud of is that we've been able to do this without any tokens. Third party integrations, credits buying whatsoever. So just install Yoss Premium and that will give you access to, our AI for free. No matter how many suggestions you generate, does it, does

[01:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: it leverage, another service?

So is it using, for example, chat, GPT or open AI's technology or is it Yes, it does. Okay, got it. Yeah. Can I ask another thorny question? Because I, I just would like to know when I typically do the, SEO of things, I do wish to write something different for Twitter than I would for, Facebook.

'cause I, think Facebook crowd tend to, there's more. There's more. Open text. We say you can write longer things, which might, engage people. Do I just click a button and all the suggestions for all the different fields get filled out? So the meta description and so on and so forth? Or do I have to go one field at a time?

Click, click, Get the generation, yeah. One field at a

[01:08:33] Taco Verdonschot: time. Yeah. Okay. yeah, we don't want to accidentally override all the good things that you already had in there. Oh, good point. yeah. Yeah. there's a little use AI button, next to the, fields where you can use it and that will, pop up the model and give you five suggestions.

If those aren't good enough, you can generate more. And as soon as you select one, you can then, go back to your original editor that has been in yo for ages, and you can tweak it and, yeah.

[01:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: okay. I ha I have another question and this is, I just gi give me your best approximation. Honestly tackle, does AI do a cracking job of this?

My intuition with all the AI that I've used given certain guardrail, obviously if you just ask it something random, give it, then it's just hallucinates all over the place and it's just really weird. Although that's getting way better. But given that the guardrails are around this and you're asking it for a very tiny subset of what you could possibly ask it, a short description of the content itself, honestly.

What's it like in terms of quality? Does it, as you've described here, create compelling titles or is there quite a lot of going back and fixing and tweaking?

[01:09:52] Taco Verdonschot: So I think the biggest challenge that our team had was to, get rid of all the clickbaity, titles that it would generate. Because. If you've been on the internet longer than a week, that's probably where you're allergic to already. and so that's not helping your SEO at all. yes. a lot of time and energy has been spent on creating a high quality, um, title and high quality meta description when you use the AI feature.

[01:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, that's one of the things I noticed. It gets, it just lapses into something akin to children's pros, if and it gets carried away with, superlatives and saying, this is super epic and, my favorite word of all time. Awesome. tends to appear rather a lot, anyway, so thank you for that.

Anybody else want to comment on that? or should we just let Tako have his, his sponsorship slot completely Unimpeded gets the, no. Okay. thank you. It's out now.

[01:11:05] Taco Verdonschot: Yes, it's, been available since last Tuesday.

[01:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Okay. Go snap it up. Alrighty. So that will be in the show notes as well, whilst we're on the sponsorship slots.

Let's, let's do this one. I'm joking. Nobody sponsors anything on this show. It's just they do, but they're not related to the people in the panel. They sponsor the show. so Pressable, tell us about this. Jess, you've got a fabulous new dashboard. And I say fabulous because I've tried it and I actually genuinely really like it.

So tell us what you've done. Thank you. I

[01:11:39] Jess Frick: genuinely like it too. We, primarily, our lead frontend engineer Wayne, put months of work into this. we overhauled the entire backend experience. I. If you can scroll down just a little bit. Okay. I wanna show some pictures. Oh yeah. it is truly beautiful.

one of the things that we're working toward, and we're not there yet, but we're working toward it. We wanna be one of the most accessible hosts available. we want everybody to come sit at our table. All of our navigation has been moved to the left. We have some beautiful menus, intuitive, labels for each of the functions.

everything is where you would expect to find it. One of my personal favorites. if you can scroll down just a little more. I wanna show the dark mode 'cause it is

[01:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: so beautiful. Oh, it's so funny. Oh yeah, You're into that. Okay, nice. Alright.

[01:12:40] Jess Frick: It's not just like plain black with white lettering.

Like we have this gorgeous, deep, blue and there's, some depth to it. but one of the things that Wayne put a lot of energy into was making sure that, people with contrast sensitivity, and those that prefer maybe some color perception assistance, have the ability to fine tune this for theirselves.

so we have multiple op options for, the color schemes. everything is mobile accessible. but really I just, I love the way that it looks. I love the way that you can find everything so much easier. I'm really excited about it, if you haven't told, been able to tell. but a lot of this stuff has also been driven by customer feedback.

That's one thing I love about Pressable. when people send us feedback and thoughts and ideas, we really take them all to heart, and this is a labor of love based on a lot of that and some really, smart design work by Wayne.

[01:13:47] Nathan Wrigley: Aw, thank you. Pete is back. She also likes it. She says, I love in capital letters, the new Pressable dashboard.

I've, I have to just mention it. sorry, Jess. I tried to go to the Pressable website on my new phone and,

[01:14:05] Jess Frick: yeah, I, don't know what to tell you there, Nathan. I'll reach out to Caterpillar and see if they've got any

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: integrations or maybe you could send me a tiny little stylus. you know that sky rather than my big finger, which, I could, we, forgot to optimize.

That's right. Yeah. The audience of one, that guy with that phone. lovely. Thank you so much by the way. Rob and Tim, if you fancy putting something in the private chat that you also would like to flag in this episode, feel free to do that. That's lovely. Anyway, pressable, I'll record it.

[01:14:40] Tim Nash: I've seen the fee, the bag of swag that was handed over pre-session.

Yeah. For me.

[01:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It was expensive flying out to Russia to meet on that bridge in the middle of nowhere. We came at both ends. yeah, so pressable.com, you can check them out and obviously this article will be linked in the show notes tomorrow. It's called Say hello to the my, to the New My Pressable dashboard.

Nathan, can I.

[01:15:05] Rob Cairns: Can I bring attention to, Jarron's comment? I think you need to highlight that one on the screen.

[01:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: he says is the brand of that new phone show. Okay. Okay. So you're gonna like this, is from a brand of, so the people that make this phone, you, didn't know that they made phones, but now you do.

It's Caterpillar. You know the company that make like heavy industrial machinery and shoes? turns out. Yeah, they make phones. Can I get it? Can I apply

[01:15:37] Rob Cairns: the episode title? Where did Nathan get his new phone?

[01:15:43] Nathan Wrigley: It was a guy called Dodgy Pete. I met him down at the local, but anyway, not for my phone.

Let's get on with word for stuff. Ricks. Ricks have got a new pricing update, so we won't get into this particularly, but, Brix is a page builder. It's very popular. It seems to have taken quite a lot of the elemental crowd along with it in recent times. It's run by a singular single developer, or at least it was, I dunno if it still is.

But lots and lots of work has been put into this over the months. I would link to this, but basically if you've. Been thinking about getting onboard the bricks train. my head went in all sorts of directions there. if you've been thinking about that, then maybe now is the time because they are going to be upping their prices from what is very reasonable to still something fairly reasonable.

it's possibly worth doing it. You can see here that at the moment it's 70, sorry, it's going to $79 for one site, a hundred forty nine, four three sites, 2, 4, 9, 4 unlimited sites on an annual basis, but they're still holding onto their lifetime pay once forever, 5, 9 9. All of this is happening on the 15th of January, 2024.

So if you've been thinking about that, maybe that's worth checking out quickly. so I'm gonna go move over to Tim 'cause Tim threw this into the show notes and I confess that I didn't get a chance to read it. So I'm hoping that Tim can tell us why this piece. Okay.

[01:17:15] Tim Nash: If you scroll down just a little bit.

And scroll down and stop. Just go up a tiny bit. So we've got the, actual message. Keep going up. Oh, got it. Dear user. Yep. over the last week or so, lots of people have been getting emails that pretty much say that, dear user, the WordPress security team has discovered a remote code execution vulnerability on your site, blah, blah, blah.

We've patched it. Don't worry. Yay. Click this button and download the plugin to install. Needless to say, the emails are not sent from the WordPress security team, and if you download the plugin, what happens is you download a plugin that immediately then in say, a file into your WordPress core and adds a new user and mul multiple black back doors and step ups to exploit your site.

Why this? I put this in. This isn't particularly unusual. This is a phishing attack. what makes it interesting is it's a semi-good phishing attack. Oh, you don't come around very often. Phishing attacks normally are really, bad. Now, don't get me wrong, this one still has all the nice telltale signs, a bad phishing attack, for example, WordPress is not spelt with a capital P at this point.

We're using WordPress with not spelt with a capital P, literally as a security mechanism. Yeah, okay. This is how you detect phishing is that you go along and go, oh, it's not spelled correctly. That can't be right, but it's got a lot of the right things. It's added urgency in there. It's got enough information in there that sounds legitimate.

The site that you go to in this particular case is en n gb-wordpress.org. Now anybody in the UK who goes to wordpress.org goes to en nb gb.wordpress.org. and it's got a legitimate certificate. All the bits. Now, it's a couple of other things that was interesting about it. It's running on CloudFlare, but this is being geographically targeted as well.

So this particular domain appears to be targeted at UK customers and that specifically broad organizations. it's not going to be very successful because the sort of people it's currently targeting will spot that. There's still the little mistakes, but nobody in this, nobody watching this, I don't think would fall for this.

But your clients will. Your clients absolutely will because it's got enough trust markers on it, enough things that seem just about reasonable. When you go to that, to the click the download plugin, you go to that website, it looks genuine enough. They've done enough copying and pasting. Oh, it will get people.

Now the good news is if it does get people, this is the one of the very few. Normally whenever you have, someone site gets hacked, someone like me will come along and say, you can't restore from a backup, but we can tell when you installed this because you click the email and caused the chaos. So you, if you do find out that you've got clients who have been infected, you can basically work out when they click the email and you can restore to the previous point from there.

That doesn't mean, it's a, simple process, but I wanted to highlight it because. This isn't new. Phishing attacks have happened for years. Spear phishing attacks happen all the time. We saw a year or so ago a spear phishing attack, which included, trapping for two FA codes afterwards. Yeah. So basically it, you not only did it get into the next layer, it then said, oh, the, website you went to, you logged in.

And they said, oh, and they, behind the scenes, they were trying to log into your site in real time. If they hit a two FA code screen, it asked you for the two FA So these things are getting more sophisticated and more clever. Tim, if you have anything to do with clients, share this with them as a good example of things to be looking out for.

And no, as we all know, the WordPress security team would never send you a patch as a plugin that you can download and install yourself like that. It would come through the normal update mechanisms.

[01:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: There is a special place in Hades for people who send out emails, which are. Attacking your software and they purport to be from the WordPress security team.

There's just the word pathos does not fit. sorry, but didn't spell WordPress right? Yeah, it's actually, I just read through it and it doesn't have the telltale signs of no punctuation or misspelt or, just quirky grammar. It's all, actually, it, looks really legit. Sorry. Rob it I felt like you were Yeah, I

[01:22:07] Rob Cairns: was gonna say, Tim, I actually had three of my customers who I do the security management for.

Fall victim to this phish and attack. So we just gotta keep educating people. the biggest problem is in this space is we've educated people time and time again, not to click on links. They don't know, and they still do it because they get caught in that urgency. And I think that's the key word that you hit on the nail, is the urgency of this one was very well written and very good.

And that's the problem. So we gotta, Hey guys, if you don't know, ask, look it up. Go to Wordfence, go to security. Go somewhere, talk to one of us. honestly, because it's just a pain in the butt and this was pretty sophisticated. It's better than most of the ones that we see. thanks for bringing in.

[01:23:05] Tim Nash: if you did two things to me, obviously if they spelt WordPress. Correctly that would've helped. But if they, all they had to do was do a reverse check on the do PJs o Yeah. Authors list to get a actual username to attach to that email.

[01:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: they could have here first, phishing attack creator.

That's what you've gotta do, In order to increase the,

[01:23:29] Tim Nash: those two tweaks. And I think that they would've gone from a, yeah, Relatively high percentage to an almost a staggering number of,

[01:23:38] Nathan Wrigley: sadly, the attacks never get worse. They only get better. Yeah. luckily we have the likes of Tim and Rob here to talk us through that particular one.

Luckily as well, I'm about to change your life because here is possibly the best website. Ever created, ever. drum roll please. Drum roll. That's right. it's also, it's the most boring website you've ever seen, but it's brilliant. Can I just ask everybody, stop what you're doing right. Go here.

Go to draw fasts dot. I don't even know how. That's s spelled. Go to draw fasts tl draw.com. Draw fast.tl draw.com. You're gonna be met with this beauty, right? It's the most boring website you've ever seen. But let me just, try something out. Humor me, right? I'm gonna put a little box in. There's a little box.

You pick it from the palette and you type in a little prompt. What should today's prompt be? Panel. Something about cell

[01:24:39] Rob Cairns: phones.

[01:24:42] Jess Frick: A panda on a cell phone. Yeah,

[01:24:44] Tim Nash: I was

[01:24:46] Jess Frick: a panda on a cell

[01:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: phone on, hang on, lemme spell that A panda on a cell phone. So cell phone, we don't use that word, but is that the general mobile phone?

No, that's fine. So long as it'll work. Okay. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick a tool and I, what shall I draw first? Shall I just draw? I'll just draw a straight line. Let's see what happens. Okay. Not much in that particular case, but let's keep trying and see if we can get something to work here.

Ah, so you can see what I did there. I drew a line and then I drew another line and, okay. Is it a cell phone with a panda? Not yet, but we could try something else. Let's add a little bit of, I don't know, let's add a little bit of blue there. It's not really living up to the expectation of panda on a cell phone, but considering that I just drew three lines with that text prompt, I think that's pretty blooming.

Remarkable. Yes. Let's add a little bit more, and see what we can get. Let's go for a thin line of a bit of green. Let's put it about there. Which I'm hoping would create some sort of, oh, it did look like a cell phone just for a moment there, didn't it? Did you catch that right? Should we do another one?

Let's start another new, maybe he doesn't know what cell phone is. Yeah, Maybe let's, what did you say, Rob? What was your one?

[01:26:08] Tim Nash: No, just, Nathan's new cell

[01:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: phone. Oh, okay. No, we're not gonna put Nathan in 'cause it definitely won't know what that is. Let's try something else. Let's try Oh, you twice. Oh, let's try a sparrow.

Let's try that. I don't know. A sparrow, in a bucket. Of water. Let's see what we get. I dunno if I'm gonna have run out of prompts, but let's do, I don't know. Let's draw a little circle. That's cool.

[01:26:37] Rob Cairns: That's really cool. I

[01:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: mean, what the heck just happened? That, is that not a sparrow in a bucket of water that I drew by drawing a circle?

Don't you think? That's just amazing. That's well,

[01:26:50] Jess Frick: yeah. Except sparrows can't stand on water, Nathan. Oh, this thing is

[01:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: ridiculous. Okay. It's ridiculous. Okay. Let's, make, let's add a little bit to the bucket. Okay. You're right. I feel bad now I feel bad. let's just see if we can, let's see if we can add a little bit.

I don't know, a little bit of grayness there. What would that do? Apparently, absolutely nothing. Let's add a little bit. I don't know. Let's just put something there. See if that does anything. Yeah, it's added a little bit of shimmer to the background there. Let's try a bit of blue. Maybe it'll give us some sky or something.

Yeah, that's cool. oh,

[01:27:25] Taco Verdonschot: what the heck? So the interesting thing is the initial response was pretty impressive, and after that it, it's not as

[01:27:38] Tim Nash: impressive,

[01:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess. Can I just say This is user error because I watched a video of somebody who actually is, half decent with a mouse and is not trying to do something on live a live stream.

And they, had more of an intuition of what kind of color palette to pick and where to position it and how thick the line should be. And they drew something in the space of about 30 seconds and it was utterly brilliant. So my expectation is that with a very short amount of time playing with this tool, you are, you're like your gut instinct as to where to put the mouse and what kind of tool to put, and if I wanted to, let's say, add a hat to the bird, how, I would go about doing that, it, was utterly remarkable.

So there you go. You see I've changed. I would like to

[01:28:28] Tim Nash: point on my screen where I have a panda being morphed into a phone as it's part with parts of it coming out of its backside. oh, horrifying. This is not a good tool, Nathan?

[01:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. I'm gonna add, I'm gonna add a dash of purple at the bottom and let's see what that does.

Absolutely nothing. Let's do a bit there. I was

[01:28:49] Taco Verdonschot: curious for Courtney's suggestion to see if that, would work. Happy

[01:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Trees. What was, Courtney's suggestion? Okay, here we go. Happy trees. Thanks. Some happy little trees like Bob Ross. What is that? The, is that the suggestion? So should we, and

[01:29:01] Jess Frick: now we see if Tim's assertion

[01:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: is correct.

Okay. So are we starting a new one? It's Nightmare Fuel. What's the prompt? What was it? Paint some. Yeah. Happy little trees. Some happy little trees.

[01:29:15] Tim Nash: Like Bob Ross. Like Ross. Who's Bob Ross? He's a American

[01:29:19] Nathan Wrigley: painter. Huge. Oh, okay. I feel bad now. Sorry. Bob Ross, you've obviously, got a history of being brilliant and I don't know anything about you.

I apologize. So what am I gonna do? Should I just add in a little, let's add in a little shape and see what we get. Oh, for some reason I'm on this really pale color and it won't allow me to go away from the pale color. I wonder if that's because I'm using op credits as I go further down the page.

I'm getting less and less opportunity to use like bright colors. The palette is being like, constrained by the tool. So maybe that's something that I need to do. sorry Courtney, I failed you.

[01:29:54] Taco Verdonschot: The, slider that you just touched.

[01:29:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Let's try that. Maybe that's it. Yeah. Thank you. let's try that.

So we'll go for black. Let's put No, it's, it's definitely gone. Can anybody see there's something there? There is a little tree. There's little of a tree. Let me go for this tool. Let's see what this does. Let's put in green. Didn't, oh, I dunno. If you can see now that looks like a tree. It's very pale and I dunno what the reason for the pale is, but there's a tree.

And if I know anything about Bob Ross's artwork, that's the kind of tree that he would've drawn. I'm sure of it we're besties, me and Bob. but honestly, go check it out. I will link to it in the show notes. But the URL you can see at the top of the page. Draw fast.tl draw.com and if it hasn't changed your life, then I blame Mark West Guard.

That's right. That's it. That's all we've got time for. Tim, he's what the heck is Nathan on this week?

[01:30:59] Jess Frick: I just hope that Mark pays up. Otherwise you're gonna say, I blame and then, it's a cliffhanger.

[01:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Actually blame. Yeah. We speak on a regular basis, mark and I, and he, I know that he appreciates me, taking the Mickey out of him and he does it in return, he's a good guy.

Yeah. Yeah. You've seen those pictures of my head at Word Camp, some of them not suitable for public consumption, let's just put it that way and comment on back channels. Let's, let's knock this one on the head. Let's say, thank you very much to our guests. Really appreciate all of you coming on for Rob, for Tim, for Jess, and for Tako.

Really appreciate it. You know what we've gotta do before we round this one out. Oh, yes. Jess is going for it. Yes. That's great. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. apologies if your comments didn't come through. I'm really sorry. Apparently a proportion of them didn't, but we still had quite a healthy amount, so I'm very, thankful for that.

We'll be back next week. Take it easy. We'll see you then. Take care.

[01:32:05] Taco Verdonschot: Bye bye.