[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 389, entitled, all new the community show with Courtney Robertson episode one.
It was published on Thursday, the 12th of September 20, 24. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And before I get to that exciting news, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, a few weeks ago I unveiled a brand new show and I alluded to the fact that there's going to be five or six more to come. Well, here's the second one.
I'm going to be doing a show every three months or so with Courtney Robertson. I haven't really got a perfect title for it yet, but the working title for now is the community show, because that's what Courtney Robertson and I will be talking about.
I know of almost nobody in the WordPress space who keeps her finger on the pulse of the community as much as Courtney does. And we're going to be dipping in, every three months or so, and talking about all of the things that have happened in the community, what is happening in the community. About the events, maybe it'll get into code, maybe it'll get into plugins, you never know. But generally speaking, we're going to cover the community.
But this episode is a little bit different. We thought at the beginning, we would highlight her process for actually gathering all of the content that she does. And you're going to find out how I do it as well, for this week in WordPress show. And so we spend about 40 minutes talking through how we keep on top of all the things that are happening in our growing, and pretty giant community.
So it's a real peel back the curtains episode on what Courtney does, and how she manages to keep up to date like nobody else. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Courtney Robertson. How you doing, Courtney?
I am doing well. I am very excited this week, the time of this recording we're getting ready for work camp, us, and contributor day, so that's on my mind a lot. It's a good week.
Yeah. It is a good week, but, being the person that you are, I expect you are very busy with WordCamp US kind of tasks, not just for your day job, but involved in the actual event itself, right?
[00:06:20] Courtney Robertson: I am lead organizer of contributor day this week, which means that my make WordPress, slack dms, or overflowing with plans from the many tables we've got about. 30 tables each with a lead or table lead as well as an assistant this time around. And so I've got a lot of conversations happening this week.
[00:06:42] Nathan Wrigley: If you didn't have that on your plate and you went to the contributor day, which table would you pick? Is that an unfair question?
[00:06:49] Courtney Robertson: It is because, I love this. I am sponsored by GoDaddy. And, I get to contribute as part of my role that is not full-time. I have obligations internally at GoDaddy as well. but I, in my contributor role, float between several teams. I facilitate the meetings for the meta team. Additionally, I've been working with Hari Shankar in a subset of the sustainability team.
sustainability means much more than just environment. It's also.
[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: It really does.
[00:07:25] Courtney Robertson: it's also economic factors, financial factors for the project, as well as, the health of the project. So the, metrics around contributing, Hari and I have been really working on putting together some demo dashboards that we'll have a preview post out soon that shares how we so far are already tracking some metrics related to core.
Training and the community teams, as far as contribution goes and being able to historically look back in time and see are our contributor numbers growing, declining, stable, et cetera, and, improving the reporting mechanisms for that.
[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, this is you. You are just giving us gold for future podcasts here, Courtney. There's absolutely loads we can get into. I should say before we get too far into it, that this is hopefully one of many appearances of Courtney on WP Builds because I. If you were paying attention a few weeks ago, I had a podcast episode with Rae Morey from, the Repository, and I explained in that episode that Rae and I are going to be doing, regular episodes, but not all that regular.
It's going to be about three, or sorry, about four times a year. So once a quarter. and the same is going to be true hopefully for you and I, Courtney. Courtney and I are going to join together once a quarter, something like that, four times a year. And we're going to discuss the topic, which we're going to discuss today.
Actually, today's a bit different 'cause we're just going to really introduce what we're going to talk about in subsequent episodes. But, So in a sense, you've become like a co-host on, on WP Builds, and I'm really grateful. So that's yet more time that you're giving up into the WordPress community, but I'm particularly grateful because I know that you are very, busy.
So I really appreciate it.
[00:09:15] Courtney Robertson: I appreciate that you handle the scheduling and do all of the hard work of putting these shows together. Not just showing up here to talk, but all of the post-production efforts and getting that out there. It makes
[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: I actually really enjoy all that stuff. Yeah, I really enjoy all that stuff actually. And nerding out on the, the Google Docs and things like that. So I should probably say what this is. So Courtney is going to be talking about, Courtney's going to be talking about community and you've obviously just heard that Courtney is deeply involved in the community.
Dare I say it, Courtney, I know of nobody. Who knows more about the WordPress community than you do? I think that maybe there's some edge case. There's somebody out there who I've never heard of who actually is more into it than you are, but you genuinely seem to have. A passion for it, a real interest in it.
You, really sweat the details. You produce lots of content, which I then, steal basically for the, this week in WordPress show. because you scour the internet and you find all the different bits and pieces that are out there to do with the WordPress community, post it into various channels. post status is where I get.
A lot of that information. So yeah, I think it's fair to say that you are the person to do this show, so take that compliment however you like.
[00:10:33] Courtney Robertson: Thank you. I've, I, have long been an avid news reader in the mornings. Soon as my kids, now that I've got them, are up and off to school, yay. For school age, I grab my cup of coffee and I usually sit down and start scanning through the news. And I get to do this as part of my job, right?
Like how amazing is it? That part of my role means knowing what's happening in our community, and I often elevate the things that are related to WordPress that work and calling, calling folks in to contribute in whatever capacity they can be it labor. Come give effort to this or financial. I elevate those opportunities as best as I can.
And then the news of who's got new products, et cetera, a lot of that I'm paying attention to, but that's part of my hat internally of making sure that my coworkers at GoDaddy that should be in the know about what the community is doing, that they know that information. And It's a, it's a real blessing to find a job that picks up on this thing that I almost feel is an addiction, which is staying up on the news.
[00:11:53] Nathan Wrigley: That's so great. Do you know what's really interesting in there is that I really like the posture that you've got there. What I mean by that is I, how to describe this. I think there's something nice about deliberately going out and finding. The people and the things who don't necessarily shout about themselves.
Do you know what I mean
[00:12:16] Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Like we all hear about the people who shout about themselves successfully because they've shouted about themselves successfully. But in our community, there are so many people who do things and the last thing that they would have would be kicking up a fuss about it.
They just diligently get on with it, do it, do the thing, and then just back away and hope that it's picked up and, I really appreciate the fact that you. Go after those people and you're looking for those stories and looking for those things, those events, those people, those, whatever it may be.
And you do surface all of that. And I've hopefully shared a few of those bits and pieces well, 'cause I have that a, similar intuition. I love to, to find the bits and pieces that aren't necessarily getting shouted about by other people. so appreciate
[00:13:00] Courtney Robertson: That actually speaks to, part of the health, the project health dashboards. on the last release, without getting into it too much, there were some people that were missed in the props list, the list of people that had major features that shipped in, in that release. And some of that work has been ongoing for more than five, six years.
and it is something that. Many people depend upon. And so I don't want to get too specific because I don't want to, it was accidental. But, if you listened to upcoming podcasts with Nathan, you'll hear the folks that were involved. Just tune in wherever Nathan happens to be podcasting, and I'm sure you'll get the stories.
[00:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, Okay. Yeah, I know what you mean. okay. Yeah, watch out for an episode. I think we're talking about the tavern. There'll be an episode over on the tavern. Yeah. Okay. okay, what is this one about then? every time Courtney comes on to this show, the WP Builds podcast released on a Thursday.
Courtney and I are going to be talking about. The community. so whatever that is. So that could be about events, it could be about plugins, themes, it could be about, I don't know, some sort of interesting story that got broken. It could be about a little bit about core, anything really that can be encapsulated by community.
We'll try not to overlap with the other shows that I'm doing, like with Ray, and you'll find out who the other people are as those sort of come along. but what we've decided to do today is. Is a one-off. We're going to spend the time just talking about where we actually find the community where you can go.
so maybe this is like a 1 0 1. So if you're really, familiar with the WordPress community, you're entirely happy that you know everybody that you need to know. Maybe this episode's not for you, but if you've got an intuition that there's bits of the community that you haven't uncovered, pay attention.
Have a listen. so it's going to be a bit rambly 'cause we haven't mapped it out. We're going to just. See what comes out. But, interestingly about, I don't know, it's probably about four months ago, Courtney and I got on a call and we, talked to each other about the process that we go to, to create our news episodes for Courtney.
It's post status and it's text. For me, it was the, this week in WordPress show, which is audio, but I still have to, summon up stories and what came out of that. How much more Courtney knows than I do. she really is 10 x the amount of information and distilling it and what have you. So Courtney, it's a broad question.
We've gotta begin somewhere.
[00:15:36] Courtney Robertson: Oh.
[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Let's just hit it. Where do you go? And if I feel like you're going to quickly, I'll slow you down if that's all right. 'cause I know that you've probably got like a billion things you want to say in a tiny amount of time.
[00:15:48] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. so I will go through this all, Nathan, after we're done and make sure that you've got links for everybody that's there. the first thing we start
[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: pro.
[00:15:59] Courtney Robertson: the first thing we start with is coffee, because we're going to need it, and Nathan and I both ran to grab a cup. So that's step one is get your coffee or your hot beverage of choice because you're going to be sitting back.
And enjoying savoring that cup while you kickstart your morning. So I'm going to take a sip.
[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Dear listener, we are literally both holding coffee
[00:16:23] Courtney Robertson: There you go. So that said, usually the way I have done this is that, in my browser, I'm, a big fan of the ARC browser. I've organized, so I've done some. The work that I do is knowledge work, meaning I need my, role means that I need to know information, and I've done some studying and thinking about how do I organize myself so that I don't forget things because I had children.
And when you're pregnant, they steal your brain and your memory doesn't always come back to you. that's, I survived the years with littles in the night. So my memory is good, but it's not where it used to be. I'll just say that. So the first thing I do is I launch my web browser of the day, and I've organized it.
If anyone has read about building a second brain by a Tiago Forte. He teaches the para method, which stands for projects, areas, resources, archive, and that's how I organize everything. Every folder I make, every browser I use, every, everything is my workflow of how I keep myself together. So under the areas, I have a folder that says Daily Lunch.
And inside of that I've got several folders. Of things that I open up as my morning routine because I don't want to overlook things and let them drop off. so I usually will begin with my RSS reader, which is quaint for those that are, perhaps younger. But RSS readers used to be a really big thing, I want to say 15 years ago.
And
[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: I still use RSS. Yeah.
[00:18:15] Courtney Robertson: So the one that I use is called Feedly. What this does is it allows me to, I, started with Google Reader. Unfortunately, Google killed it. yeah, everyone still mourns that.
So
[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: they do. It was good.
[00:18:30] Courtney Robertson: of me having to go out to find the headlines, I don't want to open up a million different websites, nor do I want to trust whatever social media platform.
With whatever algorithm as my primary method of getting the news. I want to know that I get the things that I want and I don't want to have to think about what website it comes from. And have I looked there lately? So my RSS list is going on 20 years of stuff.
[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
[00:19:01] Courtney Robertson: I have it organized in folders.
I've got one that's marketing related, one that's like general tech news, one that is WordPress. And in the WordPress one. And I should also say here that this also allows me, because I'm on the paid plan, it's five, 10 bucks a month or something, it allows me to also, bring, receive email newsletters to this.
And I prefer getting my email newsletters there because my email inbox, literally, I get hundreds of messages in my Gmail account that I've had since Gmail opened, and I can't get through all of that. In my RSS list, I have all of the news sources that I want to follow coming to me. And I also will add in, if I go to a WordCamp, I'll go through the speaker's websites when they share, here's my slides, and I'll put them into my RSS feed as well.
So
[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh boy. Your RSS feed is busy.
[00:20:03] Courtney Robertson: but it, the thing is, like I, I have it collapsed so that I just see headlines.
[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Nice.
[00:20:11] Courtney Robertson: I only skim what are the headlines. That doesn't mean that I read every article. I want to see what the headlines are and decide then, is that interesting to me to read?
[00:20:24] Nathan Wrigley: can I just interject at this point? So I, also use RSS and basically if ever a website comes up, which appears to show. Anything of interest over time about WordPress. it's not like necessarily something like TechCrunch, which might have one article every two years or something, but something which is repeatedly doing it.
I just go and, just append forward slash feed to the end and see if I get an RSS feed. And then, Google is there a, and then I add it. My one is called, my, my Feedly, if you like, is called Sui, and it's called Su. It's the URL is Sui News. So SUI news and and I can do the same sort of thing.
I'll throw things in there and all, I've got it set up. So all it does is give me the title. And so I'm doing more or less the same as you, because otherwise if there was like the excerpt I'd, it'd just be too much overload. And and I've probably got I dunno, a hundred news outlets producing tech WordPress stuff.
And basically my intuition is if it starts with a number, ignore it. if it's five best things that you can fuck, 28 things that you can do with a, I just pass that by. But I'm captured by almost everything. Read the headline, move on, read the headline, move on, read the headline. Oh, that's interesting.
Then what do you do? How do you siphon off the good stuff? Where does that
[00:21:47] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, so a lot of times I will take that over to. If it's a longer article, I'll toss it to my read later system, which is read, wise. This is where we start digging into some of the real gold read wise reader, so read wise.io and that functions as a read it later system for me. But I can also highlight things in there and append any notes.
There is some AI that's in there that will let me say, here is my prompt. Craft a blurb that I might use in a newsletter,
[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:22:26] Courtney Robertson: right? Yeah. And
[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: neat. Yeah.
[00:22:29] Courtney Robertson: so I toss things there that are, I need to look at this longer if it is something short or if it is something that I feel I need to share with others, it a timely manner.
Whether that is on my personal socials or if I say for instance, right before this call, I was reading Adam Zelinsky post that I came across about how he built a parser for playground, little dev oriented, and it reminded me of a video that Morton Rand Hendrickson recently was on TikTok, iterating upon how AI is changing what developers do.
And how they do it. So Adam used a lot of AI to build this system and I thought, oh, Morton would be interested in this though Morton is no longer part of the WordPress community as much Morton would be interested in the AI piece of what's of a developer using AI to do the thing. So I just dropped it to him in a LinkedIn dm.
and so that's a normal for me is like at this time of day, if I see something that's timely or. Causes me to think, oh, this person might be interested in this. I'll start sharing it to them while I'm doing it because I'm not going to remember
later.
[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really interesting. 'cause I, on the whole don't do that 'cause I have. I do this thing every month. I know you do post status e every week. So what I do is I just take the intuition that if somebody's subscribed to my newsletter, then they're to get what I pick out. And I, if it comes outta my feed reader.
Then I immediately drop it into the WordPress post. So on, at some point during the week when the first bit of interest comes my way, I'll create a draft post and then I'll just start dropping the, links into that post that I know will make up the news story. So as the week goes on, that will slowly fill up and then usually I dedicate more time to it on Friday and, put all the links in there.
But also if I'm just browsing the internet and I stumble across something that's not in the RSS, but I don't know Twitter. Pushed me in some direction, or I found something on LinkedIn or what have you. I have a, a fabulous Chrome extension called tab Extend. And, tab extend is basically it outsources your brain.
For tabs. So it allows you to keep an ongoing record of all the tabs. And it's not the usual, oh, just collapse 'em all and don't worry about it till later. You can create folders and sub folders, and you can attach notes and you can put them, you can, give them colors and things like that.
And also it works in the, on a mobile phone. So if you've got like an Android or an iOS phone, if you stumble across something that you like, you just click the little share button, click tab extend, and it'll drop into, and in my case, I have it this week in WordPress. Folder and everything goes in there.
And then at some point during the week, towards the end of the week, I just go through that folder. Everything that is still of interest to me gets put in the, post. Everything that's not of interest just gets deleted.
[00:25:38] Courtney Robertson: No,
[00:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if you want me to know that, but there you go.
[00:25:42] Courtney Robertson: I've used it. I like it. it, it sadly was not cooperating with ARC most recently, which is a chromium browser, but,
[00:25:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:25:53] Courtney Robertson: I'll dig into seeing if I could get it to cooperate.
[00:25:57] Nathan Wrigley: I really like it. It's, it made my, the minute I discovered it, I was like, that's the tool. I'm not going to keep looking. It allows me to just save stuff. in the past I've used things like Evernote and Notion, but there was always some much more friction there. You gotta open up another app.
Whereas this, when you open up a new tab, it, the tab extend chromium extension will reveal to you, oh, here's all the tabs you wanted to remember. Now just click on the one that you want.
[00:26:23] Courtney Robertson: Yep.
[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Anyway, sorry I interrupted.
[00:26:26] Courtney Robertson: no, it's good. So, here's one of the beautiful things about, systems like Feedly and RSS readers in general, is they export all of your sources into a file called OPML. And for those that are just dipping their toes in, ah, I've never used a feed reader, or I'm new in the community, how do I even know what the new sources are?
one of the things that we could do, this may take a bit of doing Nathan, I don't know if I could get it before airtime, but I could export my OPML file and pare it down just to the WordPress folder so that people can get all the sources that are WordPress sources that I'm using. And that's something I've done in some of the tech, some of the other folders I've got.
the tech news, and also there's one on design. Chris Coyer shared Chris and CSS Tricks formerly shared his OPML file of designers. He follows, I just slipped that all into my Feedly system. So now I have all of
[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:27:31] Courtney Robertson: so I can
[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: So, he's, so Chris in this case has exported a bunch of RSS feeds into an OPML file. you hit one button and you've got his curated list. it's a bit like playlists on Spotify only for future content coming through RSS. Oh, that's neat.
[00:27:48] Courtney Robertson: an old school system and people have recently been talking about upgrading the RSS protocols and what it can source, but, don't underestimate the power of this in terms of getting the information that you want. Also, don't feel like you need to build out this crazy system immediately.
So each WordCamp I go through and I find I follow the speakers. I often will follow everybody on social media. But I also will then put the speaker's, blogs, each camp if I know that I don't have them yet into, so I'm just slowly building. So what people see is something that I've been doing. I've been RSS reader with coffee in hand since 2006, probably.
[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's big.
[00:28:37] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So at this point, don't feel that you need to immediately do everything. it's a slow growth, and I would say the same thing is true in the other buckets that I check. So aside from feed readers, I also listen to podcasts. Podcasts are RSS as well, but audio format, right? And they too will do an export as RSS feed.
And so you could get somebody's OPML files for that. And I also go to YouTube subscriptions. So my podcast catcher, I like snipped because it also will let me highlight things and clip it and send it to read wise as well, so that if I need to look back, it's got the transcript and I could tag it. And so
[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: What's this, a podcast player
[00:29:29] Courtney Robertson: yeah.
S-N-I-P-D Snipped, S-N-I-P-D, snipped.
[00:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: that's a podcast player that allows you to take bits and say, publish this portion to social media. Oh, that's
[00:29:43] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, I use it. I can actually get it to give me like a audio file. it's a, I can make it a video that automatically puts the captions up so I could share it to social media or I can also highlight things and maybe I don't publicize it everywhere, but my read wise account hooks up to it. So then I want to be like, I remember that time when Nathan said that thing and I want to find it again
[00:30:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:30:11] Courtney Robertson: want to trust my memory to find it again.
It will.
[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: That is so cool. Oh, honestly, Courtney, you've just changed my life. Like the rest of my day is gone. I'm going to end up spending absolutely loads on snipped. Is that a premium thing? Do you have to pay for the features there
[00:30:27] Courtney Robertson: I do pay for ai, and again, it's five bucks a month or something, five 10 a month. but when you're heavily relying on podcasts to understand what's going on in the community,
[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:30:38] Courtney Robertson: be a worthwhile endeavor. I don't know that everybody should do that. I pay
[00:30:44] Nathan Wrigley: Does it help you summarize things like you, you take an hour of content and give me the top, I don't know, the top five bullet points that came outta that. yeah. I think actually AI's pretty good at that
[00:30:54] Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
[00:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: I, think that's one of the things that it's remarkably good at if you just give it a corpus of knowledge and just say, focus on that and nothing else.
So I don't need the internet. I just need, tell me about that hour of podcasting. I think it's actually really good, okay. That's brilliant. Thank you for
[00:31:11] Courtney Robertson: I also check, my YouTube subscriptions and so again, I subscribed to channels and in the past I used to send everything to my watch later queue. And just have a watch later party in the background while I work. If I felt like it, now I send it to my Read wise account because read wise, as soon as the YouTube video gets, the closed caption on there, takes 24 hours sometimes for that to automate.
Then read Wise will get the, it will show the whole transcript and you could watch the video. And then if you wanted to, again, highlight and save for yourself some segments. There it is.
[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: Read Wise is read wise.io. All of these, by the way, I'm writing them down as we go and I'll put them all into the show notes and I dunno, maybe
[00:32:02] Courtney Robertson: And again, what works for me in my role, I'm not saying everybody go spend lots of money on a bunch of monthly subscriptions.
[00:32:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, but what's really neat though, about what you are doing is that you are doing the legwork, a lot of legwork to cut out a lot of the noise. And, obviously not everybody will align with the content that you want to highlight. I. But I do. and so it's, it really helps me because there's something about the stuff that you constantly put out and I'm like, yeah, I want to read that and I want to read that and I want to read that.
So getting an insight into your process is really cool. It, you see it on the post status blog and you think, oh, it's, somebody just dumped it there. no, Courtney spends hours doing this stuff, but obviously you can't spend like an infinite number of hours. So getting the process that you are using is really interesting.
Yeah. Okay.
[00:32:53] Courtney Robertson: So then, a few other places I check out there is, more developer focused, daily dev. And
[00:33:05] Nathan Wrigley: good.
[00:33:06] Courtney Robertson: it is. And so what I would, before I veer too far, when you find somebody that you want to follow. Go get their blog in your feed league. Go find their YouTube channel. Go find if they have a podcast and subscribe the minute that you're thinking of it, 'cause you're not going to do it later.
And so I build up all of my social accounts, my RSS, everything as a, Hey, I think I should follow this person and add their stuff or this company and add their stuff so that I don't miss it. But I do want a little serendipity in my day. And I want to be able to train that serendipity a bit, so to see what's going on beyond the WordPress community.
I look at daily dev and I often will focus in the web dev space, not just WordPress. So that means I'm looking at the PHP information. JavaScript specifically react within JavaScript CSS. I'm tuning a little into what other open source communities are doing and or frameworks built off of open source. So CSS, the language is open source.
But I'm paying attention to what's going on in Bootstrap and in Tailwind or in PHP, I'm looking at Laravel and Symphony a little bit. And so daily.dev is a great way for me to have all of that. And if I find that I am regularly always opening up, for instance, I discovered while surfing daily.dev, the one day, Amazon Web Services AWS open source.
Newsletter. So within the AWS department at Amazon, they have an area that is focused on open source. So I will then say, oh, I stumbled over to this thing, not stumbled upon days, but I found this thing. And sowant tonna get on that newsletter because I, saw an article on Daily Dev that led me to that.
So now that newsletter's sitting in my Feedly as well. So it's just a way of giving myself like a curated. Experience of still some serendipity in my browsing the web and knowing what's going on in spaces. I don't know what I don't know. So how do I add in things into around me that are outside of my bubble when I'm not the expert outside of my bubble?
And so daily Dev gives me that.
[00:35:30] Nathan Wrigley: really good. It's, you put me onto it. Actually, when we had that call, that was probably, I don't know, four or five months ago or something, and I get it literally every day. And honestly, most of it I just scan through and I think, no, not for me. But, but there's a, whole ton of it. That I, that I end up, like you say, it's serendipity.
You just, you throw stuff in there that you think maybe something will come out of that. And then once in a while it does, and you're like, oh, that's gold. And actually I have at the bottom of my newsletter for this week in WordPress every week there's a bit called, not WordPress, but useful anyway.
And, that's often now where those things come up
[00:36:04] Courtney Robertson: Right.
[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: and they send you an email. So you don't even have to go looking for it. You just plumb your email address in and they'll send you this curated list of possibly interesting stuff each day. and I noticed that you, do you surface that at the bottom of your post status post?
you get the pH stuff right at the bottom beyond, yeah.
[00:36:21] Courtney Robertson: the dependencies. Anything that WordPress itself is dependent upon major frameworks. I will put in tools often, so WordPress, a lot of WordPress plugin devs are using. Composer and home brew and these types of things. And so I add all of those things in at the bottom of the post as well, hoping that the plugin devs and all of the places are paying attention to, oh, there's an update coming for PHP 8.4 is on the horizon, so sometimes I'll see the news about that. Or somebody blogging about. Here's what you can expect in the changes, and I find that's pretty interesting.
I do look at some general world news types of things as well. I try and look as an American, I feel it's important for me to see both how my country is reporting global news, but how other global news sources. Are also reporting it. And so I look at General Global News. I check out Reuters and Al Jazeera and BBC and a few other sources.
I just, honestly, for those, I launched them. I click through a couple of continents, see what the beat is there. but I feel like it's important to see, and it's interesting sometimes what I can learn tech-wise. By checking these sources out, for instance, that certain nations are requiring, I think it's in Switzerland, that we're requiring open source tools to be prioritized over proprietary for governmental work.
[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: So there's the bit of serendipity, just wondering about you come across stuff, which is interesting like that. Yeah. And you know the things like you can go to prison in Ireland if your website is not accessible and things like that. Yeah, it's, yeah. Really interesting. okay.
There's the high level of what you do and I don't think, I don't think we're trying to sell. Anybody this process. It's just fascinating. there's only a few people out there who really are going to want to do this. I'm one of them. You are one of them. There's a few others who are creating, curating.
Ray probably is one of them. the WordPress news. And so I will put all of the links to those bits and pieces. Oh, go on.
[00:38:43] Courtney Robertson: the, there's, okay, I'll name off just a couple of quick other little bits. of course, all of the sources like medium and dev two, I also launch those, a couple times a week and hash node as well. and what's the other, there's another big substack, right? So I have curated things to follow in those places.
I'll check on those. and, David Bessette launched the, with his daughter, Olivia, launched WP front page. So I scan through that one as well, like once a week or so and see what's in there just to make sure I haven't missed something. Once I get through looking at those, I often will move on to scanning.
My social media accounts and one that I would like to really draw attention to. Actually two things. I facilitate a LinkedIn group with Rob s and
[00:39:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.
[00:39:35] Courtney Robertson: and we're at a little over 14,000 people in there. so I will check in and see and also vet anything that needs to happen as well as vetting.
I, I help Chris Wegman does most of the work on this formally at WP Engine. Chris. Every day logs into jobs.WordPress.net and looks through what's submitted and publishes it. I assist with that. So I'll scan through that too. And again, these are all broken into folders in my browser, so I don't forget a thing because I don't want to trust my memory.
And GitHub as well. Same deal with GitHub. And I look at like the GitHub front page that shows me all the activity. Of what people have been doing. And then I will also get, go check my notifications inbox as well. and again, I, while I'm doing these things, I'm either sending certain things to read wise or to my, to-do lists or to people that need to know the things.
That's just, I have my cup or to of coffee and that's what I do to get started with my day cup or
[00:40:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I honestly Courtney not a joke. When I watched, so when we had that call a little while ago, I, we, you shared your screen, you do things at a prodigious speed. Your, your navigation of the computer is way faster than mine. And and I reckon that if I got up and had my coffee. By the time I'd gone through the things that you've just described that you do, like before the second coffee, I'm basically ready for bed, at the speed that I do things.
I'd get up, do what you do in a matter of hours, I don't know, under an hour or whatever it is. And then, but for me, it would take a whole day. but. We'll put all of the links in the show notes. I'm just curious,
[00:41:21] Courtney Robertson: Mm-Hmm.
[00:41:22] Nathan Wrigley: just pivoting some, way away from the process and obviously the process that Courtney's just described is going to be the thing that A, helps me make my, this weekend WordPress show.
But we'll also inform what we talk about in subsequent shows because it will be the bits that rise to the surface. You'll need a new folder. Courtney, you'll have to have a, a WP Builds, show kind of folder for the very best bits. Where do you, where would you recommend to somebody who's brand new to the WordPress community, what things would you recommend that they visit online, attend in person, get involved in?
And obviously that's going to be your own personal proclivities, but what kind of things appeal to you community-wise, that you would encourage people to look at, think about?
[00:42:06] Courtney Robertson: to bring all of this into the community specifically, I say I do all of these things that involve me in my computer. But if you hear Nathan takes the output of that. So Nathan and I have a relationship. I send something to Morton. Morton and I have a relationship that exists outside of LinkedIn messages, right?
so we have spent those times together. So go where the people are, get to meetups, get to camps, if we have to rely on Zoom and others tools, we'll do that. Get to meet people in the space, because. It makes all the difference in how you understand the information that they share and or the information you may share with them.
And for a long time, my work was not about do I know all of the news. I am very fortunate that now a lot of my work rides on that. But it also was informing what I was doing as a teacher. It was informing those things. So it's again, being around where the people are and meeting the community, but.
I would also say, if you're looking for a couple of sources for these things, of course we're going to put all the show notes together. My real true main sources, I would narrow it down to two things. I have a Twitter list that I put all the WordPresses in, unless they've been so vile that I cannot, so it's hard for people to, It's usually that doesn't happen.
[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: It does. Occasionally though some things need to be expunged. I agree.
[00:43:40] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So there's a Twitter list of my closest 4,300 WordPresses that I connect with.
[00:43:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:43:49] Courtney Robertson: so if they have WordPress in their title, any of those kinds of details, I, that's a bit of serendipity, right? So the social media algorithms. So I would say follow that and start meeting people from that also.
[00:44:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, we'll link to that in the show notes. just quickly, WP Builds.com, search for this episode. I dunno what number it'll be, but it'll be coming out very soon. look for search for Courtney. Top right with the little magnifying glass icon. And, yeah. Okay, so there's that. Sorry.
And then carry on.
[00:44:20] Courtney Robertson: then the other thing that I do quite a bit is, Elevating what the work of the WordPress teams are doing. So I know the people in the teams, because I'm inside of make WordPress like the Slack channel for make WordPress. But additionally, if you just want give me one list that shows the blog post from all two dozen plus teams, make.WordPress.org/latest, please forgive.
[00:44:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. That is a good one.
[00:44:54] Courtney Robertson: Ahead of time. Please forgive. This is still a classic theme. This, part of the site has not been redesigned. So we just have a couple of simple r ss widgets that are in there. And so again, make.WordPress.org/latest. I put in all of the teams blog posts. the one exception to that would be like, Gutenberg, there's a lot of activity, but that all happens in GitHub, right?
so there are a couple of places you could additionally check. I put all that together for you in the and anyone that wants to get it in the weekly post status this week in Make WordPress Roundup that I, write. But if you just want to check on your own time before I have one of those, so once a week I'll compile the work of all the teams make WordPress.org/latest.
Please notice the times that a title compels you to read the article and when it may not. Some of the teams are just like, here's the updates for the last month. The title isn't very interesting, but the content might be. And
[00:45:58] Nathan Wrigley: I.
[00:45:59] Courtney Robertson: I might pick on the design team. Their last post was really great as far as the title goes about the new design initiatives.
But traditionally, there's just like a design updates for the last two weeks. And that title may not be interesting, but you're going to miss gold if you. Don't see what's going on in there, and so notice the times, and so the teams will have different things going on. Sometimes they say, here's our meeting agenda.
Here's the meeting recap. You could participate asynchronously in the Slack channel chats about it. Those times are when they pull in and say. Here are all the content that we have sitting in track or GitHub or whatever, and we need to have a discussion about it. And so the recap posts, I feel like if you don't have time to get to the meetings and participate at that level, reading the recaps that a team puts together and says, here's what we did at the last meeting, could be a helpful way of getting that information.
[00:47:02] Nathan Wrigley: there's so much in this episode, to be honest, and, and this will be like no other episode that we do with Courtney. So if the machinations, basically this episode is like the meta, this is the, this is how, this is what's going to go on behind the scenes for the episodes that we do in the future.
So if, this kind of content didn't if it didn't push your buttons. Don't, worry. come back and the next one that we do will just be a case of, okay, this is what we found interesting in what we have both read over the last, I don't know, three months, but also I think maybe it'll be shining a light on, things which are about to happen, events which are about to happen and things like that.
[00:47:39] Courtney Robertson: I would anticipate
[00:47:40] Nathan Wrigley: all sorts.
[00:47:41] Courtney Robertson: our next record date. I am looking ahead a bit, is close to a release and we'll be through most of the contr new contributor mentorship cohort that goes along with that release.
[00:47:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So
[00:47:55] Courtney Robertson: little bit of
[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: there's a whole other thing.
[00:47:58] Courtney Robertson: but I.
[00:48:00] Nathan Wrigley: so that's what this show is going to be about. It's not going to be about that because that's what we're going to do in the background to figure out what's going on because both of us are our, I. In my case, I'm doing air quotes.
Job is to, is to find these news articles and create content about it. And Courtney's job, definitely job is to, is to do similar things, text-based and what have you. So that's how we're going to be doing it. And if you've got, if you've got anything that you've heard in this episode and you just caught it in your ear and you think, oh.
What was that? And you haven't got the capacity to rewind or you didn't hear what it was? All of the bits and pieces. I've been taking lots of little notes on my fabulously high tech piece of paper and, and I'll put all of them into the, show notes. So WP Builds.com. Go and search for this latest episode.
I can't remember what number it'll be, but, search for Courtney Robertson. And, and you'll be able to find that. And, yeah, so that's it. And we'll, we will be seeing you, no doubt. We'll see you on this week in WordPress before. I'll see you next week in, in Portland, for WordCamp us. That'll be nice.
And, but if none of that happens, then I'll see you. I'll see you in about, I don't know, 12 weeks or something like that for another episode of, this with the content front and center. Courtney, thanks so much.
[00:49:16] Courtney Robertson: absolutely thank you for having me, Nathan.
[00:49:18] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting to Courtney today. If you have anything you want to say, if you're interested in Courtney's process or my slightly more poor man's version of Courtney's process, head to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 389, and leave us a comment there. I will respond. It would be really nice to hear what your thoughts are.
Don't forget that other episodes will not be like this. It'll be more looking at the content that we have found over the last three months or so. Not to the process that created it. But I hope that you enjoyed that anyway.
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