[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 405, entitled new show, The Nice Show with Mark Westguard, episode one. It was published on Thursday, the 16th of January, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by Mark Westguard in a few short minutes. But before that a few bits of very short housekeeping. If you want to keep in touch with what we do at wpbuilds.com, head to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. Over on that page, you'll be able to find all of the different places that we hang out. I am hanging out as you'll find out in a moment on Bluesky a little bit more. My handle over there is at nathanwrigley.com. So head over to there and I'd love to hear from you on that platform, really enjoying it.
The other thing to mention is that if you would like to get yourself, your product, your service out in front of a WordPress specific audience, head to WP Builds.com forward slash advertise to see how we can help you with that endeavor. There were a few companies in a moment that you'll hear from who have done just that.
The other thing that I always like to mention is that if you enjoy the podcast and you want to share it on social media, but you want to make a comment, head over to our website and use the wonderful WordPress commenting system.
So in this case it had two episode number 405, and leave us a comment there. We would really appreciate it.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, something totally new and somewhat unexpected. I got in touch with Mark Westguard a little while ago. He and I have been growing in friendship for quite some time now. And I said to him, would you like to do one of the new shows? We've got loads of people giving us contributions.
So we've got Rae Moray, we've got Courtney Robertson. We've got Birgit Pauli-Haack. We've got Tim Nash and Remkus de Vries. And I thought it might be nice to get Mark on, to talk about coding.
However, when we started chatting, we decided wouldn't it be nice to just do something a little bit left field. And so that's what we're doing.
Now, I don't know how this is going to land. It's kind of WordPress, but it's kind of not. We're calling it The Nice Show, and genuinely that is what we're talking about.
We're trying to find things out there in the year 2025, online, that we think are in air quotes, nice. I think it's fair to say that the year 2024 has brought all sorts of interesting things in the WordPress community.
Maybe online, you are suffering from fatigue, from social media? And so the endeavor is that this show is a bit of an antidote to that. Some of it is WordPress, some of it is not, but hopefully it lands well with you.
If you've got any commentary about it, if you think we've missed the target, or if you think it really isn't appropriate, I'd love to hear from you.
If you think it's a great idea and it cheered you up, I'd love to hear about that as well. Head to WP Builds.com for search for episode number 405, and leave us a comment there.
So here we go. Brand new, with Mark Westguard, The Nice Show. I hope that you enjoy it.
Hello there. How you doing, Mark?
[00:05:01] Mark Westguard: I'm doing good. How are you doing?
[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. This is Mark Westguard. That is Mark Westguard's voice. Mark Westguard is more than just a voice, though he is got an actual body. I can see it.
And, he's joining me today and he's giggling, which is the best way to begin this show because we're trying something new. Back in 2024, late 2024, I reached out to Mark and I said, should we do a show together? And he said. Yeah. Alright. And then I said, what should we do it about? And he said, I don't know.
And I said, what about code? And then he said, yes. And then when we sat down and I tried to come up with some things that would work in an audio podcast with code, it was harder than I thought. So then we had another thing and thought, let's just do a show, which is a bit of fun. And that's what this show is.
It's gonna be called The Nice Show and it's, and
[00:05:48] Mark Westguard: This is
[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: we're already giggling. It's the whole enterprise and the idea. Is because the year 20 22, 20 23, 20 24 and probably 2025 is have been in many regards, dumpster fires. There's so much coming at us from all angles, which is negative. It brings you down.
We're gonna do the, the antidote to that. We're gonna try to throw silly content at you, some of it to do with WordPress, much of it not to do with WordPress, and, and hopefully cheer you up a bit.
[00:06:19] Mark Westguard: That's right.
[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: So if you've got any expectations of this being largely to do with WordPress, suspend it for this episode.
And
[00:06:25] Mark Westguard: Just press pause.
[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: po. No. Yeah, go and find a go and find a different WordPress podcast. So it's called The Nice Show and I've blocked it into different categories. But firstly, before we get into that, just tell us, tell tell us. Tell us all who you are. Mark. Who are you?
[00:06:40] Mark Westguard: Who are? Who are you?
[00:06:41] Nathan Wrigley: exactly. I never introduce myself.
That's a good point. I'm Nathan Wrigley. I run a podcast called WP Builds and and who are you?
[00:06:50] Mark Westguard: Hi, I'm Mark Westguard. I'm the founder of WS Form. love the WordPress community and try to get involved as much as I can. And, I'm doing this show now with Nathan Wrigley. It's, we, we thought this up in the last
[00:07:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. What
[00:07:04] Mark Westguard: is good as it's gonna get.
[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: Sometimes the best ideas come just like that, and, this is not one of those, but anyway. Anyway. See, you're
[00:07:14] Mark Westguard: could be revolutionary, you.
[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: already. Okay, so here we go. What we've decided to do is we are gonna block this episode into different sections and we're just gonna talk about nice stuff.
And in order to do that, we're gonna break it down this time around, next time we do it, we might have different sections, but we're gonna do people that we like, nice people. Nice people. Then we're gonna do what I've called nice code. So anything, and Mark's got something up his sleeve for that nice community thing.
That'll be a WordPress thing. Nice internet thing. So well, yeah, we'll talk about that.
[00:07:45] Mark Westguard: There are some nice things on the internet.
[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: You've gotta look really hard. And there's only four of them.
[00:07:51] Mark Westguard: There's four
[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: four nice things on the internet, but we've managed
[00:07:55] Mark Westguard: So we're gonna be good for the next four
[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And then hopefully something else nice will have happened.
nice real world thing. Looking forward to that. nice short video. Oh, what a joy this will be. I won't be able to show it 'cause it's a audio podcast, but I'll tell you to pause it. I'll provide the link and then, and you know, and then you can come back and spit your drink out as well. and then maybe, who knows, maybe there'll be some other things at the end.
But, first stop. Nice person and, together, I think we've decided on, well, who's our first nice person, mark?
[00:08:29] Mark Westguard: Our first nice person is Michelle Frache and what a nice person she is. I met. I didn't meet Michelle. I think I started chatting to her online through, WP Coffee Talk. I was looking for places to advertise my business and up she popped and I started texting her, I think online.
And, we didn't stop texting after that. I don't think we've had a day where we haven't
[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? You are? Oh, interesting.
[00:08:59] Mark Westguard: Yeah, and we've obviously met at work camp and stuff like that, and we've built up a good, good friendship, Michelle and I, and she comes to visit us for her birthday and we, my wife and our kids and Michelle have.
Lots and lots of yummy meals together and a birthday cake. And, but no, genuinely, Michelle is just, she's just a lovely person and I don't know anybody that's met Michelle that would say otherwise. She, we don't have enough time in this show to read out her WordPress do org profile for everything that she does for the community.
she has spoken at so many events. She supports different work camps. She, I dunno where to start, but, Be between everything that she does. She is also capable of just being a lovely person to everybody. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say anything negative about Michelle,
[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I, I, I, there's a load that Michelle does for me, not with me, for me in the background. And I actually can't remember when I met Michelle, but, I. We do this this week in WordPress show, and, and I read out the bio and she's deliberately caught it down because she does so, she does so many things that it, the bio was taken like a whole minute to read.
So she, I guess maybe she was being a bit bashful about that, but she cut it down and now it's, it's still giant. But she does so much in the community. She's got a really big heart. And, and the stuff that she does for me, which helps me out is wrangling the show. I'm not very good at finding guests. And she has that as a superpower.
'cause she just knows everybody. So she really, really, really helps me with that. So, so Michelle Frache there, you get our award as one of the nice people on this episode. We, we don't have an actual award, but maybe I could send you a tweet or something to say. You're a
[00:10:52] Mark Westguard: We should have had her on the show to it to do an acceptance
[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: You're officially nice. That's something we can do in the future, mark. Maybe we should have sort of award system where we send somebody an official, official
[00:11:02] Mark Westguard: cold call them.
[00:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Cold. Call 'em up, see what they think. But Michelle Ette, thank you so much for everything that you do for me and also I guess that you do for Mark or with
[00:11:15] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Thank you very
[00:11:15] Nathan Wrigley: I have a, I have, I have some knowledge though about what she thinks about you. be because I know that she really likes you because I, I also happen to know that you are very good to her, especially when we were at Word Camp us in San Diego. I have a very strong memory that you were being a very supportive person in her direction as well.
'cause I don't think that event was, everything. It could have been, let's put it that way. And I think you were one of the people that, stepped in and, yeah. Made a difference in that, on that
[00:11:44] Mark Westguard: Yeah, we are, we're. Each other's agony aren't and UNCs, that's for
[00:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:11:49] Mark Westguard: that's what friends are for,
[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: So Michelle Frache, thank you for being you. We appreciate it. If you don't know Michelle, then have a look at the show notes.
Wp builds.com. Search for this episode and we will link to Michelle's bits and pieces there. The next one I wanted to mention, this will be our last one. This, this time around is, Joe Dolson. I. Mr. Joe Dolson, who is one of the people who does the tireless accessibility work in the WordPress space, and I've been lucky enough to hang out with Joe on two or three occasions in real life.
All too brief, but also, very graciously. He has. Decided to, in much the same way you are doing now, he has decided to do a show with me called, well, w the WP builds sort of accessibility show for want of a better word. And and it's really interesting do watching him do what he does, he takes the websites apart and, you know, critiques them from a, an accessibility point of view.
And I just really appreciate. Somebody who wants to be involved in that sphere of things. I don't quite know what that is, but I just really appreciate somebody who wants to make it their mission to improve the web for people who probably find it difficult to navigate around. And you know, he's fighting the good fight.
So there we go. I don't, you don't know Joe, so you can't really sort of chip in on that, can you?
[00:13:07] Mark Westguard: I don't, but I want to know him and, I can't agree with you more that accessibility is important and I think being good at accessibility on your website or whatever you are building is good for those that need it, but also for those that don't necessarily need it, it makes a website easier to use.
So I'm all for the advocates in that space. I know quite a few people in the WordPress space that focus on accessibility and have a lot of respect for 'em.
[00:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: a few, isn't there? We could have mentioned any of those, but it's just the, it's just the fact that I've been, meeting him and doing the show. I've just got a real high level of respect for Joe. So, so there we go. There's our two nice people. Hopefully that's cheered you up.
Audience members, you know, you probably started this show thinking, what the heck? by now you should have a bit of a grin. Let's see if we can turn that. Into something a bit bigger as the show
[00:13:54] Mark Westguard: Let's grow that grin.
[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: grow the grin. I like it. There's a phrase. so the next piece is nice code and honestly we're gonna use this as an opportunity to promote something that you've been doing recently.
And it could have been anything, could have been your work, could have been somebody else's work, but we're gonna plump for what you've been doing. 'cause you've been a busy, busy man.
[00:14:13] Mark Westguard: I have, yeah, I, I made the strange decision to decide that in my form plug, and I wanted to make it easier to style forms and, and I thought, oh, this won't take long. And then four months later I'm still,
[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: There's, there's not, you know, there's only a couple of the hundred, what is it, 400 different settings that you could come up with.
[00:14:34] Mark Westguard: Oh, it's ridiculous. Yeah. It, you, it's when you do a project like this that you realize how complicated forms can be. everyone kind of thinks of a contact us. Oh, that's easy. But yeah, when you've got somebody building a window configurator for a, window installation company, then you realize.
How complicated it's, so no, what we've done is, completely rebuilt the Styler in WS form and made it, UCSS variable. So it's super easy for people to develop with. and yeah, it's literally tens of thousands of lines of go behind it, to, get it working. But then on the, on the face of it, it's quite easy to use.
the idea is you can just go in there. Click an element that you want to modify, like a, I don't know, a field border or background color or a checkbox style, and then you can just use the sliders and other input. Inputs that we give to, to change the look. And then you can export those, you can import those styles.
You can have multiple styles per, on your website. So you can have a style for your book, for your footer, a style for your header,
[00:15:35] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:15:36] Mark Westguard: things like that. So it's, yeah, so it does, I'm quite pleased with it and we've had some really good feedback about it. So that's, that's our nice bit of code
[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah. This month. Tell, tell me this though, I, if I'm an inexperienced user and I don't really want to sort of wrangle all the bits and pieces, and I don't really wanna get into the 400 odd settings, are there ways for me to just click a button and be like, okay, that's pretty good. That'll get me, yeah.
You've got templates that'll
[00:15:59] Mark Westguard: Yeah. it, the, heart of it, it really is just a few different colors. So you've got like your text color, your background color, maybe a color for the submit button. And if you change those, that does most of what you want, and then those colors bleed through the rest of the website.
But if you want to get a little bit more minutia and a bit more detail, then you can go into specific elements. Even like the calendar, you can go into a day and actually change the font style for
[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh wow.
[00:16:25] Mark Westguard: So yeah, it goes fairly detailed,
[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: I in order just to make this a bit more fun, I'm gonna throw down the gauntlet. If there's anybody listening to this who has WS forms and wants a challenge, I will give somebody a whole US dollar, one US dollar. If you can show me the. Ugliest form that it's possible to make, I mean, truly horrific.
I want you to go absolutely berserk, make everything as unreadable as possible, as ridiculous as possible. I think that'd be entertainment, don't you?
[00:16:57] Mark Westguard: And we'll make it a preset in the style templates.
[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright. The ugly form. Okay. That is nice. So, yeah, if you've, if you've got WS form, go and make a truly ugly form and then DM me on Twitter at WP builds and let me know that you've done it and, and we'll showcase maybe we can ourselves have a bit of a giggle, next time and show some of those off.
That'd be nice. Okay. The next thing. That we've done is so we had a nice person, we've had nice code. That's your stuff. Next one is nice community thing. So we're back to WordPress again. We're staying with WordPress just for a bit. And I got a couple of things. First one is a WordPress event. It's coming up soon.
We're recording this in middle of January, 2025. I keep wanting to say 2024. I can't get that out my head. 2025 and World Camp Asia is coming soon. And, excitement building up over there. You are going, aren't you?
[00:17:51] Mark Westguard: I am going. Yes. Yeah, it's gonna be a long flight.
[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: Of course. Yeah.
[00:17:55] Mark Westguard: long haul flight. I'll be playing lots of games on the way there and then, yeah, it, when is it like, I think it's only a month away, isn't it? Three or four weeks
[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. Something like that. I don't actually have the dates to hand, but if you go, if you Google WordCamp Asia, 2025, you'll be able to find it.
[00:18:14] Mark Westguard: Are you
[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I don't know yet. I'm not going at the moment.
[00:18:18] Mark Westguard: Yeah. I will be there with, Michelle's going.
Bob, dun, Bob WP will be there as well. We'll be next to each other, sponsorship booth. So we're looking forward to that. We usually get up to mischief,
[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:18:32] Mark Westguard: but yeah, I'm looking forward to going to Manila,
[00:18:34] Nathan Wrigley: I might be there, but I don't, I don't, I haven't booked a ticket yet, let's put it that way. But we'll have to wait and see. But I am what's called a media partner. So the mere, the mere mention of this is fulfilling that obligation. If you sign up to be a media partner, you have this obligation to sort of mention it before, during, after.
You have to mention it in, you know, a sort of favorable way and promise not to be, mean, and what have you. And, and that's fairly easy 'cause I love all that kind of stuff. But I don't know if I'm gonna go yet, but, Manila, which way round do you go when you fly? So you are, you are not on the East coast Exactly of the US but you're closer to the east than you are to
[00:19:09] Mark Westguard: Closer to the east than the
[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: you fly west over California and then across the Pacific.
[00:19:16] Mark Westguard: yeah, it's funny actually, we, so we usually go west, and this time I'm leaving really late on a Sunday. And I arrive on a Tuesday because of the time difference. 'cause I le, I leave just before midnight on Tuesday, on Sunday, and arrive on Tuesday.
[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: sleep throughout the whole of Monday. Monday's just written
[00:19:35] Mark Westguard: Monday's just gone. And then, yeah, I come, I think I come back about a week and a bit later, but, sometimes when I've gone to the far east, I go up over the pole, they sometimes go up over, over the pole and back down again. 'cause so I used to live in New Orleans, so New Orleans to, Singapore is literally the other side of the planet, so they fly over the top.
But I think they can only do that a certain number of times. A month or something. 'cause of radiation or
[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah, yeah. But you imagine also whatever's coming outta the engines is probably not all that favorable for the, for the ice down there.
[00:20:10] Mark Westguard: for the
[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: So here's a weird story. When I was about, when I was considerably younger, so when I was about four, it wasn't when I was four, you'll know why in a minute.
I worked in a travel agent. I was not a four, for a very short amount of time. I wasn't very good at it. So I didn't last very long. And then I discovered web development and I wasn't very good at that. But here we are. the, one of the things that I did in the travel agent was sell tickets over the millennium.
So, so ex, you know, the, the, you could basically buy a ticket, and one of the tickets that you could buy, and they were like red hot. The minute they came on sale, they went for crazy money. So you could fly from Sydney at like four in the morning on New Year's day 2000. So you'd gone from 1999 to the year 2000, and you could fly to California. Arrive at like 4:00 PM in 1999 again,
[00:21:10] Mark Westguard: and do it all
[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: so that's exactly, it was basically full of a bunch of people who wanted to do the New Year's twice. It's very greedy.
[00:21:19] Mark Westguard: That's
[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: isn't that brilliant? Isn't that absolutely great? But anybody coming your way, if they, I mean, presumably there were planes in the sky at that point, there would've been a whole bunch of people who just totally missed that that entire day.
It is gone. so there's our first nice thing, word, camp Asia and
[00:21:35] Mark Westguard: is a nice
[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. The second nice thing I want to mention is something called the WPCC. I forgot the right number of C's there. Two C's, WPCC. I think I said it three times, then the WordPress Community Collective. And, if you haven't checked this out, I think this is worth checking out.
I will put the links in the show notes, but recently, and we chatted about this on this week in WordPress just the other day, they have, gained and apparently it doesn't come without quite a lot of paperwork, kind of non-profits status, what we would call charitable status in the uk. And and it's a way that.
People like you or I, if you have some money burning a hole in your pocket and you would like to spend that, but you don't know which endeavor in the WordPress community you would like it to go towards, you can kind of give it to the WPCC and it's almost like a bit of an escrow thing. And they will, they will distribute that money for you.
So they take the responsibility of finding people that might make use of it. And you can just, let's say you give them, I dunno, a hundred dollars, $200, you can then kind of say to yourself, okay, I've done a good thing with that, but I don't necessarily have, have somebody they want to give it to. And they will, they will take that task on.
So I just thought that was really nice as well.
[00:22:47] Mark Westguard: It is nice. I, they thanked me once and I didn't, I forgot who they were and then I realized I had donated money to them,
[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: I see. So there you go. You see, you were nice.
[00:22:58] Mark Westguard: I did a nice thing
[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: See in the, in the, in the
[00:23:01] Mark Westguard: But we should,
[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: nice. You have been nice.
[00:23:04] Mark Westguard: this is a nice thing to give money to.
[00:23:06] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. WPCC two Cs, again, links in the show notes, so that, that's a, that's our third nice thing. So we're halfway through. The next thing is completely nothing to do with, WordPress at all, and I've just called this nice internet thing, so this could literally be anything but the, the nicest thing that's happened to me on the internet or one of them is the discovery of Blue Sky.
you've used that.
[00:23:32] Mark Westguard: I signed up for it and I'm surprised how big it's got and there is a nice WordPress community there. 'cause a lot of people were there. And that's basically the people I follow and that follow me, poor people. But, but yeah, it's, and it's a nice place to be and it's a nice place to be right now because, for, in my opinion, there's no advertising on there right now.
They haven't got to that point. So it's quite, there's not much noise there.
[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: I don't think that advertising free bit can last. Can it
[00:24:02] Mark Westguard: I don't
[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: get, get in while you can, you know, enjoy it whilst the, whilst the water's warm.
[00:24:08] Mark Westguard: And then next year, the NICE show will tell you the new social
[00:24:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah, it's coming. Well, I would say permanently it's gonna be Mastodon, but, but Mastodon iss a bit confusing. So I think the mainstream, a adoption of Mastodon is a little bit difficult because you've got this whole server thing, which you've gotta be involved in at the beginning as a first step, which I think turns people off once you've got over that hump.
It's brilliant. But, yeah, blue Sky was. I, I'm gonna use the word founded, it may not be the correct word, by Jack Dorsey, who, who, who was also the founder of Twitter. And I think Jack Dorsey realized fairly early on in the Twitter journey that Twitter should never have been a platform, it should have been a protocol.
and that everybody should have been able to bind into this protocol. And you, you know, you wouldn't necessarily need an account on Twitter. So that's what this is, and it's the at, at protocol. And the intention, let's see if it happens. Who knows? Maybe venture capital will get involved and kill it all.
But, the, the intention is that the, it'll be federated and you'll be able to sign up with different servers. So people could set up their own server with their own moderation rules and things like that. But at the moment, it looks exactly like Twitter, except there's slightly fewer menu items. But what there is, the layout is literally identical.
[00:25:27] Mark Westguard: user interface is the same. All the wording's the same. It just doesn't have all the commercial stuff on it. And it, it seems to me like it's, yeah. Yeah. it seems to me like the, I dunno, the temperament there is. A lot nicer as well. It, there doesn't seem to be as much, I dunno why it's 'cause there's a lot of the same people there, but, maybe I haven't followed the same people,
[00:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: No, no. I, I
[00:25:51] Mark Westguard: but it's, it seems nicer.
[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's because there's no algorithm. So that's the other thing that may, maybe there will, common algorithm, oh, and I'll get onto that in a minute, but, basically you see who you follow and if they, if the people that you follow retweet or it's called reposting or res keeting or whatever, then you'll see that.
But the, the blocking mechanism works. And so if, you know, if you just come across somebody by accident, you think, well, I'll follow them. And then it turns out that's, I don't really wanna see what they're, you just block them and it really works. So it's just non algorithmic feed and it's linear, you know, it's, it's chronological.
So you're gonna, if you haven't logged in for weeks and weeks, you won't see content from weeks and weeks ago. You'll just see the stuff that happened just the other day. But, but interestingly, this really could be interesting. The idea is that you'll be able to make your own protocol. So you'll set you, you could set on your, version of Blue Sky, if you like.
So in your account, you'd be able to maybe download in the future a set of rules to say, okay, if it's got the word WordPress in it, show it. If it's got the word, WP builds in it. Block it, and so on. And you know, everybody's gonna sign up for that one. But you get, you get the point. You could so say, okay, if it's, if it doesn't align with my stance on subject A, okay, I'm gonna come up with some rules to, to inoculate myself against that.
And I think that's really interesting 'cause then you can kind of police it yourself.
[00:27:17] Mark Westguard: Yeah, because right now you'll just push stuff on X that is gonna make them money, right? It's gonna push the advertise. They're trying to give it more traffic. so yeah, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but on Blue Sky right now, I don't think it's giving you recommended content. It's only showing you stuff that you are
[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep.
[00:27:33] Mark Westguard: So it's fairly
[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is.
[00:27:35] Mark Westguard: I think that's why it's got a good adoption.
[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: and, and if you, if you're interested, I'll put it in the show notes, if I remember to. and if not, just DM me. which again, you can do, you can, there's this fabulous feature called, now, what is it called? Starter packs. That's it. So you can, if you are, if you've got a brand new account, you can find a starter pack that aligns with what you'd like.
And on up to 150 people can be included in that starter pack. And with one hit of one button, you can follow them all. So. I've created a WordPress one with a bunch of people that I think are worth following on Blue Sky. So it, it's called WordPresses, ERS at the end. So if you're interested and you're starting with Blue Sky, you can just download that starter pack.
Well, I say download, you just hit a button and suddenly you're following all of the people in there. And then you can, you know, do what you like, change them, what have you. But it could be anything, you know, it might be that you're into some other hobby or whatever. You can download Startup Hacks for all those, and they're all made by, you know, human beings.
They're not made by. robots. So blue sky, that's my,
[00:28:34] Mark Westguard: Isn't that
[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: that's my nice internet thing. That is nice.
[00:28:37] Mark Westguard: I think it is a nice
[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, next swing. Yeah, you're probably not gonna agree. Yeah, this is just weird. real world thing. Nice. Real world thing. And I don't even know why I think this is so nice. I feel like a child saying it now, but I used to love swimming.
When I was a kid, I loved swimming. I used to ca there was a oh oh oh, great story. There was a, there was a, there was a swimming pool about 500 yards from where I lived as a, as a child. And let's say that my town was called Brighton, it wasn't. But, it, my, my town, it was, you know, imagine it was like Brighton swimming pool.
There was a great big sign, really high up that said Brighton swimming pool and somebody at great risk to them, to themselves climbed off and removed the L from pool. And and you can imagine how fun that was for a child my age.
[00:29:42] Mark Westguard: this is how Nathan's
[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: is the kind of toilet humor that I like, but, the, the, I used to love it and I've rediscovered swimming
mark and I find it to be the most pleasurable experience.
So there is my nice real world thing. Do you share my joy of swimming?
[00:30:01] Mark Westguard: I do share your joy of swimming. I used to go swimming. Every Tuesday as a child, my mum would drag me to swimming lessons.
[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you didn't enjoy it. Dragged is not the word I was hoping to hear.
[00:30:15] Mark Westguard: it's funny, being a typical kid, I didn't like going, but when I was there I loved it.
[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:21] Mark Westguard: then afterwards I'd get a packet of Worcester sauce flavored crisps
[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: No, no,
[00:30:26] Mark Westguard: that was my
[00:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: wait. That's exactly what I did that, no, honestly, that's what I did. I went to the vending machine upstairs and I would buy a packet of Walker's. Walker's
[00:30:36] Mark Westguard: yeah. Walker.
[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: sauce.
[00:30:39] Mark Westguard: which they no longer make. They stop making
[00:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, we won't get into that. 'cause that's not nice.
[00:30:43] Mark Westguard: That's not nice. No. But no, I, yeah, and I remember when I was, about to get married, I thought, I need to lose a few pounds for the photographs. And I used to go swimming Yeah. twice a week and just do breast stroke for an hour and loved it.
[00:31:01] Nathan Wrigley: is what I do. I go two or three times a week. I've recently rediscovered it. I, I'm basically sporting the middle age spread.
[00:31:09] Mark Westguard: they.
[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: I, I thought it would be, it'd be good to sort of curtail the middle age spread a little bit. You know, I'm not getting any younger,
[00:31:16] Mark Westguard: That's right.
[00:31:17] Nathan Wrigley: And so I discovered rediscovered swimming about July last year.
And I am, I am basically addicted. I go at stupid o'clock in the morning.
[00:31:26] Mark Westguard: Yeah.
[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: the other day I was there at five in the morning for a swim.
[00:31:29] Mark Westguard: It's open at 5:00
[00:31:30] Nathan Wrigley: open at five in the morning. And guess who most of the people are at five in the morning. This is, this took my breath away the first time I saw it. Children, school children who are just like really into swimming.
Get it all done. They're out of the pool by six. They get, get changed, go to school. But I, I was expecting myself to be more or less the only person swimming at five in the morning. No, it's full. It's
[00:31:53] Mark Westguard: Wow. That's amazing.
[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: like me.
[00:31:57] Mark Westguard: I guess it's like people going to the gym, right?
[00:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:32:01] Mark Westguard: one of the best types of exercise there is, I believe. 'cause he,
[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: There's no, well, no bodily impact. Hopefully it's having some impact on the, overall levels of fitness and middle aged spread. But the, yeah, no, no impact whatsoever. It's very graceful and I was telling you, I'm in what's called a flow state, which is to say that I, I genuinely, it's like meditative to me.
I'm sort of floating. I can hear these bubbly sounds. I'm not really putting a lot of effort in, if I'm being honest. And and I don't really have any memory of the hour that's passed. I just sort of get into the pool. It's a bit like when you go to sleep and you wake up and you think, what just happened?
And I get out an hour later and think, what just happened? And I love it. Absolutely
[00:32:43] Mark Westguard: think you've discovered relaxation.
[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: I have, yeah, we'll come back in a month's time and I'll hate it and I'll now begin to like. Dodge ball or something like that.
[00:32:51] Mark Westguard: nah.
[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So there you go. Nice. Nice thing. And, the final thing that we've got for you this week, sadly, I can't, I can't describe it.
Not really
[00:33:04] Mark Westguard: There's not a lot that happens audio
[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: No, no,
[00:33:06] Mark Westguard: the clip.
[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: but what does happen at the end is I'm gonna send you to, I'm gonna give you a link that I want you to follow. I don't have a short URL. If I was cleverer, I would've created a short URL. I dunno if Mark can quickly throw me a Bitly link together, whilst I'm talking. But just go, go and find this.
and I dunno why it's so funny. It's, it's not exactly rude. It's the sort of thing you could show to a child of any age, but it's not exactly, not rude either. It's of a, a young man, shall we say, has decided to take it upon himself to drink an entire four liter bottle of Dr. Pepper, and see what happens.
So I just love, I just absolutely love his reaction when he realizes. He filled himself up with gas and apparently there's no capacity. He has no ability to expel it. It's just,
[00:34:04] Mark Westguard: He just gets stuck in
[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: it just
[00:34:05] Mark Westguard: just becomes the closed valve.
[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: It's so entertaining. It's brilliant. Have you, have you managed to create as a short Yeah. Is he just the mere thought of it is making me giggle.
It's brilliant. Any
[00:34:17] Mark Westguard: I think you're probably better off going to the show notes, but, I did a quick one with tiny url.com. It's tiny url.com/ycx. Two three PX eight. But, yeah, short, the show notes should be an easier
[00:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: We'll, we'll link to it in the show notes, but honestly, that is the, I have not laughed as much as that in a long time and. okay. Totally. Mark's having a bit of a coughing fit. He's had to switch his mic off, just totally apropos of nothing. How many times in your life have you, can you remember descending into uncontrollable laughter?
Like to the point where you couldn't breathe and you just wanted everybody to just go away and just stop? 'cause it was too much.
[00:35:06] Mark Westguard: it happens quite frequently 'cause I do enjoy doing that. I need to write down what it was about because I always forget it and I think, oh, I wish I, but then sometimes I'll go back to a video that I was in stitches and crying and couldn't breathe about. And I'm like, why was I laughing at this?
I think it had to be the right time, for me to be crying about it. But, yeah,
[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: being in a, in the uk we had this really, really not very good restaurant chain called Little Chef. And I remember
[00:35:34] Mark Westguard: Oh yes.
[00:35:35] Nathan Wrigley: when I was about 12, and a mate of mine just holding up a pancake for some reason it, it fell on his face and I thought that I laughed for like 10 minutes, unrelenting laughter. And then, and then another occasion round a campfire. When my friend, my friend, put his shoe in the fire and the whole of it just so swelled up. He was perfectly all right, but there was just something just magical about him, his, his enormous shoe. I just thought
that
[00:36:06] Mark Westguard: we should have a section on nice memory.
[00:36:09] Nathan Wrigley: memory. we'll add that in for next time.
[00:36:11] Mark Westguard: it reminds me of, so where I used to live as a kid, they would have a bonfire every year for Guy Forks, which, for those in the US that we have a guy for night with
[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: Where we celebrate burning a human alive
[00:36:24] Mark Westguard: yeah, we, yeah, we do basically.
Yeah. And, my mum had just bought me a new pair of shoes and I decided the following day to go and walk to the bonfire and walk over it. Unfortunately, it was still hot and I walked back home wearing a pair of plates 'cause the souls have melted.
[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I, I love
[00:36:49] Mark Westguard: yeah, there's a fond
[00:36:50] Nathan Wrigley: I, I have a friend, I won't tell you his name, but he has this technique and it's very effective if he's feeling miserable and he's, I, he's shown me it, right? He's actually shown me this thing in action. He begins laughing just very deliberately when he is not feeling happy and he just goes, and then he, then, you know, then he goes. And within, within 30 seconds, he cannot stop. And you think to yourself, there's no way that's gonna work. Dear listener, try it. Put yourself in a room where nobody's gonna laugh at you and just, just give yourself a good minute, Ron at it. And I swear it works. It's very effective and it's very nice. So
[00:37:37] Mark Westguard: Laughter is
[00:37:38] Nathan Wrigley: there we, it really is.
It really, it's a bit like yawning.
[00:37:42] Mark Westguard: it is. Yeah.
[00:37:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. so yeah, a lot nicer. So there we go. We've given you our nice people, our nice code, our nice community thing, nice internety thing, nice real world thing. And finally, nice short video thing. And, maybe next time we'll do nice memory thing as well. I dunno why I'm adding thing to the everything, but, there you go.
[00:38:03] Mark Westguard: Nice
[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: Dear Wp Builds listener. Hopefully, you take this in the spirit in which it was offered. I know it's nothing to do with WordPress particularly. There was a few bits and pieces in there, but you know, the year 2025, I just thought let's, let's do something to cheer the listeners up a little bit and Mark
[00:38:19] Mark Westguard: we all need it.
[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: I appreciate you making me giggle today. Thank you so much.
[00:38:24] Mark Westguard: appreciate you making me giggle before and during the show and no doubt after.
[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I really hope that you enjoyed that. A little bit off piste. Mark and I really going in all sorts of peculiar directions. We obviously talk about all sorts of different things. Some of it WordPressy, some of it not really WordPressy.
I hope it hit the target. I hope that it cheered you up. Perhaps it's something that you want to leave as a comment on. Head to WP Builds.com, episode number 405, you can find in the search and leave us a comment there.
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Okay, that truly is all I've got time for. Join us on Monday for This Week in WordPress. It's live every Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time. WP Builds.com forward slash live. We hope to see you there. If not, we'll be back with an interview next week.
So all that I need to do now is fade in some dreadful, cheesy music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
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