This Week in WordPress #324

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 324 entitled Getting the genie out of Corey's huge bottle. It was recorded on Monday the 10th of February, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by three fabulous people. First one is Michelle Frechette. She's our co-host for today, but also I'm joined by Tim Nash and also by Corey Mass.

We're here to talk about WordPress. We get a little bit derailed at the beginning talking about various other bits and pieces about the fact that most WordPressers seem to have some sort of music in their background.

We then do properly get into the WordPress bits and pieces, and to start off, we talk about the roadmap to WordPress 6.8, what is coming, what are the new features that are gonna be landing?

Then it's a little bit of an intro into WordCamp Asia. If you're heading to Manila, what are the kind of things that you might be able to do in the event as well as outside the event?

A long conversation is had all about sponsorship of WordPress events, WordCamps in particular. How are sponsors going to be vetted in the future? Who is keeping the guardrails up there.

And then we talk about some events. We talk about Cloud Fest, and we talk about another online event for publishers in particular.

And then we get into the WooCommerce rebrand. I don't know if you noticed, but they've got a new logo that's really nice.

Simply Static have a hosted option. And there's a variety of other things in the podcast as well, including Corey's huge bottle, and the inevitable conversation about AI.

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

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Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Little old lady. Do you remember Chilton and the Whaleys? Tim? No. Oh, okay. Fine. I won't go anywhere with that. Okay. It was a, UK show and there was a guy that used to, one of the main characters started that way. Hello? Little old lady. And, and so it went and I suddenly had that in my head, so I thought I'd use it, but now feel like an absolute moral no, Hello. I'm gonna carry on, episode 324. I've got some kind of weird echo, I dunno whose thing it is, but somebody's audio, seems to be coming back through my ears. So if one of you could address that. Hello? maybe put in the Yeah, can you, guys hear me? No. I'm trying to mess with you by repeating what you say, so it echo.

Oh, thank you. You are very kind. no, I think some, I, dunno who, but somebody. I've got my audio coming through. Nevermind. We'll press on regardless. I can, sure. That I can deal with it. This is episode number 324 of this week in WordPress, and I am joined as always by three. Thank you. Cory. Three. Fabulous, folk.

First of all, in the corner. How am I gonna get this right? Yeah, down there. Down there it is. Michelle Frechette, the co-host of this week. Hello, Michelle, how are you?

[00:04:25] Michelle Frechette: Hello. Hello. Hopefully you can hear me. I switched mics.

[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you've got like a load of technical equipment in the background there. It looks like a storage for tools and stuff.

[00:04:34] Michelle Frechette: It is. Oh, it is. I just, I have to pull out all my old tools and all those various places and get them into the storage and then put the storage back, okay.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: You're in the process. It's in process, yeah. Yeah. there's Michelle Frechette anyway, and Michelle Frache is the director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web.

She's also the executive [email protected]. In addition to all of that. Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech and a creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages, author, blogger, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress Tech events. She also is living outside of Rochester, New York, where she is an avid nature photographer and you can learn more about her if you just want the one simple URL with all of those other, the ones attached.

I'm sure. Meet Michelle online is probably the best place to go. That's up. Thank you for joining us again, Michelle. Appreciate it.

[00:05:29] Michelle Frechette: My pleasure.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: the next one over there. It's Tim Nash. Now, Tim Nash normally gets me to do something pretty humiliating at the beginning of the show by reading things out in I don't know, in sign language or reading things out with song or So, yeah, I've just given him an idea.

Oh, no, Anyway, I went to the show notes today looking for the, probably difficult to achieve biography only to discover that it's not there. He did write one, but somebody else must have overwritten it when they pressed updates of the show notes, which I'm so glad about. 'cause that means I just get to hand it over to Tim and say, introduce yourself.

Have

[00:06:09] Tim Nash: you ever felt this suspicious feeling that Yeah, someone went along? It's strange

[00:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: it wasn't me, I promise you.

[00:06:17] Tim Nash: Ah, no. Hi, I'm Tim. And, yeah, basically I just come along here to, make Nathan do silly things and now I'm wondering how much a set of se four flags are gonna cost.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's the one that they do for shipping.

And you, oh gosh. we could spend the whole hour and I'll get three words out. It wouldn't be that much fun. Or we could do maybe moss code or something. We could try that next time. But for now, just tell us who you are in your own voice, singing or otherwise.

[00:06:49] Tim Nash: I am Tim. I am a security, WordPress Security Co.

See, it's really hard when I do this, it's much easier to get you to do it more. Yeah. I'm a WordPress security consultant and, yeah, regular. Panelist on this show. So basic

[00:07:03] Michelle Frechette: people hopefully know me. It says doom speaker. I think he should have to do that in the form of a dirge. So it says Doom speaker.

Ooh.

[00:07:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Or some kind of a, it's not so much fun. Would I'd have to do it right? Medieval chant or something like that? Yeah, I could. if, you haven't come across this

[00:07:20] Michelle Frechette: exactly

[00:07:21] Tim Nash: like Cory's doing, if you haven't come across it. Look up Bard core on YouTube. Oh yeah. Bard, what? Fantastic.

[00:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: Bard core, like hardcore, but with Bard at the beginning.

Bard in

[00:07:33] Tim Nash: the front? Yeah.

[00:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is it like really hardcore, like medieval monk chanting or something? It's medieval, music, but with pop songs. Oh. Oh, that's great. I went to York Minster yesterday. It's just this great big old, let's just use the word cathedral 'cause basically it looks and feels like that.

And I, I had my, I had these headphones with me and I put on a load of Gregorian chanting as I walked around and it was very atmospheric, I have to say. It brought a tear to my eye actually. It was pretty amazing. Can I attempt

[00:08:03] Michelle Frechette: it?

[00:08:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Go on.

[00:08:07] Michelle Frechette: Tim Nian security always likes to bring us to Word Promise.

[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: You know what? We should definitely get on the show a little bit early and do a five minute practice of that, because if we all have to just drone one note, it makes the whole thing sound so much better. That was fantastic. Well done Michelle. Thank you. Thank you. She's got,

[00:08:31] Michelle Frechette: I've seen Marty Python.

[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: You've got courage. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. oh. Don't get me started. And finally. hello. Down there. Down there we've got Corey Muss. Hello, Corey. You

[00:08:42] Corey Maass: what?

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: That's my python. Here we go. Here we go. Hello, I Corey. Hello. Hello. he's the founder and creator of O-M-G-I-M-G WordPress Freelance Developer.

That was actually a pretty good attempt at British Accent, like a, quite a regional British accent, but that was pretty good. I'm trying to pin where that was. Monte

[00:09:00] Corey Maass: Python.

[00:09:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Monte Python. Yeah.

[00:09:03] Corey Maass: I, and a hundred years ago I was, the phrase that comes to mind is, was, is very theatrical. I actually could do a lot of different accents, including different regions and.

And whatnot. And it's all gone out the window and yep. Now it's just screeching money. Python want to deliver? He cut.

[00:09:25] Michelle Frechette: He comes by it. Honestly, because his father smells of elderberries.

[00:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, he does.

[00:09:29] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: That was a, oh, that was French though. That was a French man speaking from a parapet. Talking down if you were 10.

I shall, don't you a time. That's

[00:09:38] Tim Nash: right. That's it.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no, we've gone, we've totally lost it. We're gonna go on the, sorry. no, it's fine. but the, but I really appreciate you all, the three of you joining me today, and, we will try to get away from the accents, however, just occurred to me, right? And this has occurred to me many times, and I'm just curious, I'm just gonna put a question to all three of you.

And it, it was reminded by, what we can see in Michelle's picture there. I do podcast interviews multiple a week with, WordPresses. And very often we've got a camera like this, I reckon more than 50% of the time. More than 50% of the time they are a musician of some kind. They play something or they have played something or their children are playing something and they've stopped playing, but they did as a kid.

I'm just gonna go round, just let's see if 50% of us have had musical ambitions in our past. Let's start with Tim. did you play or do you play anything?

[00:10:36] Tim Nash: I used to play the guitar. Yep. I do still have own possess one. And my daughter plays the trumpet.

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there we go. One outta one so far.

Michelle, I can see the instruments there, but I dunno if you are, it's something that you did do no longer do. Never did. What's, your relationship with music, musical instruments?

[00:10:54] Michelle Frechette: So I have a very musical family, but, they've multiple Grammys in my family, by the way, Grammy Awards. Ooh. And, I'll tell, I'll spill the tea later.

But, I've played trumpet, guitar, piano, mellophone, french horn, and I've been part of the, drum line as well.

[00:11:14] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Wow. That's loads just like your regular biography. Your mu your musical biography is also pretty incredible. so that's two out two and already when I said that, yeah. Look, do we count that?

Is

[00:11:27] Corey Maass: that real? Is

[00:11:28] Michelle Frechette: that

[00:11:29] Corey Maass: real music? only, actually would officially call myself a DJ in the last five years, but have been producing dance music for 25 years.

[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you're definitely, or more

[00:11:42] Corey Maass: do you, play a traditional instrument, keys, drums,

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: string

[00:11:46] Corey Maass: instrument. I taught myself enough drumming in high school to be in the, mandatory punk bands.

and, but nothing, and I've tried to take, I took piano lessons from the loveliest little old lady, in New York City for a few years, and so at some point was able to muddle through a few things, but

[00:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:12:11] Corey Maass: no, it's, all computer generated.

[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But still a very, a deep interest in music. A lot of cut.

[00:12:16] Corey Maass: Yeah. And and I'm, I consider myself a percussionist because by making, I've always made, Dance music with a lot of, poly rhythm. Yeah. And so fairly complicated. Yeah. Rhythmic structures and stuff like that. wow. Not just SS

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:12:40] Michelle Frechette: Boots and cats. Boots

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: and cats. so that's three out three.

And for my part, I'm no longer what I would call a musician, but as a child I used to be very much into playing the guitar. And my family are very musical and, what have you. Okay. So that's four out of four. And, and it's like that wherever I go in the WordPress space, there's just musicians everywhere.

And I think there is a, oh yeah, there must be. It has to be more than coincidence. Oh. It's because 50% of my friends in the real world do not play musical instruments. It's way lower than that. music is

[00:13:13] Michelle Frechette: very mathematical.

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:13:16] Michelle Frechette: And, so code and music hand in hand. As a matter of fact, these are my father's guitars.

And after he passed, I inherited them. And I joke all the time that by just virtue of hanging guitars in the back, I now look like a developer.

[00:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: That's exactly, there's all, there's you, there's very often a musical instrument lurking in the background, and so you never have any

[00:13:37] Corey Maass: friends around, so

[00:13:38] Nathan Wrigley: that kind of gives you away too.

No, I, went from, instead of having me, I just went for hexagons. instead.

[00:13:43] Michelle Frechette: But you never actually light up.

[00:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm really good. I can do really, I can play the hexagons really well. I've got all the hexagon, hexagon, Gans. Oh, I'm good on the hexagon. made myself chuckle there. I don't, know why.

but anyway, so straw poll. Dear listener, if anybody's watching this live and you wanna just comment, do you play a musical instrument? Have you ever played a musical instrument? Just let us know. I'd be curious to know

[00:14:09] Michelle Frechette: quite a few in the comments. Yeah. Oh, okay.

[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: It's coming already. Is it? Okay, speaking of that, let's just crack on.

Let's just have a look into the comments. I'll just say some names of people that have popped up. hello says, Tammy Lister. Nice to see you. Reese Wind is joining us from a bitterly cold Newton Le Willows, influence wp. So that's Ryan from Charlotte in the us. tacho is joining us from a cloudy, oh no, I wouldn't say vi Chen.

Please tell me. I got that kind of vaguely right. hi. Happy Monday, says Aaron. Aaron Bowie, tacho is saying other things. Ooh, nice. Brandon from China working late as always. Oh, I wanna say

[00:14:49] Michelle Frechette: thank you for Brandon. I couldn't post his comment, but he alerted me to a typo on the post dentist website.

So thank you, Brandon. I did correct it.

[00:14:58] Corey Maass: That's cool. That's very nice. I'd also like to point out that now I'm seeing music references everywhere, so Happy Mondays already mentioned. That's about, oh, yeah. There was one other that I thought I saw.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:15:10] Corey Maass: Yeah.

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: O okay. it is an honor. sorry. In honor of Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl.

It's a dis on track on other, okay. This is about the, whatever that thing was. The Gregorian champ thing probably. here we go. Web friendly guy. He's not a security expert. He's a, that's a, not a security expert. He's a very voice.

[00:15:32] Tim Nash: I would like to point out that those are not mutually exclusive.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: No, they're not.

Marcus is joining us from Florida, Orlando and Courtney Robinson is, okay, so here it begins. Says this is must be the point where the comments reached the comment about music.

[00:15:49] Michelle Frechette: Yes.

[00:15:50] Nathan Wrigley: I played seven string electric violin and five string mandolin. Not only that, you managed to find the one emoji that this platform can consume, apparently, which is a violin, which is great.

Well done. Tammy Lister flew over here cello a long time ago and piano not played for years. But learning music as a kid means code was easier. That I think is, there's gotta be a connection there. I think there's bits of the brain that are built up learning music, which correspond. To bits which may be overlap with writing code.

I, I have no idea if any of that sentence is true, but it feels like there might be. tacho says, I used to play the saxophone, but I would not be able to do it anymore. I'm afraid I still have it there. Yeah. It's nice to have right? Lying around. One day. One day that thing will come out of a box. Eight minutes later it'll go back in the box.

Can

[00:16:37] Tim Nash: I just say I totally conceit Teo with a saxophone? Yeah. Or even at one of the, those really large baritone, the really big

[00:16:43] Nathan Wrigley: saxophone was he should bring it to Word camps. Even if he doesn't play it, he should just have it around his neck playing really smooth jazz. Yeah. Yeah. Really smooth. Yeah. Yeah, Like Jazzes have always got really cool names and KO's got a really cool name. This is true. Yeah, j Jazzers, jazz musicians and skiers, all skiers have got cool names. Dunno why that is either. Cammie McNamara, it's, only 28 this morning, so we're onto the weather again. I'm waiting for the song to appear and get outside to exercise.

Good morning friends. Sorry I've hijacked the weather conversation all about the, the musical instruments.

[00:17:15] Michelle Frechette: Miss

[00:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: have we done that one? Yeah, done that one? Yep. Cammi piano. Elliot is saying Hello Patricia. Hello. Music is very mathematical. Oh, is that what Michelle was saying? That explains why soccer development on music.

That's okay. oh, bless. Yeah. I wasn't very good at music, but I enjoyed it. And I was into the kind of music where it was better to be better to sound rubbish. the sort of punky vibe, that kind of thing. It didn't matter if you got the notes wrong, it was just, it's cooler if you did that. Anyway, we're now 18 minutes in.

We haven't said a word about WordPress, but nevermind. That was fun. I enjoyed that. Thank you for being such good sports. Here we go. this is our website, wp builds.com. I'll race through it. put your email into that field if you wanna keep up to date with what we do. And very big thank you to our three sponsors.

We've got GoDaddy Pro, blue Host, and Omni Send have been sponsoring us for absolutely ages. Thank you for keeping the lights on, helping the show carry on into the future. Really appreciate it. We have an archive if you, go to here. And then here we have our podcast archive. And, a couple of podcasts came out in quick succession this week 'cause I, messed something up a little while ago.

So we did two the last week and the first one was, I spoke to Anne McCarthy and Beer at Pley Hat. We're doing a regular once, a once a quarter, at the core podcast where we talk about all of the different bits and pieces that have dropped in WordPress core in the last three months. So go check that out.

But also, This chap who I was talking to, Daniel Post, who has a plugin, which, enables your website to, to do things like consume comments, post comments to Blue Sky, the increasingly popular amongst WordPresses. That's my impression anyway. social network, it looks and behaves much like Twitter. But, is, it doesn't have the ads at the minute and it doesn't have an algorithm, so it's quite nice.

And anyway, he's built a plugin. I think he got the timing just right. He was building it before it became, a popular thing. And, now, now it seems to be taken off. So that's really nice. And that's the interview there. And also, I do a show periodically. There's no cadence to this. It's just when we get around to it with, this chap who's called Joe Dolson and he works in the, accessibility space.

And we've done four shows now. And the latest one dropped last week as well. It's called the Accessibility Show, what a title that was. and this time around we were looking at, or rather he was looking at cookie banners and whether, cookie banners can be accessible or rather whether cookie banners are accessible.

Short answer, Not so much. Is the sad truth. go and check that out, and next time we come around, Joe, we'll probably find some ones where that isn't the sad truth, a cookie banner where it is actually possible to, do it, in a accessible way. So that's the WP build stuff onto the WordPress stuff.

So 6.8 is coming down the pike. and this was written a few days ago by, Kal luckier, sorry for the name if I got that wrong. WordPress 6.8 coming is set to be released on the 15th of April, and there's a few foundational features which were introduced in the previous versions, which were gonna be improved upon.

My understanding is that the WordPress core offering, maybe you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that. It's gonna be less featureful in the near future because of the, the repositioning, specifically of the automatic workforce onto, for profit things. And I'm guessing, with automatic being the big biggest contributor to WordPress core.

I'm guessing that the, in the future maybe a lot of these releases are gonna be a less featureful. We'll see. Is that your impression, everybody? yeah. Nodding maybe. Yeah. Okay. let's go through what's in this one. So there's gonna be a few design improvements, and again, this sort of speaks to that.

It says it's, working on polish, fixing and clearing, issues. So there's no great focus on brand new features. Accepting, here's some stuff which is interesting, the zoom in, zoom out mode, which I really like because my blog posts tend to be quite long and have different patterns dropped into. It's nice to see what's going on.

you'll be able to apply different styles, section styles, and designs directly from the toolbar. So you'll be able to cycle through a, a. W whilst in that design mode, which is quite nice. also when you look for the fonts, it will actually show what the font looks like instead of it just being, this is the name of the font, but no indication of what it will look like.

I always think using the name of the font is a poor way of doing that. for example, the Sora font there. That's not really showing me a fat lot about what that font will end up looking I want the lazy dog jumps over the bat with the man holding the marmalade sentence, whatever that one says. the one.

'cause it would give me some more indication of what all the letters look like There. I can see an s and o and R and an A and that's about it. But anyway. Or a hover

[00:22:20] Corey Maass: with more preview or something.

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: Alright, there you go. Something like that. Yeah. Where it could do the lazy cat dog sentence thing. also, you will get a different toast notification when your images have been cropped or rotated.

It's not really a lot, but there it is. And then this is quite exciting. support for speculative loading and I hear you all cry. What's speculative loading? my very untechnical understanding is that based upon what you are doing on the webpage, this API if you like, a speculation rules. API will make decisions.

That sounds very AI based, doesn't it? But it will decide to go and prefetch other things. So for example, I don't know, I dunno if it's done on things like hover State. If you hover over the contact USS link, there'll be a, an impression that, yep, let's load the contact toss page. Therefore, having that sort of cache somewhere else.

I'm gonna put that one to Corey and Tim. Have I butchered that horribly or is that about what it is? Tim's sort of a bit.

[00:23:25] Tim Nash: No, you've, more or less got that. just to be very clear, there is absolutely no AI

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: in,

[00:23:30] Tim Nash: no in

[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: in stuff. It was because I used the word, it made the decision. It sounds like this API can think things.

Yeah.

[00:23:38] Tim Nash: if we go back to the basic core that an AI is a statistical model that's running an IF statement, then sure, it's just ai. but these, are literally just a bunch of if statements. If you're doing this, then it will then it. If it does, you hit something that's in the if statement, it will choose whether or not to act.

there's no AI here, don't worry. But is it things

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: like that though, where the mouse is located at this current moment, if you hover over something for, I don't know, 0.4 of a second, there's a, there's an intent there. Let's load that page regardless of whether the click occurs.

[00:24:11] Corey Maass: That's the core of it.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. but it's

[00:24:15] Corey Maass: also the, if you ask AI to speculate about the speculation of speculative loading, you'll get your answer.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You'll consume all the world's resources. as it just, it's like chess. No, it's like playing tic-tac toe nors and crosses, we call it Against itself. Yeah. A member of that film.

okay. But that I think is really exciting. That's a really cool thing. So even potentially, I. A site which wasn't very well optimized. This is another lever which you can pull that WordPress will pull for you on your behalf to have the appearance anyway, the simulation of ev your website loading really quickly.

[00:24:56] Tim Nash: The downside to that and speculative, one of the reasons for using the speculative, loading API is that it helps a little bit with this, is that let's say you are on 3G or you are on, load bandwidth networks. Before we would things like, there would be, there were plenty of plugins out there that used to make you feel like it was going really fast.

And what it was doing was really, once you finished loading one page, it just started loading the next pages that were in the, like the top five links or whatever. whereas the tive loading will actually also check things like, Hey, I'm on a 3G network. I probably shouldn't. Click the load the next page until you actually ask for it, because we might be burning your bandwidth.

So this is, a sort of halfway house between the two approaches. and so this is only gonna partially burn your bandwidth.

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay? Okay.

[00:25:50] Michelle Frechette: this is really helpful, right? For those people in countries who don't have the speed that we have for networks and things like that too, right? So if you are in, a developing nation where.

Internet's a little bit spotty, perhaps this is something that could help, especially since a lot of people are still using their phones for those things. which

[00:26:09] Tim Nash: just general travel. If you're going on a train and you go through the tunnel, in theory, the pages should already be cashed ahead.

Unfortunately, all the DNS requests won't be for any human purpose.

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: It's always Gotcha. okay, everybody thumbs up, thumbs down. Is this a good idea to go into court? I'm on the firmly thumbs up side, I think. Yeah,

[00:26:29] Michelle Frechette: of

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: course. I can't see a reason why not. Yeah, I need

[00:26:32] Corey Maass: support for.

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:26:35] Michelle Frechette: This is my release.

I am the release, one of the release coordinators for 6.8. So I like it. Of course I do.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, all the bits that are in. Yeah. okay. So that's that. But

[00:26:45] Michelle Frechette: you, were commenting earlier about whether people like something, I believe you can comment on this post, so if there are things, you have ideas like how to show the.

Find some things a little bit easier. Did somebody just play a guitar?

[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: No. But I was wondering if somebody struck a gong or something like that. Sorry. It

[00:27:01] Tim Nash: was me. I, was trying to shut my watch up, which I've inadvertently not turned off notifications before the start. No, we know

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: you've got like a range of glockenspiels down.

I and

[00:27:10] Tim Nash: I went to go and turn the notification off on my watch and hit my mic Stand in the process. How funny. 'cause I don't get to normally have the mic stand because of this.

[00:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: I'm calling it, it was F sharp. good. It says

[00:27:23] Michelle Frechette: the man who says he is not a musician. I don't even know if that shop

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: a note.

[00:27:26] Michelle Frechette: I believe you can leave comments, so if you have specific things you'd like to comment, you can do that below, right?

Yeah,

[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: you can. You totally can. You have to be

[00:27:33] Michelle Frechette: logged in. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: okay. The speculative loading thing, despite the fact that I've butchered it, d go and explore that. 'cause I, think that's genuinely really interesting. And obviously the ability to make things, quicker and anticipate what it is that you are going to be doing is incredibly useful.

And then the very final thing from here is the polish. Again, they're using the word polish. It's not really new feature so much, although I guess maybe it is polish, the query loop block. and they're adding enhancements like filter by year pagination, fetching results by adding an offset and blocking block spacing, improvements.

These are all things which I think have been added to many third party solutions in the past, but now they're gonna be in the core block. And there's other various bits and pieces as well. Oh, and the bottom one, which I thought Tim might want to speak to, because I don't understand this, the, security enhancements, one thing was mentioned, a various security related enhancements are planned for 6.8, the most significant of which is the switch to using B crypt for pass password.

Hashing. And, at that point, I'm just gonna say, why, would we do that? What's the benefit of bp? it's

[00:28:44] Tim Nash: because we are slowly but surely, people are no longer gonna be using my, password, B crypt password plugin. Wow. basically in whenever you hash a. Plugin, you're using a, an, algorithm to do the hashing.

and these algorithms, can be broken in certain circumstances, often with large amounts of computers over a very long period of time. And therefore, in theory, your password could be compromised, by default. many years ago, some, we had some very insecure password methods for hashing and, over time, PHP has had many alternatives and we've been stuck in ryt world for a very long time.

The, whole way that passwords work in WordPress are filterable, and so you can upgrade and there's multiple plugins. I've got one, but they, people behind roots, the theme had a, password as well for a very long time that did just, did decrypt. and this is good. Because now we b Crip will become the default.

Hopefully, there will be some fun. Everybody's probably will find that they, you, have to obviously know the old hashing algorithms to more, to the new ones. So there's a little bit of work that they might have to do. And I, it, I imagine there's gonna be lots of edge cases of ev people being logged out briefly.

but it should all solve itself nice and easily. The of course, it's wonderful that they're moving to be crypt, the rest of the world's on Argon, which is an argon two, which is our, the newest standards. But, we'll, get there.

[00:30:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Oh, okay. I thought you were gonna wax lyrical about how B crypt is the shiny new object.

You, you're saying it's a little bit old. 10 years ago it was the shiny new object,

[00:30:30] Tim Nash: but what I would say is that it's shiny new and more importantly, stable. So it's, not shiny and new, but it is stable and it is standard on every single hosting platform you're gonna get. Okay. So this should just sit I, the, if you are hosting, platform does not support B crypt, you should not be on that platform and move.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And so if I am a regular WordPress user, will I have any, anything to do? Anything to notice? You mentioned maybe briefly being logged out. Yeah,

[00:30:57] Tim Nash: you, might, depending in some very odd circumstances, you might find yourself logged out. When you log back in. the problems are gonna come if you somehow magically logged out, logged back in and reset your password, but you managed to reset your password before it through the change happened, then you might end up with some keys that don't work properly and then you'd have to reset your password.

Again, these are like the tiniest edge cases that I can think of. I imagine that they're gonna have to Absolutely no one, hopefully 'cause they should just. It should just work it.

[00:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: Best advice, best security advice. Advice I can offer is never update your password and go for a really short, memorable password.

like four characters or something like that. Do that's the Sure. More helpful. Write it on a little piece of paper. Yeah. Write it on a piece of paper. Stuck to the monitor with the word password and a colon.

[00:31:47] Tim Nash: I'll be honest, that is not a stupid thing to do. Oh, I know. People think that they took, they, they joke and laugh and go, ha It's no. And then go work. Stick your password on a monitor. If someone has broken into your house, has reached your car, your monitor, and is staring at it going, I best keep that password because that's gonna be really useful to break into Nathan's website.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good

[00:32:08] Tim Nash: point. That's gonna be awkward.

Yeah. But obviously a work environment. Yeah.

[00:32:14] Michelle Frechette: I just pin, all mine to the top of my, my ex. my, my Twitter account, that's a, yeah,

[00:32:19] Tim Nash: that's, a better place for them. I, once went to a security conference and genuinely there was a, somebody went on screen and they had a file called Password stop text.

Oh. And somebody dared them to open it up, and he did. And obviously people took photos and things. It turned out it was a somebody else's password file.

[00:32:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good. That's fine. Yeah. Anyway, don't listen to me. obviously use the, stronger password as you can possibly manage. And but yeah, I get your point, honestly.

And also, I suppose the last thing you're gonna be worried about in the advent of a criminal, getting into your office and, fiddling around with your computers is you're really gonna be dealing with the insurance agents and the police for the next few days. Not, my, my

[00:33:01] Tim Nash: parents used to have a password book and, my dad still know, oh yeah, no,

[00:33:06] Michelle Frechette: that's mine.

[00:33:07] Tim Nash: Yeah, okay. Open it up and see if you can put their username and passwords into a website. 'cause I guarantee that book is just full of crossed out things, clu random, some weird shorthand and passwords that are in concise, just utterly,

[00:33:22] Michelle Frechette: even my mother can't use her own password book anymore. yeah, there you go.

You

[00:33:27] Nathan Wrigley: the, the technical question today coming from Tacho, is be crypt ready for a content computing world or would it be sufficient for, insufficient for security?

[00:33:41] Tim Nash: when bad actors have access to quantum computers, they're chasing your WordPress password, where the quantum computers are consumable ready that a bad actor would easily have access to it.

we will not be using B Crypt. Okay. Good. I

[00:33:59] Michelle Frechette: thought, we stopped calling them bad actors and started calling them naughty boys earlier in this podcast.

[00:34:04] Tim Nash: No, Those are the security

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: people. Ah, okay. Anyway, there you go. So that is the stuff that's coming in WordPress 6.8. There's tons more on that article, including a bunch of accessibility improvements.

I'll just put it up there. You can see there's a laundry list of, different things. Too many to mention. and as Michelle she says, if you wish to make some commentary on that, you can. The article was published on the sixth of Feb and it's just called Roadmap to 6.8. Okay, let's move on quickly. I just thought this was quite nice.

I, I have now decided it wasn't. Anyway, I'm going to Word Camp Asia now, and so I was suddenly scrambling around for, things to do and I'll be there. Yeah, I'll hang out with Michelle, probably that's what will happen. But, Gutenberg Times produced an article if you are attending. It's quite a nice little summation of the different bits and pieces that are going on.

So the fact that it's almost like three conferences in one. You've got a contributor day, which is separate, and then you've got the conference and the talks, and then there's this youth camp, which I confess I didn't know much about, which is scheduled for, the same time as the main event.

And it's for eight to 17 year olds, quite separate. And then there's, different bits and pieces that people in the community have written about, Philippine culture, Philippine food, and also, the, the normal arrangement of the after party and some side events that are going on. What you can do at Contribute today and a whole load more basically.

go and have a look. This article, if you're gonna be attending the event, it's happening. I think. 20th to the 22nd. I think I've got the right date for that.

[00:35:38] Michelle Frechette: So it's

[00:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: in, not, this week, but the following week in Manila, Philippines. And if you go in, yeah, I will hope to see you there. That'd be nice.

There

[00:35:47] Michelle Frechette: will be a panel on ai. Yeah. Moderated by Taco. And I am one of the panelists, so if you want to talk about more of what's happening in AI and your fear for your job, come to that panel.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: so also there's an, so no one's skateboarding. Thank you for contributing. There's an important discussion going in.

Make accessibility on what's being done for the WP admin in 6.8. Okay. Thank you. so you can check that out. Make. Slack. Okay, let's move on. Let's put the next piece up. Now this one's not new actually. It's, like probably getting on for what, was the date on this? 31st of January. So it's a couple of weeks old.

I don't quite know how it escaped my attention, but it did. and it's called announcements, sponsor review process changes. And you can see I've highlighted loads here, but I'll just try and paraphrase it. but I'll start at the beginning. The community team has always had guidelines around sponsorship, specifically for GPL and WordPress Trademark Compliance.

These guidelines are outlined in the Word camp organizer handbook and the agreement among Word camp organizers, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. And then it goes on to say, whilst those in theory were enforceable, it was very much left to the organizers to get on enforcing those. And maybe it was more of a sort of trust system than in the past.

However. Since, and I'm back to reading it, since late 2024, a more thorough vetting process of sponsors have been in place. Project leadership, has mandated this new process, which means community program managers were tasked to manage previously the new process enforces. So it's all around the WP Engine, automatic legal, wrangle.

Oh, and it's around, I just bit my tongue. Yeah. Oh, sorry. and it's all around trademark and GPL compliance. So for example, you won't be able to become a sponsor at the event if you are in infringing that. And honestly, I. I don't want to get into because I genuinely don't know what is and what isn't falling inside and outside the scope of that.

But here's an example. If you were to use a term like WordPress hosting on your website, that would be an immediate, nope. You're gonna have to go and become compliant. IE change what you currently publish on your website and wherever you're publishing it. and in addition, all sponsors at the moment, going forwards, are gonna have to be authorized by Matt Mullenweg and it says, and Mary Hubbard.

So I don't know if that and is a or and, or an and from project leadership. And then it says the new process has caused significant delays in receiving payments from sponsors, which is a requirement for announcing their support. we, the program managers understand organizers, frustrations with the process and are working to improve it.

And I probably said everything there is to say about that. So new process, all sponsors to. WordPress events in the future. All of that has to go through Matt and Mary Hubbard. Now, I didn't know if that, if there was some sort of caveat there in terms of the size of the event. Like Tim and I were, went to this event called WordPress Word Camp Whitley Bay in, when was that, Tim?

To

[00:39:03] Tim Nash: Whi. Shall I Sponsor No Less?

[00:39:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I hope you didn't have WordPress hosting written.

[00:39:09] Tim Nash: I don't, believe, to, I'm just imagining the process for some, a small word camp like that of, yeah.

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: So

[00:39:16] Tim Nash: Matt, looking at it going, who, who is the, do you think would have its

[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: tentacles in that though?

Because in theory, 'cause the way I read that Matt would have to, and Mary. We both have to approve. And that event, it really, there's 80, I dunno what the number is, but there's 80 people in a room. Something like that. it's fairly small. It's one day, it starts at nine, it's over by five. and obviously if there was a bottleneck for sponsorship for an event like that, could be, a bit critical for that event going on or not.

[00:39:47] Tim Nash: I, we destroy it.

[00:39:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Whereas the bigger ones, you know the word Camp Asias and Europe and us, you can imagine that, that, there's more money going around. There's probably more resources put into all of those kind of things. So it might be a bit more straightforward. Anyway, there's the story. If you want to talk about it and get into it, feel free.

There. There was a time when,

[00:40:11] Corey Maass: sensible contextual choices could be made. Like I remember going to a word camp. Birmingham, I think it was Birmingham, Alabama. And it was, there were 60 people there. Sorry for anybody who planned it. Maybe it was bigger, but my recollection. But anyway, very small camp. And there were a couple of sponsored tables in front Blue Host, 'cause they were, whatever it's called, a universal host and or universal sponsor. Global sponsor kind of thing. Global sponsor. Thank you. we don't, from ours, the universe, global, some stellar, inter intergalactic body. but there was also a table that was blank was empty and there was a little placard that said, please put down your stickers, put down your business cards, put down your, and yes, you were not a sponsor, but it was a great way to network and it was a great way to spread the word and I.

I was, I, it's the only word camp I've ever seen it at. And maybe I'm outing somebody that then though they broke rules. But this was a hundred years ago. but I miss that kind of, obviously if you're spending a hundred thousand or 200,000, like there need to be rules, it's how much regulation are we gonna introduce to the point where we no longer have sponsors, especially for the ti the eight tiny camps that still exist and manage to exist.

[00:41:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that, was my concern is that, you can imagine that Matt Mullen wagon, Mary, a really busy with a variety of things and it did imply in the article that there's hope, hopefully some sort of streamlined process. Maybe it's more of a. I don't know, maybe in theory they rob a stamp it, but rather than doing one at a time, maybe the team go to them with 15 or 20 and they just rob a stamp.

But also, I guess the, problem might arise if people, let's say for example, you just want to be controversial and you wanna show up to a word president and you wanna wear a t-shirt from a comp, I don't know, some company that you own and you just wanna write WordPress hosting by something.

I just wonder if. That kind of thing. Like where, what are the, proclivities and things gonna, I guess you can wear anything on your person. I don't know. There must be some rules around that. Tim looked like he was taking a breath to say something. Maybe he wasn't that.

[00:42:34] Tim Nash: No. first of all, let's just get the important bit outta the way, which is that obviously, sponsoring a work camp is such a cost effective marketing tool that, that people race to give money over 'cause they know it will convert their products so beautifully and brilliantly. And this is the, best opportunity you as a marketer you'll ever gonna have.

And it's in no way something that you do for the community. Purely to let the community have events. Yes, there is branding opportunities, but let's face it, this is a sucky way to do marketing. Actually, there was

[00:43:08] Nathan Wrigley: a great big spoonful of sarcasm in there, wasn't there? I'm just

[00:43:11] Tim Nash: a little bit, yes.

[00:43:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:13] Tim Nash: Consequently, when somebody is going, Hey boss, I want to sponsor this event. It's a great grassroots event. It will, it oh yeah. I appreciate that. All they've put all these rules. No, you can't have the contact list. Don't be silly. No, you can't do this. No, we can't do this. No, we can't do that. Oh.

And we may be able to sponsor. What do you mean, mate? Oh, there's some bloke somewhere in America who's going to decide whether or not we can, on what basis? I don't know. It just is. Can you imagine being the person who has to have that conversation with the person who's gonna give the money over outta context of everything we know about the drama that's happening from their perspective, they're just gonna go What?

No. Go spend it on PPC or go spend it on, go spend it on a, on that other Super Bowl, the one over there Drupal conference where they seem to be happy to take our money. It's a real, kick in the teeth if you are like, oh yeah, and we don't even want your money and let these small work camps really desperately need the money.

These are the grassroots events that need this money. So if they're going to be cut off or even strangled, slightly bearing in mind that they're not getting a humongous amount of financial support outside of the sponsors, they attract themselves. It's really hard. And also a lot of these sponsors are local.

The whole idea of work, local work camps is they're meant to be local. They're not, some of these aren't even WordPress specific. They might be, the fish and chip shop that's gonna sponsor the food.

[00:44:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But it would be really interesting to see if it, does cause a bottleneck. couple of things from that.

Firstly, I wonder if this process will change rapidly, in the face of issues which may occur. the bottleneck being Mary and Matt's, available time to actually make decisions like that. and if that changes, but also I wonder if, there's, I don't know, a document that's gonna be drawn up, which explicitly says, this is allowed, this isn't.

And we're gonna, we're gonna trust you again there. Sorry. That is to say we're gonna trust the organizers of the event, hand that trust back again and say, you are now given the offer. I think you've got it

[00:45:26] Tim Nash: right the first time.

[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The, one of the things in here. There was something which says it's gonna be like this for the foreseeable future.

I can't remember. I can't find that line, I apologize. But there was something which said, oh, it says, it is unclear how long this process will be in place as we expect this to be in place long term. We will continue to look at ways to improve the process. So the, I'm just reading between the lines there and thinking, okay, this is maybe the new default for the foreseeable future.

And, to be clear, without

[00:46:01] Tim Nash: word, without sponsors, word camps cannot exist.

[00:46:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So in, in relation to that, Patricia has said as a word, camp mentor, event supporter in, I can confirm it's valid for all size of events, not only flagship. Okay. So that was in response to me saying, I wonder what size of event it, it affects.

Michelle had a good conversation with Mary on the post that podcast the other day. No info on this. Nice to hear who they are. You, Michelle, as in this Michelle. Oh, nice. Did you get into this topic by any chance?

[00:46:34] Michelle Frechette: No. It wasn't getting to know you with Mary. I don't think enough people know who she is and what her responsibilities are, her past that kind of thing.

So it really was more along the lines of getting to know who she is. Okay. Sitting in this really lofty position. So

[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: if you wanna drop the link into the,

[00:46:49] Michelle Frechette: I did

[00:46:50] Nathan Wrigley: private. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. I'll, drag that out in a minute. It's on and then

[00:46:53] Michelle Frechette: it's on, YouTube. The post you go live today.

[00:46:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

there's always, so we're back to Patricia. There's always been rules and sponsors have vetted what is new is the WordPress hosting is no longer accepted sponsor must replace this with, and then I'm having to word for WordPress on their site or something, which isn't WordPress hosting. Yeah.

[00:47:13] Michelle Frechette: So

[00:47:14] Nathan Wrigley: grammar.

[00:47:15] Michelle Frechette: Grammar, grammar alone says that if you put something in front of, like Michelle, hosting means that it's. Owned by Michelle. So that's the whole idea is that hosting for WordPress is different than WordPress hosting.

[00:47:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:28] Tim Nash: I mean it's, no, it just sounds like you're hosting wordpress.com instead.

[00:47:34] Nathan Wrigley: The, the point being, I'm guessing that the sponsors won't be told, you cannot sponsor under any circumstances. It's more go fix this, go fix that. I suppose it, maybe the point of it though is that if Matt and Mary are the ultimate custodians of the Yes no decision, then it's not on the volunteers to make decisions about tricky language.

look, is that, does that contravene the trademark? does that, is that within And that without, we've got these two companies which have got something similar, but they're not quite the same. We think that one passes, but this one doesn't. Maybe it can go via Matt to the lawyers and then back and forth.

Anyway, the point is that's how, now, that's now. How it's, and if you're attending a Word camp, especially if you're organizing one, that is gonna be the new process. Whether or not it's impacted people so far who've been declined, entry to, a sponsor slot. I don't know. Alright, let's move on.

We now have this, actually we'll come back to that in a minute. I'll do that later. This is an event I didn't know anything about. it's, called WP Publisher Success Week, and it's happened once before. at least I think it has. 'cause it says the second annual, because WP Publisher Success Week and it's mooted as gain high impact insights into tool in and tools in short, incisive, intensive, sorry, sessions that will empower you to migrate to WordPress with a focus on data management, SEO, security and scalability.

So it sounds like it's a, po, like a, an event, which is. Trying to woo people over to WordPress, bring them along, especially if they are, in the publisher sphere, content creators, big news organizations. And I was looking at this, which is the, who attended the WP thing in 2024. And, there's some interesting names.

I dunno how they get the metric on how they attended, whether it's, I dunno how they do that. But here's some idea of the kind of content that's going on. Ray, Morrie, who, is is on the podcast from time to time. She, got a session called The Evolution of WordPress and what's Coming in 2025.

That's also with Vahe Arabian. I want to say. There's another one, called Streamlining Editorial Workflows for a major WordPress migration. Another one Website Migration Essentials, security Scale, enterprise Insights Workshop. And then unlocking AI potential for media publishers, real world strategies and insights.

So it's five or six little things in one day. And it all feels like just trying to assuage people's fears in a sense about why you might have a problem coming to WordPress. there's that. There it is. It is at URL state of digital publishing.com.

[00:50:22] Michelle Frechette: Immediately following word ccha.

[00:50:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. That literally immediately following it, isn't it?

It's right afterwards and

[00:50:30] Michelle Frechette: it's a four day event, so there you go.

[00:50:33] Nathan Wrigley: Had you, heard of this? I don't even, I think, Ray maybe put me in touch with it because I spoke to her the other week and coincidentally she's one of the speakers. I imagine it was her that told me about it, but I had not heard about it.

[00:50:46] Michelle Frechette: I hadn't either.

[00:50:47] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. Anybody Or should we move on? Let's move on. I think. Okie doke. speaking of WordPress events and things like that, this is another one happening in the near future. If you enjoy rollercoasters. And, like Disneyland basically, cloudfest is the place for you. It's an event entirely based, like they take over a theme park.

I remember, the first person who told me that? I really had to think about that for a moment. What really actually take, yeah, they take over the entire theme park and, I don't think that header, that hero image does this event justice really. There's not a ride in sight. there's just people looking at a conference in a sort of ordinary way, but they have pivoted a little bit in the last few years is my understanding, to have a specific WordPress day where all the things WordPress get talked about.

So I thought I'd mention it. it is happening this year. It is one day of the much larger Cloud Fest day. It's gonna be on the 17th of March, 2024. And, my understanding that looks to me like. Is that Jonathan Wald and Robert Jacobi? I'm gonna put money on the phone. I

[00:51:55] Michelle Frechette: believe so.

[00:51:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it's them.

and it sounds like a bit of a riot. it does sound like if if you enjoy your hedonism with your conferencing, this is the thing for you. I saw some pictures of the accommodation last year and things, and it looks really good. The only feedback that I have had from people that have been in the past has been ecstatically overwhelming.

They, they seem to think it's a bit of a breath of fresh air attending an event where there really is more than just the event. There's something on offer to keep you interested in the evening. It's just a bit of a laugh. There's music, there's entertainment, there's rollercoasters, all of that kind of stuff.

And, yeah. So there you go. WP Day at cloudfest. Anybody wanna say anything about that one?

[00:52:42] Michelle Frechette: I've heard good things.

[00:52:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:52:43] Michelle Frechette: But I'm unable to attend so far. Schedules are crazy. Yeah.

[00:52:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's it's just, it's in the southwest I wanna say, of Germany. not far from Strasburg, which I know is not in Germany, but it's not far from there.

if you haven't got your ticket yet, oh, that's another thing to say. We were talking about word camps earlier, and the fact that the ticket prices, ticket price for a word camp is typically very, low. because this is outside of the sort of chapter program and there's, that it's, I'm guessing it's for profit, it's got more realistic for want of a better word, ticket pricing.

So I think it's into the, multiple hundreds of dollars if you want to.

[00:53:23] Tim Nash: It's probably worth emphasizing. It's part of a larger. Conference that is aimed at hosting companies and hosting providers. it's not necessarily, and it was never a re it is got more WordPress has been creeping in over the last few years, but, I remember going many years ago and it, wasn't WordPress related

[00:53:42] Nathan Wrigley: stuff's did it, did you enjoy it?

[00:53:44] Tim Nash: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Nice. there's nothing wrong with being, whined and dined and especially, if you work in that industry. There was lots of, vendors who, unlike perhaps in the WordPress space, if you've only ever been, if your only time you've been to a conference is a word camp, then going to something like cloudfest will, make your mind explode.

Both with the cost, but also with just how different the events are, how leaky your data's going to become, and how often how many people are gonna be talking to you on email for the next 10 years. But also just how much money is spent and how much people are, you, are, there to be.

Sold to, but not in a necessarily a massively negative way. and if you maximize your time there, you can probably come out with, new wardrobes, new, lots of new stationary and, some very nice goodies along with obviously knowledge. Bob

[00:54:43] Nathan Wrigley: Don was there last year and there was a guy giving away, those remarkable things.

It's like a tablet but done with E Ink, so it's the size of a, an iPad or something, but it's a bit like a Kindle, but with a pen. And there's a guy just giving those away. They're like $500 or something. This guy just had a stack of them and he said, yeah. One of these

[00:55:02] Tim Nash: many years ago I went to a conference in, San Francisco and I flew out.

Heathrow and I had two laptops 'cause I had my personal laptop and my work laptop. When I came back, I had to go through customs with five laptops.

[00:55:19] Michelle Frechette: Oh my goodness.

[00:55:21] Tim Nash: With the 'cause, I, two sponsors decided to give, laptops away. If you just, what, when you were on the first day, they, you literally walked in and they gave you a laptop in a bag, and then two sponsors gave you laptops space.

There was three, I got three laptops at that one event.

[00:55:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing customs didn't let you walk through with all that, or did they?

[00:55:40] Tim Nash: The thing was I got through, turned around to see my, the person I was traveling with who was emptying out his, and I'm like counting it. He's like on his seventh laptop. Oh, he went rounding yet?

Yeah. Oh my way. He had a limit at San Francisco. They must be used to this, is he coming into the airport? They must be used to this sort of stuff, but it's no, Seven is too many. Can I,

[00:56:02] Nathan Wrigley: ask Tim? Six is fine. Seven is six is fine. Seven way too many. There is a line, Tim, you said you went out with two laptops.

One work and one, I dunno what you said the other one was, but you'd like personal. Personal, what's the, do you not just why before you go on a conference, you're not just combine the data of the two and say, I'll just have one. It'll be easier.

[00:56:25] Tim Nash: We're talking, nearly. Yeah, 10 plus years ago, and, oh no, I carried a corporate work laptop that, had been wiped due to who I was working for at the time.

It was a brand new laptop that was given to me to travel with. Gosh. and, it was wiped on the way back because, I was going to a foreign country, which with, different laws and different regulations. Oh, I see. Got it,

[00:56:53] Nathan Wrigley: got it. Okay, that makes sense these days. Of course, with cloud storage being ubiquitous and very low cost, you just, everything's in the cloud, isn't it?

It doesn't matter whether you lose the thing on the way out and get stuck in an airport terminal, you just pick up where you're left off. we have, apparently got a, so Patricia says, cloudfest is an amazing event. She says, she'll see you there if you can go. She also says, when you subscribe to their newsletter, you get a, code for a free ticket.

Oh, okay. There you go. If you want a free ticket, subscribe to use that. That's great advice. That's brilliant. Thank Good to know.

[00:57:28] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:57:29] Nathan Wrigley: there's a cloudfest in us in Miami, happening in November. That's good. And also another one in Port of Ventura in October. I dunno where that is, but, doesn't sound like the uk, that's for sure.

and they've got another one in a, theme park in Spain. That's port of that Port

[00:57:46] Michelle Frechette: Aventa. Yeah, that's the one.

[00:57:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's the one that's in Spain. So if you want to do a tech conference and you like rollercoasters, I. I think it's a done deal.

[00:57:58] Michelle Frechette: I'm more of a teacups kind of girl. I don't do the rollercoasters anymore.

But

[00:58:01] Nathan Wrigley: no, I used to love rollercoasters. And then same at a certain, when I became, a certain age, I, I suddenly realized that my body could no longer handle going round and round. And I would come off feeling, just

[00:58:15] Tim Nash: imagine giving the, talk on the Teac cup as you like the screen.

You have to just look at it. You could start on teacup your way up to the rollercoaster. You just

[00:58:25] Corey Maass: open the window and then they'd

[00:58:27] Nathan Wrigley: tell you what to do

[00:58:28] Corey Maass: with the,

[00:58:29] Nathan Wrigley: see, one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life was, you may remember this, Tim. There, there's a person who we don't mention anymore because it turns out he had a horrible past, but he used to do this show where he would fix it.

You know who I'm talking about? Yeah. where he would fix things. So people would write in their letters and say, I want to do this extraordinary thing. That is never gonna happen unless you make it happen. And then he would do it and they would film it. And it was this, little kid from the Boy Scouts and he decided that he wanted to take him and all of his boy scout mates on a rollercoaster that sort of goes round and upside down.

And all of them were gonna try and eat a pack lunch. And and it was just, it was literally hysterical because not a mouthful went in, they would be holding the sandwich and they'd be going and it would just bounce and then the milkshake lid would come off and they would, it was absolutely brilliant.

Anyway, there we go. That's that propo of nothing, but it was very, funny. Okay, moving on. That was Cloud Fest. Here we go. post status. This is mic. This is Michelle's territory. Most definitely. Tell us about this.

[00:59:40] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so with the new, launch for Woo branding, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to catch up with some of the Woo folks and do a podcast with them?

So I had Tamara Neeson and Bo Lemons. Tamara is the CMO for Woo and Bo, I missed his title, but he's definitely like overseeing the, project itself. oh, he's got a really

[01:00:02] Nathan Wrigley: unusual title. Like he's a artistic

[01:00:04] Michelle Frechette: director. Yeah, The

[01:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: artistic director. That's it. Yeah. So

[01:00:07] Michelle Frechette: I, apologize for not having that off the top of my head right now.

But it was a great, podcast. It started with, with Tamara and then BOA joined us about halfway through, and we talked about the branding, but we also talked about the roadmap for, For a woo and where it's going and how we talked also about how the WordPress ecosystem works, and I said, when you start to build more things in decor and you're basically making other people's products in the ecosystem obsolete, how do we deal with that?

And so we had a lot of those kind of conversations. it was really good conversation. So I encourage you to, go ahead and listen the transcripts there if you'd rather read it. But, yeah, it was great. And then same day, a few hours later, I actually interviewed Mary Hubbard. I always say, yeah, it's Mary.

So, that's also on YouTube. There it is. yeah, so the post will go live. I've just checked with my staff to find out why it hasn't already been posted. It should be. but the post on post status will link you back here as well and provide a transcript, et cetera. So that'll be live a little bit later today.

[01:01:11] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, is it, hang on, we're back to the, is it this bit here that you're worried about? this is the interminable. WordPress video block basically, I dunno why I did that. Basically it renders the block, it renders the YouTube video, I reckon about 20% of the time, and the other 80% of the time, it just gives you the text of the video in bed.

so I'll,

[01:01:34] Michelle Frechette: check in, I'll check into that. That, that one is a lot. It is live on YouTube, but it's also obviously you can listen to the audio. But the one I've tried that

[01:01:43] Nathan Wrigley: block about 800 times and it is just a total lottery, whether it worked, my advice would be use an iframe. It just, it's just gonna,

[01:01:51] Michelle Frechette: yeah, gonna

[01:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: work.

I don't usually have problems

[01:01:53] Michelle Frechette: with it, but I, I'll double, check It, it just might be that the link is not quite linking through, so I'll double check that one one. Okay. the post for Mary hasn't gone live yet, but. I don't know why it should go live soon, Okay.

[01:02:05] Nathan Wrigley: I, have the link for it and it will end up looking like that when you can me just

[01:02:09] Tim Nash: take a moment to say how awesome a name cash up is.

Thank you. Cash up. you've, you've never been on at the same time with promoting it for me to say it, but yes. I really like that, Dave.

[01:02:21] Michelle Frechette: Thank you. Cash up. the other podcast Yeah, the ones that that, Cory Miller had were like the draft and I can't remember some of the other ones, but I thought, what can I use that kinda leans into tech, cashing up, I'm gonna cash up with these people.

[01:02:35] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool. okay, so there's two pieces from, Michelle this week. So one about Woo, which coincidentally is let's see if we can get to it. Here we go. about. Woo has had a bit of a rebrand in the background. I, am no graphic designer, so honestly, if you show me a new design, I'm basically gonna go, oh, that's nice.

[01:02:55] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[01:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: It's purple now. Yeah. Yeah. That's about

[01:02:58] Michelle Frechette: it. we joked that they did it to match my hair and Oh, Tamara said, I thought you did your hair to match the new branding. Chicken egg. It's lovely. This,

[01:03:08] Nathan Wrigley: this green is all the rage at the moment, seeing this all over the place, but there has been a significant update.

So there's the, new logo. it got this sort of purple background to it. I'm, sure that green will be a part of it. I'm not entirely sure. There's the sort of the smaller logo. It looks like a sort shopping that's quite clever. I quite like that. It looks a bit like a, a shopping cart because of the, it's got like a handle at the beginning of the w and then the rest of the w makes up the shape of the shopping cart.

And then there's loads and loads of speak here about why it's changed and how it adapts to the new users and being up against Spotify and, sorry, Shopify and things. Definitely not Spotify. That's a totally different thing. Shopify and Wix and Squarespace and all of that and all the while.

That's brilliant. But I'm just gonna look at the logo and go, that's quite nice. I like that. That's a nice logo. So I dunno if anybody wants to get stuck into that, but it, I like it, it looks better, but if you're asking me about the psychology of it all, I'll just go, I quite like it. That's it. That's, I'm

[01:04:06] Tim Nash: confused.

Is it now? Has it now officially become, woo, I have an answer. WooCommerce an answer. Oh.

[01:04:13] Michelle Frechette: if you listen to the podcast, you'll find out the overall project is woo. The platform itself is WooCommerce.

[01:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: So is how is that not still really confusing? I'm confused. So what do we call it then? Do we call it Woo.

So if

[01:04:26] Michelle Frechette: you're using the plugin and, it's suite of products, that is WooCommerce. Okay. But the overall project itself is Woo.

[01:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'm still confused. It's, this is a woo to me. It's more,

[01:04:38] Michelle Frechette: than the, it's more than the software, right? So

[01:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, But I just want one name that's, the basics of it.

I just want the,

[01:04:46] Michelle Frechette: are you not Nathan, but also Nathan Wrigley.

[01:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you're right. Yeah. But I want everybody to just call me Nathan. but yeah, you'll write Mr. That's right. Com. Yeah.

[01:04:57] Michelle Frechette: Is there, a middle name to Nathan Wrigley?

[01:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: There is. I do have a middle name. Yeah.

[01:05:00] Michelle Frechette: What is it?

[01:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's, Asher Bal.

It's not that. Make it as tough as you go. I know. It's John. It's John. the thing, the, my parents very cleverly thought that if I didn't like the name Nathan, I could go with John. And if I didn't like Nathan or John, I could go with Jonathan. But luckily I liked Nathan, and so that's it. But, I'm just

[01:05:22] Michelle Frechette: gonna call you NJ from now

[01:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: on.

I'll tell you my passport number if you like as well. And then you can all have fun going on holidays. Me,

[01:05:29] Michelle Frechette: I'm more interested in your banking home, but that's

[01:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: okay. But yeah, there you go. No, you're not Michelle.

The so it's not confusing. It's only confusing to people like me, but I do like it. I've gotta say for whatever the, things are, which makes something look more modern, I can't encapsulate them in my head. It does, have that. Yeah, it's nice. I'd rather like it. Yeah, it's nice. Anything Corey and Tim on that before we move on?

Running outta time.

[01:05:59] Michelle Frechette: We always run outta time. Okay.

[01:06:00] Nathan Wrigley: Alright. Okay. In which case I'll bring this to your attention. This is, Patrick Posner. He works with Mike McAllister on the Ollie theme. and in fact, I don't know if they're both on this project as well or if this is just Patrick, but I've, I've only ever spoken to Patrick about it.

He has a, he's had a plugin for a little while called Simply Static, which he en took it over from somebody else and has kept it going. And it enables you to create a static version of your website and then ship it. If you've got the pro version, you can ship it to things like Netlify and a variety of other different things.

I can't remember the providers, but there's a bunch of providers. But he, he's taken a, he's taken a new. turn this week and has launched this, which, is, I dunno if it's called like hosting or something like that, but essentially now he's gonna bind hosting into it. So you don't have to even go through that step of setting up a Netlify account or what have you.

And for free, looking at his page here, you, get, you get to generate a static site. So I, think free is what you always had. With free. You could get a zip file and then take that zip file and upload it somewhere, unpack it and it would just work. But now if you go with the pro of $199 a year, I think that then just deploys it all automatically for you.

And then $19 a year, sorry, a month. I think. I don't, it just, that's like a wait list item. So I don't really know what's going on. So I don't know if he's, I think he's taking care of the hosting for you, but, I just, only on the

[01:07:33] Tim Nash: studio plan.

[01:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: So that's this one here that we don't know about. Yeah. And

[01:07:36] Tim Nash: that studio plan.

I'll be honest, I did some digging 'cause I was curious. and anybody who's got a background in hosting is going to look at his plan and go, how can you get away with not saying all the things that you're meant to say? Go. And what do you mean? So things like, I think basically as a CDN, he's using Bunny CDN based on the number of points of presence.

So that's, 'cause it was very, it had a very specific number that you could Google and go Ah, It's funny. But, how, where it's hosted, how it's hosted, what measures are in place with the hosting, eh.

[01:08:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we don't know. I'm guessing he's gonna have to put all that down. I know he is got a really interesting life at the moment.

He's on, he's doing the digital nomad thing where he is. He's working from wherever he ends up. I think he was in Lao not that long ago, but, okay. Thank you. You've, remembered what I had forgotten. The studio plan is the new bit. The pro and the free bit, I think are what I've always been. But this studio plan, at some point, if you hop on the wait list, presumably.

By law, he will have to say what Tim just said isn't being said. Say where the data's gonna be. Not necessarily by law, but by,

[01:08:42] Tim Nash: if you want anybody to sign up to it. Okay. There, for, some people it will be, if you've, there are certain companies in the EU and in the UK that cannot host their data outside of the EU and the uk.

So therefore they need eu, UK based hosting. likewise, there will be in Singapore, there will be in China, there will be in America. so he, he will eventually have to give more details, but, from the very limited information given, it sounds like he's building, putting it on a. Some sort of backend and then using, buddy CDN as the CDN, which is a good choice for, small scale projects.

So I imagine it would work quite well. yeah, and if everybody's using it's not a bad service.

[01:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I imagine Terrible name. Yeah. Yeah. Bonnie, CDN. Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean. but the idea would be that you'd have this sort of like website, which exists for a period of time, and you can like hibernate that.

and then, or at least it's not the front end of your website, and then all of the, when you push the button, when you log out or what have you, it'll zip up the file, send it to the CDN, maybe Bonnie or what have you, will take control of it. And then it'll just be flat, HTML files, CSSA bit of JavaScript.

They have integrations with variety of form plugins, but I don't really know how they work. but it's an interesting option and maybe for some people having that like lightning fast thing if you've got a small site, might be just what they're after. So there you go. and t Tacho says the UK passport isn't valuable anymore since you left the e eu.

Nathan. Yeah, it was me that did that. I, it was me that left the eu. I, I decided arbitrarily, that the entire United Kingdom ought to just wake up to the fact that the EU didn't need us anymore. Basically, I've got an Irish passport taco. I'm immune to all that silliness, thankfully.

[01:10:42] Tim Nash: Thank, weirdly, the UK passport is still ranked like number four in the best passports to have list.

Yeah. and most EU passports are not ranked below it.

[01:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: I take them both. So when I leave to go to a European country, I miss the line. And then when I come back to Britain, I miss

[01:10:59] Tim Nash: you. You still have to queue up everywhere. Don't, get me wrong. No, you

[01:11:02] Nathan Wrigley: don't. No, you really don't. if you've got an EU passport or an EU country, typically it's a lot quicker.

Anyway, there we go. Tacho says he used to be a nice person. Moving on, you still are Tacho, right? Okay, let's go to this. If you are using forms with capture on them, at any point on your website, you might be interested to know. This isn't really a WordPress thing, but in the more recent past, I think you see these more or less everywhere that ubiquitous, aren't they?

At the bottom of a form is some kind of humanity check, tick the pictures of the cats line, these puzzles up, this looks like that. And eventually, if you've done enough of them, you'll throw objects at a wall. Because it's infuriating as all hell. But if you do manage to get through it, you'll be Oh, brilliant.

We love captures, they make my forms incorruptible by bots. Google's had the most popular one, called Recapture. I, don't think they made it. I think they bought it many, years ago. And, it's really popular and my understanding, I don't use it. I use, Cloudflare's, turnstile wherever I go these days for that exact thing.

Same. But but the, I understand it's free. It always has been free. You can do as much as you like. Not anymore. it's gonna be moved to the Google Cloud services platform, I should say. And you are gonna be charged. It's honestly, I think really it's not a lot really. I dunno what the fee is gonna be, but the free tier seems fairly fine.

10,000 assessments per month? no 'cause it'll be bot assessments as well, won't it? Oh, that's not 10. That's not

[01:12:31] Tim Nash: 10,000 successes. Oh, it doesn't say that, does it?

[01:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Mind you, this is on search engine journal, so we don't know if they've misreported that or not, but, okay. 10,000 assessments. You can imagine Google writes their own script to make this service profitable on the first day every month.

Go and get, I believe, that would be

[01:12:48] Michelle Frechette: illegal.

[01:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Go get every,

[01:12:52] Tim Nash: we, were trying to do a web website as you Google bot just accidentally crawled your capture a million times.

[01:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:12:58] Tim Nash: we got a new JavaScript enabled version.

[01:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. How many times did it call it? 9,999 times. So you're allowed one free assessment,

[01:13:07] Michelle Frechette: Nathan?

[01:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:13:09] Michelle Frechette: Could you bring, up the most recent, post that I put in the private chat?

[01:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I can, yeah. Is it to do with this? Let me just grab it. It's, hold on. It's

[01:13:16] Michelle Frechette: tangential.

[01:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: one second. Copy link address. I'm

[01:13:21] Tim Nash: hoping

[01:13:21] Nathan Wrigley: that this is the chess capture.

[01:13:24] Michelle Frechette: It's that,

[01:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: is it not? It's better, right?

I'm on X so I might Oof what? Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a capture what's not just please. Okay. For those that are listening, it's picture,

it's pictures of either me or Michelle. That's brilliant. I do have a memory that you put that up. I'm gonna take, this one is me. This one is me. This one, and this one. That's brilliant, Michelle. That's fine.

[01:13:55] Michelle Frechette: But let's face it, the whole thing is like looking in the mirror for you.

[01:13:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I got shown one the other day, and it was pic picture.

this wasn't a real one. A friend showed me a comedy one and it was pic. Even thinking about it, it's making me laugh. It was pic, pictures of muffins or a chihuahua. Turns out that if you get real close to a muffin and real close to a chihuahua, they basically, they look the same, Go and Google it now.

All of you, chihuahua and muffin pictures and see if you get something akin to a, catcher. Oh, that's brilliant. Thank you, Michelle. That's made

[01:14:31] Michelle Frechette: my pleasure.

[01:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: so anyway, Thanksgiving. Yeah, you've got to, you've gotta pay and there will be disruption. You are gonna have to recycle the keys. So stuff will break.

So you do have to know about this, tri turnstile. I think it's free, forever and ever. I dunno, maybe there's number. It's so much

[01:14:51] Michelle Frechette: easier.

[01:14:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:14:52] Michelle Frechette: it's, behind the scenes. You don't have to do anything.

[01:14:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, do you go for the, do you go for the

[01:14:56] Tim Nash: invisible one? Do you Oh, yeah. we are all so slowly but surely seeding even more control to CloudFlare to destroy 99% of the internet when it inevitably breaks.

Have you? Sure. Let's go with CloudFlare.

[01:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Have you, have you got like weird intuitions about CloudFlare then? Do you, see CloudFlare Beco? Because if you'd, 12 years ago I thought Google was this really altruistic company that did nothing wrong. And I, I had really high, if you'd have asked me on a scale of Naugh to a hundred, what are the morals of Google?

I would've given it a flat a hundred. I would give it almost nothing now and. You're right. Like things like that, CloudFlare, it does worry me, but I don't see any evidence of it at the minute. But maybe there is.

[01:15:45] Tim Nash: CloudFlare is a company. And it's, it is a company that it does many good things.

It does many dubious things, just like any company does. And once you start having a percentage of the web being that flows through, you. You inevitably have to be considered to be a bit dubious and that we should start worrying about it. 'cause that's how we end up with not a distributed web, which is a problem because it's all percept.

What happens when a authoritarian regime decides actually your, your based in our country, we can just take you over. Or, a billionaire decides to buy it up because he is decided that he was upset about something, and runs it in. So whenever you've got these sort of massive corporations like this, you have to be a little bit wary about how much, traffic's going through them.

That doesn't mean that they're doing anything wrong. And obviously it's also in the, that's like the whole job of a company to be successful. So you can't say, oh, they're bad because they're successful because. That's their job. But yeah, we should always be wary of companies that have eight percentage of the web.

What

[01:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: did you say, Cory? How much was it?

[01:17:02] Corey Maass: 16.

[01:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: 16% whole internet traffic. Quick Google search flows through, oh,

[01:17:07] Corey Maass: Google. Sorry, say that again. Cloud, Flare estimates, so it's their own number, estimates that around 16% of global internet traffic passes through CloudFlare.

[01:17:18] Tim Nash: it's a scary statistic for AWS as well.

Yeah. If you imagine how much, how many important services run through Amazon's infrastructure and ultimately we are consolidating. Large sites on the big three, on Amazon, on Azure, and on Google. these are then being backed by putting a layer in front of them of CloudFlare. So these, as we are doing this, we are slowly but surely destroying the web.

Now, that might be not a problem for most people, right? But long term it might be, a horrific problem.

[01:17:53] Corey Maass: My solution, why I learned how to farm.

[01:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: I, dug a big hole in the back of the garden and I put blanks over the top and I'm just gonna go and sit in that and get, get Damn

[01:18:03] Tim Nash: you Also, that's, but that's the decision you have to make.

Whether or not you can, you can't, you can go, oh, I'm only going to use the bit of the web that's not controlled by corporation. Yeah, that's right. You can sit on your, your own little bulletin board in the corner and wait for someone to dial up into you.

[01:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like, all people that use Linux have had this discussion with themselves, about the, corporate nature of the laptop or whatever, and it's I'm.

I'm having a Linux laptop. It's gonna be so difficult. I don't care. I'm having a Linux laptop. Nothing will ever work. I don't care. I'm having a Linux laptop. You won't be able to print anything. I don't care.

[01:18:41] Tim Nash: Printing works brilliantly on a Linux system. The only part of it that does, no, that's not true.

Most of the things work on a Linux

[01:18:48] Nathan Wrigley: laptop Upend your own argument. But, but that's an interesting point. Anyway, Google services are becoming charged. If you've got 10,000 or more, don't go to Turnstile. Evil is all I can say. It's just, I didn't say that, by the way. Lawyers, whoever you are, wherever you are, I didn't make any such reference.

That was a joke. da I spent Reese, I spent not a small amount of time last week completing doom capture. It is, that sounds like it's a game or

[01:19:21] Tim Nash: something. Yeah. Is that the ga The game Doom in a capture if you com you have to do the level to prove you're a human. What? I'm lost. I don't get it. So you, could put you, you know that the, there's a, like a running meme of Can you play doom on it? Oh, okay. Can you play doom on your capture? Oh, God. One made a capture that was doom. Oh, Reese. Oh. Oh my goodness. Reese. What the heck? That sounds see, the thing is that I'm like, that's all well and good, but wait until you can put civilization and do all 13 hours of it to get through before the end of it.

Yeah.

[01:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: this is a good point from Tacho, at least we get a bit calm. If CloudFlare goes down and AWS goes down, at least you can have a biscuit sit down and just relax for a bit. Mind you, nobody, most of the corporate world are not doing that. They're just freaking out. By the way, just think about the number of notifications that are building up.

yeah, Exactly. Cory, the way that you drank that bottle just then, it just, you got this perfect angle on the camera. It just looked like. Like you're drinking from an entire tank of water. Look at that. It's absolutely huge. Cory drinks eight liters of water at a time. okay, so there's that. And then the very last piece that I wanted to mention today, this is probably about right, is if you, love the ai, which I know more or less everybody does, then you'll have definitely heard of Deeps seek.

I was so pleased. It made me feel quite good in a way. I didn't pick up on deep seek at all until everybody had got bored of talking about it. there was all that woo-hoo deep seek the new thing and what have you. I didn't really pick up on it as a thing. Now it, that whole thing seems to have washed away.

just, the, fun of OpenAI claiming that they had been stealing their data, which felt a little bit, hollow, given where OpenAI gets much of its data. But, this piece came along if you, I love this. If you are a deep seek user, it's highly likely that you just tick through on the terms and conditions and just said, yeah, whatever.

it'll be fine. You'll be normal. But apparently if you did click that I. one of the terms and conditions is that you are liable, for deep seeks company travel expenses and the cost of hiring lawyers and things like that. If, the ai, requires legal defense. So I'll just read, deep seeks terms of use, contain requirements that may make users reconsider using the app as they could shift the balance between benefits and perceived risks by imposing significant financial obligations.

This is on search engine Journal. Again, one such requirement makes users liable for travel and litigation expenses if they violate the terms and the violation results in legal action. I section 7.2 of the terms. Has three parts that are fairly standard. It asserts that the power to enforce its rules report suspected legal violations to authorities and shift legal and financial responsibilities onto users.

However, it, the, third part includes travel expenses and the costs of collecting evidence and paying fines. And the users IE you are solely responsible for legal claims, demands and losses that arise from violating deep see's terms of use, engaging in activities, suspect suspected of breaking law or regulations, or being involved in legal conduct.

May, maybe this is, maybe I'm just over egging it, but I just makes me giggle. if they got in touch with you and said, thanks for using our software, but it gave some weird stuff out that we didn't expect. We wish that you'd have tried harder and we wish it hadn't given you a load of rubbish, but we're gonna come after you now because of what our software did for you.

I just thought that was priceless. that moral of this story. I don't know what the moral of this story is, but it's probably a moral careful.

[01:23:15] Michelle Frechette: Be careful what you click.

[01:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: Be careful what you click. Yeah, don't do. Oh, that's a

[01:23:19] Michelle Frechette: good title for this episode.

[01:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. be careful what you click. Okay, I'll write that down.

but there you go. I don't know if any of you are massive users of ai, but if you are, I feel I

[01:23:32] Tim Nash: want to just do the tiny co, the, but actually, oh, I know there

[01:23:37] Nathan Wrigley: is more, but it's way worse if I do them more at the end.

[01:23:41] Tim Nash: no, just for the, so this is obviously the deep seek.com. Yeah.

Chat bot. Yeah. Not the actual model. Yeah. Which doesn't have such licensing and God, have you actually paid attention to any of the other licenses that you've ticked on? Oh, I bet it's

[01:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: terrific.

[01:23:58] Tim Nash: But it's interesting, isn't it? How this p how people are, went from Oh, no deep seek. It's amazing to all of these articles, slowly but surely trying to chip away at its legitimacy.

we, 'cause it's ultimately used not American, you just see this over and over again that and it's all coming from the same sources and bits and pieces. But yeah, open ai, terms are equally as mad, yet nobody's writing papers about how, how using their terms gives you X and YZ so it is a little bit of propaganda.

[01:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: I know, but it's fun propaganda to

[01:24:36] Tim Nash: read. I know. But

[01:24:39] Corey Maass: it's fun.

[01:24:41] Tim Nash: It's

[01:24:41] Corey Maass: the serious point attached to it. So is the inverse of this. Every other company will fly you to wherever.

[01:24:48] Michelle Frechette: Yeah,

[01:24:48] Corey Maass: that's what I was. you get a free trip to San Francisco. Yeah,

[01:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: If we need, to get you in front of some lawyers, we'll fly you in and, pay for your lunch.

Be very careful with

[01:25:00] Tim Nash: that, Oh, free trip. Oh, Cuba, that sounds, oh, I know. Which product am I going

[01:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: to? AI is all the hotness in WordPress at the moment. And just to finish it off, we've got five minutes, so we'll finish it off this way. A couple of pieces in the WordPress space. The first one was Brian Cords.

who, wrote a piece called Getting the Block Editor for ai, and he was explaining about how a client wanted a particular thing to be done, and then getting into a conversation that he had with Matt Madero, who's been, creating a lot of content, video content, and what have you all about trying to, build things with ai and the fact that it's, not really just a case of you get the thing that you want, you've also gotta build in like a, UI for the, especially on the WordPress side of things, if you wanna do something, you can't just build the functionality.

You have to build in the functionality for storing that data, for retrieving it, for editing it, for updating it. In other words, there's 10 times more stuff going on in the background. And then, Remus did a piece, and I've not heard of this. Mku did a similar piece, not really similar, but it's called How to Get the Most Out of Cursor for WordPress Code.

And essentially what, I'm learning about AI from the distance, 'cause I'm not really using it, is it's all about your capacity to prompt in the same way that it was all about your capacity to code and the knowledge of that was incredibly important. Feels like we're entering an era where those people who really understand how the prompts deliver, they're gonna be the people pushing the, the envelope with all that.

And so Remco brings something, to mind called a product requirement document. And the idea being setting out all of this kind of to the AI before you start. And if you do that, apparently the chances of you getting out, what you intend, is far greater. You don't just ask it a blunt, question of build me this.

You tell it how to build it and what you need out of it in terms of a UI and all of that kind of stuff. So there we go. A couple of AI pieces, dunno if anybody wanted to,

[01:26:58] Corey Maass: and of course the, truth lies somewhere in the middle and. Depends on which app you're using, and, inter interacting with which service.

So at the beginning, not to call myself out, but at the, actually at the beginning of this podcast, I actually wrote out a long prompt because I was like, Nathan's blathering on about British shows that I've never seen. Oh, always. I, let's have it generate a bunch of, 'cause I was actually watching a bunch of videos this morning.

I, I tried, copilot the free version last couple of weeks and then today, and Twitter seems to be. predominantly showing me at least things that advocate for cursor that it's miles better. So I was like, okay, so let me spend 20 bucks for a month of cursor and let's compare. not at all fairly or equally, but let's just try something, right?

and, see what it did. And but it's watching a lot of videos. They're like, you can either generate these documents, dot rules, but apparently the dot rules is going away. And but you do wanna do some thinking and write out long prompts, but then it's specifically really good at update this piece of code to be these four lines of code in a cer, to fix a bug or whatever.

So it's all, still a moving target has been my, experience. And even day to day something will seem to be good about fixing a bug and then the next day trying to fix a similar bug, it'll go haywire. Weather patterns, whether the captions are, pictures of Nathan or not, all seem to affect whether, this stuff you know will how well it works for you.

[01:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: I like the idea of it being the weather. We can just blame the weather. However, on an uptick, I suspect that in the future of AI generated code, Tim's gonna have loads of work. it's not all bad. Yeah, no, this is

[01:29:07] Tim Nash: genuinely the case already. I can, I already do, during code reviews, I can pretty quickly pick up which bits have been generated by what AI program you're using.

Chachi, bt four has a very specific style unless you tell it otherwise. And Sonet 3.5 has a very distinct style unless you tell it otherwise. And those are the two, like the big ones that are being used in production places. And this code is going into production often without thinking through a plan, without doing the checks.

But it is surprising how easy it is for you to go, Hey, dear. AI overlord, please actually apply the WordPress coding standards to this code base. Yeah, I remember you saying that, or somebody sent that to me and I'm amazed the number of times I've seen this and gone, why did you not do this? also, why are you not putting this through linting and proper checks as well?

But, very few people seem to do that on. The which ones to use. They're changing so much. I've got a copy which I was playing with this morning of visual, vs code insiders, which is like the beta, beta alpha of their new tooling set and it's much more like cursor or windsurf and it's rubbish.

It just falls over and dies and can't manage even the most simplest tasks and goes, hello, I'm overwriting these files. What those files? It's the flu in my working directory. Where have you gone?

[01:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's just temporarily got a headache. It's just had enough of it.

[01:30:40] Tim Nash: But at the same time, you can sort, every time you see this stuff, you can see the future and people who are learning now.

We'll be ahead of the game. And there is, you, we have reached the point where the genie has been un taken outta the bottle. you even have to learn that you really like genies or you need a new profession where you don't wear far, away from a genie. and I don't think we push it back in the bowl e as we certainly aren't gonna be able to do that by wishfully thinking that these things don't happen, or saying, I don't code with ai.

I was like, good for you. You also don't get jobs anymore.

[01:31:22] Corey Maass: It's I remember going to, I remember going to a coffee shop that didn't have wifi. Because they were like, we only want, pensioners who read books and have real conversations and we will not have people working. And I'm like, and you'll be outta business in a couple years.

[01:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:31:41] Michelle Frechette: and they're, a Starbucks now.

[01:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Taken over. Yeah, very quick. The, really SCO thing, I would like just point out that

[01:31:48] Corey Maass: on, the topic of ai, one, Michelle is speaking on a panel about this topic and two, subsequently hasn't said a word because she doesn't want to give away whatever it's, she's gonna, it's really

[01:32:00] Michelle Frechette: hard to get a word in Energizer, three of you.

But what I did wanna say about AI is, and the, US government, which is very specific obviously to Corey and myself, is that there's this huge lawsuit and this huge, like deadlines looming over us about TikTok because of its ties to China and feeding information into the algorithm. Nothing has been said about how much information we put out in all the other places, especially when we're feeding everything we think about into these AI and deep seek is definitely ties to China, which is very interesting to me that, there's. Focus on one particular platform when all these other platforms were just like, take my data. Please.

[01:32:43] Tim Nash: Yeah. I, find it amusing that by dance, the people behind TikTok also have an AI editor and it's Okay, but would you use it?

[01:32:55] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, I'm honestly now that I've heard, I'm morally compelled to go and try some more AI at the end of this episode.

I thought you were gonna

[01:33:02] Michelle Frechette: say that you're just gonna use paper and pencil from now on. Take photos of it done website. I'm gonna try, I'll give

[01:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: it, I'll give it eight to 10 minutes and see what, comes of it. And then I'm back to pen and paper. No, I do

[01:33:13] Michelle Frechette: my, blog post all just gonna be handwritten.

[01:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, it's suck

[01:33:16] Michelle Frechette: for SEL, but

[01:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: I'm getting more ludite as the days go on. there's a bit of me, which kind of, I, I'm like that guy that wants to play vinyl. I could have Spotify on my phone, but I want, the record player and all that. How is that your

[01:33:29] Tim Nash: Caterpillar

[01:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: phone doing?

oh, it's, do you know what? It's a battle.

[01:33:35] Corey Maass: All I'll say.

[01:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a flip phone and it, yeah, it's, sometimes it wins, sometimes I throw it. Luckily it's made by Caterpillar, so you can throw it against any wall and it comes off better. It survive gets, yeah, it's really hardcore. It's built for people to throw.

it's basically built for people on building sites and, so it lasts forever. But, yeah, it's a, it's an ongoing love-hate relationship at the moment. Loads of stuff about AI and the comments. I'm sorry, we've run out of time, so we won't be able to get to those, but hopefully you'd be able to see them between each other and, that's it, that's all we've got time for.

I think I'm gonna call this one getting the, the genie out of Corey's bottle. I think that's where we'll go with that. There it is. I think you saw it, here first or not as.

[01:34:20] Michelle Frechette: I like what James Loud just said though. He says the pen is mightier than ai.

[01:34:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the pen is mightier.

That's true. Can I

[01:34:27] Tim Nash: modify that to your brain is mightier than ai?

[01:34:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah.

[01:34:31] Tim Nash: Also true. Yeah.

[01:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You wait, and see. Tim, you'll be eating those words when the AI over Lords come to get you.

[01:34:38] Michelle Frechette: AI is hive mind. So I don't know. And

[01:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: on that bombshell, let's end it. thank you so much for chatting to us.

If you're in the comments today, I really appreciate it whether we got your comment on the screen or not. Thank you so much. It makes this show so much more interesting. I'd also obviously goes without saying, I'd like to thank our co-host who is Michelle Ette. She's over there and co me just there and Tim Nash, who's over there, really appreciate it.

We'll be back. Oh, no, we won't. I was gonna say we'll be back next week, but I'm g I've had an enforced hiatus of two weeks 'cause of, word Camp Asia. So we won't, unless somehow I managed to cobble. No, that won't work. so just decided, Don yourself, just now we'll have a couple of weeks off, so we'll be back in this date.

Plus 14. So it's the 10th today. Difficult math. 24th I'm guessing. Something like that. So we'll see you then. Thank you very much. Last thing before we go, let's do the, let's do the little hand thing. Oh, he's got the bottom.

[01:35:36] Tim Nash: Nathan, you're not coming back on the 24th.

[01:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: No. What? No, that would be two weeks.

You're right. It would be the, the one after that, the seven days after that. So however many days. Can I do that again? Sorry. 32nd. Second. Yeah. I have to do the hands again. That's great. Thank you very much. And we will see you whenever it is two weeks from now. Thank you. Take it easy. Three weeks, right?

March 3rd. Alright. Yeah. Oh, I can't add up

[01:35:58] Michelle Frechette: March 3rd. We'll see you March 3rd. Yeah. Thank you.