This Week in WordPress #349

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 349, entitled Unpleasant Clumping. It was recorded on Monday the 22nd of September, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three guests. I'm joined briefly by Dave Grey, but also I am joined for the entirety of the episode by Tammie Lister and by Tim Nash.

It is a WordPress podcast, and so guess what, we talk a lot about WordPress. But we talk about some other things as well.

So for example, we talk about, with Tammie, who is very much a part of it, the new Core Program Team. What does that do? What are the intentions of it and how will it work going forward?

We also spend quite a bit of time talking about Notebook LM. Tim brings this to the table and it's a fascinating chat about a product an LLM's UI. How does it work, and why was it designed in such a way?

We also talk about the new WordPress Hosting Team Annual Survey. It's been done in the past, but now it's being done again, and hopefully it will offer up some results which the entire community can use.

We also talk about WordCamp Canada and a new workshop day, which has been added in.

The Yoast Care Fund has been decided, and we talk about who is the recipient this time around.

Six websites a minute. That is something that used to impress Matt Mullenweg, but now wordpress.com is adding three websites every 10 seconds or thereabouts. We talk about the scale of the web and how wordpress.com is helping that, and also maybe, the role of spammers in setting up all those websites.

We also talk about GoDaddy's new AI Airo Builder.

And then the DebugHawk. It's a new plugin, a new SaaS in the WordPress space to help you optimize your website.

And then we get into a whole load of silliness, particularly the Ig Noble Prizes, and how you too ought to be painting your cows like a zebra.

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

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Hello there. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Depending on where you are in the world. It is the 349th episode of this week in WordPress, which means that I have listened to that song 349 times, and. Honestly enough, now it's two minutes of purgatory. I really do need to change that music.

Nevermind. you can see that I'm joined by a, lovely panel. Firstly, I would just like to, to say, she was gonna be joining us today and a few of the social posts that I put out there said that was gonna be the case, but, not feeling too great. So she's having a, she's having a week off. So as you'll find in a moment, we're being, we're being joined by Dave instead.

But I'm gonna go around the, the other panelists and then we'll come to Dave toward the end. So firstly, let's go to Tammy Lister. Hello, how are you, Tammy?

[00:04:24] Tammie Lister: I'm good, thank you. How are you?

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Tammy has written me something called a tanker.

[00:04:31] Tammie Lister: I

[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: don't know what a tanker is. Can you tell

[00:04:33] Tammie Lister: It's a different, paste version of, kind of poetry.

[00:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: Is it like a haiku? No, it's not like ku. We always say

[00:04:39] Tammie Lister: haiku. It's just a different version.

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I'll read, I'll, firstly, I'll read the short bio, which is only one line. So this is Tammy Lister's bio product engineer and tinkerer, drinks, tea pokes things, and is the co-founder of Gilden Berg.

And, the tanker, which was created by a AI goes like this, T fuel experiments designer mind explores code, open source pathways, binary short thoughts, take new shape, art and engineering merge. That's very profound. How lovely. Yeah, that's really nice. And AI did that for you?

[00:05:15] Tammie Lister: Yeah, I put in every, like all my sites.

And then, asked AI to do it in that format.

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Distilled all of that into just five li don't get me started on ai. Tammy, we're gonna talk a little bit about it later. Tammy is very ai as you may know. I'm somewhat skeptical. Yeah, this

[00:05:33] Tammie Lister: is, an ai.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: okay. thank you for calling us. I'm human. I really appreciate it. If indeed it is you, we'll find out. It's me. We'll see you all. Good. I'll, be seeing you in a couple of days, so I'll, I'll be able to decide if it's you or not poke

[00:05:48] Tammie Lister: me.

[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there is Tim nh. Hello, Tim.

Hello. I am definitely, yeah. Nice. Certainly real. it was weird. I dunno if you guys can see, but because I'm the sort of person running the show, I can see all of your images in the big screen, but I can also see a little version of them all underneath. And whilst the two minute music was running, Tim went and I dunno what he did.

He paced around his room a little bit. Tim, the weirdest thing happened. There was like an your legs went missing. I dunno, dunno what going on. I'm totally a

[00:06:23] Tim Nash: human being. I'm not an

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: ai. He is real. He put me, bless him. Tim wrote a little play. That we were gonna have to recite. Tim likes to give us fun, interesting bios, and he'd written a little play, but it involved Michelle and as Michelle's not here, that fun will have to wait for another time.

So Tim Nash's bio has been distilled into a more regular one and it goes like this. Tim Nash is a WordPress security consultant, a professional doom speaker, and you can find out more about [email protected]. He also teaches WordPress security at WP security oh one com. Just before I get to Dave. you're not very busy this week, are you, Tim?

There's not a lot going on.

[00:07:08] Tim Nash: No, I'm having a nice chill week, Yeah. Nothing, happen. As someone who is famous for basically never leaving his house, I, thought I'd just carry that tradition through on this week, and I'm totally not gonna be Yeah. On the, I'm already on the road. That's why my background has changed, so there's no, how are you

[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: out of the house, as it were?

Yeah, that's why the secret background had changed. Oh,

he, is it a secret government location that he's not allowed to disclose bunk?

[00:07:32] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:07:34] Tim Nash: it's literally a bunker. That's, why

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: a bunker.

[00:07:38] Tim Nash: They've gone and hidden me down here, extracting all the secrets. And then, they'll, they're gonna let me out though on Wednesday, 'cause they're gonna let me come down to, London to listen to

[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: Tammy.

So that's, that was the first thing I was gonna mention. luckily this is a really nice WordPress week if you live in the uk. especially if you live in the sort of southeast or can get to the Southeast, there's a lot going on. So if you are not in the uk, just skip forward a few seconds if you're listening to this as a podcast episode, because, might not matter to you, but there's a couple of things happening.

The first thing is that W-P-L-D-N, which is normally on a Thursday, it would have been tomorrow, sorry, on this Thursday, but we've scooted it forward one day so that it doesn't collide with loop comp. So you've got jam packed itinerary. If you wanna come and join us at W-P-L-D-N, it's happening on Wednesday.

If you wanna go to Loop Comp, my understanding is that there are still some tickets available and if you use the coupon code W-P-L-D-N, then I think that's 50% off. I'm, not sure, I don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's 50% off the original price, whether they're still available. I dunno. So you could really have a nice time.

Come and join us at W-P-L-D-N. Spend the next day Loop conf. And also, we're gonna be hanging out at the W-P-L-D-N venue from two o'clock on Wednesday. So if you're a bit of a loose end and your train gets in earlier and you wanna just hang out, come and join us there. And then we're all out on the Friday morning at, at the pub.

In breakfast and things

[00:09:03] Tim Nash: like that. So I won't be at the pub because by that point I'm on an airplane. Where are you going? So I'm going off to Poland,

[00:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: to the unpronounceable word camp that I can never say, what is it? Gya or something? Gya. Oh, I think outta the blue. I get it. And are you speaking?

[00:09:21] Tim Nash: I am, Reese win very kindly got his sister-in-law to send me a voice message with the pronunciation. Oh. And of course I've been trying to say it back to myself and then listen to, and they're like, I can't get the pronunciation. So it's, that wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it's that.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: But you, so you are Wednesday, W-P-L-D-N.

Thursday you are loop on Friday you're getting on a plane, and Saturday you're doing gya, and then you're gonna go back to your house and never emerge. Yeah. You're gonna hibernate hedgehog style.

[00:09:50] Tim Nash: Yeah. No, I'm so Fri Saturday I'm doing. I talk on a panel and then I'm literally the Saturday evening, get on a plane to come over.

It

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: keeps your busy this WordPress, doesn't it? So if you're in the, if you're in Europe, come and join us. Come on. Yeah, indeed. okay, I'll get to the comments in a moment, but I should say a great big thank you to Dave Gray, who's over there. I sent, I have a list of people who have offered to come on this show at very late notice.

And, I emailed that list, about an hour and a bit ago, and Dave was very kind to say that he could join us. He's got kid. Sort of collection from school duty. So at some point he's just gonna wave goodbye and disappear. But hopefully he'll be able to stay for a proportion show. But thank you. And with that, he's away.

Yeah, that would've been great. That comedy gold. That would've been so good if you had actually disappeared. Dave, you're gonna have to do your own bio 'cause we didn't get one written down. So just tell us a little bit about you. I, the episode messages in case someone else overwrote. Oh, thank you. Okay, so let me see if I can find it.

da. Episode messages. Here we go. here we go. Dave hasn't released any new plugins since his last appearance. This is not on Dave, what are you thinking? but as long, the new partner program for his administrator toolkit to help grow awareness of it and figure out how to market it. So you can find that.

What's the URL for the best place? administrator toolkit com. Administrator toolkit.com. No. Wp toolkit.com right? I if memory serves, I couldn't hear you first bit. Administrator toolkit.com. Administrator toolkit.com. Sorry, your audio. No WPS in that I'm being agnostic. No, wps administrator toolkit.com.

anyway, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. a few bits of housekeeping. I guess first of all, we should come to the bits and pieces that anybody's saying. Very nice to have you with us. the Guilty party Reese Wynn. There he is. he will be, he there. Says there.

Anyway, pink hand waving. Hello. Hello. Hello? Dave Dun is joining us. Afternoon everyone. Hopefully he'll be joining us as well in W-P-L-D-N. That would be nice. Gosh, it's, W-P-L-D-N all the way down. Courtney Robertson. She's normally in the us she is in the us I dunno, maybe she's on a plane now.

She's gonna be joining us at W-P-L-D-N as well. This is great. Patricia. Hello everyone. I hope you're all doing fine. Yes, we are. It'd be nice. It'd be nice if you came along as well. Lawrence, he's in Australia. It's somewhat doubtful if Lawrence is gonna make it. Tim's doing his best. Judith Charmer's impression.

I don't get that. What's, who was Judith? Oh, was that some sort of holiday show back in the day? Yes. Judith Ch Why did she have a green screen or something? Was she famously, I dunno. I don't get it. okay, let's move along. This week is our Glastonbury Fringe Festival and WrestleMania all wrapped into one for the WKW PFO WrestleMania.

Okay. and lastly from Reese. I'm having to buy a cocktail when I see my sister-in-law on Tuesday, Tim, to say thank you. Oh.

[00:12:50] Tim Nash: I hope it's a nice, a really fancy one. The, sparkly or even maybe a skull one with flames coming out of it. Yeah.

[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that sounds good to me. Okay. I'm gonna look at these captions so they don't do that silliness.

There we go. That's better. Fix that. can't wait to see you all there indeed. And Mark Wilkinson. Yeah, mark did reply to my email, but was unavailable 'cause of the school run, which he's got to go on shortly. Anyway, there's our panel. Thank you so much for joining us today. Keep the comments coming in.

If you do fancy getting somebody else to join in with us today, send them here, wp builds.com/live. And over there you've got YouTube comments. So you need to be logged into a Google account unless you don't like Google, in which case look, search inside the video player. At the top right there's a little black box, which says live chat.

And if you click on that, you don't need to be logged into anything, you just type your name in and we'll get your comments. And so with that. Let's get on with the show, shall we? Let me share my screen. This is us little bit of self-promotion, wp builds.com. If you want to keep in touch with what we do, just pop your email into that little box and we'll send you two emails a week one when we package this up.

So I'll send it out as a podcast episode tomorrow morning. And then we also do eighth. Thursday podcast episode, the archive section up here will get you both of those. as an example, this is the podcast archive. These go out on a Thursday most recent episode was with, it was all about shutter press.

So we've got a brand new plugin all about selling your photographs. So it's a bit like a kind of WooCommerce extension to sell your photographs. So that was interesting. But also, if you would like to come on this show, I have a URL for you. It is wp builds.com/and then the acronym for this show this week in WordPress.

So it's TWIW, fill that form out and, you never know. We might have you on the show at some point in the future. There we go. That's it. That's all I got, right? Tammy Lister. Proud moment, I think. This is, this is Mary Hobar who, Mary Hubbard, excuse me, who is the executive director of the Word Project.

And that title has changed. Did she di inherit it directly from, fra? I think she did. Anyway, moving on, this is announcing the core program team. This was just a few days ago, the 15th of September, and it says, and I'll quote this pro, this program model was first introduced with the core AI team.

Building on that experience. I'd like to expand it into an experiment with the launch of the core. Program team Tammy Lister, Woohoo, has agreed to help as the first team representative and I'll, read this, but then Tammy can explain more. The goal of the team is to strengthen coordination across core, improve efficiency, and make con contribution easier.

It will focus on documenting practices, surfacing roadmaps, supporting new teams with clear processes. The team will not set product direction. Each core team remains autonomous. The role is to listen. Connect and reduce friction so contributors can collaborate more smoothly. Tam, it's over to you, really.

obviously we know you are involved, but do you wanna just give us the skinny on what the thing is,

[00:16:09] Tammie Lister: so it's just getting started and I think that's the thing is, if you click through, core program team blog, there is, so we're trying something a little bit different. so there's a first post, which literally says.

Kind of an expanded version of this. so I won't go over that 'cause someone can, people can go there and read. It's the, there were two posts. Ooh. the first post is expanding a bit. And then the other one is just as there are conversations that happen. Really what I am trying to do is just surface those in a weekly, this post.

So we are trying for a little bit to not have, weekly meetings, which, is as a team kind of forms and works out what it's doing. But, any discussion that happens in Slack comes through. So that just deals with the kind of process and information, but that's it. Like our teams have.

so particularly in ai, we've been doing this, roadmaps. We've been doing surfacing communication that way, and also trying to really have this format of experimentation. So it's twofold. One, the fact that the AI team has had this experimentation. And the second, how can we increase this, Coordination within teams and how can we surface where there are ways to improve or where one team is doing something that another team could really benefit from, or a practice. And I've actually found this, so one of the kind of examples I found is when we were setting up the core AI team and some of the flows, I've looked at the performance team and I've looked at the core, core team itself, and I've been cherrypicking all these different processes and then.

Bringing them together and then doing my little spin on them on how that they would fit into the kind of core team. And that's great, but I'm doing it each time in my own little variation. And then being able to like document and share those. And also having a place where people can do this. So we have a place where developers can be, we have a place where designers can be, we have a place where you can go for translation, but where do the people who wanna do product, project management and program work?

At the moment, we don't necessarily recognize all that work. It's beautifully invisible. And they're running around connecting. They're running around sorting our project boards. They are doing it. and this is a way to do it even down to labeling. So in core ai, when we had the labels, I, we're setting up all the new repos.

And what I did, I went in and I looked at the core editor labels. That was a lot. Then I looked at the core performance ones. Not all of those we needed. So we, cherry put them over and there's like a command you can use from GitHub and like we put it in the handbook, but things like that, right? Like sharing that information and where, can that information be?

It's not always gonna be on a new teams, but your teams set up repos all the time. Teams, want to share information. Teams want to get contributors, maybe a team tries something new. I saw the other day the training team were doing this like, almost Sherlock Holmes investigation thing. It was cool to see they've got like this que, but I only discovered that by just looking in their slack to see.

So all these kind of cool stuff. just being able to share that this is going on and finding a way that, it might be able to be used in other teams. We don't know how this will get used yet, but when you are a contributor, being able to find this information as well is really, important. So that's part of this is where do you go to find all the roadmaps?

Where do you go to find what needs to have your contribution? If you have a particular skill, you can, all those kind of things. There's lots of questions about where, do we have goals and that's gonna be collectively decided. There's a stack thread. It's the price about how we do that.

but yeah, that's, we have not decided what we're gonna do yet. So people can come and join and have that discussion. It's all completely open and then we decide what we do.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: So very much bound to core. But it sounds like at the moment, the thing that you've committed to is this weekly post where you are gonna solve There's, yeah, there's two thing, there's

[00:20:22] Tammie Lister: a weekly post and then there's a in the Slack channel, where people can be like.

What am I doing and what are my blockers? and then we're going to have some discussions and work out what this team does collectively by the people that turn up. because that's what you do with a team, that it's really as simple as that in the way that we work, particularly on teams that aren't necessarily shipping a feature to start off with.

Yeah. what are we doing? What are the issues? So one of the things I'm doing at the moment is the handbook, and there were a number of paper cuts in our flows that weren't documented or weren't, I found out you, there was no documentation for the subscribe box on a new team. And like little pieces you find that you are only gonna find if you happen to do a new team under a new moon with your hand behind the back and all these kind of weird things that, that you only do, right?

but being able to document this stuff, we, don't necessarily always try our flows.

[00:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm just gonna reiterate what Mary said. Yeah. So the, goal is to strengthen coordination across core, improve efficiency, make contribution easier. And then the focuses will be documenting practices, which sounds a little bit like you've.

Kind of got into the practice of that a little bit. Surfacing roadmaps, supporting new teams with clear processes. But from what you've just said, nothing's set in stone just yet. No. The team exists and you are keen to see where this takes you. Yeah. And

[00:21:48] Tammie Lister: the point is the listen first. So if, a team's doing everything and it's going really well for.

Why should that change? Why should, other people should learn from that team and other people should discover why that is, why contribution's working so well on that team, and be able to listen. I'm a great believer when you walk into a space, listen first, if I walked in speaking and then just saying, you need to do something this way.

That wouldn't be, that, that's not project or program work. That is a completely different, aspect. So yeah, it's really about that. Most of the people who are gonna be on this are gonna also be embedded in a different team, doing very, hands-on kind of, train work and doing it.

there's a couple of us who are in core AI are definitely doing roadmap and project management and, product management. that's what we're doing. we're doing that in another team and then when we come into the program team, we're going to be bringing those practices and seeing how we can share that and come together.

[00:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: So also point out, 'cause I feel that people will be curious to know, what the autonomy is, but, the very last paragraph said, the core program team will not set product direction. So this is definitively not a, we've got a new governing body basically. No, it's not that. and I'll read on a little bit more.

each core team not yet remains.

[00:23:21] Tim Nash: No, we could, slowly but surely give Tammy most of it and then Yeah, all of us step away and Tammy could just be standing there. Go. What do you mean? No, that's right. Come on. What human, I'm gonna carry

[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: on reading. Each core team remains autonomous. The program's role is to listen, connect, and reduce friction so contributors can contribute more smoothly.

I would imagine unless that sentence had have been that paragraph had have been added, that would've been the assumption of many was that, okay, this is coming to, I don't know, add a layer of e efficiency on top of us or something like that. But now, we know that's not this. I think an experiment

[00:23:58] Tammie Lister: if this team doesn't add to, ease, contribution.

If it doesn't do that, the experiment's failed. that's, something I, wrote about in the first post. Like an experiments should be tested and measured. Yeah. And I really truly believe that, as much as we form teams, if this team doesn't work. Shouldn't be a rat. I will be truthful about that.

it's one of those things I think it will. otherwise I wouldn't be trying to be part of it, but. It's, it will serve its purpose. Yeah. However long that needs it. The point is that we need to give experiments measure, and we need to determine how that works.

[00:24:40] Nathan Wrigley: so I'll just highlight the pieces again.

So the first one that caused me to, get aware about this, Tammy, put in my path and it was this one, on make wordpress.org. It's called announcing the core team, sorry, the core program team. There's a variety of links to the Slack channel, and then a link at the bottom to the welcome post. And in the Tammy's piece, which was entitled this Week in Core program.

number one, which I presume will be followed by number two in a short, in short shrift. But, there we go. That's that piece. nomad Skateboarding joining us from, not sure where, but, hello. We tried a version of this in the training team last, year before last. Sorry, I'm just gonna make it so that Tammy's face is not disappeared.

We tried a version of this. in the training team year before last, I was gathering free feedback from all the other teams. it's truncated, but I'll read it. Anyway, we ended up turning it into the roadmaps that are now there. This is needed. So you have a, fan in Nomad skateboarding. That's nice.

And, apropos of nothing. Joining us is Vladimir from Helsinki, where it's Rainy. Sonny Rainy. Thank you for joining us, Adamir. Nice to have you. Anybody, Dave or Tim, anything you wanna contribute to that piece?

[00:25:52] Tim Nash: Systemizing is good.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yes.

[00:25:56] Tim Nash: Generally. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say out outside.

No. But, when, as a pro, this is a project that's like over 20 years and it's the teams, some of the teams have been around for a while. Some of the teams started off ad hoc. There is, we have a real problem and our problem is that we have an aging core team and an aging teams in general in WordPress and aging WordPress level.

As we lose people, as we inevitably will through just, people will be leaving if we don't have the systems in place, we have to resurface that knowledge. If we're resurfacing things constantly, we'll also change things ever so slightly and you end up with ch that sort of like Chinese whisper style scenario where that thing that somebody told somebody once upon a time has now been passed down 12 levels and now it is there and you end up with that with the scenario of there's a box in the corner with a button and we can't press it.

Why we don't know, but we can't press the button. WordPress core and make, and WordPress as a whole has lots of those sections where it's in code, whether that's in process, there are lots of it of we can't press that button. Why can't we press the button? I don't know. But I got told once upon a time not to press that button.

So that's

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: really an interesting take on it. Tim, I hadn't really given it any thought from that angle. the, there are many

[00:27:15] Tammie Lister: buttons. Yeah.

[00:27:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Lots of buttons. Okay. Yeah. having ever contributed in any way, shape or form to core, I dunno what the buttons are, but I imagine they're, the

[00:27:24] Tammie Lister: problem is I will generally press buttons.

I'm sorry. Okay.

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: No, the new role, your new role precludes you from pressing all above? no.

[00:27:33] Tammie Lister: In general, I'll just to find out and then document why you shouldn't press the button as to what

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: I do thing. the age of the WordPress contributor base is skewing I mean it, I feel it's not skewing older, it's just.

Is getting older as the calendar year moves on year by. It's just getting older and we haven't, don't seem to have that throughput. and so maybe this will make life a little bit easier, to that

[00:27:55] Tammie Lister: the newer contributors, and outside practices probably can teach us something like, as well as we've gotta listen within, we've gotta listen without as well.

and that's part of it, like maybe something we're doing, someone new is gonna turn up with their credits. we've got all these awesome people turning up and they might be like, have you thought of doing it this way? And then that could spread across all the contributive teams and be really awesome for all of us.

[00:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. let's hope that the, optimism that we have at the moment, it carries on. That's great. So there we go. That was the first piece. each of the guests is given the opportunity to bring some bits and pieces to the show, and we try, to do them at the beginning. Dave obviously didn't get that opportunity, so that'll be a pass for Dave, but Tim did, and so Tim has decided to share this one.

the URL for this is jason spielman.com and, and it's all about notebook. Lm, I'm so inexperienced with all of this, so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna give it to you, Tim, tell us why.

[00:28:56] Tim Nash: this came up on to my various feeds, earlier this week. And, I like notebook L Notebook, lm for anybody who hasn't come across it before, is a Google product.

It is designed for mainly more towards academic research and research in general. It was one of the first usable AI solutions that had an actual purpose. It wasn't just like a chat bot and then it would feed you back garbage. It, came up with things. Most people will have come across it 'cause of its like podcast feature where you can give it a bunch of sources and it will generate a, podcast with two, two people just chatting away.

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: It's evil, pure evil. But anyway, carry on.

[00:29:41] Tim Nash: however you feel about it. It's so good.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: It's Oh good.

[00:29:45] Tim Nash: But it, so that's what it's mainly known for, but it is a research tool. It allows you to do, a really good example is that when I had to teach, a bunch of classes about, latest legation and I actually needed the legislation so I could drop the PDFs into Notebook LM and get it to tell me the, what was exactly the bits of quoting the bits of law I actually wanted where I could cite it properly, but I could then say, and how does this interact with this set of things that I'm doing?

This article isn't about Notebook LM itself. This article is about the UI.

[00:30:22] Tammie Lister: Interesting. And the design

[00:30:23] Tim Nash: interface and how they came up with the branding and the design. Because one of the things that I find fascinating is that, all AI seems to be developed around the idea of a chat box.

[00:30:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really? And so,

[00:30:36] Tim Nash: much AI is a little rectangle and you, where you feed some input in, and that's, it.

You have no way around it. So notebook, lms. Differentiates itself because there's so much more to it. There's so much different ways to interact, and there is a little chat bot, but it's, tucked away. You almost don't need to use it because of the interface is there to give you those inputs.

And I found that fascinating and I, make use of notebook a lot, so it was a really interesting to see how they'd been, they'd wired it in such a way that actually for me, worked really well for my brain.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: It's curious that chatbots even became the thing. They, obviously chat, GPT came out whenever that was, seems like a dec decades ago, but it was really just a handful of years and now everybody's leaning into that.

I, as Tammy can attest, I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to ai. I don't really make much use of it. I don't have a great deal of need for it, which is probably the reason. But, I'm working on a plugin, I'm not doing any of the coding, Dan maybe is, but we're together, we're doing this podcast a plus plugin and Dan fed the documentation plus the website, plus I can't remember some other bits and pieces into Notebook, lm, and it's spat out a podcast and annoyingly.

It was extremely good. so whilst the podcast was, I don't know, the vernacular and things like that was a little bit weird. I listened to the whole 30 minute episode and it talked to me about a product which I've been intimately involved in, and it surfaced five or six, maybe 10 things, which I hadn't even thought of.

It came up with these interesting scenarios, and I just found that to be really profound, that given data, it could tease out. Things which it had not been told to tease out. it had just intuited those for, it for itself. But, anyway, so that's about Notebook lm, but thank you for bringing this.

I expect Tammy's got something to say about ui. She's pretty good with those. It turns out.

[00:32:38] Tammie Lister: no, this is interesting to me because I've just been writing my talk for, Wednesday, which is about the in AI interface. And my argument is that we should have less interface and actually this approach is, aligned with that because what it does is it puts AI very, much not at the forefront of the interface.

AI just happens to be there. AI is part of it. It's not like the feature, it just gets the job done. The reason I'm gonna put your point about you said, about, wondered why chat. We've been using chat for decades. Like the bots, like we've been typing into a bubble screen in text for a long time because to us it's a trusting interface to us.

It's the way we've got help on our websites, it's the way we've done customer service. so we've learned to trust it. And actually it's not necessarily a healthy pattern to use it for AI because it's a shortcut for us to trust. So there's a whole like. Way that AI is using some almost shortcuts to our brain from trusting to putting a smile on it, giving it a name, that there's some not great stuff if you dig into some of the AI patterns as well.

but the way forward, that kind of design is going with AI is this, and then where it's just about do you even need an interface? Can, is it actually doing the job? And then. AI just happens to be part of the tech stack, and that's really what matters. It's just, it gets the job done.

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting a whole article just about the UI of it, because

yeah, there's a lot of complexity going on.

it's incredibly complicated what it's doing and if they can distill that into, but it's just product flow.

[00:34:26] Tammie Lister: It just happens to be ai. So we are just like, oh, it's ai, but it's just a product flow.

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's what

[00:34:32] Tammie Lister: it is. Like it is just a really clever one.

[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: nomad Skateboarding's got a commentary on that and, I have not used Notebook LM on a mobile, but obviously he has, another positive for Notebook lm he says, is that it works fantastic for mobile users.

I'm guessing there's a Android and iOS app? No, it's,

[00:34:50] Tim Nash: the UI for the web interface really, because they don't, and that's in itself, when someone goes, oh, actually I might make the website. That be the important thing. It doesn't force you off to go and use app, which is really good. I have lots of, Experience just using it as a study guide. if you've ever done flashcards like with, and similar Yeah. Yeah. Tell it, make me flashcards and bring those up. so it's really useful. Stuff like that.

[00:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: do you entrust it implicitly now or do you do a fine double checking process?

[00:35:25] Tim Nash: No, obviously it's still going to regurgitate and it because you are giving it sources and it, you can skew it to primary sources, it helps, it reduces down.

There is still the time where if it's going outside of its primary sources, it, can still hallucinate. But generally when it's referencing and citing its own, the source that you've added, IE the things on the left hand side in that screenshot. Yeah. If, which is just a list of sources which you provide it, whether that's a, a URL or that's a PDF, whether that's a video, as from its own, from that source base, it tends to be quite good.

Like all, AI setups, if you let it go out full free with its, artificial imagination, it will just imagine stuff and it can hallucinate. If you set the parameters really tightly and what this does, which perhaps now you find with things like chat, GPT. Now if you say to something like, chat GPT, tell me about this, it will come back and it will normally cite you the source at the same time.

Okay. That's a relatively new thing. That was notebook's, lms, first thing, it would always tell you where I cited this source from and why. And you would let you click the link, go and check. Go to, yeah. Go and check it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a little bit more trust in it than I would some others.

Still because you can

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: follow up, right? Yeah, You can do the follow up, not just, assume it's telling you the truth. just a couple of things. Firstly, peach says Hello, Peach. Nice to have you with us. And Elliot down the road from me also says hello. That's nice. Thank you very much Dave.

Anything to add to the notebook? I, or shall we move on? Was gonna say a funny comment. Is AI in the room

[00:37:04] Dave Grey: with us now?

[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, probably somewhere it's listening. I, I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment. It's by a guy called, Val Noah Harra. It's called Nexus. And it's absolutely fascinating chart and it literally tries to chart the, rise of technology from the Stone Age right through to ai.

And it's a fascinating, there, there's a through line, which I hadn't really thought about and it's really interesting. It's definitely a recommendation. It's called Nexus by Val Noah Harra. It's really interesting if you wanna see that bigger historical picture. okay, let's move on. So there're the few bits from our, guests this week.

Let's do this one. Let's go to the repository. this week an article came out, the 11th of September, so it's a little bit old, but here we go. WordPress hosting team launches annual survey promises to publish results. My understanding is that there have been endeavors like this in the past, but then the, kind of the contents of the results never, saw the light of day.

So that's, I guess the difference here. But, I'll just read a little bit. The WordPress hosting team has launched the 2025 hosting survey. There's a link you can click to it and it looks like the. This so you can delve a little bit further if you are a hosting company, inviting providers. So hosting providers of all six shapes and sizes, who run, WordPress websites.

The results will be published in full and used to inform updates to the wordpress.org hosting page, A page every host wants to be on, but few who understand why you can get on there. Basically there's this sort of assumption that maybe, I don't know, there's a financial trade or something going on in the background there.

The survey was last run in 2023, but now apparently will be an annual, thing and the results will be published into the. I dunno where they'll be published, but hopefully they'll come light somewhere. It's a fairly in-depth survey. It's 54 questions. You can do it as a survey or fill out a spreadsheet and, not skimming the surface.

It asks basic questions like pricing, language, customer numbers, and moves onto more technical stuff like PHP, database versions, caching layers, GPL, compatibility, et cetera, et cetera. And, and a whole bunch of other things. And so if you are in any way, shape, or form involved in a hosting company, if all it's to do is to get it onto that hosting page, that seems like a curious, it.

it's not just used

[00:39:37] Tim Nash: for

[00:39:37] Nathan Wrigley: that. No. I feel

[00:39:39] Tim Nash: like this article may be not misleading, but, I think everybody. Yeah, I'm a, I can say this with relative impunity. Everybody knows that you, if you're gonna fill that survey in, you're not getting on the hosting page unless you, you are one of the hosts that's already on there.

And they, but the hosting team itself is made up of people, people from hosting companies from wider industry supporting the hosting companies. So the hosting team is a much bigger thing than that page. In fact, that page has nothing to do directly with the hosting team. that's ultimately a different team that has access to it.

And there have, in the past been lots of locks against. People editing that page regardless of what plans of input in place. But this survey does allow, by publishing it in full means that how you hosting companies themselves, but people who also, work with hosting companies can go through and see the various and compare what's going on in different places.

So you can, it gives you a big overview and it, what it can do is reach lots of companies. So if you take something like, oh, no, I forgot his surname. ke from reviews, the person who runs Review Signal, he does a hosting survey at, so at once, a year. Kevin? Kevin? Yes. Kevin,

[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: I've on the surname as well.

Yes. Anyway, we will try to correct that at some point in a minute. But he, he, his reviews are really super in depth, but they are a snapshot of a very small segment of the broad hosting and they're brilliant for what they do. Everybody wants to get on those reviews and you want, you wanna do well there because that is something you can really go as a hosting company, go and shout about and say, look at this.

[00:41:28] Tim Nash: We are in this list. Similarly, hosting companies will want to do this review, survey. 'cause they'll want to be part of that. But also it then can feed into things like, what should the priorities be for hosting companies?

Are

we, looking at PHP versions that are really low? Do the majority of these hosting companies have caching?

So that data that it's pulling out and u it is really useful 'cause it helps dictate. Other aspects from other teams coming in as well, potentially. So this is something that could be shared to other teams, but even within the hosting teams, it helps with the hosting documentation and, the best practices for the managed host side of things.

So I think you probably best limiting the expectation that the, hosting page is changing. And just take this as Hey, this will be really useful data. Let's go with that.

[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: Would this, so let's say for example, you're a hosting company and you get to that form, and I think it said that there were 50 something, 57 or 54, something like 54 questions, and you suddenly realize that you've, there's a little gap.

Let's say, I don't know, you can't answer three questions fully. Do you think it's more likely that at that point you are gonna back away? Because it's gonna look weird if you submit something and there's gaps? So what I'm saying is do people, do hosting Companies often get to this and they're not fully out because they can't provide everything.

In other words, do the questions limit the scope of who can participate? I'm not summing that up very well, but do you understand what, I haven't,

[00:42:59] Tim Nash: seen the 25 questions, but I have seen the 23 questions. Okay. There wasn't anything on there that was, should have stopped them from filling it in.

Now whether they would go, do we want to admit that we don't do this? Yeah,

[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: that's what I was trying to get to. That's the wording. Yeah.

[00:43:13] Tim Nash: None of it's particularly hard for you to disti to work out separately. And to be honest, most hosts will, say, yes, we have a SLA agreement that is 99.9 up time and you go 99.9.

Yeah. Yeah. So that you're down for three days a year. what, because that's how math works. So all of these sort of things, they, people, they'll, most of the people will fill this in truthfully because it will be what's re they're replicating what is on their website. now whether they'll then see the results and go, huh.

That's interesting. All of our other, all these other hosts say that they're up for 99.99% of the time. we should probably do that. That seems much more reasonable. and so it gives them an opportunity to compare the others and they can't, and it's possibly a, I don't imagine they wouldn't fill it in because they, there's no trade secrets amongst this.

that's good. Publicly available.

[00:44:11] Nathan Wrigley: And the, the chat has come to the rescue, Tim, Steve Burge coming in, saying, Kevin, I'm going to say Ohashi. I apologize. Did you say Hasi? Sorry, Kevin, if I, if I got your name right, wrong there. Thank you. An annual, I think it's annual. It feels like sometimes it comes around more than annual, or at least, no,

[00:44:31] Tim Nash: it's annual.

[00:44:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but it's a full, so if you google Kevin Ohashi, I can't remember the, I just tried to Google it. Review

[00:44:39] Tim Nash: signal. Review signal, I'm pretty sure.

[00:44:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:44:41] Tim Nash: Yeah. I think that it is worth saying that a review signal is a paid for. So the hosts have to pay to get the survey to get on that, but the, he's very open with how everything is managed and how everything is being reviewed.

And, it's as close as we have to, like a truly industry standard for Hey, these people have at least met some sort of, I've tested the same thing on every one of these sites. Yeah. you can argue about individual tests and bits, but it, that the whole gamut is there and, yeah, it's the closest thing we have to a decent sort of this is the benchmark.

For going and picking your host.

[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So go and check that out. but yeah, so there we go. We, now have this, hopefully if you are in any way connected, you can go and fill out that. It's been going for a couple of weeks now, I think. Something like that. So I don't know when it ends, but hopefully the results will be published at some point in a way that people like me can actually understand that.

I guess the, nightmare would be if it gets published on some kind of on un mention unmentioned place that you know, you've really gotta go and search for and it's in a way that you can't really understand. So let's hope. Let's hope it's available for all of us, right? Anybody else on that one?

Dave? Tammy, before we move on,

[00:45:54] Dave Grey: new host is happy to have

[00:45:55] Nathan Wrigley: won. The results are in already. Okay, there we go. right here we go. That was the survey. And then we will go here. So this is a bit of community news. I've gotta say, I, this time last year when Word Camp, so this is about Word Camp Canada. They, call it Word Camp A, eh Because apparently the Canadians are famous for ending sentences with that little word. I was slightly concerned that this event would never see the light of day again, because at the time, there was so much going on in the WordPress space and this event, I feel got a bit consumed by that tidal wave of stuff.

And it, it seemed like they had a real struggle getting, getting seat ticket sold and what have you. So it, but this year's event looks to be exactly the opposite. It looks like everything's going gangbusters. So this is Word Camp Canada 2025. It's happening really soon, I don't know, three and a half weeks, something like that.

October, or at least the date for this beers. And they've just announced, a whole day of workshops. It's a two track thing, so you can turn up and enjoy two different tracks. I think they start in the morning doing the same thing, and then they split off in the afternoon into a beginner track and a developer track.

And this, has just been added on as a complete extra, so you don't have to pay any extra if you've already got a ticket, it's just now a thing that you can attend. Beyond that, I don't really have much to say, but, I'm just pleased that what felt like it could be a real flagship event, it felt for a little while, like I said, that it was, not going in the right direction, but now it looks like, it's been really taken up by the Canadians, north Americans and elsewhere.

So yeah. Anybody got anything on that? I don't suppose there's a lot to say. No. Okay. Anyway, Bravo. all the organizers, go and check it out. You can find that at Canada. Dot wordcamp.org and as I say, it's the 15th, I'm not entirely sure. I think that's the first day now, as opposed to it being the last day.

So you're gonna turn up early for that one. So maybe there's some hotels that need to be rejigged and things like that. All right. Excuse me. more community news. This is a thing which comes about all the time, the Yoast Care Fund, which is a, like a, I dunno what the right word is. Bursary, let's go with that.

Which is announced. I think it's annual. again, it always seems to come around much more quickly than annual, but it probably is annual. It's

[00:48:37] Tammie Lister: not annual. Is it not

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: do you know?

[00:48:39] Tammie Lister: No, it's just nominated.

[00:48:41] Nathan Wrigley: Whenever it happens, I

[00:48:43] Tammie Lister: don't know what the cadence is. I do apologize for that, but.

Don't think it's annual.

[00:48:48] Nathan Wrigley: No. But, anyway, we, whenever it comes about, we like to just praise firstly Yost for offering op this kind of thing. And then just mention the person who, who got, and, apologies. Dan, Tabby Franca. I'm gonna say, I, hope that's right. has received the award.

The way it works is that it's a nomination and then recipient thing, so somebody has to do the nomination and then presumably behind closed doors, the nominations are filtered through and what have you and, decided upon. And, the nominator said the following things. Dan has been a fantastic at fantastic as an event organizer at Word Camp Asia in Manila, 2025.

Stellar organiz organizer locally in the Philippines, actively organizing and speaking at several meetups and workshops. And I often see events from the Philippines in my feed where Dan is involved. the recognition for that basically. this is for hard work, Don. So well done, Dan. Basically, I don't have anything else to add unless you two do three do, sorry.

Sounds all good. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing that companies like Yost actually, there's no need for them to do this. No. And it's also

[00:50:00] Tammie Lister: not tied to anything. It's not like you then have to go and do sponsorship or anything. It's more like you are doing, you doing what you are doing. We see what you are doing or someone sees what you're doing and here's something for doing that,

[00:50:14] Nathan Wrigley: an interesting framing of it, and that, that's in the back of my head, but never comes out in that way.

So this is, a, reward for work already, Dawn. It's not okay, you've been quite good now carry on being good and do the following things and here's some money to do them. This is just a,

[00:50:31] Tammie Lister: this, person's probably gonna continue doing this even if they work they recognized, which is also because they're just so awesome.

And that's the thing, like these people, they've been recognized. It's just we see you. Yeah. Isn't that good?

[00:50:43] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that amazing that we have companies in the WordPress space that have, and it matters.

[00:50:48] Tammie Lister: It'll matter to that person

[00:50:50] Nathan Wrigley: doing the work. Yeah, that's right. Yep. Anyway, welcome Dan. Sorry. Not welcome.

Well done Dan. brilliant. So there you go.

[00:50:57] Tim Nash: also welcome 'cause they might come on the show.

[00:50:59] Tammie Lister: Yeah, you welcome lot Dan.

[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: Come on Dan. Welcome. Congrats. Although it's, if it's Manila, it's probably I don't know, like midnight or something like that already. We occasion. Oh. So we had Lauren led, he's the, usually the, Tim and Cameron usually the only people from that part of the world who come in and say hi.

So it's late. But, Dan, if you're fancy comment on, we would love to have you. That would be really nice. WP builds.com/twi if you wanna be involved. Okay.

[00:51:29] Tim Nash: Sound like a YouTuber, isn't he? He's getting his plug and everything, like subscribe,

[00:51:33] Tammie Lister: I reckon. He's got his AI robot installed and he's smashed that.

It's his pot installed and it's not actually Nathan speaking. It's Nathan Bot.

[00:51:43] Nathan Wrigley: I honestly, I'm somewhere else having a nice cup of coffee, knees having a great time. the, whole like and subscribe thing, I never subscribe to anything. I'm such a curmudgeon. I always think I'll go back to the things that I want to go to or, I'll follow the algorithm anyway.

I tried to subscribe to something the other day and I tried to. Smash that bell or whatever it is they say it doesn't work that way anymore. Now you, did they really say

[00:52:08] Tammie Lister: smash that bell?

[00:52:09] Nathan Wrigley: No. If you, people always used to say that, didn't they back in the day Me out here, the day when I was a, when I was a child smash that bell.

Did they really? But they, now you've got this choice. It comes, it's this dropdown. You don't just hit this icon and then you are subscribed. There's like this, there's four, I think four choices beneath it where you can indicate the kind of the regularity of it. So anyway, if you want to keep in touch with what we do, pick the most frequent one and hit the bell and then smash that bell and smash frequently.

[00:52:41] Tim Nash: Smash

[00:52:41] Nathan Wrigley: that bell.

[00:52:42] Tim Nash: Smash

[00:52:43] Tammie Lister: the bell and then click the drop down

[00:52:46] Tim Nash: and then select the most frequent. Please. Select.

[00:52:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. It's very polite. Thank you. Yeah, please. Thank you very much. pinky. Pinky. okay. So anyway, if you fancy doing that'd be nice. Okay. Back to, back to this stuff. So this is, this is apro of nothing.

This, website could have really come from anywhere, but I just found this statistic curious. So this is on Matt Mullenweg's blog. I dunno if you've noticed, is it just me or has Matt returned to Blogging. I dunno if that's,

[00:53:14] Tammie Lister: yeah, I love it. I think more, it's

[00:53:16] Nathan Wrigley: every Tim's decided to clear off at this point.

Yeah,

[00:53:18] Tammie Lister: Tim's done. Yeah, Tim's had it's, it used to

[00:53:21] Nathan Wrigley: be that Matt used to blog like once in a blue moon and you'd see something come, but now it's like almost every day probably

[00:53:28] Tammie Lister: should be motivation for all of us. I'm feeling it as well, but like in a good way. I think it's a good thing we all should be blogging more.

[00:53:35] Nathan Wrigley: And it's not very much, not always connected with WordPress. This one is 'cause of the nature of the show. That's what I'm highlighting. Yeah. But often it's of, just some other random stuff. And it is tangential, but it, leads me to an interesting statistic. So Matt has published this article called Every six Minutes in which he says, I can't remember, he went to the dentist or something like that.

Dinner tonight, he said, and there were a bunch of old magazines sitting on the table. So by old magazines, he's talking about when he was a kid and, and tech magazines. And you, if you are looking at it, you can see that there was an advert on the screen for a company called Highway Tech Technologies.

And he was saying that, so this is an, issue of Wired. And back in the day, this company, highway Technologies was making the, probably. Rightfully boastful claim that they were setting up, a website every six minutes. So once every six minutes. So 10 times an hour, they would, onboard somebody as a, client.

and Matt then goes on to say this, and I just found this statistic to be utterly fascinating. Haven't done the maths. Actually, I should probably do that whilst you guys are talking. and he's saying that every six minutes means 240 a day, which is, I guess he's extrapolated to a year at a hundred thousand websites over the course of however many years.

And then he said last month, wordpress.com, so.com, was creating a website every three seconds. And that just made me, I honestly, I couldn't take that in every three seconds to me seems Like kind of Google sta statistics, if o obviously I know Google probably carries out a hundred million, SERPs results every like few minutes or something like that.

But a new website every three seconds. So every 10 seconds that passes, you've got three every minute you've got what, like

[00:55:31] Tim Nash: 28,800 seconds? 28,800 sites a day. How, what I mean. Okay. Keep in mind wordpress.com free hosting spams exist.

[00:55:45] Nathan Wrigley: So do you think, so? Okay. Do, would you imagine the majority of it would represent just spam them, just some spinning up a nonsense site or what have you?

And to be honest, to be fair to Matt in this, Matt is not making a claim about, he then doesn't go on to say logistic websites or anything like that, or look how brilliant our platform is. He's literally making a connection with. old magazine, what we now do, but still, the breadth of that is amazing.

28,000 sites a day. Whether or not they stick around, I presume quite a lot of them do. Anyway, sorry, Tim, I interrupted what you doing? no,

[00:56:19] Tim Nash: I interrupted you. But yeah, it's, an amazing statistic. and the scary thing is, I think there, there are that while, wordpress.com is a massive host, they're still a, they're not the biggest by any stretch.

And other hosts have similar statistics. The, but the big thing is for wordpress.com that is gonna be almost certainly include their free signups, which unfortunately will meet, even if the majority of those don't actually even become active. They, will, because there is a lot of anti-spam that goes into trying to keep people outta those three sites to use them for spam, but.

Whenever you get to that sort of scale, the vast majority of your signups are spam. It's just the nature of how it's sadly, but

[00:57:04] Nathan Wrigley: regardless of that, it's still quite a platform, isn't it? wordpress.com, just, think the previous one where they were saying that Six minutes. Yeah. One every six.

[00:57:13] Tim Nash: They were probably all spam too, just to be clear. Yeah. There's no differe.

[00:57:16] Tammie Lister: I also, from a process perspective, think about how much of that was a manual. Yeah. And how much of that wasn't automated. Yeah. I was like Marge and Bob in the back room handing they, they'd print out a form from the printer and then they'd have to go up some stairs, and then they'd have to put it on someone's tray, and then they'd have to pick it up, and then they'd have to stamp it, and then they'd have to process it.

[00:57:39] Nathan Wrigley: Now margin, not just employ data center to do now margin bought the

[00:57:43] Tammie Lister: robots.

[00:57:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Sorry Dave. Sorry Dave.

[00:57:46] Dave Grey: No, that's one minute worth. The other five minutes is the old five minute installer.

[00:57:50] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[00:57:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:57:51] Tim Nash: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:57:52] Nathan Wrigley: They weren't installing Drupal at the time,

[00:57:54] Tim Nash: so

[00:57:54] Nathan Wrigley: it was just, but amazing. Just literally amazing.

The scale of it all, every three seconds. just the wordpress.com website, scale that across Wix, Squarespace, Drupal, all of these other platforms. there's loads of them. It is pretty remarkable. And the, my, I had that same intuition, probably most of it's junk.

wordpress.com still have to deal with that junk. they have to process that stuff, figure out whether it's spam or not. And presumably if it passes all the gatekeeping, then put it online and keep it online.

[00:58:23] Tim Nash: I had a very fascinating conversation with a person who does spam for living. They built, they build, SEO spam sites for a listings sync living.

What

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: they, that's, they're not trying to prevent it. They are. no. That's what they do. They, that's what they do. and they produce between 1000 and 2000 sites a day. So that's one, person doing that as a freelancer. 'cause it's a freelancer sort of job. so you can work you, when you start scaling it out like that, you start to realize the scale of these things.

[00:58:57] Tim Nash: chatting to him was fascinating because it was just like, oh, I knew.

[00:59:03] Tammie Lister: I would love to know what goes on about scale in the mind of someone that does that as well. Like what their kind of story is.

[00:59:11] Nathan Wrigley: They have a very different set of incentives than I do, put it that way. just it is just built on a different model than me.

That's just, yeah, it's totally

[00:59:19] Tim Nash: financial, but also challenge, because for all of the, whatever you think oh God, sleazy, horrible, all the negativity at the same time. He's, he was absolute joy to chat to. He was really, yeah. So they just focusing on

[00:59:37] Tammie Lister: like the problem and the challenge of it, rather than anything.

Yeah.

[00:59:41] Tim Nash: And getting a large paycheck out the end of it. Yeah. So from their perspective, it's the best thing ever.

[00:59:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you think about it, if you go to your local printers and you see their print Ron and they're producing like 58,000 pizza menus or something, you don't view that in the same way, even though that is basically spamming your actual letterbox.

[00:59:59] Tammie Lister: It depends on your perspective. 'cause I do view that in the same way.

[01:00:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Fair enough. But I wouldn't see that in the same light. I'd be seeing that as say, yeah, that's what you do, that's your business, if you like. Whereas the spammer, the, website spammer, I see that business as a sort of shady thing.

But from what Tim said, that's just what they do for a living. It's interesting. They're not, doing anything. I'm going to make the assumption that they're not doing anything nefarious. They're just knocking up a bunch of SEO sites so that they can capture.

Legitimate traffic. Nothing that they're doing is illegal. it, reeks to my sensibilities. it's not where I would wish the world to be going, but, I guess that's what they do and probably get paid really handsomely for it as well. A yay. Yay. Anyway, him and his 28 mates are, are knocking up all of these websites, but that's what I was trying to

[01:00:51] Tim Nash: get at.

28 mates. Yeah. That's all it is, 28 people can't produce that much. Any site spinning up. It's, that's, that is quite a terrifying call. It's

[01:01:03] Nathan Wrigley: darn it doesn't seem all that impressive anymore. 28, 8

[01:01:06] Tim Nash: people.

[01:01:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, it's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. so James is joining us. Hello James. Nice to have you with us.

He says hello and good morning. What celebrity or gator are we discussing today? We got into a conversation the other day about alligators. And and it was wild and what eating them and all sorts. no, we're not doing any celebrities or gators today, James. We are in fact just talking about spamming and how lucrative it can

[01:01:30] Tammie Lister: be.

Why were you eating Gators? I

[01:01:31] Nathan Wrigley: wasn't just Frick and Marcus Burnett both live in Florida where it's like on the menu. 'cause they're everywhere, That was a thing we got chatting about. moving on quickly, Reese says, I'm wondering if me and Tim know the same spammer, known if you, in my, you two can talk at, we almost certainly do know

the same spammer.

Okay. Maybe you do. okay, there we go. Anyway, I come to England

[01:01:57] Tammie Lister: where our island is small, technically is smaller.

[01:02:02] Nathan Wrigley: just, I'm conscious of the time, so if you need to drop out I know you need No, I'm tipping on. I've about two more minutes. Fly. If you just wanna give us a wave when you are ready to go.

I appreciate you being here. I know we won't be able to say goodbye to dramatic effect.

[01:02:14] Tammie Lister: Just make Oh, Dave, this is weird. Can we do our little wave in the middle Yeah. Of the show, just so that everybody, so that look how forward thinking I am. Tim and Tammy, can you just give us a little wave so that I can use that as the look at Tommy's face?

[01:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go with that. That's perfect. No, I can go. Tim's Tim's off. He's away. Yeah. And that's the end of the show. No, We'll, we'll. keep going. Moving on. let's go here. That broke

[01:02:42] Tammie Lister: me. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:02:43] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. It broke me, but I was just thinking, I, whenever a guest leaves early, there's always like a big hole in the

[01:02:49] Tammie Lister: two process driven people.

Me and Tim is broken now.

[01:02:53] Dave Grey: I'll leave now. Don't confuse you. Yeah. Time. See

[01:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: you later. Thanks, mate. Nice to, nice to have you with us. Cheers, right? In which case we will move on. Let me just see if I can get to, I

[01:03:03] Tammie Lister: wanna know what happens to the interface when you've got three people. Oh, ah, you get a row all

[01:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: by yourself A lot.

That's weird. That's very nice. Yeah. Yeah. you are capacious. Look, Tim, tell me you can really stretch out, not, not hurt anybody. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, cavi mTOR, the next one, you may have noticed if you go to our website, we are, the WP Builders is sponsored by three companies.

One of them is GoDaddy. So I, always think if I'm talking about GoDaddy or anything like this, probably a good idea for me to preempt it. But they had a, big news announcement this week, all around the AI space. And they've got a product. They've got a product, which they've been touting for a little while now.

But finally. They've brought it to fruition. It's called Aero, A IRO, and it is their, it's their launch into the AI site builder space. I was very lucky actually in, who is very senior in the GoDaddy space. He joined me on a, On a call. We didn't record it or anything like that, but he just gave me a kind of run through of how it works.

And Tim, it leans into, oh, was it Tommy? I can't remember. No, it was Tim. It leans into this, it's got a chat box, basically you, launch the platform and and you go through and you can see it actually on the screen there, we go. You basically asked a bunch of questions with a chat bot, and then it launches your website.

The whole process is over in about, I don't know, three minutes or something like that. I have nothing more to add than that. I had a go. It worked. It was totally credible. And if you are in the space where you need to turn around websites really quickly, and it struck me as a curious option.

If you are trying to show clients a whole bunch of different possibilities for the exact same website, something like this might be really useful for that because within three minutes you can have a working version, then you can spin up another one, and what have you. So anyway, it is called Arrow. by GoDaddy and you can go and check it out.

I will put the link in the show notes. and if you

[01:05:10] Tim Nash: were even slightly worried, it is a registered trademark, the, size of our registered trademark. yeah, Why do pe What, Can you tell me what, why do people do that? Because it, 'cause it is, it's all over the place, isn't it? If you see the word arrow here as an example, it's got, sorry.

[01:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: For those of you that are listening, I'm highlighting on the screen the use of the word arrow in the normal text and it's got the rec, whatever that is the R thing, is it registered? Is that what it stands for? Yeah. I'm always curious as to why you would use it in every example of it, as opposed to, you can see it in the header here and in to my sensibilities.

I think maybe that would be where you'd stop doing that. It's not just GoDaddy, it's all these big companies, isn't it that do that? I

[01:05:54] Tim Nash: think it's to do with litigious lawyers, isn't it?

[01:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Litigious lawyers. I like it. let's hope lawyers are litigious. but anyway, there you go. arrow is the new product.

No doubt. At some point in the future I'll be doing a podcast episode about it, but you can go from, you can go from nothing and a few words later. You've got yourself a website. anything Tim, Tammy, before we move on. Okie doke. What have we got next? We're gonna miss that one out 'cause we did it last week.

I'm relying on Tim here. Tim. Tim is our best friend here. I'm watching

[01:06:29] Tammie Lister: Tim's face.

[01:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm okay. Okay. No, Tim looks very happy. Let's see how it progresses. I have no conception as to the capability of this. I purely saw a link a few days ago and noticed that it was a new tool in the WordPress space.

It is called Debug Hawk, and you're gonna find [email protected] that the strap line goes, diagnose WordPress performance issues in seconds, not hours. And then, you've got the usual stuff, it goes down and breaks down all of the different bits and pieces that it can do. And I don't know what its capabilities are, but I'm gonna hope that Tim knows a little bit more.

Is this a, recommendation, Tim, or is this something you would steer clear of, or You don't have to be familiar. I'm not gonna say whether you should use something or not use something that's, don't want that coming round back to me. no actually, who has worked on projects like, spin Up WP in the past and similar, so if you've come across that this is his own project, I think it might be partnered with somebody.

[01:07:34] Tim Nash: I, dunno. But, it is a, I believe a SaaS application, where you basically install like an agent onto a site and then it will provide and surface a bunch of insights for you if you've come across something like, new Relic or, think of it sort a little bit of a combination of New Relic, query, monitor by oh wow.

Platform,

It looks very pretty. The graphs look very pretty and that's where mine, I haven't used it. I have seen it. I have followed some of the development of it. I, as I say, if when you go down to that pretty dashboard, it looks pretty, dashboard it's in, it's got a nice dark mode. It looks pretty, there's green things and stuff.

how useful that it will be for you? Very much depends on your use case. For, I've not seen anything about its alerting capabilities. I've not seen anything about how it does the integration. so at the moment it's one to keep my eye on when I get to play with it. I might be able to come back in with a two thumb up recommendation or not.

But, at the moment it, it certainly looks nice. the price might put off quite a few people, I'll be honest. So I'm,

[01:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm showing the pricing here. I'll read it into the record in case you're just listening to it. I'm guessing it is a SaaS app because we don't normally have WordPress plugins charging it.

It is a SaaS app, I'm sure. Yeah. Thank you. So it starts at 12, goes up like basically $300. And what you get is the, number of events, seems like the thing, that, if you do up to a hundred thousand things or events as they call them, you can go in at the, low tier. But if you've got a giant.

So to be clear,

[01:09:16] Tim Nash: if you are gonna push, if you are pushing data, it's not you doing things, it's data being pushed in it's number of events that are being collected now, my understanding is you have no control over how many events are being collected. interesting. Obviously there will be a, obviously there'll be collecting a certain number of things, but you can't like, reduce down the, how often it gets collected.

So it, this might mean that you have little control over the actual, pricing and you can, you may find yourself being over on for all I know. And to, to be clear, I, have nothing to go on other than the fact that Ashley's a lovely person. It's probably really generous tier limits. But that pay to play style scenario could put a person who's maybe on a, I'm thinking more those sort of smaller agencies that tend to actually have lots of clients.

Yeah. So if you are a small agency with 50 to a hundred clients, you might look at this and go, we cannot afford this. This is way outta Ali. Whereas if you are a single site. Maybe you're a lar, a large site, maybe a large e-commerce site where you might, this might be the perfect tool for you. You might be getting that diagnostic information you want out of it and you're getting through.

The other couple of things is obviously, due diligence as to where the data is being kept because there's various laws and legislation on that data you have, because it's surfacing data that's from places like the database and query what queries are being stored, and there's getting data from logs.

All of that is probably privileged information that you do not want to necessarily be passing to the wrong data center for your country.

[01:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: There is a, there is a config, or rather there's a doc section. at the top it will explain that there appears to be some kind of aspect of it, which is a WordPress plugin.

That's no surprise. Yeah. and then information about how it all works and what have you. So yeah, go and. Go and check it out. But it's, I, guess the interesting bit here is it, is from somebody, at least in your experience, Ashley, I don't know Ashley. but they have heritage in the WordPress space, so it's definitely worth maybe checking out.

Yeah. Yep. Okie doke. Thank you. Tell me anything on that or shall we move? Okay. so this is really a big change. The, we're going to a. Definitive WordPress plugin, Corey Mass, who is behind gel form. He's often on the show. And and I think it's quite nice when people have been on the show many times to surface the bits and pieces that they've done.

But also, coincidentally, this is right up my street, I could really make use of this. So he's come up with a plugin called Post Calendar and it's, it looks like it does one thing, and it just leans into this one fairly straightforward thing. If, like me, you are constantly putting content out.

So I put at least two, maybe four bits of content out each week and it's a constant battle for me to know when to schedule things. 'cause I basically wanna be able to finish it. Tie it off, schedule it, and then move on. But because I've got this cadence where it comes out every Tuesday, every Thursday, and then various different bits and pieces in between, I'm constantly trying to juggle when to do things, and a calendar interface for WordPress posts and when they're going to go out would be really great.

And that's what he's built. It's called post calendar by Gel Form. And it's exactly what you'd imagine. You, you create a post, you schedule it at some point in the future, and then it appears in the calendar. But the, bit which is really nice is, for me, you could reschedule it by just dragging it all.

Add Google Calendar or something like that into a different date, or at least that's my understanding from what I read. That would be perfect for me because in me, I just wanna see a line of things every Thursday. One thing on a Thursday and another Thursday, I just wanna see that everyone is full.

That's kind of it, and this would satisfy that perfectly. thank you for building that. Corey, I'm definitely gonna check that one out. It, it's probably not for everybody, but, there you go. Anything on that? Probably not. Okay. yeah. it's on wordpress.org. Yes. My

[01:13:29] Tammie Lister: only comment is it goes to show that there is always space for an idea in Yeah.

WordPress. And we often are like, ah, I wonder what, oh, okay then this, you find this something that doesn't exist.

[01:13:40] Nathan Wrigley: the list view is really not ideal at all because it's all in this text format. Which is fine, and you can see the schedule date, but when everything gets jumbled up and the dates don't follow down perfectly, I know that you could maybe filter by that thing and do them in reverse order and what have you.

It's still not ideal. It will, it's ridiculous, isn't it? It'll save me whole minutes a week, but it's just. That nice little helpful thing. It's on wordpress.org. I love his version numbers by the way. I dunno what's going on there. His version number is, so like 175 million or something. I dunno.

[01:14:18] Tim Nash: It's hard doing WordPress stuff,

[01:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It'll

[01:14:21] Tim Nash: change here. A little change

[01:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: there. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, it's, he's got fewer than 10 people using it at the moment, but he's gone a I

[01:14:30] Tim Nash: what,

[01:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: 1 billion? 1 billion around in my

[01:14:33] Tim Nash: brain. Just broke reading that. Yeah. So he's been committing per character then. Yeah, that's

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. I imagine he's gone to the keyboard and just gone, ah, that's, I dunno how that works.

has

[01:14:44] Tammie Lister: he got a change log that we could have a quick look at? I do. No, I feel like I need to

[01:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: look his change log. Here we go. The translators that browse the code. SVN Development log. Development

[01:14:55] Tim Nash: log. It's, it's a timestamp. Maybe use it. Okay.

[01:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe there it is. It's a time set, but normally you say a version number, don't you?

That's interesting. Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point wasn't to discuss a great lengthy version number. The point was to mention the utility of it and how it could be useful, especially if you've got an editorial team and then, you try not to make things collide. That would be really useful.

Okay, so we're gonna move away from WordPress for a little bit. We've got about, I don't know, 15 minutes or something. if you are like me and you decided a long time ago that you really didn't want your private conversations to be in the hands encrypted or otherwise of some of the large companies, I'm talking about you Facebook with things like WhatsApp and things like that.

Quite a while ago, this product came onto my calendar. It was called, calendar, came under my radar. It was called Signal, and I just got all the right signals, about it. I genuinely, I got really into the weeds about how it all works and the founder was a guy called Moxie Marlin. And, my understanding, having read a bit about it from people who know what they're on about, is that he's over-engineered it and future-proofed it.

In other words, it appears to represent some kind of gold standard of, encryption and instant messing. I don't know if that's true, but at the time, again, yeah, it was Lord. Yeah, let Tim have his words in. But it certainly represented a different shift, a different pivot. It was free, it was end-to-end encrypted and I'm not sure that a lot at the time it came out was offering that promise.

the product has, matured, Moxie's moved away. It's available, I think a certain proportion of people have leaned into it. It's not got any of the traction that things like WhatsApp have for, obvious reasons. 'cause it's a standalone app. But one of the big problems of it was taking it from one device to another because there was really no mechanism to do that.

Seamlessly. if you, knew what you were doing and you read the documentation, there were ways to make it so that your new phone would ingest stuff from the old phone. But it always required you to have the phones both available and switched on and to follow the steps and what have you. and in quite a few cases, I imagine people will not follow those steps and then realize that their entire history of stuff has gone away.

So they've introduced the first paid thing, inside their ecosystem, and it's called backups, secure backups. and I'm just letting you know that it's a thing. It's like me, you lean into signal, you can now pay to have a, repository of data. I'm not sure where it's stored or how it's stored or what have you.

But anyway, right over to you, Tim. Debunk it. Tell me I'm wrong.

[01:17:41] Tim Nash: let's just go back to the first bit when you started with, I really Signal because it was a secure, and I, it was keeping my chats private and I, it was all nicely decentralized. I really, I you really read into everything to learn all about it.

And, then you finish that line with, I dunno where any of this is stored. I dunno how this works. No, that's right.

[01:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's true.

[01:18:10] Tim Nash: That is the difference between Signal then and Signal now. Oh. Go on. just that Signal is a company Now Signal is a, it, the Signal I think originally started off as a nonprofit organization.

[01:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It definitely was. Yeah, it was. But it Signal is a company now,

[01:18:27] Tim Nash: and it needs to make money. And, so why it's, the way it's making money is by, taking the way, the reason you couldn't have signal backups previously is that the key was hardcoded as part of your hardware, to the device. So it was associated with the device.

So when you backed up and tried to use it on different device, the encryption key used components of the, device itself as part, the decrypting process.

[01:18:50] Dave Grey: Got it.

[01:18:51] Tim Nash: So the two, you couldn't have two phones. you could move your key from one phone to the other phone, but it wouldn't work 'cause the phone didn't match.

If that makes sense.

[01:18:59] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[01:19:01] Tim Nash: So to get a backup system working. At some point we have to break that.

[01:19:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'm not gonna use Signal anymore. Now. That's it. It's over that relationship is gone.

[01:19:13] Tim Nash: I'm not suggesting don't use Signal. But, there, and the article does half explain how they're getting around this.

it has all the right privacy sounding words, but when you start thinking about it, you're like, but fundamentally, this, these chats used to work in a very specific way. They used a very specific set of ways that was well documented and open, and you could see and read and understand, and this is an opaque black box that they wish to charge you for.

[01:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:19:46] Tim Nash: Dammit. Okay. There's nothing wrong with signal itself, and I use Signal all the time. In fact, you and me Cat

[01:19:51] Nathan Wrigley: Fire

[01:19:51] Tim Nash: signals. So yeah, we do.

[01:19:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm a big, I'm a big fan. I just, I hadn't made the connection. They're not going to, they're not gonna go out blowing the trumpets about their sort of company status and things like that, are they anymore?

It does

[01:20:02] Tim Nash: say as a nonprofit, they that refuse to collect or sell your data, but I'm fairly confident that Signal has become, has a company behind it these days. I think you're

[01:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: right. I think that's true.

[01:20:11] Tim Nash: I think I've read that somewhere. I'm sure I've seen it somewhere. I may, if I'm wrong, then I, then I, apologize at the, but it still doesn't solve the initial thing, which is fundamentally the way to get the backups to work.

You have to break stuff. At which point,

[01:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, the, okay, so here's the, key. Never throw your phone away. Keep it going for the next 40 years of your life. Just keep that phone going.

[01:20:35] Tammie Lister: Isn't that security risk?

[01:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, probably. Yeah. No, there's, this stuff's hard though, isn't it? This stuff is really hard because they're in.

They're, in a marketplace where they're, playing against, they're trying to get traction against companies like WhatsApp and things like that, who, they're just ubiquitous in everywhere, aren't they? I think the promise is really hard to, probably hard to deliver. The only

[01:20:57] Tammie Lister: secure thing is that tin can with a bit of string on it that you might want to, no.

'cause

[01:21:02] Tim Nash: even that, you could actually,

[01:21:03] Tammie Lister: if you,

[01:21:04] Tim Nash: I dunno if you'd ever did this as a kid, but you can intercept the messages on a tin can string, because you could put a c clamp on the, string midway through, and then you have a second string and you No.

[01:21:15] Tammie Lister: Move the childhood. No.

[01:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Let's just keep Tim, let's just be clear.

You are the only child that did that. You're the only child that did that. Nobody else did that. Everybody just marvel that it worked. Your childhood, you were there with a clamp in the middle.

[01:21:29] Tammie Lister: Yeah, the children were wandering around the clamps, putting them on children, listening on. I think that's brilliant

[01:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: though.

Fair

[01:21:36] Tammie Lister: enough. That's great. have you thought about how incur it is a little Tim in the playground That speaks to your

[01:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: credentials though, Tim. I think next time you poss you you talk about yourself in any sort of online security setup, you need to mention that Tim n was the clamp in the playground.

we did that in my fly, man. Aw. anyway, there you go. So it's maybe not as secure as you thought it was, but, signal, which is my go-to thing, I, in the day tried to get every family member and extended family onto signal. How's that going now? It's fine. They've all, they all have adopted it and it's become, a, channel.

Now, they might

[01:22:20] Tammie Lister: not be,

[01:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: they only use it for me. I am literally the only person. So if they wanna communicate with me, go through signal, 'cause that's just what I've got. 'cause I don't have things like, WhatsApp on the phone.

[01:22:31] Tammie Lister: Would you change, would you tell them though that it's been changed?

[01:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

I probably would to be honest. yeah, there's no point in trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. But I do have this kind of rose tinted, that's also thing Now you've gotta explain it to people that, like how that, how do you explain?

I'll just get Tim to do it. Invite Tim over for a coffee.

It's money

[01:22:53] Tammie Lister: for a clamp on a bit of string.

[01:22:57] Tim Nash: But the thing is, the signal had its place and still does, it's still a perfectly good chat. I think we need to accept that if you are sending, the sort of things that you're gonna be sending. If you accept that messages are transitory Yes. Yeah.

And that they only exist while you are sending them, then this becomes a lot easier to accept that, hey, if I lose my device, I lose my chats. You've not lost your contacts.

[01:23:21] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[01:23:21] Tim Nash: You can still log in. You just lose the history of those chat. And that's fine. And as long as we, it's when we want to have that world where it's like we wanna preserve everything and keep everything safe, and we want the utter privacy that comes with it.

that's where we get those clashes. So I

[01:23:40] Tammie Lister: like that things. Change and like I lose things and stuff. I don't know, maybe it's me and, but I like that, like I like the clean sleigh and I like the, you choose what you save. rather than you're just like dragging these giant archives around like some kind of boulders around the internet.

That's, no,

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: I want the giant Boulder archives. I want all of it going back. I see.

[01:24:03] Tammie Lister: Yeah. But that is not, that is not sustainable. Think of the trees. Think of the puppies.

[01:24:09] Tim Nash: Oh, a few years ago I went for a mental shift where I, I went, it was Trove Tuesday, so pancake day, and I was going through my messages looking for the pancake recipe that I had been sent many years previously.

That was the pancake recipe that always worked and was like, I do this every year. What, One day a year? This is every year. And I went copy. Paste into my notes. Oh,

[01:24:38] Tammie Lister: yes.

[01:24:39] Tim Nash: And now that's what

[01:24:40] Tammie Lister: idiot's for. Yeah. Save the thing properly. Tag it. The thing we don't do anymore is tag it so that you can do a proper search on the things you really care about.

[01:24:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it's more, it's ephemeral, it's it's a disappearing medium. You're okay with ephemeral.

[01:24:55] Tammie Lister: Be okay with stuff. The amount of times that I've lost blog post, eh, that's still okay. Like the important ones have stayed.

[01:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: I'm struggling with that whole thing. I love the idea of things that I've done.

I, just, I dunno, I, it's like photography to me almost. You're gonna forget them eventually. But I love that, the backlog of photography. So I'm no good at photography, but I take lots of pictures and that they fit into the same class of thing. it's, like a moment in time. It's like a snapshot.

And especially the ones with my, like parents who are now quite elderly. There's something. There's something wonderful about going back many years and reading the little exchange to and fro, I don't really wish to keep signal messages that were about nothing like, dad, where's the, can you come and collect me from such and such place?

No, But I guess it's all on nothing.

[01:25:47] Tammie Lister: I think it depends on the, so it depends on the person. So me, I'm like probably a super minimalist. I really am. Yeah. Like I, I would quite happily eh, backpack and then whatever. Yeah. But that's the, I'm really on an extreme, but that's okay. yeah.

Nobody has to be in me. Yeah. but that is. what I now am in a position is that there are certain key things that I do want to hold on to of not pancake recipe necessarily, but, like recipes or things that are key to me. photography to me is an interesting one because I like the fact that I don't have everything because of the sheer amount of photographs I've produced.

Yeah. I could never search through them. and I don't know, although rediscovering my old music lately, I have enjoyed and I keep you see old music. Yeah. But I've ta but what I have enjoyed is the stuff that was tagged properly. Ah, and in index properly.

[01:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's a profound difference between you and I.

'cause I bet you use obsidian.

[01:26:53] Tammie Lister: Yes.

[01:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: See, I, can, I can't be bothered with any of that. I just want, I want a flat structure. I want my data. 'cause I have no need in, the way my life. and sitting

[01:27:03] Tammie Lister: is part of one of my processes. Yeah.

[01:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: But I have no need to make everything connected with everything else.

So, as an example, the, signal chat, let's say with my mom, just it, the fact that it just goes back in time. Forwards in time. That's enough for me. So my mom's chat is one thing, and then when I save documents, I, don't really do the whole tagging thing. I, because I don't really need to, everything for me is here today, gone tomorrow.

But I'd like a copy of it anyway. We're running outta time. That I was

[01:27:30] Tim Nash: gonna say that's fine. What you want is iMessage. Maybe a, an apple and just live in the world. That's just, I don't have an Apple phone.

[01:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: Do I need an, you need an Apple phone for that? Don, you.

[01:27:41] Tim Nash: but you, what I meant was you, have a, therefore a platform that is collected all that database.

It could be Google, it could be Apple, but you, that's what they're trying to give you. That unified. I have a spotlight bar. I open it up and it will show me the photos. I think you're right. Yeah. I think you're right. that is, I'm going to always been a conflict with a privacy first. I siloing everything.

So the, once you start siloing things and putting them in gates and locks, if we lock something up, we've got a key and we will eventually lose the key.

[01:28:12] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[01:28:13] Tim Nash: there there are boxes that I have in my garage and I locked my

[01:28:16] Tammie Lister: obsidian, so my obsidian is locked to myself. So if I actually forget my vault, I'm done.

Like and things like

[01:28:22] Tim Nash: that. Yes. Which is why I have two vaults. One that is a in my, so only

[01:28:28] Tammie Lister: two would be my question to you because I have more than two votes.

[01:28:31] Tim Nash: I'll rephrase that. I have a very public, not a public as in it's exposed on the internet, but one that is, that isn't locked down and isn't locked, that specifically has information that I, or important stuff like, stuff on.

And then I have a more private one that has, secure and important things I need to know, like how to fix my car. That goes obviously in the really private vault and my, public vault is full of useless things like cat photos.

[01:28:58] Tammie Lister: I, think they have five or six. It's not useless vaults at the moment.

[01:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: I, I, won. I think we should double check. I think we should have this as an entire episode. Like how deep can you go into the We? I'm not too

[01:29:10] Tim Nash: bad for yeah.

[01:29:13] Nathan Wrigley: but I'm gonna move us on quickly 'cause we're running outta time that we had, a variety of different things. I'm just gonna get rid of most of them and we'll just go to this one 'cause I like this one.

which is the I Noble Awards. So this is lovely. Every year we obviously have the Nobel Prizes and somebody many years ago decided to set up the IG Noble Awards. Get it. It's kinda, yeah. A bit of a play on words, although not quite. But each year some panel decide on the most. What's the word? Bizarre use of, research time creative.

And so they surface people who've been doing interesting things. if you're outside of that little, community that's doing that, it seems quite weird. they are presented by actual Nobel Prize winners, so that's fun. But I just thought I'd give you some of the things that have been, been under the microscope this year.

'cause they're great. So recipients of the award this year, were received. So I'm not gonna name names or anything like that. I'll just the, thing that they got it for, 'cause it's fascinating. the first one that I want to mention is somebody carried out research to find out whether painting a cow with zebra stripes would reduce the amount of fly bites it received.

If you're a cow, this is just like man from heaven Central study. yeah, exactly. Okay. But this one's curious. So somebody else did some research trying to figure out, which, why did they not try it on humans first?

[01:30:38] Tammie Lister: I don't know why. As someone that always gets bitten by my scooters, I'm up for trying.

I suppose the other thing is how many

[01:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: humans are realistically gonna want to be painted like a zebra? I'm up for trying, I get around really by

[01:30:50] Tammie Lister: mosquitoes naked. I would be well up to trying

[01:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: look, there's a picture on the website that I'm gonna link to, which actually has a painted cow. but they don't tell us what the results were.

I, I wanna know now whether it was positive or negative. Yeah.

[01:31:03] Tammie Lister: And there's a pi on the picture. It's just got this circle saying biting flies, which is I

[01:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: love it. Yeah. It's so unscientific. I love the fact that the body is a perfect rectangle and

[01:31:13] Tammie Lister: leg. Yeah. Leg

[01:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: biting flies. I think it's, yeah, bit of jokes.

then another one was whether pizza toppings, which pizza toppings. Were preferred by, lizards. Very important. That's proud

[01:31:27] Tammie Lister: if you're a lizard. Very

[01:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: important to know. Another study was carried out to see if there was a, a link between using the smartphone whilst on the toilet. he, hemorrhoids.

[01:31:40] Tim Nash: Yeah. The thing is that one worries me because that implies that someone had to think about that long enough. It was like they've never doom scrolled in their life. They actually don't recognize it actually,

[01:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: and actually carry out the research. You can't, presumably you can't identify hemorrhoids without.

Identifying hemorrhoids moving on. another one was, the prize. The literature prize was re for recording and analyzing the growth of the person. So the person that was doing the research analyzed their own fingernail growth for 35 years. What the heck? then the pediatrics prize was for work.

Looking into the experience of nursing a baby whose mother eats garlic. I can't even pause that in my head. I don't even know. That's how you

[01:32:25] Tammie Lister: get the next Buffy.

[01:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's like a vampire thing. Okay. That at least anchors it somewhere For me, the psychology prize was to in, for looking into what happens when you tell a narcissist or anybody else that they're intelligent

[01:32:43] Dave Grey: kind of chemistry prize was awarded,

[01:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: for experimentation with eating Teflon to find out whether or not it could be used.

Used to boost eating Teflon food volume and satisfy people's appetite. That's yeah. Okay. Who's gonna eat delon though, right? We're, nearly out, but, another few. whether or not drinking alcohol can improve people's ability to communicate in a foreign language. I think we all know that.

We think that's what happens, but. Anyway. only a couple more. The, somebody else explored how foul smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe rack. And, last couple, the aviation prize was done for, I just wanna use

[01:33:26] Tim Nash: a shoe rack.

[01:33:27] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know, I don't even know what that means, but somebody got paid to do that research.

the aviation prize was for their work being the effect. Is there more shoe rack? I dunno. These questions need answering, don't they? You see now we're all sucked into it. We, oh, now it seems tremendously important. What kind of shoe rack was it? A big shoe rack. A little shoe. It was expensive. The aviation is, do you have to sneak in?

[01:33:54] Tammie Lister: Was it in like a hallway? Did you have to walk past the volume of

[01:33:59] Nathan Wrigley: the room? Yeah, would be

[01:34:02] Tammie Lister: like,

[01:34:03] Nathan Wrigley: honestly, if you'd have asked me which one of them you were gonna drill to, it wasn't the shoe right now, but there you go. so the aviation prize was for looking into the effect of alcohol consumption on bats abilities to fly.

Okay. And finally this, I think we, hang on, Did they get the batch drunk? I don't dunno.

[01:34:23] Tim Nash: Yeah, they must have done right.

[01:34:24] Tammie Lister: They must

[01:34:25] Tim Nash: have. that seems slightly unethical. presumably you get a peppe and some, yeah, you just forced

[01:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: you, or maybe you just give them fermented fruit or something like that, So

[01:34:36] Tammie Lister: what does a batch drink?

[01:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: Gin Berry. Yeah, ma. Oh, that was good. Kaching. That was the best bit. the physics prize, final one, the physics prize was used to, was given for studying, past a source to see, if it was possible to avoid, I'm gonna use the exact phrase, clumping.

I have no words. People. That was,

[01:35:09] Tim Nash: that was just simply somebody from the physics department trying to explain how, why they were expensing their trip to flock. Yeah.

[01:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And yet this is what people, this is people unpleasant. That's gotta be the name of the title of this podcast, hasn't it? Unpleasant.

Clumping, that's going's. What about drink? Yeah. No, I'm going for unpleasant clumping. I love that. okay, so there you go. Now you know, you, you too can look back on your life and think, why have I wasted it? Why was I not a research scientist Thinking about shoe racks?

[01:35:43] Tim Nash: I, many years ago was sitting in a, an event for a, for the university, and we were basically talking about various research that we were doing, and there were different research groups, and we were, it was like speed dating, but for various groups.

And I got partnered up with somebody who was looking at the curvature of the letter C. What? And they, were doing their PhD was gonna be in the curvature of the letter C and I, joke to them, that's great. That sounds like you can get 25 more PhDs out of that.

[01:36:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And they just looked at me and went, what?

Oh, know, you've got the whole neer thing to go with as well, another 10 years.

[01:36:19] Tim Nash: So ever since then, I've realized that now you could study just about Eddie o. Yeah,

[01:36:24] Nathan Wrigley: but, what happens when somebody like comes with a differently curved sea and shows you, look, I can do my sea. You've never on it. This

[01:36:31] Tammie Lister: was the same as when I was at art college and I realized you could just, you could pretty much write an art paper on anything and just fight and call it art.

There's, a level of academic that you just don't want to dig too deep into if you actually want to finish your course.

[01:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think these are the people that then go on to create spamming, SEO websites. They got, they, they got funding. We

[01:36:55] Tim Nash: didn't, yeah,

[01:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: for the letter C. Okay, on that bombshell, we don't need to do any waving this week, which is quite nice because we've already done the waving, so it only remains for me to, firstly, thank you if you were in the comments, given us a little bit of a, a heads up, posing some questions.

I think we might have lost a few

[01:37:12] Tammie Lister: people. always at the end when you get onto the IG Noble Prize, they drop off like flies on zebras that are painted like zebras. so yeah, thank you to, firstly Dave Gray for joining us, although not for the entire show, but also thanks to Tim and thanks for Tammy as well for joining us.

[01:37:31] Nathan Wrigley: We will see you, I guess I'll see you, on Wednesday at some point. but stick around. We can have a chat after this show has ended. Thanks for making comments, and we will be back next week for another edition of this week in WordPress. Take it easy and we will see you soon. Take care.

[01:37:47] Tammie Lister: Bye bye bye.