This Week in WordPress #365

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress episode number, 365 entitled Beards and Booze. It was recorded on Monday, the eighth of Feb, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but I'm also joined by Marc Benzakein and Rhys Wynne.

We talk an awful lot at the beginning about just blogging, and I can't remember the last time we talked about just that, blogging. What it's like to blog, why we might do it, and why it's an important thing to do in the year 2026.

We also spend a great deal of time talking about the educational space in WordPress and how the overlapping initiatives can be quite confusing.

As you might expect we also talk a lot about AI, despite the fact that I try to keep up. It's very hard there so many things happening at such a breathtaking pace. So AI is going to be the stable of what we do, I suspect, in the year 2026.

But there's all of that and so much more, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpuilds.

Hello. Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. welcome to 365. Oh, that's the number of days in a year, isn't it? Coincidentally, 365. That's the, so if we did an episode of this one a day for a year, this would be the 31st of December. Congratulations, WP Bills, if you live that long.

Yeah. Yeah, I know. nobody wants that. Once a week is more than sufficient. anyway, sorry about last week. the show was meant to happen, but I had to pull it because there was technical gremlins and, I got a few emails for people who were questioning what was going on and this platform just didn't work basically.

And I don't really have a backup, so if anything goes wrong and it's catastrophic, like that reached out to support and they were very apologetic. But all seems to be working this week. So here we are. We're gonna chat a little bit about the WordPress stuff that's gone on this week. There's lots about ai, quite a lot about community and things like that, but in order to make it more interesting and not just me, blathering on for 90 minutes, I have invited a bunch of panelists and over there, let me get this right.

Yeah. there we are. Down there in the corner is Michelle Frechette, the co-host for today. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:03:00] Michelle Frechette: I am well, thank you. How are you?

[00:03:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. I've got to make a big special thanks to Michelle because, last yesterday I was out doing family things and during the course of the day, tko who was gonna be on the show, and I think I sent a few tweets out last week to that effect.

He was unable to make it 'cause of family commitments and bits and pieces like that. And Michelle stepped up and, said that she would come on. So I'm enormously grateful to you for doing that. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Yeah, I appreciate it. So, let's learn a little bit more about Michelle.

Michelle Frechette is the executive Director of Post Status and in addition to her work at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast Barister WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, creator of WP Career. Paige's co-founder of Sponsor Me, WP, and also Speed Network Online.

She's an author, influencer, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and other tech events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid photographer of nature. You can find out more at the one URL, which is Meet Michelle online. Thank you for joining us such late notice. Thank you.

Thank you. It's my

[00:04:04] Michelle Frechette: pleasure.

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, next one on my list in just going down the list is Marc. Marc over there for the first time that he's got a nice hat on. I appreciate the, hat wearing. That's nice.

[00:04:15] Marc Benzakein: I wanna be like Nathan.

[00:04:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Well, no. No you don't. That's very kind of you. Marc's joined us on many occasions.

It's very nice having Marc on. He is a Marceting lead and partnership manager over at Maine, wp, which is the best self-hosted WordPress management dashboard, trusted by so many in our community. He's been part of the WordPress community for years. Helping agencies work smarter and occasionally.

Convincing, convincing them that Marceting doesn't have to be a bad thing. Do you know what, it's kind of curious that Marceting and the WordPress community like you, you kind of wish that they would go hand in hand, but it, there's a lot of people in our space for whom Marceting is kind of their nemesis.

I don't know if that, rings well. Yeah,

[00:05:04] Marc Benzakein: I think that's true. I think it's true in any industry because it's a matter of, you're in business to make money. At least that's the assumption. Yeah. And of course, Marceting costs money, so Yeah. It's, it already starts off, on the wrong foot until you and, So, yeah, it's, I think there's

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: something particular about an open source community as well though, that kind of

[00:05:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah,

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think the ethics, it could easily, probably a little harder be misaligned, so it's kind of, it is been an interesting tightrope that our community have had to tread with things like sponsoring events and stuff.

Anyway, we'll get onto more about that in a moment. Thank you for joining us. Smart. Really appreciate it. And it's always stupid o clock where Marc is, so, it is

[00:05:44] Marc Benzakein: stupid O clock. it is. Stupid O clock. Gina, my, my partner, she hates. The days I have to get up this early. Oh, she just absolutely hates it.

I'm so

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: grateful. I really appreciate

[00:05:57] Marc Benzakein: it. Thank you. So shout out. So shout out to Gina. I gonna shout out to Gina right now, even though she doesn't watch the show, 'cause she is hopefully asleep right now. I want her to know how much I appreciate her good sportsmanship with me getting up, waking up the dogs, making the cat meow, doing all the things in the morning, dropping dishes in the kitchen, all that stuff when I'm trying to stumble around in the dark to, to get here.

So.

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I am also grateful, for the allowance that has been afforded for you to come onto the show by getting up early and waking up the dogs and causing a fuss in the house. I appreciate it. Did you say, Gina? It's all for you, Nathan. Gina.

[00:06:37] Marc Benzakein: Gina. Yes, absolutely.

[00:06:38] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Gina, thank you, me, I appreciate you, man.

[00:06:41] Marc Benzakein: I'm going to clip this and I'm gonna send it to her later.

[00:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's lovely. Thank you. Yeah. She won't know which one of us is which, 'cause we're both, with the hats. Oh, no.

[00:06:51] Marc Benzakein: I'm not wearing glasses. I'll say I'm the one without

[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: glasses. Okay. Without the glasses. There

[00:06:55] Marc Benzakein: you go.

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go.

okay. So thank you. And then we've got Rhys Wynne. Just speak, be there. How you doing Rhys? I'm doing good. how are you? Yeah. Good. Yeah. So, Rhys has been on the show quite a few times now as well, so we're all old hands here. So, Rhys Wynne is a Welsh freelance and WordPress developer living in northwest of England.

he co organizes the Manchester WordPress user group, writes WordPress plugins and speaks at events. He also tends to focus on performance, SEO and general backend WordPress and WooCommerce development for small and medium sized businesses and charities. You can find his WordPress services newsletter and plugins at D Win re and I'm gonna spell it out so that It's D-W-R-N-R-H-Y s.com. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. That's okay. Dot com or find his less focused ramblings and links to whatever social profiles are popular at Rhys, RHYS dot whale. like the country, not the animal. Yeah. W-A-L-E-S, Rhys dot whale. So that. Is our panel, that's who are gonna be with us today.

However, an addendum to that is that you too can kind of be part of the panel, I suppose, in a way, by putting a comment in. If you want to drop us a comment. It kind of keeps the show going. If there's anything, if you hear something come out of one of our mouths and you think, oh, I'd like to add something to that, or disagree with that, or agree with that, feel free.

Write us a comment. And the best place to do that is over on our WP Builds live page. I realize that you may be watching this on some other platform like X or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. They don't allow us to have the comments come through. So if you write a comment underneath it, it'll just be locked into that platform and it won't be shared to us.

And I've got no time really to go around on all the platforms and consume all the bits and pieces. So go to this URL instead, and it is wp builds.com/live. There you go. WP builds.com/live. Brilliant. Look at that without even prompting Rhys's on it. and and you'll see a little box on the right, it's YouTube comment.

So you have to be logged into a Google account if you wanna use that. However, lurking at the top right of the window with the video in it, there's a little black button that says live chat. You can click on that if you like. And in that way you don't need to be logged into anything. You can just type into that and it'll ask you for your name and that's all.

And you can start tab tapping away. And a few people have done that. Thank you for joining us. So we've got James, James is joining us. He says, good morning. And as is so often the case with the show, it begins with the weather. I mean, I live in the UK so I think Rhys and I can basically agree it's gonna be bleak.

Oh, look out the window. Yeah. Huh? It is bleak. It's gray and about seven degrees Centigrade, something like that. Like is

[00:09:45] Rhys Wynne: full on.

[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: You have the same as me. Current temperature in Boston apparently is 15 degrees. So nine degrees centigrade. I'm not jealous. that's too cold. whoever this is always open design.

I suppose that reads, as always, open design says, minus three in Jamestown. Is that ny, does that stand for New York State? Is that what that is? Yeah.

[00:10:07] Michelle Frechette: Yes.

[00:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, thank you for joining us. Whoever you may be, Marcus Burnett, he's with us as well. Hey,

[00:10:13] Michelle Frechette: I think that's Emily.

[00:10:14] Nathan Wrigley: Emily. Is it Emily? Emily?

Yeah. I think it's Emily. Thank you Emily, for joining us. Appreciate that. it's been too long since this, the last, this week in WordPress. Lovely to see, or Yeah, we missed the whole week. I know. That's crazy. Too long. And, Michelle Ette, whoever she may be, says, oh, it's minus 15 degree. Oh, that's brutal.

Minus 15 where she is. But at least it's sunny. over the three feet of snow, we've accumulating three feet. Oh God.

[00:10:44] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. When you drive down the roads, you feel like you're in a deluge because the sides of the road are like so high up that you have to inch forward to be able to see, to make a turn around the corner.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:10:53] Michelle Frechette: A little scary.

[00:10:54] Rhys Wynne: Wow.

[00:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was saying on a previous show that we, because we, because we're at that part of the world where we neither get much snow or basically we hardly get any snow, and when we do get, it comes for a little bit and it goes away and it's a few inches. We don't invest in the infrastructure to make stuff go away, like in snowplows and all that.

So when we get us like two millimeters of snow, everything just stops.

[00:11:17] Michelle Frechette: Like, stay home. Stay home. Yeah.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:11:19] Michelle Frechette: Meanwhile, it was. It was minus two degrees when I went out yesterday morning for breakfast and snowing

[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: copiously. Yeah. Okay. Marcus is kindly furnishing us with his, he's got, oh, of course. He's in Florida.

The home of the alligator. We found out, 12 degrees centigrade on his usual morning walk. I actually saw a picture of your walk the other day, Marcus, I dunno if that's a typical thing that you do, but I saw a picture of like an empty tree lined boulevard or something into the distance in you saying Yeah, that was a pretty picture, wasn't

[00:11:49] Marc Benzakein: it?

[00:11:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:11:50] Marc Benzakein: I have to ask Marcus if he's, carrying around any pocket meat though.

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yes. Well, that was the whole thing last time, wasn't it? Yeah. We got into pocket meat. What the heck was that? Oh yeah, it was in the context of alligators, wasn't it? It was in the context. No, we're not doing that again. Not going down the alligator.

Oh, come on. You gotta

[00:12:09] Marc Benzakein: bring up the old jokes, Nathan.

[00:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: So No, we're not doing it. hello, beautiful people. That's too kind. who is it? who is the webinar again? I forgot. Oh, I'm so sorry. but whoever you are, you're very kind. that's really lovely. Of you and Brett saying it's 25 degrees Fahrenheit in Wisconsin.

Okay. And one last one. So this is, who did you say this was? Did you say Emma or something? Emily. It's Emily. Emily saying she confirmed it in

[00:12:39] Michelle Frechette: the

notes.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Ski down the sidewalk where they are. Oh. I suppose that's, we don't have that luxury. Right. Well let's get onto the word pressy stuff.

Shall we raise the screen? Please? Keep the comments coming. It's really nice, it's lovely to have them and, I'll raise as many on the screen as I can, but let's make a start. So this is our bit of promotional stuff before we begin. WP builds, we really a podcast on a Thursday. the podcast can be found in our little archive section, which is right here.

and this week I never do ones about podcasting, but this week I managed to steer it around to actually making content on a WordPress website in the podcasting space, which is really nice. I was chatting to, Seth Goldstein, who, whose whole like thing is podcasting and WordPress and who's got a business around Podcast Mastery, it's called.

So that's a really interesting conversation. if you wanna get involved in that, click on that link. 455 was the episode there. And yeah, you can see there's a little bit more, I write a little bit about each of the posts that are coming up. So the other thing to mention is that if you wanna keep updated, just put your email address in this little box, click subscribe, and we'll send you an email when we produce this, what we're doing now, and also that podcast episode as well.

Okay. There we go. So the next thing to say then is that we allow the guests to drop in any sort of articles that they've been perusing over the last 5, 6, 7 days, something like that. And if they've got anything they want to self-promote as well, they can. And Michelle Cher, she's the first one up. We are looking at underrepresented in tech, which I know is your website.

This one's called it's, we're celebrating International Women's Day Live. Tell us more, Michelle.

[00:14:18] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So this year we decided instead of just talking about women, we want to introduce women from tech, the tech field during an eight hour live stream. you can register via Eventbrite, you'll get the reminders and it'll add to your calendar.

and we're gonna be able to talk to 15 women. So if you scroll down a little bit, the, any women in tech who are interested in being interviewed during that eight hours can fill out that form we are giving, we're trying to fill out around the world, so we're hoping it's not all US based. Okay. So it's not an automatic that you're in.

we are gonna make, evaluate and make sure that we can cover, several different continents and make sure that we're introducing people from around the world on International Women's Day.

[00:15:01] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So, forgive me, I'm not too sure it's on

[00:15:05] Michelle Frechette: March 8th. Yeah. There,

[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: it's Sunday. Sunday, March the eighth.

Gosh, that's quite. Quite a commitment. Eight hours, not, is that nonstop or is that, are you interspersing that with breaks and things or are you just going right the way through?

[00:15:16] Michelle Frechette: We're gonna go right through, but, we'll, be able to take breaks by, I may interview somebody while Samma is off, having.

some coffee and lunch, and then the next one she may interview without me. Okay. and most of them we'll do together though, so.

[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well that's really nice. So, if you thank Jimmy, fulfill the, the categories there, you can go and fill out the form. It's underrepresented in tech.com/uh, IWD 26.

So International Women's Day, 26. And, obviously you're on the lookout for some people and there's a few bits and pieces to fill out and

[00:15:51] Michelle Frechette: they don't even have to be WordPress '

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: cause Oh, okay. Yeah, we

[00:15:54] Michelle Frechette: encompass more than WordPress. It's

[00:15:56] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:15:56] Michelle Frechette: And it's underrepresented in tech. It isn't underrepresented WordPress, so,

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: yes.

good point. so the webinar is saying he likes the initiative, thinks that's a great initiative and I love that as well. Thank you, Jim. Well, and Tacho says, thanks for covering me today, and he's here. We should smuggle him in somehow, shouldn't we? You're

[00:16:12] Michelle Frechette: welcome. Talk.

[00:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: that's really kind.

[00:16:15] Michelle Frechette: If you want your seat back, let me know.

[00:16:17] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. okay, so there was Michelle's bit, I've given you the URL, but I'll drop it into the show notes if you wish to see that. And then

[00:16:27] Michelle Frechette: can I just add that mention, watch this too. It isn't an event just for women, it's an event for everybody to take part in and learn about the women who are in technology.

So I encourage men to tune in, register to watch the event as well. Thank you.

[00:16:40] Nathan Wrigley: Women on the screen, I guess is who you're after though. yes. They're the people, you, women on

[00:16:44] Michelle Frechette: the screen and everybody watching.

[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Yeah, that's nice and clear. Thank you. I'll drop that into the show notes, like I said.

Okay. Now we've got three pieces which were popped in by, Rhys. And the first one is from a uk WordPress developer and pizza, shop owner, I think is, he's in the

[00:17:02] Michelle Frechette: comments today. Today and

[00:17:03] Rhys Wynne: he's in the

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: comments. That's lovely.

[00:17:06] Michelle Frechette: Elliot,

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: is he, where is he? Where's his comments?

[00:17:10] Michelle Frechette: He was in there, he said hello, and he's been on an amazing vacation according to his, I know his, TikTok.

[00:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he went to Bali. And, I'm quite jealous of, anybody that goes to Bali. okay. Anyway, we'll, we've got this on the screen. This came from Rhys. Rhys. Why did you pick this piece called Rethinking? Where I publish my content?

[00:17:31] Rhys Wynne: I love this. I thought this was superb. Yeah. And it was it gave me a lot of thoughts on thoughts that I'm happening.

So, for context, he was on holiday in Bali and he wrote this blog post, after he got back. He also has done a video on it where he basically says, everything that I took, every single photo that I took, and if I uploaded it to social media, eventually it was there to be forgotten. Like the TikTok would disappear.

The, the Instagram reels would stay for a day. If you get posted on Facebook or X, it will eventually drop down the feed. So then he kind of talks about, well actually I should publish this on my own block, kind of thing. And but, so that it stays a little bit longer. And this is something I was reading it and then I was, so I've been trying to blog a little bit more on my own personal blog as well and, just talking about things and it really resonated with me.

'cause one of the posts I've kind of got in the archives is there's like a social media, me, like of you in 2016 against you in 2026. And I realized that I blocked quite a lot in 2016. 2016 was quite a big year for me. I went to the United States, Wales, qualified for the f for the Euros for the first time in my life.

So I went to France for a month and my brother got married. And it helped me look back at that time, me writing it 10 years ago.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:19:11] Rhys Wynne: And what's been really nice is side note, my sister-in-law is Polish and I went, the wedding was in Poland. There was a really, nice restaurant. I could not remember the name of it and it's in Krakoff, but I wrote it on the blog post.

And I am going to go to find that restaurant when they go to Krakoff for Workout Europe. So even though those posts don't get any sort of traffic whatsoever, they're there and they are still on the archive. And I could just go back and go, oh, it's useful for me. And I think this is what Elliot was kind of saying.

Yeah, is the, there is going to be a, even if nobody views his photos from Bali in the past. He probably will, or his family will, and it will be a nice, a nice reminiscence of, that time. Yeah. So,

[00:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:20:11] Rhys Wynne: Yeah, I just, this was one of those things that I just was like, yeah, we should do this.

We should post it. Everybody should post more on, on their own sides and then share it to social media now.

[00:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, please finish if you add something, I,

[00:20:26] Rhys Wynne: no, I mean, I know algorithms are against like people link, social media linking back. But this was a, it just really resonated with me and it was,

[00:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: what, do you know what Rhys I've, I'm so fed up of the algorithm.

I'm so sick of the algorithm. I'm fed up of everything being done for an algorithm. I mean, honestly, I could swear at this point and then say the words algorithm at the end of it, but I'm not going to. Who cares about the algorithm? Just like, like Elliot, he's obviously got a bit fed up with the algorithm.

I had the same epiphany, I don't know, about 18 months ago or something like that. started writing more on my blog. And here's a mysterious thing that I can't explain. I get a great deal of satisfaction writing on my own blog. I cannot explain what it is. There is something about sitting in the same chair, writing the same content in that ui, that WordPress UI and clicking publish, and it gives me all the good feelings in the world and the exact same set of typing.

Yeah. Out onto something like LinkedIn or Facebook or social media of any kind. None of it. I don't get any of that sense of intuition. It's ephemeral. It's gonna be gone by tomorrow. It'll be completely forgotten. I'll never find it again. Yeah. And I don't really know how to put it into words, but there's a, there,

[00:21:59] Rhys Wynne: yeah.

[00:21:59] Nathan Wrigley: And it's really nice and, we've been droning on about it for years. Own your own content, yada, yada, yada.

[00:22:05] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: It just feels nice. It's just

[00:22:07] Rhys Wynne: a nice

[00:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. And thing.

[00:22:08] Rhys Wynne: And even if you own your own content for you, like even if nobody else reads it, which is going on to the next thing I'm going to talk about.

but yeah, it's really, it really resonated with me. So I wanted to highlight him.

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: I hope people do more like Elliot in the year 2026 and beyond. Marc,

[00:22:27] Marc Benzakein: I just wanna say that this really hits for me too because, I used to blog a lot. back before social media for those that can remember that.

And it wasn't just for me, but it was because I didn't write for the likes, I didn't write for the followers I wrote so that my family and friends and everybody when I was moved away and all that could stay in touch and see what was going on. And I think that one of the reasons that maybe you feel something, Nathan, when you write something is because your motivation is completely different.

Yeah. When you blog, yeah. You're writing for yourself, you're writing for people you actually care about. If you're writing on social media, it's a completely different mindset where it's like, it's about how much traffic you get, how much, how many likes, and in your brand and all these things. And you don't go through and look at who all liked your content.

You just wanna know how many likes you got, whereas. When you're blogging, you just want your family and friends and people you love and care about to know what's going on in your life, and you wanna share that with them and you hope that it creates like this conduit through which you stay in touch with people that matter to you.

So I think that there's a lot more. of the really important things that go along with when you blog and, when you write for yourself and for, the things that matter. So, this has actually re-inspired me to go back to doing the blogging, so thank you for bringing this up. you very welcome.

Yeah. Yeah, because it, it actually put into words some things that have been going around in my mind, but I really haven't, like, it hasn't jelled with me until like, right this minute.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I kind of feel, okay, so this is gonna sound so overblown and apologies for what's about to come outta my mouth. I kind of feel wholesome.

At the end of doing a blog post.

[00:24:24] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: And at the end of doing social media stuff, I don't have that feeling. It's just like this empty exercise in Yeah. Pouring stuff into Dev Null and hoping that some of it doesn't go in there. it's kind of weird. Like the incentive is totally different. Marc, I'm not doing it because I'll then go back eight minutes later and see did anybody?

Or was there any like traction? It's just, here it is. I've thought about it. I'm offering up to the world. Maybe nobody will read it, but I don't care. very different. very different. Yeah. And Michelle, have you got anything on that before we move on?

[00:24:57] Michelle Frechette: It's interesting because like, I have not thought about that in the past and just posted things on social instead of to my own blog or things like that.

And then I go back and I try to find it 'cause I wanna reference it and the search features on social. Are lacking so I can search my name. That's a nice way to

[00:25:16] Marc Benzakein: put

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: it.

[00:25:16] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[00:25:16] Michelle Frechette: Like my handle and a specific term that I know I used and it comes up with nothing yet when I scroll endlessly to find the thing, there it is with the terms that I was searching and it doesn't find it, and so I'm like, do I start categorizing every single thing that I post so I can reference it back to a link later on?

Or do I just. Maybe save some of those things and post them on my blog as well. those kind

[00:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:25:41] Michelle Frechette: Things.

[00:25:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:42] Michelle Frechette: And I haven't not, haven't started re reblogging or blogging again yet. but it is on my list for 2026 and yes, I realize we're almost halfway through February and I haven't accomplished it yet.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: it's

[00:25:54] Michelle Frechette: interesting, but I'm getting there.

[00:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I haven't done much in the way of blogging this, this, year, but I fully

[00:25:59] Michelle Frechette: expect you were on fire at the end of last year.

[00:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I think I will be, again, I've just taken a little bit of a hiatus and I've got some ideas for posts that I, wanna write.

And also, it's fairly cathartic. I get this, it's almost like self therapy. I'm writing stuff and getting, I don't know, getting stuff out there a little bit and feeling, I don't know, I don't know. There's something going on. It's much more, wholesome and the mading crowd is not there trying to, either rate it up or rate it down or what have you.

there's always a. Piece in each episode that we do where it gets a bit of traction. And this would appear, maybe there'll be one later, but this would appear to be the one for today. so James saying, we're all burnt out from social media. It's time to own your own space again. James, I could not agree more.

I thoroughly agree with that sentiment. I am sick to the back teeth of it. I'm sick to what it's doing to me. I can only speak about me, but I've noticed things in my life which are not wholesome because of social media. I can only draw a line between me and social media, and none of it's good.

I'm not sure that I get a fat lot out of social media. yes. Says Tacho Publishing on your own blog means it won't be forgotten. It can't be forgotten if it's never seen. Can it? Or am I being too negative now? I know what you mean, tacho. but the incentive for me isn't the number of people that see it.

That is a hundred percent not why I'm doing it. If I write a piece about a walk that I did, which I've been doing quite a bit recently, with photographs and things like that, I don't anticipate anybody's gonna see it. But if some curious person does see it, that's great. The incentive is not for it to be seen.

It's, well, obviously that's a lie 'cause I'm posting it online. There must be some aspect of that, but it's not the big upfront thing in the back of my mind anyway. Elliot. Oh, Elliot, there we go. hello Elliot. Posting for a quick dopamine hit. I like, yeah, I'm, I think we've just covered that off a little bit as well.

So Sean joins us. it's amazing when somebody reaches out after finding a blog post from X years ago. That's still helpful. Yeah. Okay. So it has its place. Okay, we'll have to agree that it definitely does ver versus verse publishing for longevity. we are maybe getting lost a little bit now 'cause of when these comments dropped.

Is there anybody seeing a particular comment that's worth raising? I can see about 10, but I haven't.

[00:28:21] Michelle Frechette: Sean. Sean? The very last one I think is worth raising.

[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: Is it this one that begins sometimes? I am actually, no,

[00:28:27] Michelle Frechette: it's, I love the Posse acronym, publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. The very last,

[00:28:32] Nathan Wrigley: oh, the most recent one.

That's lovely. Thank you. I love the, I was just about to say what you literally just said. so yeah, that the poss I'd never heard of that. Yes. Yeah. But why haven't exactly that, right? Write it on your blog and then if you, and then share that. Go to social media and share it and what have you.

Yeah, that's true. I run a business as James, and now I can separate my thoughts brain between work and life. Yeah, that's another curious thing on social media. If you've somehow got this one handle, then you are. You are kind of constrained in the kind of things that you can write because it may collide with work.

'cause you that you,

[00:29:12] Michelle Frechette: me? Yeah, just, I just publish everything everywhere you do The right people will pick it up or not.

[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: But presumably Marc, let's say for example, he, we all know Marc May, WP and things like that. There must be boxes and constraints around the kind of things That you may or may not be able to do because the association is, Marc works for main wp.

Anything that Marc says reflects on main WP and that's strange. Well,

[00:29:36] Marc Benzakein: to be fair, Dennis is like, beat yourself. He's always been that way, which I really appreciated about him. He's always, he's unusual though, isn't he? Yeah, he's just, yeah, he is unusual, but he's always been be yourself and if I don't like something you'll say, I'll just disown you and that's it, but not disown you.

but, I'll make my own disclaimers, but, by and large, I've never felt that constraint. From external pressures. There are internal pressures where I'm like, well, is this really something that I want, to be out there or whatever. There are a lot of personal things that go on that affect people in my personal life that even though they might go to my personal brand, I feel like I need to protect them.

So it's actually more the other way than it is, as, I don't wanna say that I don't want to protect man, WP 'cause Absolutely. I absolutely do. I know what you mean, but

[00:30:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah.

[00:30:31] Marc Benzakein: I feel more protective of people who haven't given me permission, necessarily. so, yeah.

[00:30:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what, we've just spent nearly 25 minutes on this show talking about blogging.

How nice is that? Like we never talk about, it's lovely blogging.

[00:30:49] Michelle Frechette: let's just skip the AI chapter. I do wanna say I do post, I do post myself everywhere. Yeah. Even when I was publishing for Stellar, it was my voice behind it. But I have two things that I've learned in publishing to social over the years.

Number one, I spent 12 years on my school board and realized that anything I say is viewed as me not representing the school board necessarily, but whether they wanted to reelect me to the school board going forward. Yeah. And so I always thought about that. I always have that in the back of my mind. How do I wanna be seen by the public that are, whether it's international or local?

And two, my personal mantra and my personal mission statement is lead with kindness. And so if I always pose leading with kindness, it's, it may not be that other people see that as kindness. So I have, for example, have the tweet that, broke the world and over 30,000 views several people lambasted me about.

But honestly it was still leading with kindness because it was about things that were important to technology. So doesn't mean people are always gonna like what I put, but I always have kindness foremost in what I'm posting. Yeah. So that I don't get nasty and I don't say things that I wish I could take back later.

[00:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: And, curious thing, I dunno if this is true, but it feels like it's in the background somewhere. The, the immigration policy for your country, Marc and Michelle is for not immigration, tourists, even in the near future, are gonna have to surrender their social media content potentially at the border.

I can't remember the number of years. Let's. Go for four years or something like that, which is kind of a curious thing that, we were all sold this, oh, social media, la everybody got angry on social media and now those angry things that you may have written three or four years ago might come back to haunt you, which is

[00:32:33] Michelle Frechette: it's 'cause of our current administration who doesn't believe in our constitution of free speech.

[00:32:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, there you go. So this one will get trolled and I will never be allowed into the USA ever again.

[00:32:44] Michelle Frechette: Well, they may kick me out soon too, so who knows? Yeah.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: moving on then. Patricia. Hello. Hi, Patricia. Patricia. Apologies if you wrote something about the Rhys thing there. That was obviously, Elliot.

Oh, Marc. Oh, it's that Go wave. His wave. He

[00:33:00] Michelle Frechette: has to go wave his

[00:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: arms and

[00:33:01] Michelle Frechette: turn the lights

[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: back. Gotta go wave his arms. That's brilliant. so, hello and, gonna walk. The dog says the webinar. Okay, that's fine. and just James, here we go. Forgive yourself the draft post. He says, the only issue I have with personal plug is finding time to write the mountain of draft.

Draft post is staggering. Here's my advice, James. Either just forgive yourself for not doing it. Or when you get to the third word, that's enough. If that's all you've gotta say, just hit publish. Yeah. Doesn't need to be a tome. It doesn't need to be some sort of dostoevsky thing. It just needs to be I ate lunch.

that's what you've gotta say. Just hit the publish button and forgive yourself. And, and I, for one, will subscribe to your RSS feed. And, so there we go. So that was wonderful. What a lot of fun that was talking about blogging, Elliot richmond.co uk and the blog posts all about writing content, on his blog was written on, I don't see a post date, but it was fairly recent.

I'm sure you can go to more feed five

[00:34:07] Michelle Frechette: years ago. I'm kidding.

[00:34:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The last post on the blog was within the last eight years ago. Yeah. It

[00:34:16] Marc Benzakein: lives forever.

[00:34:21] Nathan Wrigley: he's too busy making pizzas, right? So, okay. I'm gonna refresh this one, Rhys, we're gonna have to race through these ones, I think now a little bit. So, okay. You, yeah.

[00:34:29] Rhys Wynne: very

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: quickly. Terry. God Gaia, Terry Gaia slash phantom obligation. What is this? Why are we looking?

[00:34:35] Rhys Wynne: So this, again, talk. Okay. if you scroll down, there's also like a, like a read in plain text.

I'd click that.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Where's,

[00:34:45] Rhys Wynne: but it's really, so very, quickly. Terry Godar, I believe is a, UX designer. Yeah. And again, talking about up to up current things because why not? this is about an RSS reader and what he has proposed. What he says is that potentially why RSS. Struggles is, RSS was built on, emails.

So, so every single RSS field feed, feeder was built like it was an email thing. That's right. So it had like your notification, a red dot with your notification and how many unread things, like there is an email. What he has basically said is, why are we doing this? Because there is, you don't need, while you can reply to an email and most of us should reply to an email, you don't, nobody cares if you don't read the blog post.

And this kind of resonator with me again, 'cause it was like, oh yeah, I've got an RSS feeder with like hundreds of articles that are unread and nobody cares. The people who write it don't care if I've read it or not. So he goes on to say. How to structure it in a different way. And he's got like a beater app, which I haven't checked because you have to sign up for it.

But like he's proposed like more of a campfire, like a river kind of thing where you just let the content scroll past so it would effectively, so is it like a different

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: UX instead of it just being things which you check off and say, I have read or I haven't read. There's a different sort of UX component to it.

Is

there?

[00:36:20] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:36:21] Rhys Wynne: I mean, I mean they, I think they said that the river one wasn't great 'cause it was like social media effectively. Yeah. Which is they wanted to try to get rid of. But things like the library where it's just like, here is some new stuff for you to read. Go ahead and read it kind of thing.

and, they're still trying to work it out, but

[00:36:41] Nathan Wrigley: I

[00:36:41] Rhys Wynne: was like, oh,

[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I do know what you mean. Like the RSS to me, the RSS is the most an RSS reader. I use several. Yeah. They are the most beautiful things in the world, but equally they're not that engaging. So unless you're curious and you want to, I wish there was an RSS reader and maybe there is.

Where the more I interact with a certain person, the more or certain website, the more it kind of leverages that. So not some sort of algorithm that I don't control. So I'd like to be able to say, you know what? You are giving me too much from this particular website, but the things that I seem to click through in that ux, I would like to see more of that.

And then over time, my RSS feed might have some sort of equilibrium for the people who, I like and admire and whose stuff I wish to read. Yeah. Thank you. All right. that one, I'll put the link in the show notes, but it's terry gaia.com/phantom obligation and I dunno why there's numbers counting up on the screen there, but there is, and we're onto 3 31, which is, fairly impressive.

I'm gonna move on if that's all right. Very quickly and, introduce Rhys's third and final article of today. This is, Matsuo at, and the title gives it all away. Introduction to the new HTML Elements, geo Location.

[00:38:03] Rhys Wynne: Location.

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: Very

[00:38:04] Rhys Wynne: cool. Right? Very cool. So if you've ever tried to do geolocation, usually have to use like some sort of JavaScript library or import something in which can work for a bit and then it breaks and it's a bit of a nightmare and it doesn't really work with anything.

it's now in HCML and it's now done at a browser site. yeah, it's not, I think it's only in Chrome yet, but basically if it's in Chrome, eventually it will. Yeah. In everything and you press a button and it pops up a window saying, do you want to, share your location. and you can do that. Yep.

And it works and it's great. And it's got a few examples on that page, which should, should work as you may not want to do online, but

[00:38:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:38:54] Rhys Wynne: you've got attributes.

[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you've got the usual choices, haven't you, like allow this time, which is kinda like this one time deal. You probably wanna do that if you've got no interest in coming back to the site or allow while visiting the site.

And then I think there's other options, isn't there? Like allow forever and, on, there's certainly background operations that you can do with apps. I dunno if it'll ever stretch into that because it's based in the browser. I'm not entirely sure, but,

[00:39:17] Rhys Wynne: yeah.

[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:39:18] Rhys Wynne: But yeah, it's, you could do things like you could you, there's attributes where you can watch it, which you basically, once you've.

Accepted it if this person moves around, follow them basically, and things like that.

[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It doesn't sound weird at all. no. But yeah, I can imagine if you've got like a, I don't know, a fitness website and you wanna track the bike ride that you're about to do or something, yeah. You don't want that at, you don't want that website open all the time, but you do want it to be monitoring what you do.

'cause that's part of the deal. yeah. Very cool. very cool Indeed. the interop that's going on between the browsers as you said, means that I'm sure that if this is in Chrome, it'll ship into nightly builds of Firefox and whatever else is out there in the very near future. But yeah, thank you for pointing that out.

That's absolutely great. sorry for joining late. you don't need to apologize. I canceled it last week, so you know, you, you win. okay, let's move on in that case, and let's go now into some word pressy stuff. I don't have a lot to say here really, other than that, hopefully if you've got your, WordPress installs set to auto update over minor releases, this will have happened already.

Maybe you got a slew of emails or something like that. But WordPress 6.9 0.1, which is a maintenance release, has been released. There's 49 bug fixes, which include things throughout Core the block editor and addressing. It says here multiple areas of WordPress including male classic themes, and you can see the full list.

I genuinely have nothing to say, except as always there's the great long list of people. We can't name them all. But. Thank you very

[00:40:55] Michelle Frechette: much. We could, but we're not going to.

[00:40:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we could, but they all are. and thank you for the people who contribute to that. Sue 6.9 0.1. Okay. This is very cool. This is very cool.

I think this is cooler than I thought about when I put it under the rundown. So if like me, you've been blogging lately, at some point it's quite likely that you'll link out to things and if your blog stays up for many years, it's quite likely that some of those links will just go stale over time.

websites come and they go and things get moved around and they're no longer there. Well, this apparently is called link rot when you've got a bunch of links. Spacing out from your website, so to external resources and they just disappear, which is a bit of a shame. so automatic have joined forces with the way back machine, the internet archives way back machine to offer a plugin called the, or called Internet Archive Way Back Machine Link Fixer.

It says it's quite a mouthful that, but it does what it says on the tin. it literally does what you'd imagine. I'm gonna read the blurb internet, the name of that plugin, I'm not gonna say it twice 'cause it's hard. This is a plugin designed to combat Link Rock. The gradual decla decay of web links as pages are moved, changed or taken down, it automatically scans your post content on save and across existing posts to detect outbound links for each one.

It checks the internet archives way back machine for an archive version and creates a snapshot if one isn't available. So it will even by the sounds of it. If there is no, or like a archive linked it, it will go and create one. I dunno how it's gonna do that. But anyway, this will automate that whole process for you and you can see, in the normal way it's on wordpress.org, you've got all the, the screenshots where you can see how it looks and what it does.

But I just think that's a really nice idea. so bravo to, yeah. Automatic on the way back machine. Anybody else wanna comment on that?

[00:42:57] Michelle Frechette: I think it's very cool. I

[00:42:58] Marc Benzakein: think it's awesome.

[00:42:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:00] Marc Benzakein: it's way cool. Yeah.

[00:43:02] Michelle Frechette: And knowing how many sites I've killed in the past. Yeah. just like let it fire then it would kind of be cool to be able to link back to those.

[00:43:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And presumably from that blurb that I just read, it sounds like it's gonna proactively just kind of keep this whole process going. Yeah. I don't know if I've got that right, but obviously it said on save and then it said, and across existing posts that reads to me like it's gonna slowly just go through your website, presumably on some sort of schedule and just keep checking.

On your behalf. And, and hopefully the internet archive will have more or less everything that's ever existed. So it will be able to find the approximation for it or the correct one. I dunno what that bit means about, creating one if it doesn't exist. I'm not entirely sure what that, but Can

[00:43:47] Michelle Frechette: you bring up Amber's comment though?

I think it's worth talking about.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can. Thank you. Yeah. so this is Amber Hinz from Equalize Digital. I've wondered how this Wayback machine plugin is different from a BLO broken link check, which a lot of hosts have banned because of causing performance issues. So I guess the thing here is that this will so do, in, the scenario that you are describing, Amber, do those plugins go and automatically find the way back machine, the post that, that, that is on the way back machine.

[00:44:21] Rhys Wynne: I, I think from what I'm just saying is a lot of the, a lot of the plugins that are literally just broken link checkers.

[00:44:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:44:29] Rhys Wynne: will just go through your site and they go, this link's broken, this link's broken, this link's broken, this link's broken. They're quite resource intensive. And I think when like the saving is probably not that resource intensive.

It probably just, you click save, it goes off to, an API within the internet archive says, is this available? Yes. Great. If not, make a snapshot and this is the URL for it so that it can f it can find it. I think it's more just checking everything to make sure it works and everything. if you've done any sort of like SEO, when you do a broken leg check, you do it offsite because it can break, you basically running a whole database.

You're checking everything within your database, so it can be really slow.

[00:45:23] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just read a little bit further down. So it says what the service is for, what the service and what it's used for. The internet archive way back machines is digital archive. I'm gonna read it quickly of the worldwide web.

The plugin uses their API to check for existing archive versions of webpage, create new snap such of pages, and verify the status of archive jobs. And then maybe this is more what you're into, Amber, what data is sent and when, so no personal data is sent or used to verify if way back machine services are online.

da. You've gotta put in an API key. It says, your access and secret keys are sent over and author. It's all getting into technical stuff. That actually probably isn't what you want. I'm gonna point you to this article. Amber, it's on the wordpress.org, repo. And, we lost smart for a minute there, but he's back.

he forgot to wave

[00:46:11] Michelle Frechette: his hands.

[00:46:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's alright. and I will link to it in the show notes, but you can probably find it by just googling this internet archive Wave back machine. link Fixer.

[00:46:22] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. My Inc has a really nice, PostIt or comment as well.

Okay.

[00:46:27] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. Right here we go.

this is pretty cool. It says, I wonder if it also has an option to delete the old screenshot if somebody wants to delete any old versions. Oh, yeah. Interesting. I don't know. I'm not entirely sure. That's a good point. the plugin description says, Amber makes me think it monitors over time. Yes. That's what I, that's the impression I got, Amber, is that it would just, obviously when you click publish or update on a post, I think it's doing a check then, but then I think it's just on some Chrome job going through, hopefully very gently, maybe like one post an hour or something like that.

Which sounds like what the broken link checkers do. Monitoring for broken links over time. Yeah. But again, as Ree says, I think it's doing more than that. It's not just reporting. There's a broken link. It's going and finding something, which means it's now not. Broken, even if it's not going to the original,

[00:47:15] Michelle Frechette: is there an option to just see whether or not you want it to like, Hey, I found this broken link.

Do you wanna take it out or do you wanna

[00:47:21] Nathan Wrigley: automatically scans? So I'm just reading off the, the website now. I'll just read here. automatically scans for outbound links in post content checks The way back machine for existing archives, creates new snapshots if no archive exists, redirects, broken or missing.

Links to archive versions, archives, your own posts on update. Works on both new and existing content. Helps maintain long-term SEO readability and SEO. What's this bit? Archives, your own post

[00:47:48] Rhys Wynne: on updates, I think. I think that means that when you hit update on the post, your post will go into the in internet archive.

[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. It's not archiving on your, okay. It's not like saying it's a draft or something. I was thinking that makes, no, that's not good. I

[00:48:02] Rhys Wynne: think

[00:48:02] Nathan Wrigley: that's what they mean by that. Okay. So every time you create an update, it pings the way back machine, the internet archive. Oh, that's nice. Okay. So,

[00:48:10] Rhys Wynne: and it's

[00:48:11] Nathan Wrigley: not so it's a proactive crawling mechanism by the sounds of it.

[00:48:14] Rhys Wynne: And I think based on what Mayen has said about it also has, I wonder if it has an option to delete an old screenshot, a snapshot. I don't think you would be able to delete snapshots from the internet archive. Yeah. I don't know. Like that would be, that's kind

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: of the point, isn't it? This

[00:48:29] Rhys Wynne: I mutual. That's kind of the point of it.

[00:48:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:48:31] Rhys Wynne: a mutual. But I think if you go and update an old post. It would potentially then go Right here's a snapshot from the 1st of February. Oh, I've updated the 1st of March.

[00:48:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:48:43] Rhys Wynne: Here's another snapshot from the 1st of March. 'cause you can see how a site changes over time.

[00:48:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Amber Hines, one last thrower that I see, she says, yeah, I know it does more.

I'm just curious about what the, continual process for monitoring links is. Yeah, I think you are, we're probably just as confused as you are to be honest. So, maybe we ought to check that out on another, episode, but, okay. Anyway, very nice. Thought that was a kind of cool thing and definitely worth mentioning.

Okay, we're gonna move on to, okay. This is gonna sound negative and I do apologize. Try to be positive. I'm a little bit confused about the, the education initiatives in the WordPress space. Not because any of them lack merit. I think they all lack incredible merit, but because there's a lot of them going on and I'm finding it hard to keep up with which things are going on, where, and under what name and what thing maps to what name, and what, what initiatives are going on underneath it.

And hopefully in the next few minutes you'll understand why I'm confused. So we

[00:49:46] Michelle Frechette: need an org chart for this.

[00:49:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. A spreadsheet to, yeah, I think you're, it sounds like a new

[00:49:50] Marc Benzakein: project for you, Michelle. Oh, I

[00:49:52] Michelle Frechette: don't think so. I, know

[00:49:55] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle. I don't think you're busy enough, Michelle. You've definitely not got a lot enough going on.

So here we go. Let's start here and then we'll move on through a bunch of different articles. So this one's called Community Education Initiatives Help Grow Connections with Educational Institutions. We'll begin here in the past two years, the WordPress Press community has launched a handful of educational in education initiatives.

These initiatives are designed to help introduce onboard and educate students into the WordPress Open Source project projects like, and here come a few. Campus Connect. WordPress Student Clubs offer students the opportunity for hands-on learning with within WordPress through workshops or ongoing meetups on campus.

WordPress credits. A contribution focused initiative offers onboarding and mentorship that helps learners satisfy academic requirements while directly contributing to WordPress. Now, I know that things are being put under this sort of umbrella, this, I think it's slash education, I think it is wordpress.org/education.

So it is kind of all gonna live there. But I'm wondering if you panelists, who are all into WordPress and all of that kind of stuff, do you know the difference between Campus Connect and WordPress Student clubs, for example, putting you all on the spot?

[00:51:06] Michelle Frechette: Well, campus Connect actually gives you college credits.

it's very much organized through the college itself as earning credits for learning WordPress as opposed to a student club, which is people gathering around the same information.

[00:51:19] Nathan Wrigley: But then interestingly, if we look on the same article, there's another hyperlink to a WordPress credits. Thing, which kind of feels like that's a separate thing as well, but you're quite right.

Yeah. There, there is, there, there's definite blue, sky, what do they call it when there's a Yeah. Blue sky. Let's go with that. there's, each of these has a d definitive boundary and it does one thing. I'm just sort, and it's also

[00:51:41] Michelle Frechette: a Venn diagram with a little bit of over overlap.

[00:51:43] Nathan Wrigley: There you go.

Exactly that. Right? Yeah, there's a bit of that. So, this is trying to, this is trying to make that whole process a little bit easier. What they're trying to do is say on this article, if you've got any contacts in the WordPress space and you are somehow overlapping in the education space, here's how you can connect institutions, meet ups and what have you.

So I'm gonna drop that into the, show notes. So if, you're into education in any way, shape, or form, and you would like more intel, then there's something there. So moving into a different thing, this is quite nice. this is UIC, which stands for the University of Illinois, Chicago. I confess, I've not heard of that.

Institution and the WordPress Foundation have launched the UIC Tech Solutions Open Source Fund. So we have another thing we've just added in. It's quite a mouthful. That one, isn't it? The UIC Tech Solutions Open Source Fund. Now, this is initiative to accelerate open source systems. It's something to do with UIC and automatic, have thrown in some money into the hat to make it so that you can get, it looks like AI learning.

You're gonna get a thousand dollars if you complete this program, but there's a cohort of, I think it's gonna be 40 students who are gonna receive that money, but there's. Basically, there's another thing here, and you may not have heard of it. If you're in this part of the world, it probably would've been quite nice to have heard of that, especially if you're into those things.

And then we've got this that I've just talked about seems to be exactly the same as this, but now it's being called AI Leaders Micro Credential. And so now we've got AI leaders, Micro-Credential, we've got UIC Tech Solutions, open Source Fund. We've got meet ups, WordPress credits, campus Connect, WordPress Student Clubs.

You can you see why I'm confused?

[00:53:34] Michelle Frechette: You just need to see the silos and how they overlap and what exactly each one does.

[00:53:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. My point being, there's no doubt every single one of these things has a value, like probably an incredible value. I am just confused and because I'm confused. I would imagine it's, well, it's probably really easy to understand, but There's a lot going on out there and I, for one, would kind of welcome it if there's somebody who can get in touch with me and explain in a nice, clear format how one begins and one ends and where one is and where the other one is, that would be really helpful. yeah, so I'm, I hope hopefully that didn't come across as a moan.

Hopefully that came across as, wow, there's so much going on that it's hard to keep a track of. I, and, yeah,

[00:54:22] Rhys Wynne: I think Tacho raises a very good point in the comments.

[00:54:25] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Where

[00:54:26] Rhys Wynne: may, maybe it's me. But

[00:54:30] Nathan Wrigley: is it this one?

[00:54:31] Rhys Wynne: Yes.

[00:54:31] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:54:32] Rhys Wynne: And I'm just

[00:54:33] Michelle Frechette: like, no. I'm gonna ask Marc, is a thousand dollars crazy in the United States?

Nope.

[00:54:38] Marc Benzakein: No?

[00:54:38] Rhys Wynne: Okay.

[00:54:39] Marc Benzakein: No,

[00:54:39] Rhys Wynne: this is probably gone. I mean,

[00:54:41] Marc Benzakein: your books for one course are gonna cost you a thousand dollars, and those are online books these days. You

[00:54:47] Michelle Frechette: don't, and I was paying a thousand dollars for my ma per credit for my master's degree 20 years ago. So,

[00:54:52] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I would've assumed that's what Tacho meant, that's an inadequate amount of money.

Is that what you were positive?

[00:54:59] Michelle Frechette: I thought he meant it was too much. I thought he was

[00:55:01] Nathan Wrigley: saying it was today. Yeah,

[00:55:01] Marc Benzakein: I thought, I actually thought the same thing. I thought the same thing.

[00:55:04] Michelle Frechette: Wait, we need some clarification from you, taco

[00:55:06] Nathan Wrigley: Tacho. Tell us what you think. I thought that you were saying it's not enough.

But I think Michelle and Marc think that maybe you are thinking that's a little bit too

[00:55:13] Rhys Wynne: much. Okay. I got confused. I think this is like you are paid to complete that course.

[00:55:21] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay.

[00:55:22] Michelle Frechette: Well now have

[00:55:22] Nathan Wrigley: 3

[00:55:22] Michelle Frechette: million

[00:55:22] Nathan Wrigley: after you complete that course.

[00:55:24] Rhys Wynne: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. but the money goes to the students. It is not them.

Oh,

[00:55:28] Michelle Frechette: okay.

[00:55:28] Rhys Wynne: A.

[00:55:29] Michelle Frechette: It's not, I was, I perhaps was confused then.

[00:55:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. let me put it on this screen. So you see none of this is, I was just gonna say, and this

[00:55:38] Marc Benzakein: is

[00:55:38] Michelle Frechette: prove, oh, they earn thousand Nathan's

[00:55:40] Marc Benzakein: point right here. This right here proves

[00:55:42] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan's

[00:55:42] Marc Benzakein: point. Yeah. Point. Yeah. So

[00:55:43] Nathan Wrigley: here we go. So this is from the UIC.

So this is the fund that's been, given by automatic who sponsored with this one particular university. and we've got this line here. students who complete the course earn a thousand dollars. Ah, so it feels like it's money Yeah. To do some open source training, particularly aligned in the AI space.

Okay. I can see why automatic would wish to fund that particular thing. 'cause that's all the rage at the moment. And getting a young cohort of AI enabled WordPresses is really valuable. Gotcha. so sounds like there's 40 automatic

[00:56:16] Michelle Frechette: is paying for the course itself, so you're

[00:56:18] Nathan Wrigley: after there's no money out paid.

no, I think, yeah, no, I think they just give you a re reward, a reward.

[00:56:23] Michelle Frechette: Right, but they're not charging you also to take the course. It's not like

[00:56:25] Nathan Wrigley: a reimbursement. no. I don't believe so. Yeah, I think you, you somehow, maybe you have to upfront the money at the beginning and what have you, and then, you get the money at the end and, anyway, there we go.

so is Tacho still here, students Insane. Would, virtually anything for Oh no. Tacho did think it was too much.

[00:56:43] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Okay. Okay. That

[00:56:45] Nathan Wrigley: I was totally wrong. Alright.

[00:56:46] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. but Michelle and I were wrong because we were thinking that the student is paying the thousand dollars as opposed to the student getting,

[00:56:53] Michelle Frechette: but I'll also tell you that students in the United States will not do anything for 50 to a hundred euro.

I mean, maybe they'll like shovel your sidewalk or mow your grass. yeah. But they're not gonna take an entire course for a thousand dollars. They're gonna expect a lot more at the end of that.

[00:57:08] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. No, yeah. People in the united thousand is good, is what I

[00:57:11] Michelle Frechette: mean. Yeah.

[00:57:11] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. They're very, They have very high expectations of what they're

[00:57:16] Michelle Frechette: trying to work. Well, our cost of living is ridiculous over here too though. And our cost living

[00:57:19] Marc Benzakein: isri. Yeah. I'm in California. You're in New York. You know what

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: cost of living is? I think we get the two highest education space in the United States.

You can basically add a couple of zeros to anything we have Absolutely. Over this side of the, the pond. Okay. Anyway,

[00:57:31] Michelle Frechette: sorry for pausing the confusion.

[00:57:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no. But I'm glad that we had that confusion 'cause it forced us to talk about it and figure it out. So anyway,

[00:57:39] Michelle Frechette: and, Amber has it exactly right in her comment.

[00:57:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Lovely. She to do it on I was understanding it. So Amber says Amber, hes back in the comments. I was understanding it as it pays the student to do it. Right. I thought it was free to take it though.

[00:57:54] Michelle Frechette: You're

[00:57:55] Nathan Wrigley: correct,

[00:57:55] Michelle Frechette: Amber.

[00:57:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. No, that's what we're saying now. Well reward after completing it, but it's free to do.

Have I got that right?

[00:58:03] Marc Benzakein: I mean, the one thing that I think here, the one thing that I think here is that all of these things, as confusing as they may be, they all address this idea of we need to get more young people into WordPress. Right? That's really what it boils down to, and that's the key. And everybody has their own idea about how to go about doing.

And somebody needs to come along. I don't know who, but somebody needs to come along and say, okay, let's make sense of all these ideas and bring it together. But the goal is still let's not, take away or lose focus on the fact that the goal is still to bring young people into WordPress, and that's what this is all about.

[00:58:39] Michelle Frechette: And AI is a great way to do it.

[00:58:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head Marc because I think these. So a few years ago we didn't have these overlapping initiatives. They just simply didn't exist. And then things like Campus Connect, and what have you came along and obviously they're being run by different people and they've got different outcomes.

but it's exactly what you said, Marc, I think there's this knowledge that. unless we do something about it, and unless we attract people, I don't know, under the age of 30 and lower down to come into the WordPress space, that's gonna have an impact in a decade. Or half a decade's time.

And so there's all these initiatives, they're all happening at the same time. but that just means it's quite hard for people like me, like our panel. To get a grip of which one does what's that thing again? and so the clarity around that would be quite useful I suppose.

[00:59:29] Michelle Frechette: So the world's worst web developer put the last comment in.

Nice. First as an old person's platform. There are other things that are more attractive to young people like ai. So I actually saw a claim yesterday that counters what we'd seen private prior to that, which is that, that a lot of, people are checking your resume for example, or your CV to see if it's been done by AI and automatically checking if it has.

I saw a claim yesterday that's reversed now that because they're checking to see if you're using AI and they're putting you at the top of the list because they want to see that you have AI skills in a lot of these jobs. So I'm interesting. I don't know how, I don't know if that's true or not, but that is a claim that I saw yesterday online.

Yeah. And I was like, I wish I could go back to where it was, but I saw it fleetingly so interesting

[01:00:14] Nathan Wrigley: though. I sold, and by the way,

[01:00:15] Marc Benzakein: who are you calling? Old.

[01:00:18] Michelle Frechette: I know I'm one,

[01:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'll take it. so long as I don't get really old then, that's just an insult. But I'm older than you,

[01:00:27] Michelle Frechette: Nathan.

[01:00:28] Nathan Wrigley: I'll take that.

Take that any day of the week. da. So yeah, tacho is back in, the comment got, truncated to be said, but I really dislike that we have seasoned contributors living in poverty and students getting a course fee and then a thousand dollars grant for getting free education caps, getting free education.

and yeah, okay, so bit of clarity hopefully here. Mayan, or, I dunno how you pronounce that, Mayan, sorry. Thank you, Mayan. he says, yes, the course will be free to take and, upon completion, students will get a thousand dollars Goal is to get more and more young people into WordPress and it got truncated and more students may end up joining it.

Because they will learn ai. all of you are old. I,

[01:01:17] Michelle Frechette: yeah, I own it. I own it.

And, I think Rhys is, tell

[01:01:22] Michelle Frechette: me that all the time. I think Rhys is still in his thirties though, so let's take

[01:01:25] Rhys Wynne: break. Well, I appreciate that. I am,

[01:01:30] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna guess that beard alone took at least 30 years to conjure.

[01:01:36] Rhys Wynne: no.

this beard was my. I need to be able to look like I can buy alcohol

[01:01:43] Nathan Wrigley: underneath their, underneath those baby face. Yeah.

[01:01:47] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:01:49] Nathan Wrigley: young people are rejecting ai. this goes either way though, doesn't it? I think some young people, it depends on the group for sure. Some people clearly aren't. I, my, we all know what I think about ai.

I have great reservations about it. I would like it all to go back in a box, although it's marvelous in certain respects. So here we go. Young people are rejecting ai. They have a lot of environmental concerns and ethical concerns. I can only tell you about the young people in my life. They are all aligned with that comment.

The young people that I have in my life, they don't want AI to be the thing. they're terribly worried about the future that they're going to be living in. Should AI take, every single job out there? and let's keep going. Tacho, it seems that they are saying, you see, even with reading the article, we can't pause what the article says.

tacho, it seems like they're saying that free education is not sufficient motivation to take the course,

[01:02:48] Michelle Frechette: you to bribe them with a thousand dollars also.

[01:02:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there you go. And then there's a comment about Rhys's beard and alcohol. Yeah, that's why I stopped drinking alcohol. Rhys. I can't grow a beard.

It's gotta be beards and alcohol, hasn't it? The name of this episode, oh

[01:03:03] Marc Benzakein: gosh. Beard

[01:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: beards and booze. Let's go with that.

[01:03:06] Marc Benzakein: There you go.

[01:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: And booze,

[01:03:08] Michelle Frechette: I have no beard.

[01:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: No, I kind of keep mine to, manageable. Like I could strike a match on mine. that's the goal.

[01:03:17] Michelle Frechette: I mean, I'm a woman in her fifties, so I do pluck a few here and there, but,

[01:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: AI is like politics as the webinar.

You have the ones that love it and the other ones that are against it. Absolutely.

[01:03:27] Michelle Frechette: A hundred

[01:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: percent.

[01:03:29] Marc Benzakein: I mean,

[01:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: we're not

[01:03:29] Marc Benzakein: supposed to talk about it. Like, you're not supposed to talk about politics,

[01:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: fight club. That's just, okay, let's move on. So that was a whole bunch of stuff all about education and what have you.

And if you are confused like me, let's, see if in the next year or two it becomes more obvious. but

[01:03:46] Michelle Frechette: let's also agree that there's multiple ways into WordPress Indeed. And so some people who are young people will come into WordPress in spite of ai and others will come because of ai. And so.

Opening up more than one route will, will help bring more people from diverse populations in.

[01:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:04:03] Michelle Frechette: I think that's the bottom line.

[01:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. last comment about AI and it's this, there we go. That sums it up perfectly for me. tacho says, I love ai. Full stop and I hate it with a passion. Yeah. There you go.

I can

[01:04:17] Michelle Frechette: apply that sentence to a few things in my life

[01:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: right now. Yeah, no sitting on the fence there. So, okay, moving on the screen now we've got the repository. this article entitled WordPress Meetup, organizers Back Revamp Plans, but Warn Infrastructure Must, must Catch Up. So I'll quickly summarize.

if you've never been to a WordPress meetup, think of it as an evening long Word Camp. The idea is that you show up and for a couple of hours you would possibly, sit as an attendee. Probably watch a couple of presentations, maybe have a bit of networking time and it's all probably done in the same room and it's city based and so hopefully you can travel to one that's fairly close.

They kind of took a bit of a hit, massive hit. In fact, in the UK at least anyway, during COVID, never really recovered. There are a few going on, but they seem, all the ones that I've been to anyway, follow a very similar formula. You show up as a register, as a attendee. You show up, watch a few people talk about something, which hopefully aligns with what you're trying to do.

And then, have a chat with people, network, and then leave. And the idea here is, that's been proposed is wouldn't it be good if rather than show up and watch, it was show up and do. So, things where the content enables you to interact. So I'll just quickly see if I can find the correct sentence.

Yeah. So the idea, a roadmap, has been proposed, which plans to expand the traditional meetup format beyond talks and social events, to include hands on sessions where attendees can contribute to WordPress and connect with make teams, which is lovely, really nice idea. But both Rhys and I and Michelle and Marc, I'm sure in the past, has been involved with these kind of things that, that's a really nice sentiment.

But the article here is also proposing the point of how do you actually do that? Like if you're an organizer or an event, how would you make that happen? It can happen at Word camps because there's lots of time to plan. There's probably some sort of reliable wifi that's been paid for probably people are gonna show up with a laptop.

They've probably taken time off work. So, yada, yada. this is not gonna be the case for laptops. So really what this article is saying is great idea, but how on earth do we implement that? And I think that's a good sentiment. We would need, I think, a lot more direction, possibly from on high.

Yeah. to give us ideas about how that would be done. Rhys, it sounds like you are wanting to

[01:06:48] Rhys Wynne: say I Yeah. This is one of those things 'cause we're, different in AM work compared to work, work. WLDN in that we don't have speakers. We are literally a coworking.

[01:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:07:00] Rhys Wynne: So we are literally Friday afternoon we go here.

We're an afternoon based word cap, WordPress meetup. And you could just come along with your laptop. And we coworker we discuss the network. The reason why we do it like that is 'cause all the organizers burn themselves out, and that's why we, that's why we've kept it very simple.

We go to the same place. We have an OI, we put it this way, it's a coworking space. Nobody really minds that we are there kind of thing. Yeah. we're kind of a little bit under the radar a little bit. Somebody did show up and went to them and said, where's the meetup? And they were like, we don't know.

[01:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: It really is under the radar.

[01:07:44] Rhys Wynne: Yeah, we, yeah. but we just, we, that's the way in which we do it because everybody involved in it burnt out and it just, this feels like somebody going a little bit. 'cause it would probably be the meetup organizers. Planning this, and, going, okay. So, they talk about contributing, right?

You need somebody to go, if somebody wants to contribute to WordPress, you need somebody who is a Meetup organizer who is also doing con, knows how to contribute. and because, 'cause I've done both the coding and like the forum support when I've done contributing of Word camps. When I did the, the actual coding, I got a patch into Core, but it literally took me six hours to set my laptop up.

[01:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:08:43] Rhys Wynne: And it was, it, and, just, so that it worked. 'cause the way in which I work on a day-to-day basis is completely different to the way in which you are supposed to set up and use track and all that. And all that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's. It's all very well saying that, and as well as what you said, Nathan, in terms of the, the, the infrastructure, the wifi, setting everything up and everything.

It's the people as well. It's the organizers 'cause it would be us leading this and or teaching them how to do something in WordPress or whatever. I mean

[01:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you get a real range of people showing up to these things as well. Exactly. And so it'd be really hard to kind of figure out what the content would be that would

[01:09:31] Rhys Wynne: be

[01:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: meaningful and not just really like, some expert shows up and it's just, oh my goodness, we're doing 1 0 1 blog posting.

Are we, that's not entertaining. Yeah. It feels a little bit like saying, do you know what we should do? Let's run a So nothing to do with WordPress. Somebody just has this bright idea. There should be a marathon in our town. Let's set up a marathon. Because all we need to do is get a load of people to come here and run.

yeah, but what about all the things like the medical stuff and the ticketing and the organizing the event and the, yada, yada. A million things that need to happen if you're gonna run a marathon. So, same thing here. It's a lovely laudable idea, but the realities and the proclivities kind of feel that it might be much harder to do than, certainly across all of the meet ups and tacho.

Makes a good point. Oh, it's got lost. Where's it gone? There was something about nine people. There we go. Yeah. He said, I loved it when we had two or three speakers a night and a hundred plus attendees. I happily put the work that was needed in, nowadays it's way harder to motivate myself for a nine person meet up.

And this is, the problem. I don't think this would be a sticking plaster solution for that. Just saying, let's do contributor based stuff isn't gonna fix it. I don't think, at least

[01:10:53] Rhys Wynne: from an n from a Manchester meter perspective, nine meter, nine person meter would be our biggest ever.

Like, that would be our biggest thing since before COVID.

[01:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: Right? Right.

[01:11:03] Rhys Wynne: We, because we guess what, which is why we did it in such a way, 'cause we try to get the speakers of the, and the evening meetup and it struggled. Yeah. So this is why we then said, right, it's a mid-afternoon coworking thing and I realize we eliminate everybody who can't work from, who.

Who have to go to an office, who have a day job, and it does kind of limit who shows up to this. And, but at the same time, it means there is a meetup, there is something going on. They can say if you are in Manchester and you do WordPress, come along to this on a Friday afternoon.

[01:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: so there's a variety of different comments in here.

So, Elliot, who we mentioned his blog post earlier, oh, it's now moved up. where's it gone? Where's it gone? Was it gone? The comments are coming in so fast when I try to click on one. There's another one and it bumps it up. The, the cube. Very

[01:12:01] Marc Benzakein: active group

[01:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: today. Yeah. It's really nice here. Thank you for all your comments.

By the way. I don't say that often enough, but we're very pleased that you guys are commenting. Okay. The thoughts of contributing. came to mind for our meetup, but the logistics proved to be impo prove to be impossible. Not everyone has a laptop, wifi seating, et cetera. And there was something a bit like that.

I saw another comment, which was, you could spend two hours just setting up the laptop for the, so it's hard, you come to a contributor day on a big word camp anyway. Gosh, I don't, I can't circle that square, but I thought it was,

[01:12:41] Rhys Wynne: yeah,

[01:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: it was worth mentioning we only ever have one thing per show that captures the, the comments.

But today we had two. So, I'm feeling this is one of the most successful episodes that we're ever have, have ever had, so that's really nice. Thank you for your commentary. is there anything that's popped up in the comments that you think worthy of bringing onto the screen?

[01:13:01] Rhys Wynne: very quickly. I think KO's comment was about an organizer.

What he said was, as a, he split over two.

[01:13:07] Nathan Wrigley: This one, as an organizer, what's the difference between finding a speaker and finding a workshop lead? I don't suppose anything really. I suppose it's more the who's gonna show up and what are they gonna bring with them. Most of our attendees at W-P-L-D-N, they don't have a laptop.

They're just showing up and,

[01:13:23] Michelle Frechette: it also depends on how you're selling it to people and how you're organi. it's not enough to just say it's a workshop. You have to put a lot more thought and energy into how you are.

[01:13:32] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:13:32] Michelle Frechette: Sending that information out to other people so they know how to prepare to be there.

Yeah.

[01:13:36] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. Like, like, like, like, like what Nathan said, it's like there is no, not everybody who shows up at W-P-L-D-N brings a laptop. And if they,

[01:13:46] Marc Benzakein: well, and this goes to the comment James made, which I think we skipped, which is what I learned from our end of the year gather. People just wanted to network.

And I think that's a huge, part of it, I know it is for me when I go to meetups is really just to network and help people if they have issues. But that's part of networking as far as I'm concerned. yeah. and, I think that doing things the way that you do at risk is the way that makes sense to me for Meetup is just don't have anything formal.

Yeah. People show up and you get some networking in, you get some work in, you get, you get some Yeah. All these things that, that help you to connect and that's what builds the community in the first place. Yeah. Is that connection. So. And it's a lot easier than trying to find speakers because I've done both and let me tell you.

[01:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:14:45] Michelle Frechette: finding speakers com helps you find speakers, by the way.

[01:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. we've made use of that. Yeah. Thank you. Michelle's resource, wp speakers.com is worth,

[01:14:53] Michelle Frechette: but also I'll. Like my meetup in here for Rochester is still online. Like we went online during the pandemic. It's still online because my mobility has decreased since we were meeting in person.

And if I don't have somebody to help me, 'cause I can't lift my scooter and assemble it out of my trunk by myself, then I can't run a meetup offsite. So mine will always be online until, unless and until somebody else steps up to coordinate it.

[01:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe this is part of the educational piece that's like, there's this bigger picture of trying to make this whole thing work through all these different initiatives so that there are some people But younger blood so that those kind of activities can happen. okay. So there was a lot there. I don't think we've got the measure of it exactly, but hopefully the, hopefully some of these kind of initiatives will take off and maybe there will be some more kind of contributing type work, but it also feels like there's a.

Significant impediments to making it just work at the sort of click of a fingers. The ideation is where we're at. Oh, and just out of, just here, there seem to be quite a few, people who also were just railing against the meetup.com platform. meetup.com is the sort of defacto platform that, charter program meetups use.

It's free, if you are one of the charter program meetups. If you're not, then obviously you'll have to pay, but, it is, it has. It has drawbacks and it has, bonus things as well. It's got some good and some bad. And obviously things like gather press, which Patricia, who was in the comment she's been involved in rather a lot.

it would be great if that became a, like for like swap out and everybody could gather, on Gather Press home built WordPress solution for the exact same thing. So, okay. That was another point that got raised. Righty ho. it is. We're gonna have to race. I'm sorry about this. I'm gonna commiserate the fact that the community has lost, well, not lost, that's not true.

[01:16:50] Michelle Frechette: he's just moving into a different

[01:16:51] Nathan Wrigley: world. Sorry, Nick, it sounds like your demise, but, it's, maybe it'll be the making of you and wonderful things will happen. I apologize. Nick Diego, who, has been on the podcast several times, he is leaving automatic. He, obviously has been tinkering a lot with AI and has decided that he's got, got some, new pastures to, to check out.

Let's just put it that way. And so he has left automatic and, I think there's a bit of a hole there to be filled. So hopefully somebody else will come in and take whatever role that he had. But, thank you, Nick, for your contributions, particularly to this show. I really appreciate that.

[01:17:26] Marc Benzakein: And good luck to you

[01:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: Indeed.

Yeah. Good luck Indeed. Yeah. Right now the, okay, so you know what I was saying? my RSS dwindled. It's now really short. Basically, the. The vast majority of WordPress content that I am receiving through my RSS feed. And you've just gotta trust me when I say that I have got more or less everything that I can find in the WordPress space in my RSS feed reader.

So much AI is now, that's just like, more than half the content appears to be around ai. And so we'll just cover off a few things because time is short. I don't think we'll have a chance to get into them. That's handy. 'cause I don't understand any of it anyway. but here we go. So the first one is from Felix, who is no longer, employed at Google, but is still contributing.

Thank you Felix. Appreciate it. proposal for merging WP AI client into WordPress. 7.0 an API agnostic client. So in other words, it is not like clawed or OpenAI. You bring your own key and what have you, into WordPress core. I'll just let that sink in for a bit. What do we think about that first comment?

No, thank you. On here and then big it joined in care to elaborate and it would, you don't normally get this many comments, but look, AI is so interesting to so many people. I think probably if people want it, we should have it in there, but I definitely don't want it to be aligned to any particular institution, company or anything like that.

Any thoughts quickly?

[01:19:10] Rhys Wynne: Oh, is this a plugin territory?

[01:19:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's kind of that, that I think is probably where my head goes. Yeah. But I think that I Do you know what Rhys, I think the more weeks that go by, the more, this is an indispensable thing in just every developer's toolkit, isn't it? Is anybody who's developing, like any significant proportion of people who are developing, not using AI anymore, it feels like everybody's jumped on in some way, maybe some more than others.

So maybe that whole 80 20 argument has flipped. Maybe 80% of the developers out there are using this stuff habitually, and so it kind of does belong anyway. there's a proposal by Felix if you think AI belongs in core. You can have your say, call for feedback and testing is, the instructions are down here.

Or you could go and make a comment and, join in the, the phone over there. right. Okay. Next one. If you're a.com user, now there's a Claude connector. That means that, if you're a Claude user and you've got a wordpress.com account, it's possible for you to now ask Claude's stuff about your WordPress website.

So in the past, it, Claude had to make assumptions. Now it can get into the backend of your.com account and tell you things like, which is the most popular post. And essentially it can suck data out of your WordPress website should you allow that to happen. So that's interesting. Also interesting is TechCrunch very, rarely writes about WordPress.

but that thing was apparently important enough. This connection between Claude Code and, WordPress got an article. I don't know why the headline has gone. where's the headline gone? There used to be a headline at the top there saying, oh, is that it now? Is that what you get? Yeah. You just get this tiny little headline down there that's curious.

Anyway, it was mentioned in TechCrunch. So obviously, all the, all the AI makes this stuff very fascinating. Jonathan Boser has an interesting spin on AI this week. He's clearly an open source advocate. I dunno how disgruntled he is with the, the open ais and the Claudes and the Anthropics and all of that sort of stuff out there.

But he has created what's called the WP O Lama model provider. And I'll just read from the blurb down at the bottom. It's a WordPress plugin that, provides local and cloud AI model support O lama for the WordPress AI client. So if you don't wish to entrust your information or all of that to these big giant companies who, let's be honest, we don't know if they're gonna exist into the year 2027.

Feels like they've got quite a few debts to pay then. maybe going for local, LLMs and things like that is your thing. There's an article here. and a plugin, which will help you do that. And there's some experiments in the word. I'm sorry, I'm just talking. I hope you three don't mind. I'm just gonna go through this quickly and then you can sum it up at the end.

if you want. There's some AI experiments which are going around at the moment. Jeffrey Paul produced this article on the fourth of Feb. and they would like some intuition as to how much of this stuff is interesting. Maybe some of it should go into the AI experiments plugin or go into core perhaps.

So they are as follows. they are typing ahead suggestions. So this is the idea that AI would auto complete a sentence for you, or maybe the next sentence based upon the previous paragraphs. Maybe that's of interest to you. This next one, kind of scares me a little bit. It's the ability to get an AI to create mod, comment replies.

The UX that they've got kind of suggests that you don't need to read the comment, you just click a button and it replies on your behalf. Maybe I've misunderstood that, but that seemed a bit peculiar. Marc down feeds extended AI providers. So that feels a bit like what Jonathan was talking about, the ability to add in a whole bunch of different, providers and more.

And is that all done with ai? no. Here we go. This the last one. Yeah, this is the last one. This week. This week. This is AI guidelines for WordPress. If you're a contributor, and we now know that more or less every contributor is probably using ai. There are now some guidelines if you're gonna contribute to core and things like that, about what it is that you must be aware of in terms of ai.

So the most important bullet point is the top. If you're contributing and you are using ai, you are responsible for your contributions. And AI can assist, but it isn't a contributor. You have to disclose any assistance that you receive from an ai. license compatibility matters. So obviously, if you can't be certain that what your, AI is outputting isn't, I don't know, ethical, moral, legal, then you need to somehow figure that out and a bunch of other stuff as well.

That was this week. there's probably another bunch of articles being posted as we speak, which are, equal to that as well. There's a lot in the AI space. let's just put it that way and breathe. Anybody on ai, please say something. I have to have a drink.

[01:24:24] Rhys Wynne: I think the only thing, which is very interesting, very quickly is what it says about the non code assets.

this could be interesting because what happens if somebody generate, I mean, I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but if you generate an image that looks like a Star Wars character and then Walt Disney comes,

[01:24:48] Nathan Wrigley: goes, yeah.

[01:24:50] Rhys Wynne: it, yeah. it's that sort of thing where it's like, okay, so you are responsible.

I'm. images could be generated and put as being contributions. And I mean, I'm fairly, I'm using this as a very, kind of, this is probably not going to happen. Somebody would recognize a storm trooper, but it just, it does scream that there will be, there'll be something down the line where something gets missed.

[01:25:21] Nathan Wrigley: Did you see the, did you see the, there was a lawsuit somewhere in the United States. it wasn't very recently, but it was last year at some point where the lawyer, appears to have used an AI to, well it turns out, create fake, precedent. Yeah. and they went into the courthouse and they read out this, apparently, this justification for winning the lawsuit.

And it turns out it was just completely made up. It's kind of like on that level, isn't it? if you contribute something. you can't just say the AI did it you've got a, so here they're very clearly saying whatever you put in, whether it's an image or a whatever it may be, the box stops with you.

[01:26:02] Rhys Wynne: It's, the, the person from web, west Police in the UK a few weeks ago lost their job because they used ai. Because what they did was they were looking at, McCaby Tel Aviv football fans for a game against, I think it was Aston Villa. They were a team based in Birmingham, and they were saying, should McCaby Tel Aviv fans go because they think they could be a security risk based on, the political situation.

And, the person asked AI all the cases in which there had been trouble with McCarley Tel Aviv funds. And they said that there were, there was a game between McCartel Aviv and West Ham in Europe. Where they had trouble. That game never took place.

[01:26:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. But it was so full

[01:26:50] Rhys Wynne: of

[01:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: trouble.

[01:26:52] Rhys Wynne: yeah. no, that game wasn't even scheduled to take place.

[01:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's just

[01:26:58] Rhys Wynne: hysterical, isn't it? And, yeah, the, the police officer used that as an example for why

[01:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[01:27:06] Rhys Wynne: They should ban the fans even though that they, the AI hallucinated that game.

[01:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, this is my fear with the whole AI stuff, like code and everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's great, the

[01:27:16] Marc Benzakein: hallucinations. Yeah. It still hallucinates like crazy. Yeah.

[01:27:21] Nathan Wrigley: But the hallucinations just smuggling themselves into whole paragraphs of actual content. And then there's just this one weird little sentence of just made up nonsense that nobody spots,

[01:27:35] Marc Benzakein: Okay. I'm gonna do another shout out to Gina.

which is really funny because she is not super, She'll tell you, she's not super technically proficient, but she does, she's a nurse practitioner and she does use AI for some things. And one of the things that she does, which I think is actually brilliant is, and anyone can do it, is she says, okay, now that you've given me this information, cite the sources.

And that's all she has to do is just say site sources. And then she'll go and she'll look at the sources to make sure that they're accurate. And it's like, okay, if you're gonna use AI to do something, treat it like a human being. Cite your sources. Distrust

[01:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: it. Exactly, yeah.

[01:28:16] Marc Benzakein: Distrust it and question everything, whatever that, that thing is, trust but verify or whatever.

[01:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:28:21] Marc Benzakein: And which I never really understood that saying, because it all felt like a contradiction. But that's really what you're doing. you're. Trusting it to a degree, but you're still, you still wanna verify, that's the responsible thing. You're basically talking to

[01:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: a 4-year-old, aren't you?

When you're ai you've gotta trust it with that level of, competence and capacity to just make stuff up.

[01:28:47] Marc Benzakein: and this first bullet point reminds me of a few years ago, I got pulled over by a highway patrol officer. I was towing a trailer, and the chains were hitting the ground and sparking on the ground.

[01:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[01:28:57] Marc Benzakein: And I, and when I got pulled over the highway patrol officer, I said to him, I said, well, I'm not the one who hooked up the trailer. U-Haul hooked it up. He says, yeah, but who's the one driving?

[01:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, it's you, right? Yeah. Who's the one contributing in this case? yeah, by the way.

[01:29:12] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, good point.

[01:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: you wanna write this one down? It was probably about 28 minutes. I know you're gonna play some of this stuff to Gina. nice little sentence. You are to just, there you say, shout out to Gina. She's not super. That was what you said. I'm just saying.

[01:29:26] Marc Benzakein: Oh, no, she okay. Okay. Wait, hold on. She's super, she's amazing.

Okay. I knew. Wait,

[01:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: you go play. I

[01:29:34] Marc Benzakein: think I'm gonna be editing the video and showing her all of this. Okay. Because I'm not, I don't trust you now. So

[01:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: that's not gonna be the tight episode. We're definitely gonna, we want, Gina to enjoy the show. right. Okay. So last couple of things very quickly, just before we end, if you are a WooCommerce user.

You've got a new version, 10.5 you can read on the blog what that's about. and Bobette, who has been on this show a few times, a little while ago, a couple of years ago, she, managed to work out that if you wanted to change the name of a block in the block editor and you needed to use a keyboard to make that happen, you had to use 14 different clicks to make it happen.

You had to hit the keyboard 14 times. The reason I'm bringing this up, and I can't find the article now, but I think this has been merged, into core in the, presumably in the 7.0 release. So just a little hat tip, things do move even if they go sometimes very slowly. So well done. Props to you for getting that in.

just couple of things. Word, camp Asia. If you're going to that, there's a article which has come up about things that you can do if you are in and around the Mumbai area. And we are really out of time, but if you've got a Substack account or you've ever set a substack account up, there was a data breach, which, somebody managed to, I dunno whether the exfiltrated, I dunno what they got out, but it was 663,000, account holder records and email addresses and profile details and things like that.

It's a lot. So if you've got an account over there, you might just wanna check what your password is and whatnot. And, that's it. I think, yeah, I'll mention these other things, which were just on the screen briefly there for a second. I'll push those forwards into next week. So there we go. That's it.

That's all we've got time for. we didn't spend quite as long on the AI as I had imagined, and I'm very glad of that because we talked about blogging instead.

[01:31:32] Michelle Frechette: Woohoo. That was fun.

[01:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Wasn't it? Maybe that's what we should do.

[01:31:36] Marc Benzakein: Which is, anti ai.

[01:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. It's

[01:31:39] Michelle Frechette: as hard move. Let's move AI as you

[01:31:40] Marc Benzakein: can get.

[01:31:41] Michelle Frechette: Let's move AI to the end. So if we've run out of time

[01:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, let's do that. We

just

[01:31:45] Michelle Frechette: sacrifice that.

[01:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly though, if you, like I said, if you like me, it is sucking all the oxygen out the room. It is really interesting how profoundly. Important. It seems to be, up at the top, in terms of like the leadership, but also at grassroots, the people that are writing code and plugins.

It seems to be really all the things. So yeah, I'm sure that won't change, but yeah, maybe we'll change that in the future. Alright, it's time for the hand wave thing that we do. If you wanna give us your little Yay. Give a smile. Everybody smile. Thank you. So I'm gonna say thank you to Rhys. I'm gonna say thank you to Marc and I'm gonna say thank you to co-host Michelle Ette.

I'm also gonna say thank you to you lot. That was probably more comments I think than we've ever had. There was loads this time around.

[01:32:29] Michelle Frechette: That's great.

[01:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: And yeah, really great. It's two

[01:32:31] Marc Benzakein: weeks worth.

[01:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's probably three weeks worth if I'm being honest. but thank you for making those comments.

And if you're lurking in the background and you don't have some comments, we appreciate you being here as well. We'll be back this time next week, so stay tuned. See you next week. Bye bye Byebye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.