This Week in WordPress #388

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 388. Entitled The Longest Two Minutes of My Life. It was recorded on Monday, the 9th of November, 2026.

Today I'm joined by three fabulous people. I'm joined by Cami MacNamara and by Lesley Sim and somewhat briefly by Robert Jacobi.

We talk a lot about WordPress stuff, specifically about this new random function, which has been added to all WordPress websites in 7.2. I don't know why, but it's got people really heated up. They don't really seem to want random.

There's SVG icons.

There's a new exploration exploring where we should put notifications in our websites.

There's loads about WordCamp, so we mentioned a tonne of them at the end, but also should there be swagger, WordCamp events, and seems like a lot of you think they really shouldn't.

We also talk about Nexcess and the fact that they're bundling up the products, but it's still, from the panel's point of view seems like a really difficult to understand proposition.

The WPOCC has run an event alongside WordCamp Canada.

And there's loads more stuff as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

It is the longest two minutes of your life. that was Rob Robert Jacobi said in the private chat Whilst, whilst we were recording this, although Robert, I have to say I could see all of your faces. You were doing this, you were going, there was a bit of this going. Oh yeah. Little master

[00:01:38] Robert Jacobi: the music. I won't, disagree.

[00:01:42] Nathan Wrigley: Nobody's ever done that before. 'cause that music is interminable. welcome, welcome. It is episode number 388 of this week in WordPress. We're joined by three fabulous people in the WordPress space, one of whom is on a very strict schedule. Robert's gotta be out here in about 40 minutes 'cause you've gotta catch a plane.

really hope we preferably, oh my lord. Really hope we don't make you late. So let's go quickly through the, through the guests that we've got today. So first one up is Kami. Kami McNamara. How are you doing? Kami? Nice to have you with us.

[00:02:15] Cami MacNamara: Doing good. It's good to be back in my home office and, up bright and early for you.

[00:02:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. She's on the west coast of the US so it's stupid o'clock, over there. But, Camie, because she's now, because we're using my, show FM solution, Cammie's now. Like she didn't have to fill out the form, let's put it that way. I'm searching for a bio and I've just found it, so that's great.

Thank you very much. There we go. Tommy McNamara, known as Webcam, is a seasoned web designer and solopreneur based in Seattle, Washington. With over two decades of experience, she shares her expertise through her Web Designer Habits newsletter and the Web Cami Cafe, an online community and Facebook group for web designers.

I appreciate you getting that in there. That's brilliant. Thank you so much. You can also see that I'm joined by Leslie Sim. How are you doing? There's a wave. I dunno if it's mute. I thought, I desperately thought you were muted there for a moment, but it was just waving, which is really nice. Have you been on this show, this one before?

I know you've been on the podcast before.

[00:03:25] Lesley Sim: I feel like I was on something with Mark. WS forms mark. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Mark Ws forms. Yeah, maybe, It probably was this in that case. So it's definitely not your first appearance. Yeah. But, very nice to have you with us. It's been a while

[00:03:43] Lesley Sim: or

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: something. Yeah.

thank you for joining us. your bio is exceedingly short, so I'll be able to say this in one breath. Leslie is the co-founder of Event Co. There you go. drop the URL, give us that. Then we can pat it out a bit more.

[00:04:00] Lesley Sim: Event co.com.

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Event co.com. With A-K-K-O-I like the fish, like the colourful fish.

Like the

[00:04:07] Lesley Sim: fish,

[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: like the fish. event coy.com. Go check it out. in fact, as you'll see in a moment, I recently did an episode with Leslie so you can get a fuller picture of what event COI is and how Leslie ended up doing it over there. But, before we do that, let's go to Robert. Who has the longest bio?

Oh,

[00:04:25] Robert Jacobi: no, just, No,

[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: don't, no, just, no. Robert, I'll tell you what, I'll read the first paragraph. Let's go with that. this Robert Jacoby, there he is. Robert Jacoby ran 3.5% of the internet once upon a time today as the Chief Experience Officer, or CXO for Black Wall. Robert connects Black Wall security message and solutions with partners, customers, investors, as well as the greater security open source and online industries.

we'll leave it there if that's alright. Yeah,

[00:04:56] Robert Jacobi: that's the f

[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: that's lovely. if you wanna join us in the comments, please do. It drives this show forward. It's really nice. The best way you're gonna do that is to head to our WP Builds live page. Kami is spotting it there. wp builds.com.

See, it's so easy. com slash live. Go there and check it out. If you hate Google, you can't use the comments 'cause they're YouTube comments. but you can click the little button inside the video player and you can use that 'cause it's the platform and, use that if you prefer wp builds.com/live.

And thank you to everybody who's made a comment. What I'm gonna do, because, Robert's time is short, I'd normally share a bunch of those, but because Robert's time is short, I'm just gonna crack straight on.

[00:05:45] Robert Jacobi: I've already tweeted that, if I like this too much, I'll just miss my flight and

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yay.

He's getting his flight. Just so that okay. In which case I will do some of these comments 'cause they are quite nice, aren't they? tack says hello, Welcome to episode 1, 2, 3 of this week in WordPress. Oh, what we, ah, we're gonna come to this. This is the random post thing, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess you're, I'm guessing you're not a fan, but let's find out in a moment. Hello. Beautiful people says the webinar. Thank you very much. That's really kind. Oh, and Tao, does he not qualify. just saying, if you are quick enough, you can rejoin the episode from the plane, Robert. Oh, we have had that.

[00:06:31] Robert Jacobi: unfortunately this flight doesn't have starlink, so it's really,

[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, for best, a few places where you can actually live your real life again. Get a book out and do ordinary stuff 'cause there's no internet, which is quite nice. hey, Jimmy says Tako and Marcus. Marcus is joining us. We were just talking about your website.

Hello everybody. So good to see you here, Marcus. I'll

[00:06:52] Robert Jacobi: see you in 24 hours.

[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh great. Okay. It's all good. Yeah. It'll be

[00:06:56] Robert Jacobi: at Cloud Fest Americas.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Lovely. Courtney's saying hello, Jamie is saying hello from Maryland. and then there's a lot of people just saying hello, including Web D uk. Hi.

Update fatigue from each C sauce. Six. Hello. Michelle Ette saying Good morning, Elliot saying Good morning, Michelle. da. We've got Taco again. And then we've got Cascade Valley Design. Annemarie.

[00:07:23] Cami MacNamara: Annmarie.

[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Annemarie. Thank you. Best besties. You and Cammy, aren't you? Thats nice. Yes, that's right. ba Okay.

That's what we got for you so far. Okay. In which case thank you. Keep the comments, comment. If you've got something to say about what we talk about, then go for it. 'cause it helps the show. Keep going. You can, you bring your own starlink on the plane? I don't think so.

[00:07:44] Robert Jacobi: Oh, that is a really interesting question.

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can you. Wouldn't you just pay the seven $20 or whatever the airline charges and go with their, setup.

[00:07:55] Robert Jacobi: that's actually an interesting question.

[00:07:57] Nathan Wrigley: He's gonna try it. Taco he's gonna report back next time he's on this show. Can you imagine? Everybody gets the same intuition.

Everybody's long logging all these square little things on and holding them up at funny angles, trying to get internet connection.

[00:08:14] Robert Jacobi: that is slightly genius.

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:08:17] Robert Jacobi: That's, we've probably just broken the internet with that

[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, taco, he's gonna find out and report back and that'll be nice.

okay, let's get stuck into it. So again, keeping it quick. This is us. Put your email address in there. We'll send you email. How about that? For a deal. we also have a Black Friday page if you are in the market for Black Friday stuff. I think we've got about, I can't remember at the moment. I think, I don't know.

It's bigger than that. It's about 195 deals on there at the minute or something. so you can search for it by name or you can do it by category. Basically, most of the WordPress deals end up on here. So it's at wp builds.com/black. If you're fancy, going at the top here and putting your, your company near the top, you can do that by clicking on one of these buttons.

Also, here is our list of, recent podcast episodes that we did. 487 was particularly good. Yeah. really just a fabulous guess, just, so good. So that was with Leslie talking about Event Co as I just said. But last week we had John Turner talking about WP Vibe. He's in the enviable position in a few months after launching his plugin, he's already eclipsed a hundred thousand instals.

AI is all the rage, is all we can say about that.

[00:09:37] Robert Jacobi: I'm dying to try it because I've been playing with Space Fest. I'm curious how the vibe

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it seems to be one of the ones that's getting all the, press attention, if I don't quite know why. I am not sure why that one has got so much attention, but it definitely has done, anyway, so that's another recent episode.

So let's get stuck into what we're talking about today. as raised by Tacho. Here we go. This is a new thing shipping in WordPress 7.2. And for some reason it's gotta be people all dither, from 7.2. If you were to go to any WordPress website and it was not disabled, which you can do, but you have to do it with a bit of code, there's no toggle.

and you type in forward slash random, so example.com/random, it will return a random post. Now, as far as I can see, like that's a curious use of time for people to make that, but also I don't see, I, don't personally see why that's bad. maybe it's, maybe there's like an SEO drain on that or something that I don't fully understand, but to me that's, it is what it is.

I'll probably just leave it there and then somebody can get a random post. But a lot of people seem to be livid about this, really not upset, what a waste of time and all that kind of stuff. I can't see the problem in it, but, anyway, that's the thing. If you want to make it less random, you can, say only this kind of content should be randomised and only this kind of content.

Like for example here it says you can make it a little less random. yeah, okay. or no random at all. You can return false on the filter and it will just un not be available. So anybody got, any strong thoughts on this? It's a bit of a weird one.

[00:11:28] Robert Jacobi: it's, funny, I would love it as a really hard to find the Easter egg,

[00:11:33] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:11:33] Robert Jacobi: So if you're an admin, you have to find the Easter egg and the admin to turn it on. I wouldn't necessarily have it on by default. But I would have it as an a, admin Easter egg, and then it becomes an Easter egg for end users as well.

[00:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:11:49] Robert Jacobi: It's nice to have a little fun with WordPress. We've been so serious recently.

[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe they should go a little bit further and randomise the string where the Easter egg can be found your WordPress website. Ooh,

[00:12:00] Robert Jacobi: I like it. I like it.

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: It truly is really hard to find

[00:12:05] Robert Jacobi: some kind of cryptographic key that you have to find on, on X or LinkedIn or Facebook.

[00:12:12] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's brilliant. Okay, Leslie, it's looked like you had something to add.

[00:12:16] Lesley Sim: I'm just reading through the comments and Yeah, like, you said, everyone seems to be pretty upset about it.

[00:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But

[00:12:27] Lesley Sim: I agree, like this seems like a waste of time and

[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:12:31] Lesley Sim: if there's, that's the, you

[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: can see

[00:12:33] Lesley Sim: it's, that's a, yeah. If you can use people's time better and, just add a bit less to something that's WebPress is already really big.

There's, 1,001 features. Do we have to add, that thousand and second feature?

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

[00:12:49] Lesley Sim: So I don't,

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney has raised a, a legit point, which, thank you Courtney for a start. You're very clever. which is nice 'cause I hadn't thought of this. Random strings need to be tested on CDNs.

Okay. That makes sense. Right? that's an area host and CDN providers help to test. All right, that makes sense. So maybe there's some caveats around whether or not this is a sensible thing from a management of the actual website point of view and where it's getting hosted from. And then Tacho says there's 1001 reasons in the comments on that post, but most importantly, security and performance.

Yep. Okay. Fair enough. And, it's a cool feature. No,

[00:13:28] Robert Jacobi: no, there's no discovery, security performance issue. It's pulling up a random, post.

[00:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:13:37] Robert Jacobi: the post is already published, so I.

[00:13:40] Nathan Wrigley: The Leslie, if now that you've read that, is it that people are just objecting to it from a, like it's a waste, it's wasting everybody's like, development time because I, yeah.

I don't dunno. Yeah. Okay.

[00:13:52] Robert Jacobi: All right.

[00:13:53] Lesley Sim: And it is just like one, one additional thing that's like, like I said, it's, there's already so many features. let's try to have less features, not more features. Yeah.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: tacho saying should

[00:14:03] Lesley Sim: be someone that has to build features all the time. I'm like, if I can have less features and nobody's gonna complain about it, like I want, that's what I want.

Like I want less, I want my customers to give me less feature requests and like my UI looks like more clean and there's like less documentation that I have to write and, on and on

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Oh. And look at this Tacho saying, put it in a plugin. And then, who, Ja, Sorry, I, dunno how to say your name 'cause it's, long and it's, I'm gonna call

[00:14:32] Robert Jacobi: Jamira, but I

[00:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: know that's totally wrong.

We'll, it's, he's on my show at last. Where's the big

[00:14:38] Cami MacNamara: hat?

[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: It's so good. He says, but you can't rely on any w on,

[00:14:44] Robert Jacobi: on WP Builds. Not that

[00:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: I'm banned. My life is complete. We're gonna end it now. I've had Jamira choir and I'm so sorry. Whoever you are, we're making fun of your handle there. And that's not the intention at all.

but he says you can't rely on any w given WP site having the plugin. But then I suppose you can never rely on any website that you go to being a WordPress website. So kind of swings and roundabouts, isn't it? can I, okay. It's in, it looks like it's coming, so we're just gonna have to get used to it.

Everybody did say, I think it should be a toggle. Let's say that. Okay. When I'm in charge of the universe, it'll be a toggle and it'll be switched off by default. E. Everybody happy now?

[00:15:25] Cami MacNamara: And it should have to, I'm always happy

[00:15:26] Robert Jacobi: by switched off by default. Yeah.

[00:15:28] Cami MacNamara: if you wanna enable something to put, you shouldn't have to put in a bunch of code to make changes to it either.

Yeah. Okay. It should have So agreeable. Agreeable,

[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. 100%. And Courtney said, who knew that this random thing would take up 10 minutes of our show? But there you go. A curious feature on this release is the on this day widget. Yes. Peter chimed in on track to share examples of pe of times people are harmed by similar social media features.

So this is a, I've forgotten about that, but there's gonna be an on this day in, so just highlighting something that happened during the calendar, the date in this particular case, 80 20 rule says, Marcus Bennet, we're moving on. There's no more of this restroom stop. let's move on.

Robert

[00:16:14] Lesley Sim: only has 40 minutes and he's spending it talking about this.

[00:16:17] Nathan Wrigley: That's minutes. I know.

[00:16:18] Lesley Sim: come

[00:16:18] Robert Jacobi: on.

[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: I know you killing me. Alright. Okay. So in much more important news, SVG icons in the admin area, from the sublime to the ridiculous. So there's really nothing to say here, except that those familiar dash icons that you've been using forever, that have been in every WordPress instal since the year they're getting swapped out for, SVG icons.

obviously, they're superior in many ways. I'm guessing that they'll look more or less exactly the same, that it isn't gonna be some new random rainbow coloured suite of weird and wonderful icons. But anyway, it's happening. So I guess if you're a developer and you need to take notice of that, like you've got a plugin that needs to have an SVG icon somewhere, then there you go.

There's a new API. Welcome

[00:17:06] Robert Jacobi: 2018.

[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. okay. Can somebody build a plugin which randomises the sv? No, don't stop with the silliness. Make

[00:17:19] Lesley Sim: it in.

[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's move to the next one. This, however, I think we need, I think we've needed for ages, I have got plugins just for this thing, and it would be lovely to have this in core.

honestly, I don't see this much because I instal a set of plugins from people who I trust and they tend not to abuse the hooks and things, which enable ads and notifications to dominate your screen. This has been an ongoing topic for years and years and finally, again, finally we seem to be getting some traction for it.

The idea is a feature notification panel, if you like, and on the screen at the moment, we're seeing something on the left, which you might have, just like a laundry list of, notifications, everything, pushing the admin further and further down so that you can't actually see what you're logged into your WordPress website to achieve.

And the idea is something a little bit like this. You see it in every SaaS that you've ever used since 2005. A little icon, perhaps a bell, which socks up and hoovers up all the notifications, push them into one little area. And then the idea would be, maybe something like this with filterable things.

So on red alerts, normal alerts, maybe things to do with WooCommerce or the site in general. And, let's hope this comes forward because, if you are an experienced WordPress, that might annoy you, but you know how to get rid of it. If you've got clients who don't understand, they're probably looking at that thinking, what the heck am I gonna break if I turn any of these off?

And yeah. Anyway, so this is, exploring a design for feature notifications. If you would like to contribute to this debate. It was published on the make blog on the 29th of October. Anybody want to chip in on that?

[00:19:11] Robert Jacobi: About time.

[00:19:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:19:13] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. Love it. Love it.

[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, yep, One less thing, one less plugin, which you actually need to instal.

Yeah.

[00:19:20] Cami MacNamara: I actually have

[00:19:20] Robert Jacobi: a, and it also makes a a, great, checkoff a in the org repository. Do you support exclusively the new notifications or don't? If you don't, then you just don't get in. 'cause we don't need garbage.

[00:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Oh, interesting. in order to get a plugin registered on.org, do you support the core notifications panel?

yeah, I'm liking it. Leslie, sorry, what were you gonna say?

[00:19:51] Lesley Sim: no, it's okay. so looking at it and looking at the tiny bell that, that it sits in, the top admin bar, I know for a fact that I will never, ever, click on it. And so I will never, ever see any notifications ever again, which

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: it's actually maybe

[00:20:09] Lesley Sim: good, a good thing.

But so for example, with my plugins, there are some occasions where I have an important admin notice that I, have to share with people. if I've moved a big feature or something big has changed and I actually kinda want people to be able to see that.

And sometimes when I use other plugins, they also give me important information. So I don't actually hate admin notices. I think like the UI can be improved and maybe some, there can be some standardisation in how it looks, but I don't actually hate admin notices and I'm the same as you, Nathan.

I really only use plugins from companies and people that I trust and they don't really abuse it that much. So I haven't had particularly bad experiences with admin notifications. And like I said, there is zero, like there is nothing in me that will ever click on that, that like tiny notifications bell.

So I know that in the future I'm gonna be missing a lot of notifications.

[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that's interesting. So maybe, So we prize open the idea that there's important notifications and perhaps less important notifications and maybe the current spot, which, full width, top of the admin area.

I'll just start getting abused again. Wrote it straight away. As soon as you open up the, the possibility for anybody to put something there, it's gonna be used. I am, I'm exactly the opposite of you, Leslie. I go, I look for that bell wherever I go. however, I think that Wouldn't that again, sorry if you're listening to this, but I don't think that, blue on black would work for me.

you,

[00:21:54] Robert Jacobi: you need the red, you need to be like a iPhone or Android or something like

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: that to

[00:21:57] Robert Jacobi: just stick out a little bit

[00:21:58] Nathan Wrigley: more. Exactly. I think, that's exactly what

[00:22:01] Robert Jacobi: you, and maybe you can even block notifications from certain plugins.

[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. See, that'd be nice. Ah, everybody in this conversation needs to get over to this debate and, explain, what their thoughts are.

Anyway, the point is it's an exploring process at the moment. What's gonna be done, there's some other, imagine

[00:22:22] Lesley Sim: if you have like your SMTP plugin and it was, breaking and your emails weren't getting sent out. Oh, yeah. Wouldn't you wanna be told in, flashing red lights, alert alarm bells?

Yeah. You wouldn't want it to be tucked away in a corner.

[00:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we need to. But if I had

[00:22:37] Robert Jacobi: the, if, I had the random post plugin, I probably never

[00:22:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no. It's wheels never need to see

[00:22:43] Robert Jacobi: notification

[00:22:44] Nathan Wrigley: from that. That's right. Oh, okay. The long and the short of it is, there's no perfect answer. if you get a sass, you just put up with what they give you, and if it doesn't work for you, you just lump it.

We're not in that position. So it'll be interesting to see how this falls out. I'm a fan. I'd like to put everything up inside that little box. It works for me. But, yeah, maybe we need some sort of death metal music, which plays really loudly when you, go to the admin so that something terribly important.

[00:23:13] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. It's

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: really

[00:23:14] Cami MacNamara: an alert.

[00:23:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's really alert.

[00:23:17] Robert Jacobi: It's called Yeti Core. Yes. Okay. From Scandinavia Yeti Core.

[00:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. There we go. That was I

[00:23:26] Robert Jacobi: about it this year. It's very odd.

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There you go. That one is on make WordPress org. Let's keep going. I just thought this one was really curious. So the, this, so this is a summation of somebody's trip recently, to Word camps.

I wanna say clet. I am very sorry to the people that live in this place. I dunno how to pronounce the name of your, city or town. But anyway, it recently happened and they did a curious thing, which it, which really I think is maybe an experiment we should roll out. maybe not. I dunno.

They, they got rid of swag. They made it so that sponsors showing up. Were not allowed to use swag. okay. We've all been there in the past. It's quite nice to go home with a bunch of free stuff. I, think if we're very honest, most of the stuff that we take home probably ends up in a draw. maybe there's one or two bits, which you really cherish, but mostly I think it ends up in a draw.

This word camp banned it. So it wasn't like, oh, we've taken a position as a company not to bring swag. It was No, nobody can. And the person who wrote this article made the point that it just got rid of a layer of distraction. And so it was just one less thing to think about. You didn't go into the sponsor hall, nosing out the swag, you went into the sponsor hall, in order to talk with the sponsors.

So I think this is a curious observation. I think this is worth trying. but I don't know what my, what the panel here think. Have you got any thoughts on this?

[00:25:09] Cami MacNamara: I'm not somebody who comes home with a tonne of swag. Although I was just in Canada and I have a couple of little items here Okay. Brought with me that, I'm gonna really enjoy this. Maybe that's food for bringing me that. but I, do see where this would, change the mood of what was happening in the sponsor area because you would be talking more than you would be, shopping kind of that situation where you're like, who has the best swag and you're just moving from place to place.

also, sponsors are, there's not as many sponsors anymore at any of these events, so that it would also take the spotlight off of that a little bit

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: and make it cheaper for them to attend. 'cause I don't know how much the cost of a typical, I don't know. Let's say you've got a Midtier booth, you rock up with a bunch of pens and stickers and maybe a prize to give away or something like that.

it's, you're stacking up a few hundred dollars here and there, aren't you? Oh my.

[00:26:15] Cami MacNamara: A lot. Oh,

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure.

[00:26:17] Robert Jacobi: and if you have to ship it for whatever reason, And go through customs, it's, it, everything gets, actually, everything gets very expensive very quickly. And, I am so pro. No swag.

No swag.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don't, I deliberately don't pick anything up. the most I'll get would be like a pen, because I need a pen or something. I might pick those up. But I, dunno, it's been a couple years since I took anything. however, this is a, an interesting observation at WordCamp Asia this year in India, the swag was incredibly effective, very powerful.

and the, the swag was a major thing. Like day one, a lot of people really went crazy for the swag, loved it. And I dunno what the sponsors would say in that situation, whether or not they'd like the pressure off.

[00:27:10] Robert Jacobi: Some of it is regional, some of it is the audience that's actually attending, right?

if you have, 10,000 students coming, who want a shirt, want a pen, want a Tumblr, whatnot, yep. That's what's gonna happen. So it's if your business gets ROI out of a specific audience, that it may make sense. but, in general for. Eco financial, just ease of, attending a conference.

Reasons I prefer to have as little or to no swag as possible.

[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: So Aaron, hello Aaron? He says, no he doesn't. That's not Aaron. it is Aaron, but he said throw, that wasn't the comment I was looking for, nor was it that one. I don't, what's the map with me? I, as I go to click them, another one slides in at the bottom and the UI gets pushed up.

That's my problem. a TZ we say 22 says, I live for Word Camp Swag, ba baba. And then, Aaron says, don't get rid of the prizes of won a Google TV and a Google tablet. Okay. Prices. Maybe that's different. I

[00:28:23] Robert Jacobi: that's fine.

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe we have prizes, but I think that's, but we've got the swag.

the webinar says I've just got two pins and two stickers. Good for the good for memory. Okay. Maybe we have a, maybe we have a size limit. can it fit in a matchbox? If it can fit in matchbox, it's allowed. and if it's bigger than, I don't know, a matchbox, you're not allowed it or something. I know that everybody's gonna go, oh, be quiet.

But there's also the environment, right? this is very wasteful. I think in most cases. So anyway, that Word Camp tried it out and the, this particular, author thought it was a cracking idea and it worked well. Better conversations, less people looking at all the swag, Robert sounds like.

[00:29:05] Robert Jacobi: So, I see, more and more events saying, do you want an event shirt?

[00:29:10] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, yeah, asking,

[00:29:11] Robert Jacobi: maybe there can be an opt out of swag, which gets sent to the sponsors. So the sponsors then actually buy less.

[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Courtney says she's a stick, soccer for sticker swag.

Yeah. Like all the stickers. da,

[00:29:28] Lesley Sim: random swag, all, everyone has to put all their swag into a large fishbowl.

[00:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: Random swag. I

[00:29:36] Lesley Sim: love it. Leslie?

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, definitely, a theme developing in this episode. And it's the word random. okay, so Hello James. Somebody joining us. Hi. Hi. Hi. Nice to have you with us. We're talking about random things and swag. okay. So that was interesting. and let's move on. We go to the next one, which is this one here.

Oh, so this is, I like this one because obviously I, I put out newsletters and things like that and I follow WordPress events, so this might be of more interest to me than to you lot. But, this is the idea of the fact that flagship Word camp events often get a great deal of their traffic and ticket sales directly through, the wordpress.org news channel.

So I'll just read it here. One of the key drivers of the, of the unique visits to the 2026 U WordCamp US website was the, was wordpress.org. It's banners and news posts, also generated email newsletters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You'd think, I don't know that somehow people figure out that they wanna attend these events by osmosis.

they don't. These WordPress flagship events in particular turns out wordpress.org is a big driver. but it's been scattered on a little bit over the last few years and it's, each event does things differently. So this post, we won't dwell on it for long. This post is basically saying, why don't, all the flagship events just do the exact same thing?

So he points at Word Camp Asia, they did things 11 weeks before, one week before and two days before. These are like blog posts and things like that. Word Camp eu, I dunno if this is true, but it says they started one week before that feels like it wouldn't be correct. But anyway, no,

[00:31:17] Robert Jacobi: no,

That's that, that one week before was the announcement for 20, getting 2027 going.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. You're right. You're absolutely right. Anyway, the point is you can see from all of these, there's a totally different like way of doing it in each case and what if it was all standardised? And so that's what this is about. Here's a, template if you like, an SOP for what a flagship WordPress event would look like on.org.

So it starts 51 weeks out. So as soon as one event finishes, the next one gets begun. Half through the year, more stuff starts to happen. Four, four months and then two months, and so on. And, and I think that's totally true. I got a feeling this time around for WordCamp us that because the event itself was we weren't sure if it was gonna happen, felt like everything happened in a massive avalanche with a, few weeks to go, can't have been great for ticket sales.

And so if this template was followed, maybe that would fix that problem. it's not an answer to all problems and it's not an answer to, declining ticket sales on mass, but at least it would be another string in that bow. If anybody's got any thoughts, let me know.

[00:32:26] Robert Jacobi: I'm on the sponsors team for Work Camp Europe this year.

And we've been going full speed ahead already for almost eight weeks, That the, the entire team from leadership all the way down for WordCamp Europe, we're already, 10 months ahead of schedule.

[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get the feeling that WordCamp Europe operates in a, in a more efficient way, let's say, than some of the other

[00:32:51] Robert Jacobi: ones?

Absolutely.

[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: Really? Okay. Yeah,

[00:32:54] Robert Jacobi: it's not even close. Interesting Word Camp is the most organised. it's, it, I think it's technically the longest because I think Word Camp Europe actually happened before Word Camp us. I wish Mku was here. He, Yes. Tell me correctly. It,

[00:33:09] Cami MacNamara: it was June, right? It was June and, US was August.

[00:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah.

[00:33:15] Robert Jacobi: No, I meant in general, I think the first, oh, like flagship word camp ever was a word. Camp Europe.

[00:33:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:33:22] Robert Jacobi: Yeah.

[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: That was the, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

[00:33:27] Robert Jacobi: Kus was a coorg of that co-founder or official founder. I don't know what, but this team just has its ducks in a row. there's already a group that's looking at 28,

[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: wow.

Already.

[00:33:42] Robert Jacobi: Oh, yeah,

[00:33:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. yeah,

[00:33:43] Robert Jacobi: yeah. This is, it's taken very seriously and it's a huge team and maybe they've just

[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: got really good handoff and things like that, from a media part. So I'm often a media partner at that event. And from a media partner point of view, they just do it so well.

the communication is brilliant at Word Camp Europe, the, the, the provision in terms of the room and like figuring out who's having the room at this point in time. And it's all just taken care of by somebody, out on the organising team. They just take that burden, run with it, and then inform you when everything, all the docs are in a row.

It's really well organised. and it feels like the handoff is brilliant. Yeah.

[00:34:19] Robert Jacobi: I would have all the flagships look at how Europe does it.

[00:34:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:34:23] Robert Jacobi: hands down, it, it's, Just so ahead of the game compared, Asia and India's brand new for all intents and purposes, so I dunno

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: how

[00:34:32] Robert Jacobi: that'll look like,

[00:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: takes a, but yeah, definitely could learn from that playbook.

And there's Tacho, KO's gone from YouTube. Comments over to the other comments just in case you were interested, which you probably weren't. He says correct. WordCamp Europe started in 2013. Word camp US in 2015. There you go. Now we know. I

[00:34:49] Robert Jacobi: know a thing or two.

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: You do know a thing or two, Yeah, we should all ask.

Let's, ask Robert a random question and see to smuggle that in. okay. maybe this will be the last one that gets covered before Robert has to depart. Let's have a little look. I obviously don't live in the US but it was made clear to me by the tidal wave of news that the world can't seem to avoid that there were elections last week in the us.

turns out quite a lot of the, the channels that cover that be that news organisations or maybe even, some of the political parties themselves, I don't know, are using WordPress for their websites. And, many of those for obvious reasons will be on the VIP infrastructure. And this was just a little post from VIP ca called, they carried the news on election night WordPress, VIP carried them.

And, just some little stats, which I just thought was interesting. at its height, when obviously, maybe with hours to go until things started to hot up, 9.46 million requests per minute across all of the, different platforms associated with this. 25.3 billion requests were served over the period.

The second to the fourth, customer uptime, the claim here is 100% of the time. And during that time, they managed to mitigate against 2D DOS attacks. What's interesting, and I wouldn't have thought this is that apparently when the election result is in question, you know what? When people are now thinking, okay, we, the polls have closed now we're waiting for the results, they stop using official channels and start searching again on things like Google for what's going on.

So they go to Google and say, what's the latest, on this, that, and the other thing where I live and what have you, which then in many cases, Google will serve up one of these websites. It's apropos of absolutely nothing. But I just thought it was curious that, that magnitude of, site, traffic was being delivered by WordPress.

And unless VIP talked about it, I would never have known that those kind of numbers were being consumed by, a WordPress website or multiple WordPress websites across the US and internationally. Perhaps. Dunno if anybody's got anything to add to that.

[00:37:18] Robert Jacobi: No, it was cool. I saw the, release when it came out, what last week.

And I was like, okay, go WordPress.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:25] Robert Jacobi: And also I'm laughing about your, everyone's, Googling it. I'm also hitting refresh, refresh, refresh. Okay. Even

[00:37:31] Nathan Wrigley: though the sites you ing one of sites

[00:37:34] Robert Jacobi: automatically refresh, I'm still hitting refresh because I'm like, I wanna fester.

[00:37:37] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. It's not refreshing fast enough.

Yeah.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's, that's right. You're not getting the data, but can you imagine like the, can you imagine the pr catastrophe if on that's gotta be the big, like in the four year cycle that you guys have, that's gotta be one of two or three big moments where WordPress websites cannot be seen to fail if it goes down at that moment.

Oh, the pr catastrophe surrounding that would be really, bad. And thankfully, it didn't. I wonder what preparation goes into those kind of specific events, like months preparation 'cause they know that traffic's gonna ramp up and testing, or is it just, it's a normal Tuesday at the office.

It's not a

[00:38:24] Robert Jacobi: normal Tuesday. Oh, no,

[00:38:27] Nathan Wrigley: no. I wouldn't have thought so, but,

[00:38:30] Robert Jacobi: but it's one of those things where, it's gonna happen. So it's like, okay, let's get into our, high, traffic plan.

[00:38:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. in the UK we have this thing where, every Christmas day the, the current monarch gives a speech.

Oh yeah. And anyway, they give a speech, I think it's at 1:00 PM on Christmas day. The power grid have to fully provision electricity. Totally different at half past one, because more or less everybody stops watching that speech 'cause it's finished and goes and puts the kettle on to have a cup of tea.

So they, have to totally configure the electrical network to, take this 3000 watt surge that just about every house in the uk they all go.

I love stuff like that. Brilliant. Yeah, it's good, isn't it? Okay. Okay. Robert. We can speak. Thanks Robert. In a minute, in

[00:39:35] Cami MacNamara: Miami

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: you'll see. Thank you. Get there. Take it easy. Have a good time

[00:39:39] Cami MacNamara: this.

[00:39:40] Nathan Wrigley: Bye bye. Alright, so we're gonna lose Robert 'cause he is gotta get on a plane to, Miami by the sounds of it for Cloud Fest, I think.

Cloudfest America. Yeah, something like that. So we will carry on. The three of us will carry on. And, the next piece, I honestly, I've no, I don't know what to say about this one. I don't like to speak ill of, companies, but I feel that this company did make a bit of a PR disaster for themselves.

a little while ago. I think it was May. This is, the company, the overarching brand behind, plugins such as Learn Ash, give the events, calendar cadence and various others during May. I think it was, they, they just, it was terribly confusing. They seemed to amalgamate a load of products, change the pricing.

Everybody woke up and all of a sudden without any notification the things that they thought they had, they were questioning, do I have this anymore? What's going on? So this is them trying to fix that. So the article in the repository says, nexus stops selling Learn dash Give the events calendar and Cadence individually moves customers to bundle.

that's all dead straightforward, isn't it? rather than have those plugins separately from now on, it sounds like if you're an existing customer, you are now just gonna be slotted right into this bundle. Ray who's written this on the repository, implies that it doesn't matter which of those products you've got.

If you've got an existing subscription, you're gonna get the other ones as well. I think that's what she's saying. However, yeah. However, like me, if you're a Cadence customer, no, you don't get it. You, are not allowed to have this. but, some, some things can. So if you've got Learn Dash, you're in.

If you've got Give, you're in, I think. But if you've got Cadence like me, you're out. So I'm more confused than I was at the end of this article than I was at the beginning. Not because Ray wrote it badly, because I'm just muddled up about what they're doing. and so as a customer kind of feels all a bit weird.

I haven't, as far as I'm aware, I haven't received any notifications saying this is what we're doing. I'm getting it from the, WordPress press. Dunno, seems like, a series of slight own goals, to be honest. Anybody wanna dip in on this one?

[00:42:16] Cami MacNamara: I spent a lot of time in Canada at Word Camp talking with, friends about this.

We are all not happy, because we have clients who are just in the events calendar. And now, in, in addition to get the bundle, the price doubled or, it's like a really big increase in pricing for those clients that are just using the events calendar. so it's a great opportunity for, other plugin providers like Leslie because I have clients that are going to want to move out because they're going from maybe one 40 a year, I think is what they're paying to three 50 to get a whole bunch of things they don't need.

And then on the flip side, I am a Cadence Lifetime person.

[00:43:08] Robert Jacobi: Me too. Yeah.

[00:43:08] Cami MacNamara: I'm not, yeah. I'm not getting this or, it, is very confusing and just, the way it was done was odd. And I, guess I don't really understand the marketing side of this. Like, why would you take these individual items that are very popular for specific reasons and just throw them all together?

Okay. Because, it just doesn't make sense. Somebody may not need learn dash or give or for their individual website.

[00:43:44] Nathan Wrigley: Does it feel like, okay, let me rephrase that 'cause I don't wanna make you express an opinion on this necessarily. I'll say it in my way. It feels like a cost, a company under so much pressure that they don't know what to do next.

it feels like a company that from on high and, again, I could be wrong about this. It feels like, there's, I dunno, VC money or that kind of flavour to it, where they're being asked to try different things out. They realised they'd done a PR disaster back in May, so let's just try something new out.

Surely the right way to go about this would've been to communicate with the, their existing audience. Maybe they did. I didn't get an email as far as I'm aware. and then they're just gonna try things out and in this case they can wash it that okay, if you've only got this one product, you're getting all these other ones for free.

But as you've just pointed out, Kamie, it does feel like the price is going up. I dunno, it just

[00:44:46] Lesley Sim: going way up.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It just feels like they've gone from one PR snafu to another. And again, I'm not trying to cast shade on any of the individuals. I'm sure they're fabulous people, but it just feels like it's a bit of a mountain now to get out of the second hole that has apparently been dug.

And if what you are saying from the event that you just attended Cammie was that you weren't alone in that?

[00:45:11] Cami MacNamara: not at all. Yeah. Okay. Everybody is a little perplexed and

[00:45:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:45:15] Cami MacNamara: we have, the folks I hang out with, we all work with smaller business owners and, going from 1 49 to three 50 to get a bunch of things you don't need is, Not optimal, I would

[00:45:31] Nathan Wrigley: say so, yeah. Marcus says, what are the chances that somebody needs this combination of plugins? Wasn't this combination of plugins put together because they bought this combination of plugins? It wasn't like this was a suite that was designed to be this wraparound thing. You had this like random acquisition, period a few years ago where they bought all these things which were very profitable.

the sort of the lead of all that stellar then got, consumed and, repurposed and renamed and all that kind of stuff. And it felt like the, the people that were in charge didn't really have much in the way of WordPress community Insights going on when they rebranded. so Marcus, I'm guessing nobody particularly might want these things in combination.

It's just that's what they've got as a company. Sorry. The people that work there. I'm not trying to be a pain in your backside, but it does feel all a little bit disjointed and weird. And, one thing here from Courtney, I hear great things about event COI says, Courtney, you used to be the event calendar support staff.

Leslie, you probably don't wanna touch this one with the barge pole, do you?

[00:46:46] Lesley Sim: Free stickers, free event co stickers. Yay.

[00:46:50] Nathan Wrigley: Next time we see you. So anyway, there you go. If you can make any sense outta that, then let me know because I could genuinely couldn't work out. as I went through it, I thought, oh, that's interesting.

I'm gonna get learned and give the events calendar for free. Am I, because that's what the article implied. And then as I went further down, all the little caveats came in and it was a bit like, not so sure about that. Now, Courtney makes the point again, what combination of their customers need these?

basically the same point that, Marcus made a minute ago. So yeah. And then I use the events calendar in that bundle only. I do not need the rest, no sense to pay for it all. That's Anne-Marie. And then here we go. web d uk, they're probably trying to make up for the drop in revenue from their slow plugin sales.

[00:47:38] Cami MacNamara: Yeah.

[00:47:38] Nathan Wrigley: In the current climate, but this sounds like it might be counterproductive.

bingo.

[00:47:43] Lesley Sim: Bingo. Yeah.

[00:47:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:47:45] Lesley Sim: I agree with what Courtney was saying. just reading raise article and seeing what she's quoted from Jack Kettering, about basically trying to, let's see what the quote is.

[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: There's a quote from Jack right at the bottom, isn't there?

[00:48:01] Lesley Sim: yeah. A whole bunch. So it says every plugin that has to be consistently updated is an engineer's time where they have to keep it in line with WordPress core requirements, blah, blah, blah. Nexus was now supporting a little over 60 versions.

They expect the number to fall, be below 10 once all customers had moved, blah, blah, blah. That frees up a huge amount of resources for building new features and functionality. I think that's the key. Yeah. So that frees up a huge amount of resources and AI basically. So I think it just seems like they're cost cutting, and.

To try to move those resources. Yeah,

[00:48:40] Nathan Wrigley: I can totally see it from a business point of view that all stacks up, doesn't it? But if you annoy your user base whilst trying to grow your business, then Let's see how that works out. So anyway, I'm not trying to put them outta business or be horrible, but it does seem very strangely communicated and ca cammie's, experience there would seem to bear that out.

But, you can go and check it out for yourself. It's on Ray's repository and this article's yesterday, no, not yesterday, 5th of May, November, I can barely speak. The 5th of November. It was called Nexus, stop Selling, learn Give and yada, some other things as well. Alright, let's move on. We're staying with the repository.

and Kami, although didn't go, was aware that this was happening. This was, a little outside event, which is starting to be a bit of a thing. I don't know, I think quite a few of the bigger word camps that I've attended recently have got some, other ancillary events going on the outside. Not, not the normal after parties, but other kind of events which are bolted onto it.

they're making use of the audience who've already flown in or driven in, or whatever it is for that event. And this is the W-P-O-C-C, so the WordPress Open Community Collective. they did a thing called the Voices of the Community, which was a gathering, for one evening between the hours of seven and nine.

And the idea was that they would, get the, audience from WordCamp Canada in Vancouver and, have a chat about the future of WordPress. the difference which they were very keen to talk about was that they, were paying, for the two members of staff who organised it. So they would pay for one person to be, who was a local organiser who would do stuff like food and get the venue organised and what have you.

And then they'd also have a, like a host or a guide or a, the person that was in charge of it all. And I dunno how it went, but I think this is a model that we're probably gonna see more of, people latching on and doing an event outside of the event, but surrounded by it as well. But an interesting take on the payment of it.

I dunno, where that money came from. Apart from the w PCCs pockets, I'm imagining. 'cause I know that a few years ago they got a large donation from GoDaddy. I imagine that's still sloshing around in there somewhere as well. So

[00:51:13] Cami MacNamara: anyway, Ann Marie and I rolled into town, when this was happening, and the next day that I heard that Morton Hendrickson spoke.

And I heard a lot of good things from people who went.

[00:51:26] Nathan Wrigley: So,

Morton, Rand Hendrickson from Yeah, he is, he's now LinkedIn, isn't he? But he used to, used

[00:51:31] Cami MacNamara: to be, he's big, he's got a really great TikTok. Oh, is he? See,

[00:51:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:51:35] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. And he lives in Vancouver. And he has quite a few huge following.

And he did a talk at this and

[00:51:43] Nathan Wrigley: got, so he's got, yeah,

[00:51:46] Cami MacNamara: yeah,

[00:51:46] Nathan Wrigley: he's got very strong opinions on the WordPress governance model. I remember with Ra, with Rachel Cherry years ago, he set up governance from a long

[00:51:54] Cami MacNamara: ago.

[00:51:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. And it never went anywhere. And so he stepped away from WordPress. maybe there was other reasons as well, but, that's an interesting one.

Yeah, Okay. So it's exploring not just the future of WordPress, but specifically maybe things like governance and things, which I know that, say Reed, who is very much at the, you know, behind W-P-O-C-C, that's one of her big, topics, isn't it, is governance and all of that. oh, interesting.

It'd be interesting if somebody writes that up, and tells us what happened. That would be good. Steve Birch says More products from people like Leslie and less from private equity.

[00:52:36] Lesley Sim: Hey, thanks Steve.

[00:52:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go. That's

[00:52:39] Lesley Sim: nice. I from Steve as well.

[00:52:42] Nathan Wrigley: what was that? More from Steve?

Yeah,

[00:52:46] Lesley Sim: yeah, He's, been doing a whole bunch of stuff.

[00:52:48] Nathan Wrigley: He does such a great job on, I dunno if you follow him on Twitter, he's just such, he does such a great job on Twitter. I really like what he does. I can't put my finger on it. I dunno why. 'cause there isn't one thread to pull, which he's constantly writing about, but he just such a great job of, like the other day he wrote a post about, ripping the AI out.

They're not using AI chatbots anymore. They ran that experiment. They've obviously had an intuition that it didn't work, it didn't satisfy their customers. And so rather than just quietly pulling it, he then just talks about it in the open and says, we're not doing that anymore. and here's why. And I love all that stuff.

Absolutely love it.

[00:53:28] Lesley Sim: time for you to do more of that kind of stuff, Ethan, or show fm.

[00:53:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I forgot. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. we should definitely mention that at some point. Remember, the 5th of November, that's a reference to Guy Forks Night, which was the other week. I don't know why that dropped in there, but thank you.

That was a, that's a UK thing. I like that you noticed that I briefly, yeah. Oh yeah. You went in on a different pla I did notice. I'm very observant behind these glasses. A 2020 vision. Okay, let's move on. Let's go to this one. Okay. I am not gonna tell you that this is something that should happen or will happen, but I really love it when people go in and make massive, bold changes to the WordPress admin in an attempt to bring it up to date.

We've had Austin DER's min admin min with two ends. That was really good. We featured another project the other week, and this is, Dave, it's a YouTube video, so I'm not really gonna be able to show it to you in that sense, but I'll, hop around a little bit. he's made a video and it's about seven and a half minutes long.

I'm just gonna link to it in the show notes where he's, taken parts of the WordPress admin and he's modernised it. And I, don't know what it is about it, but I absolutely love it. And so I'm just encouraging people basically to go and look at this video. I'll put the links in the show notes. His YouTube channel is called Dave on wp.

This video dropped on the 27th of October, and it's called, is this the end of the WordPress block toolbar? It's clearly, clickbait stuff, but I do love it. I think Dave's an aian. he is definitely got skin in the, in the game of WordPress succeeding. He is not trying to upend WordPress entirely.

But, go and have a look, see what you think. I dunno if any of the, Perry, you got a chance to look at it. You, maybe you didn't, but anyway, it's worth seven minutes of your time. All right. In which case we will move on. There's, oh, no. One more little comment here. Couple of little comments here. Oh, no, not that one.

It kept moving up. There's no private equity behind show fm. No, there really isn't private equity behind show fm and I really need to get better at marketing it. chat. Just

[00:55:56] Lesley Sim: copy what Steve is doing.

[00:55:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Just, yeah. Copy what Steve's doing. Just copy. Yeah, I'll promote publish, press and see how that goes.

Okay. Back to Ray on the repository. very short. We won't keep this one for very long. It is just to say that the, now that we know that WordPress, is coming into core, sorry, WordPress and ai, we're making moves in the next versions of a, of WordPress two to drag some things into core. It's probably a good idea at this point to keep a, keep abreast of what's going on because it's coming into the platform that you love.

And the WordPress AI plugin is now at version 1.5, and it's added a few interesting features, text to speech. So if you've got a, I don't know, a blog post and you want that to become a, oh, don't even wanna say the word podcast episode. It's not a podcast episode. If you click this button just so that we're clear.

but you can tell, you can have an audio player in your podcast if people prefer to consume it that way. I know some people do, image provenance checks, which I think is really cool. So you can check to see, if an AI generated image, if there's sort of a suspicion of where that came from or if you're slightly nervous about where that may have come from.

And then there's a couple of ai, agent experiments, which I won't go into. So minor things, but they're just building on top of one another exponentially. So they're probably, worth looking at. where's the little, am

[00:57:30] Lesley Sim: I able to have text to speech for all my blog posts, but in Nathan Wrigley's voice,

[00:57:35] Nathan Wrigley: I hope not that possible.

That was never dos. you could, you totally could. it's plausible Now check this out, Leslie. I, use an app called Descrip, and it's an editing app. You may have come across it, but one of the things that it does is it will, I'll upload this, video and it will, it'll figure out that I'm me.

It won't know that I'm me, but it'll say, who's this? And then every time I speak, it'll identify me and it'll figure out that you are you. And it'll figure out that Kamis Kami. However, when I began using the app about five years ago, you had to upload 10 hours of uninterrupted audio of you for it to do a credible job of speaking like you.

Now one sentence is all it takes. Wow. So you read this one sentence, it's about, I don't know, it's about 35 words, something like that. You can do it in under 20 seconds. And there's enough context in that one sentence. that it, can completely match your voice and it does a terrific job. It's insane.

So the answer, Leslie, to your question is yes, you can. and that, that's a problem, isn't it? I think the more we get into this sort of stuff at the moment, it all sounds like fun and games, but I don't know. You imagine that you want a, some political opponent and you wanna pretend that they said something really horrible.

That will be really easy to do and puts that person on the back foot. And, when actually they said nothing in the first place, but

[00:59:05] Cami MacNamara: Oh, they're already doing that.

[00:59:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But, they're already making air convincing. And it's, yeah. Yeah. Did you see any of that during your elections?

Did you detect any weirdness going on, like foul play?

[00:59:16] Cami MacNamara: No, I didn't, we didn't have anything crazy. Okay. That crazy happening in our state. But in Texas they did, they made a whole video of one APO opponent singing a kind of crazy song and a dress or something. And I don't know if it went out over the regular TV waves, but it went out online, and then it got played on all the news stations.

[00:59:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:59:39] Cami MacNamara: Yeah.

[00:59:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Personally, I'm never gonna listen to a blog post. but I'll happily listen to, podcast episodes, which I suppose in a sense is very much like a blog, but I don't really know why that is. I just think I'm sitting and I've scrolled to it on my website. I enjoy the process of reading. I just, I like reading as an activity, but I can see why you might want to use it anyway.

It's gonna be there now. And I'm guessing with this current state of technology, it will be pennies to turn, let's say, a 3000 word article into audio. You won't, it'll be some generic voice, but I'll bet it'll sound like it was done. it's, unlikely. Oh, I see

[01:00:20] Lesley Sim: that about yourself, Nathan.

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: What's that?

[01:00:23] Lesley Sim: No, I just said don't say that about yourself.

[01:00:28] Nathan Wrigley: no, it'll sound brilliant. I'm sure it'll sound brilliant. So anyway, that's good. Dave, according to Nomad Skateboard, oh yeah, he did. I couldn't, decide which video to choose. Dave, according to Nomad Skateboarding, had another good video, on Dr.

The Dragon Drop. And he did, he's reimagined what the block editor might look like, and it's really good. He's got like this column approach, these lanes where you can drop and resize and pull things around and it's really nice. You, it's not nothing that you haven't seen before, but it's inside the context of this new, interface that I've just shown.

So it's pretty good. Courtney says her internet was out for a few hours during election day, including the ISP website. Definitely. Suspicious timing. Oh, yeah. Oh. Should write a blog post. and in a few years, tacho says Nathan will no longer invite us, but j just generate an episode with our voices.

Tacho. I haven't been on this show since probably February last year. yeah, I'm having a cup of tea at the minute.

[01:01:32] Lesley Sim: All, of taco's comments have also been generated by,

[01:01:35] Nathan Wrigley: that's

[01:01:36] Lesley Sim: right. That's

[01:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: exactly right.

[01:01:37] Lesley Sim: Not even him.

[01:01:39] Nathan Wrigley: I saw a really in, so maybe you've seen this a thousand times, but to me it was quite novel.

I hadn't seen it before. It was somebody who was recording themselves in a, they were interviewing somebody for a job. And they were capturing what was who they, so it was a zoom call basically, and it went really well until they've now got this question in the, whole process of doing the interview.

And it's something about just scratching your face. And so they asked the candidate, can you just scratch your face? And then this candidate who'd done really well in the job interview was like going gangbusters. Couldn't do it, just couldn't scratch their face. no, I can't do that. I'm not willing to do that.

Why? Why aren't you willing to do that? Oh, I just, and all these excuses came out and it was like, wow, that's an ai we would never have known without the scratching the face question. So just so that, definitely I'm real. It just, neither Cam or Leslie have managed to do it. So draw from that, what you

[01:02:41] Cami MacNamara: now wasn't more than one person on that interview ai.

And then they got in a loop and they couldn't get out of the loop. I believe that is what happened too. yeah,

you do it. I saw that too.

[01:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: What are we doing to ourselves? who's, like for a start, if you, if your AI gets the job, presumably that's gonna be a fully distributed remote job where you'll never have to show up and doing anything in person because you don't, for a start, you don't look like that person.

But also you presumably don't have the capacity to do whatever it was that they require from the interview. Otherwise,

[01:03:19] Cami MacNamara: your agent, your AI agent, might be able to do it. So you just,

[01:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: just hang around

[01:03:24] Cami MacNamara: your AI agent.

[01:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Do

[01:03:25] Cami MacNamara: it.

[01:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I wonder how many people are, or

[01:03:28] Cami MacNamara: you have your tea.

[01:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I wonder how many people are actually getting paid to do absolutely nothing at the moment.

dat ta Very existential tacho. we don't know. I think I've seen you at a word camp, but I can never be sure

[01:03:47] Lesley Sim: that's exactly the kind of comment an AI would make.

[01:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's, yeah. Whenever I've met Tacho, as soon as I turn my back on him and walk away, I'm always left with this sense of, I'm not sure about that.

Not what just happened. so here we go. I, so this is Courtney. I switched to this provider four months ago and never had an issue before. I dunno. and ts back. I'm sure that has motivated some people to go and vote. What else can you do without the internet connection? in my part of the world, most people, as far as I'm aware, we don't have any machines that you can vote on.

You have to vote with a piece of paper. You always have, and I don't think there's any moves to do, like electronic voting. You can post it, so you can get it a few days in advance and pop it in the post, but it's still you with a pencil, or a pen on a piece of paper that you then, then gets dropped into a box.

I don't see why that system needed to be changed. why do we need voting machines? Let's just all vote on a piece of paper and we can actually count them. There we go. That's my wisdom for the week. Let's move on. Quick hat tip to Mr. West Guard. We spoke about him earlier. Mark West Guard, he's put a, I wanted to keep the theme of random.

Random, yeah. he dropped this a random text detection system. So if you are using WS form and your, emails are getting spammed be, I don't know, let's say for example by a random email [email protected] or something like that, obviously it's easy to set those things up on automation, set up a random email address, send out a bunch of forms, waste your time.

he's now got this random detector which will spam things where there's an intuition that it's, is, some, some bot somewhere has created it. maybe the same will be true inside of the forms as well, and you can go and retrieve it from spam if it turns out not to be spam, but just I think that's a really good idea.

I have, I was saying this last week, I've got, I reckon a 40 x increase in the amount of spam I'm getting.

wow. Over the last three months. but the thing is, it's originating from a not spam source. So I get the WP Tavern contact form and I get the WP Builds contact form and you just get heaps of trash coming through it.

A kismet gets rid of the vast majority of it, but still quite a lot of it gets through. And it's not spam in the sense that it's on message, it's actually dealing with a thing. But the message itself is obviously written by an ai 'cause it's following this template, I've got a plug in, right? it does this, dah, and on it goes.

And you can tell that no human's been in touch with that email at any point. that then leads me to this one, which is right at the end, but I'll loop it in now. This is the GoDaddy, CEO, who's saying that he won't read work that is written by an ai. And I am starting to have the same intuition if I detect that something has been written by an ai.

So these contact forms are perfect point in case in, case they have legitimate links, they go to legitimate plugins by legitimate people who legitimately want to fill out the form, but they've got an AI to write the email. And I just think, that's all most you basically saying, I can't be bothered, but you should be.

So I'm gonna take one second to write an email that it's gonna take you three minutes to read. And I think there's something a bit skewed and a bit messed up about that transactional nature in, the head of the person thinking, yeah, that's a reasonable thing to do. I don't think it is. and I think increasingly I'm gonna take the opinion that if I detect it's written by an ai, it's just gonna go in the bin without a reply.

Leslie's nodding. Yeah. Similar. You got the same intuitions.

[01:08:07] Lesley Sim: Oh no, I just I like how you thought about it.

[01:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. In terms of the amount of time it takes.

[01:08:14] Lesley Sim: Yeah. Yeah. It's like they, they want something from you, but they spent five seconds asking AI to write a crappy email, but then they want you to spend the one hour or two hours, to do whatever it is that they want you to do.

[01:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And here's the, interesting intuition, sorry, the interesting, information. I also have, they basically drop simultaneously into the tavern website and WP Builds website. so they've obviously been written, WP Tavern, WP Builds have got on an email list somewhere, which has been, lots of plugin people are using, drops into both of them within 10 seconds or 15 seconds, something like that.

It drops into them both and, and you just think, gosh, you'd probably get a lot further just by reaching out and actually having a conversation than by dropping some generic boilerplate. And, if English is not your first language, you know what I'm gonna, I'm really gonna enjoy reading an email where you put in the effort to get through the English language bit, because I'll see the effort, if does that make sense? Anyway, stop

[01:09:25] Cami MacNamara: sending. I think there's a difference between like having my AI email, your AI versus having AI help you send an email, right? I use it all day, every day in helping me formulate, communication with clients if I'm having a hard time with something. And then, in terms of GoDaddy and yeah, I feel like having that stringent rule, he's not gonna be reading a whole lot of emails because everybody is using AI in some way to help them write, whether you're using Whisper Flow to say what you're typing and then it's making corrections for you.

So I feel like it's not as black and white as white.

[01:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I think, it's the transactional nature of it, which, so these are not people that I know, so it's not like I'm communicating with a client where, we've done the hard work of figuring out who we are and whether or not we're reliable.

This is somebody that just essentially would like me to look at their plugin and, in many cases just feature it on something. They're just, yeah. And it's fine. You can do that. There's no proclivity, there's no mechanism. I have to stop you from doing that, but it's not gonna go very far.

because it's

[01:10:44] Cami MacNamara: not the best impression.

[01:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. It's not the best impression. I think you've got it. And, we now know that Ollie, is responsible because he said so much, sorry for Yeah. I can tell you Ollie, it's not you. yeah. I should keep them. Some of them I should put in like a museum.

'cause some of them are just, they're like the same email from two completely different plugin developers who've obviously got more or less the exact same prompt, just substitute plugin name here. And very often the tell, I shouldn't really say this out loud. The very, the, quickest way of knowing it's AI is where somebody summarises in the first sentence, who I am and what I do.

They say, hi Nathan, you run the WP Builds podcast, which has got over 800 EPIs. oh God,

[01:11:31] Cami MacNamara: I think this should be the random tab on your website.

[01:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you can, yeah. Yeah. I actually got one that was so bad last week that I replied, I replied saying, this is so bad. come on. Because they'd left all the merge tags in, so it said heart, it said media outlet, comma, first name, comma, reason for, and then, Nixon said, so you could tell that this is not a cold outreach.

And it's, oh my God, it's so bad. Anyway, they apologised, which I thought was quite nice of them. So anyway, blah, blah, blah. That wasn't supposed to be where this was all going. Let's get back to what we were talking about, tofa. Tofa has made a, a, oh, hang on a minute. Where's that gone? How did that happen?

There we go. I just messed something up in the ui. tofa one, Kenobi Dunno if you all know Tofa.

[01:12:35] Lesley Sim: Hey Tofa.

[01:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yay. Yay. He's a, I dunno if this is a brand new, but I've only just caught sight of it. I think I saw it in M's Newsletter maybe. it's called Photo Fetch. And I love looking at people's photos, and I love the, the WordPress photo directory.

This now enables you to take imagery from the photo directly by searching, for example, inside the word, excuse me, the WordPress Media Library. I don't need to say much more than that, but if you are struggling to find images, all of the ones in the directory are in order to get in the directory, they're gonna be without faces.

They're gonna have been looked at by a human being. and you have permission to use them in, in any which way you like, basically. So it's a really nice way of, finding things completely without, you'd have to think about whether Getty Images will come after you. Although I think they went bust didn't they recently?

Getty Images, haven't they gone under? I think, yeah,

[01:13:39] Cami MacNamara: I think they filed, bankruptcy or something, but they're still in existence. I still have an iStock photo account.

[01:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I have the world's tiniest violin, which I would play in, sadness image. It's so small, you can barely hear it.

anyway, this is a totally credible alternative. So Tofa, thank you. It's called Photo Fetch. And there you go. Pretty cool.

[01:14:09] Lesley Sim: Yeah. Thank you. That's a really cool idea.

[01:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: Useful? Yeah. Really neat.

[01:14:12] Lesley Sim: Michelle. I'll post it on my X.

[01:14:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Okay. Yeah, you go do that. Do that now. Yeah. That's great. I think that's a good idea.

We should do that. We should do running tweets during the show. I don't have the capacity to do it, but that's a really neat idea. If we did tweets about what was actually being said at the time it was being said, I could have them pre-written, couldn't I? There's an interesting idea. Yeah. Yeah. I could do it.

Yeah. You're not here every week. you come back every week and do by tweets, so just that. In order to get you to do that, I'll write you a really badly formulated AI pleading email and I'll send it to you please, Blaine. That's right. Hey, with

[01:14:51] Lesley Sim: all the verse

[01:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: sim, you've got a word plug in. that's how it'll start, right?

Okay. Marcus Burnett is in the comments. nice idea, Marcus. I know This's been around for, several days now, but, we didn't pick up on it last week. This is called Connect Local. and you're gonna find it, that subdomain, it's collect local dot m burnett.com. If you're looking at the screen, you can probably see the, it's gonna be easier for me to, oh no, I can't zoom in on that 'cause it's not in the ui.

So it's Connect Lowens or anything dot m burnett.com. And the idea is to connect your local, so hopefully you understand what I mean by local, your local WordPress website up to a bunch of different hosts. So at the minute you are able to connect to Bluehost Cloud Ways. Kinta hosting a Pressable spin up WP, and it looks like they've got a few more coming.

If I scroll down, I dunno where it's gone, but somewhere there's a, I dunno where I saw it, Marcus, but I know you've got a few more coming. I think WP Engine was on the list or something like that. Anyway, the point being that if you've got local, websites that are being created, you may not have had the capacity to sync those up to your hosting provider.

now Marcus has done the, done the heavy lifting with that and Marcus, before we began the call, the three of us were sitting, staring at your webpage trying to decide if it was out of focus, or if it was deliberate. 'cause if you look at it like the word connected, it's like, is it, I dunno if it's my eyes, but if it was intentional, it's very clever 'cause it got us talking about it.

So go check it out. Anything you wanna say about that YouTube.

[01:16:45] Cami MacNamara: I love the design, Marcus. I just

[01:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: have to say that. Isn't it nice? Yeah, very cool. Very, cool. Oh, it, that is, wow. That is animating, but in the slowest way possible. I imagine that is accessibility focused animation. Look at that. You can barely see it.

That's lovely. Very subtle. Well done. okay, moving on quickly. These were gonna be Robert's ones and obviously because of the time proclivities, we weren't gonna get to them, so I'll just mention them, but Robert had more to say on them, but sadly, he's, his plane got, changed and he was unable to come, stay on the show.

So this is, open SSH password authentication, bypass on Alpine Linux. yeah. SSH hole, which I think is quite, quite a nice CVE. So there was that. And then there was another one that he mentioned, and this is all about the WordPress security team. We were speaking about AI a lot on this show and, because we're now getting security problems coming at us too fast.

Yeah. Really hard. Hundreds in a month now, out outside the normal bounds of sort of 20 or 30 every, every few months, we're now getting hundreds a month. Turns out you can't really keep up. So what's the way to deal with it? you build tools out of AI to go and find the problems before other people do.

So this is part of that initiative and it says the WordPress security team is building AI tools that haunt core for bugs before anyone reports them. so there you go. I guess in the year 2026 and 2027, that's not really a surprise, but wow, what kind of a world do we live in where have to

[01:18:35] Cami MacNamara: have anything that will help is welcome, right?

Yeah,

[01:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: that's right indeed. Yeah. yeah. Anything on that you two. No. Okay. And then there was a bunch of events. This is why Robert has left. but Cloudfest America's, I guess it's a bit late in the day if you haven't got a ticket, but you never know, you might be in this neck of the woods. it's going on, or in a couple of days time.

So 11th of November through to the 12th, it's happening in Miami, Florida. There's a lot of people going. It's incredibly popular. so that's happening. And what else is happening in the WordPress world? This was another one Robert wanted to mention, evolve Digital. It's happening in New York City later on in the month, in 10 days time.

I'd not even heard of that one. but it doesn't look like it's a WordPress specific thing. But anyway, Robert is gonna be speaking at that, I think. And then Robert did mention this, which I thought was curious. State of the word has been a bit of an event for, it used to be attached to WordPress events, and at the end of a sort of flagship event, Matt Mullenweg would come on stage and give his sort of state of the word presentation.

Then it got hived out into a dedicated event. And I know they did it in Tokyo and they did it in New Lisbon, I think, was it? And New York was another one. That's right. I think they've done two, three. and now though, I, essentially, we don't know what's going on here, whether or not that event has been mothballed or whether or not there's just not capacity in the calendar.

I don't know. But if you go to the state of the world word 2026, obviously this was a holding page put up until such times as a, an event location and time and what have you had been arranged. But it does look like it's, I don't know, maybe it's not too late in the year. Maybe this'll still happen.

Not a lot

[01:20:33] Cami MacNamara: of weeks left.

[01:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: Not a lot weeks left. Yeah. Yeah. anyway, so maybe that's an event, which isn't going to happen. However, here's some more that are CMS conf, obviously CMS neutral event that's happening, in three days time, 12th to the 14th of November because it's a CMS one. I expect it's probably the most, you know, one of the most adjacent for WordPresses.

I know there's a bunch of WordPresses going, there's probably quite a lot of WordPress content, if you're a Drupal or a, who knows, whatever LER CMS that you are using this event is for you. It's happening in Poland, in Nia. what else have we got? Word? Camp Netherlands. I know Tachos, heavily involved.

That's happening on the 12th. That's to, what's that? What's that? Thursday? Thursday, Friday. and, because I can't speak Norwegian, I'm just gonna click the translate button into English. There we go. and it didn't do, oh, do I have to, what do I have to do? Oh, there you go. Word. Camp Netherlands is an informal event for everyone who works with WordPress, from hobby blogger to developer, and from self-employed person to agencies.

Everyone is very welcome. The main goal is to share ideas and create connection, that's happening this week. And there's one more, which is word campa, which is also happening this week. So there's a lot of events going on just in the sort of preamble before Christmas. anything you wanna say about that?

No, in which case I'll go to our last one.

[01:22:11] Lesley Sim: It's like a lot of work camps are just nice.

[01:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Isn't it

[01:22:14] Lesley Sim: nice to see?

Yeah,

[01:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: curious that there. Yeah. Curious that there at this time of year as well, so many kind of fallen in November, which yeah, maybe it's just too hot in some of these places at different times of the year.

Oh, sorry, one more, word Camp Beng guru, but Bengal ru, I don't know how you say that. Bengal. Beru,

[01:22:34] Cami MacNamara: yeah. Yeah, I think

[01:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's in a couple of weeks. That's, 21st to the 22nd, in India. So that's another one. And then we'll go to this very last piece with a, just a few minutes to go, drip.

I thought that Drip was like this giant megacorp, and maybe I'm wrong about that. I, thought it was like, on a scale of MailChimp or something, I dunno why I thought that. I just seemed to have this intuition that it was massive. It obviously can't be because it's been bought, been acquired by automotive, and I don't suppose automotive, even though they're a big company, I've probably got the pockets deep enough to buy MailChimp.

But, drip has been taken over, by SED and Oromo. There's not really a lot to say about that. obviously they've got things like Opt-in Monster, I presume they've still got that, but they took them over. They've been longtime users. They've watched the product grow. I'm guessing that they've been using them for their own internal stuff for years and years and now, it's theirs. so if you're a drip user and and you know you've got any intuitions about that, go and check it out. That was on x sed bulky, feed say in that 13 years in the making. I don't suppose it was 13 years actually doing the deal, but they've been using them for 15 years.

Yeah. Yeah. okay. anything on that before we go? Leslie, you've obviously got a history with Newsletter Glue. That was one you supported I think, wasn't it Drip?

[01:24:09] Lesley Sim: no, we didn't support Drip. Oh, you

[01:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: didn't? Okay.

[01:24:11] Lesley Sim: But yeah, we didn't, no, but yeah, this looks cool. Congrats to, to them and the team.

[01:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:24:18] Lesley Sim: I think they run it well.

[01:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. I like I said, I just thought they were massive. I dunno why I thought they were massive. Do you know, was this one that Jason, is this a Jason Cohen thing? It wasn't, was it, you know the guy who, no, it's not one. It is, it's

[01:24:32] Lesley Sim: a Rob Walling.

[01:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,

[01:24:35] Lesley Sim: I've thought of under underhanded comments, but this is like an underhand that itself.

[01:24:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is it? Okay. I

[01:24:43] Lesley Sim: dunno. You're like, I thought they were bigger.

[01:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Yeah. I dunno. They're just one of those companies that, because the marketing that I've had always, I dunno, they, they just did a great job of, presenting themselves as, this big credible entity. I just assumed that they were on the scale of like tens of millions of users or something.

But I'm. I'm not sure that's in fact how it was. Let's have a little look, see what we've got before we wrap it up. Any comments here? Did I say Norwegian? Yeah, I probably did. I meant to say Glaswegian. no, Dutch. Sorry. tacho. I probably did. the webinar says at Taco, like I said, I get why they do it because it's necessary.

Oh, I dunno what that comment's regarding. So not sure what that meant.

No, I think that's probably it. in which case we will knock it on the head with three minutes to go. We're not normally early, but that's good. we've obviously we're missing one of our people. We carelessly lost, Robert Jacoby earlier. He's, we should have got the hands from Robert. I don't know what we, maybe I'll find an old or get an item.

Yes. Robert's, hands. but yeah, fill

[01:26:05] Lesley Sim: in blank.

[01:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:26:07] Lesley Sim: Hope has six fingers or seven.

[01:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Should I do that? Is that just really bad if I get a picture of Robert with his hand? No, I'll, just do the three of us. That'll be all right. in which case can I ask for the hands? I don't know Leslie if you know about this, but we do our little hand thing.

we go, one of those frames will be absolutely fine. Perfect. In which case, thank you to those of you that took the time to show up and leave us comments. Really appreciate that. And obviously it goes without saying. Thank you so much to Leslie, Sim, to Kami McNamara and like half of a thanks to Robert.

You get a bit of a Thanks

[01:26:47] Lesley Sim: one

[01:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: hand. yeah, no, a full thanks to Robert

[01:26:50] Lesley Sim: Singular. Thank.

[01:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What, sorry, Leslie, what did you say?

[01:26:53] Lesley Sim: No, I said he gets a singular thank.

[01:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. He gets the one hand. That's right. It doesn't get the full compliment of thanks.

[01:26:59] Lesley Sim: Oh, no, thank,

[01:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: we'll be back next week. I can't honestly remember which guests we've got because, I'm not that clever.

Can't remember one week to the next, but we'll be back next week and hopefully we'll see you then for another edition of this week. And WordPress if the two of you want to hang out and have a quick chat afterwards, that would be lovely. We will see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye everyone.

Bye-bye.