This Week in WordPress #237  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Builds]] - Full Title: This Week in WordPress #237 - Category: #articles - Document Note: This Week in WordPress #237 covers the latest WordPress news, including the new Gutenberg editor, updates to the REST API, and new features in the WordPress 5.5 release. The Gutenberg editor is being updated with new features and bug fixes, while the REST API is being improved to make it easier for developers to build and maintain applications. WordPress 5.5 brings a range of new features, including an auto-update system for plugins, improved performance when using block-based themes, and the ability to update themes and plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard. This Week in WordPress #237 summarizes the latest news in the WordPress world, with a focus on the Gutenberg editor, the REST API, and the new features in WordPress 5.5. It provides an overview of the changes made to the editor, API, and release, as well as a look at the new features and improvements available. 1. What are some of the new WordPress features discussed in this issue? 2. How is the WordPress community responding to these changes? 3. What can WordPress users expect in the future? - Document Tags: [[wordpress certification]] - Summary: Join us for another 'This Week in WordPress' show as we chat about the #WordPress News from this week! It's at 2pm UK time. https://wpbuilds.com/live Join Nathan Wrigley, Jess Frick, Maddy Osman and Zach Swinehart. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srqgijCMs_U&ab_channel=WPBuilds [Music] thank you foreign[Music] [Music]hello hello hello hello episode number234 no it's not I cannot read uh episode number 237 of this week in WordPressum very very glad to have you here ifyou uh fancy sharing this podcast andgetting other people to come in loveit's always nice when the comments fillupum go towpbuilds.com forward slash live copy ofpaste that URL and stick it in a socialplatformsomewhere and press return and uh let'ssee see what we can do today I'm joinedby three lovely guests one of whom we'veseen many many times before hello Jess hello Nathan good morning yeah Happy NewYear I don't think I've seen you yeahyeah did you get any nice Christmaspresents or oh yeah yeah I got lots ofnice Christmas presentsum but you know now that I'm I'm alittle bit older it's not so much thetoys and it's more things like you knowstuff in my car oh yeah yeah you got theStar Wars figures this year or no no I'mlack of the new Barbie but you know it was good how about yours yeah I got Igot this thing from my Father which wasa car computer basically you you plug itinto the car and it tells you what'sgone wrong and I actually have severalthings wrong with my car and I I just Iwas a bit mocking of it I said yeahit'll never work plugged it in got themall straight away first timethose are so cool you used to have to goto the mechanic to get them to plug itin and now well that's right power is inyour hands significantly cheaper thanthat anyway Jess wait digress Jess is the director of operations for presspossible which is a very fine WordPresshosting company she's also an iced teaconnoisseur she's the team rep for themake WordPress hosting team and a proudmember of the post status Communityshe's been on many many times so it'svery very nice to have you back thankyou so much for joining us once morewe're also joined by Maddie Osmond Iforgot to ask if I was going topronounce your surname correct you gotit right right no worries and how areyou you're all right I'm doing great I'mhappy to be here I'm going to read out your biography and then if anythingcomes to mind I'll ask you someadditional things Maddie is thebest-selling author of the writing forhumans and robots which we'll come on tolater uh writing for humans and robotsthe new rules of content style she's thefounder of the blogsmith's Strategiccontent agency that works with clientslike kinsta Nexus Elementor and GoDaddyright in the WordPress space check itout the blogsmith specializes intranslating technical language intosomething understandable by the layperson have you always been into sort of content writing and things then or isthat like interesting you did at collegeor how did that become that's where itstarted yeah it kind of been in tandemwith the web design stuff but now I justmostly do the content stuff the thecompanies that you put in the bio you'velisted those do you work exclusivelywith WordPress companies or is that justa happy collection that you've gotthat's again kind of where it started Iwould say and and nowadays we mostlywork with B2B SAS in general nice nicewell thank you thank you for joining us today I hope you enjoy it and I hope youcome back and and so on and then alsolast but by no means least we have Zachswinehart who by the way gets the getsthe award I don't have an awards act butif I had an award for the best actualreal background for anybody that'sappeared on this show because I meanZach's basically in his own Librarywhich is just great hello Zach hellonice I don't know whether any of thebooks are actually in English it's a small detail yeah most of us canonly achieve these sort of the parquetLibrary effect by clicking a zoombackground or something like that yeah II I don't know what's the same if it'sthe same with you Maddie and Jess and doyou have to do a bit of a clear up eachtime you come on a show like this isthere's stuff that just sort of getspiled in over time because I have tobasically if I was to swivel my cameradown there it's a bit of a hill of justcrud and stuff like that Jess is nodding like yeah yeah just don't look rightthere because okay all the stuff thatI'm going to sell someday yeahfortunatelyyeah yeah right behind me load of stuffon the floor and what have you but Zachfabulous background so Zach if you'reinterested in this Zach actuallycuriously by real good coincidence Idon't know if it was good coincidencemaybe you booked it deliberately Zach Idon't know but Zach is actuallyfeaturing on the wp builds podcast thisweek and then because Zach had an interesting subject we managed to makeit span two episodes so it'll be on in acouple of weeks as well but I'll giveyou Zach's bio Zach swinehart has beenbuilding in WordPress as a freelancersince 2009 he loves using Wordpress torapidly build complex designs and as abackbone for SAS products he's one ofthe partners atdoubleyourfreelancing.com and enjoysteaching people how to leveragefreelancing to create more freedom andoptionality in their lives I actuallydidn't know Zach from the conversation that we had which was nothing really todo with WordPress it was all about sortof optimizing your life and life Ididn't realize that you were sort ofbuilding SAS on top of work really andcool subjectyeah I quite like it especially for MVPsI think I don't have a lot of experiencescaling a SAS product on WordPress Idon't know how well a SAS product wouldscale especially if you're not usinglike headless WordPress or something butfor quickly getting an MVP done it'sgreat yeah I was chatting to a guy called Corey Mass I don't know if youknow him but uh I'm putting an episodeout on the wp Tavern in two days timeall about that exact subject he has thesame approach as you he quickly buildsthings inside of Wordpress and then hejust sees if there's an audience thereand if there is an audience there maybescales it or maybe you know gets rid ofit or maybe just kind of moves over tosome other programming language and doesit that way but yeah very nice to haveyou on the podcast today as always pretty much always the first commentthat comes in is a weather report fromPeter Ingersoll literally every weekPeter drops in a weather report uh it'shysterical uh greetings from Connecticutthere is currently -1 degrees Centigradegrade 30 degrees Fahrenheit on theCloudy Skies had a dusting of snowovernightthat Peter literally is verbatim myweather report it's minus one at theminute there are cloudy skies and we hadsnow overnight so I don't know that's kind of weird but thank you for joiningus Peter if a bit of housekeeping hopeyou don't mind if you want to be a partof the show there's a couple of placesyou can go the first one as I saidearlier is wpbuilds.com forward slashlive if you go there you have to belogged into some Google property becauseit's YouTube and so the comments needyou to be logged into YouTubealternatively if you're joining us onFacebook uh you can share your username and Avatar only if you do the followingyou've got to go tochat.restream.io forward slash FB it'llbe in the notes at the top of the postclick the link there to authorizerestream otherwise you'll come throughas Anonymous you know just the ordinarylittle Avatar some people get over thatby just writing their name at thebeginning of the comment but up to youbut Nathan if they go to YouTube canthey subscribe there good grief Jess nowit's I had no I don't know I have noidea don't ask me about that somebody will have to try it and let us I'm sohopeless at this kind of thing yeahprobably I imagine there's a way tosubscribe oh yeah no it's an embeddedvideo so you'd have to go to the YouTubechannel and then subscribe over thereyeah I'm sure you can we don't have thatmany YouTube subscribers really this isum this is all about the audio whichwill strip out and podcast well allabout tomorrow so here we go rightWordPress is stuff let's get ourselveson the screenand okay first things first this is our website we are WP build if you do wantto subscribe via email as Jess was verykindly suggestingum this is probably the best way to doit if you go to wpbuilds.com there's alittle subscribe form on the front usethat alternatively like she said you cango to our search Google for WP buildsYouTube channel you can subscribe overthere but yeah the next thing to mentionis a WordPress story this is a couple ofthings that I'm just going to ripthrough very quickly if that's all rightyou three guess if you want to bot in and interrupt please feel free todo so but I'm not imagining there's alot of discussion about this one thefirst one is just a piece by AnneMcCarthy we've got several piecesfeaturing her today it's over onmake.wordpress.org called core editorImprovement advancing the site editorexperience and essentially she goes overa whole bunch of things including littlesnippet videos they're about 30 20seconds long where she just emphasizesokay this is how it does it because I think it's all very well explaining intext here's a new feature here's a newthing that we did but it's always easierto have a little bit of text and then avideo to see it and so that's what she'sdone and I commend her for that becauseit just makes it so easy to understandand the things that she wants tohighlight in the recent past areproviding Clarity and ease she's got asection about the reusable templateparts and the way the UI works for thatshe's got a section about the navigationblock and how that's all been now putinside the sidebar on the right and then she's also got this section aboutum This Global rows and things and thefact that they've decided to separatethose out with different colors it's ait's a good read if you're followingWordPress and you're getting confusedevery time you update you just sort ofthink oh what's happened I didn't reallyfollow what went on there definitelyrecommend in one way shape or formfollowing Anne McCarthy she goes to buythe by the title Anza Zoouh she's in post status I think quite alot and she's on make.wordpress slack as well and it's just really worthfollowing everything that she does soI'll link to that in the show notes didany of you have anything to comment onthat I suspect not but feel free if youdid I just think it's really cool thatstyle book feature becauseum that's kind of what I'm all aboutstyle guides making it really clear youknow what the existing visual hierarchyof things is so I think that's going tobe really usefulwas that this one it was right near thebottom it was one of the first videos Ithink okay okay yeah yeah that like sort of pink background there yeah this isthe this is the sort of style guidesthis has been in WordPress for a littlebit of time now and it's really reallynice you know you get this palette ofdifferent options on the right hand sidewhere you can selectdifferentdifferent ways that your your theme willlook and you just sort of Click throughthem all and the new default theme inWordPress 2023 has got like I don't know10 12 something like that they're allreally different they don't change you know a great deal apart from colorsborders margin padding that kind ofthing but the transformation that youcan get just by clicking those buttonsis prettyyeah pretty transformational so yeahthank you for mentioning that anythingelse or shall I move on I'll move onI'll move on okayokay again this is something I justwanted to briefly mentionum Justin tadlock who is now anautomatic used to write very regularlyon WP Tavern he's got an article whichhe's entitled a walkthrough of layout classes in 6.1 it's pretty quick readit's probably going to take you like 20minutes but he's he essentially hasdecided to put all of the bits andpieces regarding that title into thisone piece he says and I quote layoutrelease related classes are given tocontainer type blocks in WordPress theyDefine how nested blocks are alignedwith their parents most extenders willimmediately associate layer classes withthe group block and the row and stackvariations however WordPress usesclasses for other blocks such as soitems and so on and then the following list is a bird's eye view of the currentstate of classes in WordPress 6.1 andthere's absolutely boatloads of them andhe gives little code examples of howthey all work so again it's a bittechnical but if that Rings any bells goand check that out againI'll link to it in the show notesokaycall for testing this is Anne McCarthyonce again this is her 20th call fortesting sorry guys I know you guessesare sort of sitting there listening tome drowning on it will be over after this oneum she's put together her 20th call fortesting the overview uh is find yourstyle and she wants to see how you areable to achieve some of the recentthings that have been pushed intoWordPress so the items that are beingtested are push changes to two Stylesand also add an option to import widgetsfrom sidebars if you are into testingand wanting to make with WordPressfuture a little bit more smooth andstreamlined she needs your help again I'll link to it in the show notes allright apologies for those threeRumblings I just thought I'll get themout the way very very quickly this isthe first one which I think there'sprobably something to talk aboutum this is on WP minutewhen I started creating websites therewas no there was no almost nothing thatyou could find to help you in thatEnterprise there was very little onlinea few books were out on the shelves I'vegot gray hair so that tells you how long ago all of this happened but it wasessentially if you thought you could doit and you wanted to put a little bit oftime into it you could develop a careerin web development it wasn't really coolthough it was like website building andthings back then it was a lot morestraightforward than it was now butthere was no way of sort of certifyingyourself and saying I have the necessaryskills well the same is pretty much truein WordPress if you think about it ifyou consider yourself to be a WordPressexpert the only way you can reallyjustify that is probably producing a CV of jobs that you've had projects thatyou've done people's testimonials and soon and the idea has been raised morerecently and it's mentioned in thisarticle on WP minute by Eric carkovacand he's basically putting together thequest question should we have aWordPress certification program in otherwords should there be some stamp ofauthority from some organizationsomewhere which saysyou know Zach can do this Maddie can dothis Jess can do this what what does that mean what does that look like whowould create it how authoritative wouldit be how long should it last you knowall of these kind of things and I I kindof think in the increasingly competitiveworld that we have in WordPress this tome at least feels like a good idea toexplore so with that I'm going to openup the floor and say what do you thinkdo you think this is something thatwould benefit I don't know particularlyum Jess being an employer or working fora company certainly that wants to employWordPress experts what do you what do you make of all thisoh and Courtney got here just in time ohdid shedropping yeahuh I'm admittedly biased I'm I'm on theboard of directors for certified WPso that's um you don't think thereshould be one isshe's been there to just throw bombsinto these I am I'm the moleum but you know certified WP was uhfounded with this idea of helping military veterans find jobsand in order to qualify for some of theprograms available to Veterans and youknow military membersum there has to be credentialing throughthe Department of Defenseand so I can share with you sorry I doapologize could you just run that back alittle bit and talk about yeah the thethe U.S military connection therebecause I would imagine a lot of peopleprobably don't get that piece of the chicken yeah I forget that you guysaren't all in the U.S yeahumwell in the U.S we have a governmentumI'm writing that down that's the titleof the podcast in the U.S we have agovernment right so we have a governmentsometimesum well you know when military membersuh sign up for service it's usually intermsum and they can renew uh for you knowtheir entire career but a lot of times you know once they've fulfilled theirservice uh then they move on to jobs andcivilian World there are programs forhelping veterans get jobsand so the idea behind this was to tryto help more veterans enter theWordPress communityand I'm specifically speaking aboutcertified WP which you can find atcertifiedwp.comum and so this was developed uh as a not-for-profit organization to helpthese veterans find a place in ourcommunity of course you could watch allthe YouTube videos in the world butthat's not going to help you get whereyou need to go quickly enough to youknowfeed your familyum and so this was intended to just kindof create an onboarding program uh sincethen there has been a lot of controversydo we need it don't we need it um you know I know learn W learn uh WPthe thewordpress.org founded education isfantastic but that's not going to beenough for the Department of Defenseif they want to start giving funds andhelping veterans enter thisso it's still in its infancyum we're still figuring out what thecurriculum entails we're still lookingfor letters from employers to say yes Iwould hire someone who took a certification program that met thiscriteria and I would expect that theywould know enough to become a WordPressdeveloper on my teamand that's kind of where that goes nowto be fair I believe there may be otherpeople in the WordPress Community whohave been talking about certificationsso I am specifically talking about justthat oneum I can't speak to the other ones butyeah I think I I don't see a downside to it can we stick with certified WP for aminute and then we could broaden theconversation to just what it might lookfor in general so if we stick with thecertified WP and the military do youknow is there a does the department it'scalled the Department of Defense rightwe call it the ministry of Defense herebut okay does the Department of Defensesort of interface between the peoplecoming out of the military and uh let'ssay companies institutions organizationsoffering employment so not necessarilywith WordPress but can you map for example he was a guy who repairedhelicopters in the military we're goingto hook you up with people on the otherside the civilian side who may beinterested in your skill set and ifthat's the case is there a is there acorrelation between I don't know I wasworking insomething to do with computers on theseon the military side and then out on thecivilian side these companies might beinterested or is it more like lookyou're coming out of the military it's acomplete clean break we'll just start you from scratch on an internet-basedjob in this case you know encapsulatedby WordPressum in the United States it's not thatclean of a path I can share for examplemy brother was in the Navy and he workedon computers on amphibious amphibiousships and he has since translated thatthrough trainings with the military intoa career working on HVAC computers for large organizationsum and so there it's not like a quickcut and then you start doing this otherjob there's a middle period with thetraining and then the onboarding and youknow that there are Veteran Affairs herethat kind ofmanage that Gap it's not perfect thoughum that's interesting though isn't itokay right thank you that's fascinatingso let's open it up now to the the wholebigger debate as to whether or notWordPress itself nothing to do with the military or certified WPum whether or not this would be a goodidea because at the minute there reallyisn't anything you could say you've satthrough a bunch of videos and you sayI'm actually really good and myex-employer can certify me but what doyou thinkcan we also Elevate what Courtney saidthere apologies I haven't readCourtney's comment let me go let me havea look uh right so we should say firstof all by coincidence Courtney's wellshe's always here let's be kind to heruh can't be very often here but she was the the person featured at the state ofthe word in the video which was embeddedin the post that we're talking about sheasked the question about this um rabbleRouser that she yes yes uh doing all theright things like wearing a mask and allof that oh uh yeahum so she says she says I found much ofthe same as a bootcamp instructor wereceived funds from the government forretaining unemployed underrepresentedindividuals it needed and it neededofficial curriculum okay uh learn WP can be that official learning pathwaytowards certs we do have plans in the wpas well as as well for certifications soif you don't knowlearn.wordpress.org if you go there youare presented with an increasinglyvoluminous set of learning contentthere's all sorts of different learningstyles you can read you can you canwatch and it's about all the differentsubjects is growing over time but it butthere isn't a way of sort of saying at the end I passed this test I've got thisthing so yeahZach Maddie anything on thisI have thoughts uh so obviously my theangle I'm coming at from here is as afreelancer who's working with clientsand something that I've experienced alot over the years is I'll work with aclient who before me they worked withwhat I call a WordPress assemblerand I've noticed that it's reallydifficult for a client to know thedifference between a WordPress developer and WordPress assembler and soas I looked at some of the stuff we'regoing to be talking about today with thedirection that WordPress core is movingand stuff like the The Vibes that I getand I don't super keep up to date withThe Cutting Edge WordPress but the VibesI'm getting is that wordpress's goal isto be more accessible to the Layman likeall this stuff we see about the siteeditor the whole goal of that is to makeit more squarespacey wixy kind of thingbuild your whole website yourselfand so to me layout Builders were kind of the firstrung of the latter that makes theWordPress assembler more empowered whichis great for WordPress assemblers and itcan be great for clients too becausethey can get websites for cheaper andstuffumbut to me as the barrier to entry lowersI think that there's more and more needfor WordPress certification uh to allowin this case again my angle is thinkingabout a client to allow a client to knowif this person that they might hire is trained enough to do proper Dev stuff orif they're more you know build a cheapsite for a few hundred bucks onElementor or whatever kind of level soto me I think WordPress certification ifdone rightlike if there were different tiersversus an All or Nothing kind of thinguh to me that would be greatinteresting I love the idea of tea is Iguess it would go off in differentdirections like you said it could be youknow your experience that using a builtturning around one day websites with a page builder or your experience buildingyour own custom blocks with react oryour experience building I don't know uhblock themes or whatever it might beyeah be interesting to see if thosedifferent Pathways opened up sorryMaddieum I think exactly what you're sayingalso maybe brings out a bigger andseparate issue which is just the factthat Site Builders like Wix and uhSquarespace and things like that likehonestly at this point feel a little bit easier to use than WordPress and sohaving a certification program couldhelp get people on the same page itcould help Forge you know this uh linearlearning path or non-linear but you knowaccording to whatever discipline thatyou want to go into with WordPress and Ialso think that you know we have Googleanalytics certifications you can get getcertified in Salesforce there's like awhole subculture for that and gettingthe the badges and stuff so it seems like we're maybe even like behind by nothaving a central certification Authorityfor that andI thinkyeah in order for it to be successfulthere would need to be some accreditedoverseeing body to do thatum I have some ideas for who it could bebut at the end of the day just yeahmaybe not just being something that youcan go online and get yourself withoutany you know feedback from an instructoror any sort of like practical projects I think that would still need to be partof it for sureit's interesting the comparison you madewith things like Google and Salesforcebecause obviously it's it's all on theirterritory isn't it you know they're theyare basically you pay I don't know ifyou pay to be honest maybe theirtraining is free but you go throughtheir training they then test you andthen you are accredited on productswhich they can then sell into themarketplace so there's a there's a realobvious connection there Google will winif you certify on there on their training and presumably the same wouldbe true for Salesforce and so on sowe're in a really different positionaren't we because who who would whowould be the person that would becertifying and what would be kind oflike the WordPress way for that but alsoit occurs to me that in order for any ofthese certifications to have any valueyou've got to have buy-in from all thecompanies that may be interested in thisso let's say for example I don't knowpressable Jess is on the screen so I'm saying the word pressableum if you went to pressable and saidI've got the certification from WPbuilds which say that I can build aWordPress I mean that what who no thatit's not worth the paper it's written onit needs to be something that over timegets gets Kudos gets Prestige it's gotvalue behind it so that if you doactually succeed in getting it it's uhyou know the employers will oh all rightokay that'll get you through the doorlet's have a chat with you but also it's got to be maintained and up to date andas we've seen with the stuff that AnneMcCarthy's putting out WordPress ischanging at such a Breakneck speedhow would these materials have have kindof relevance in a year's time two yearstime I I honestly don't know it's a realit's a real conundrum and a puzzleCourtney has thoughts though she says uhthat she agrees on presumably what Zachintroduced there different types oflearning certs that's very much the planokay thank you Courtney uh oh and also um content creators assemblers designsvarying devs okay so you're talking fourminimum maybe five different pathwaysum where people can go and learnCourtney it may be that we've moved onby the time you reply to this but can Iask you directly a question are you areyou thinking about a certification atthe end where they set an exam wheresome body some space bodyum is in charge of saying this is legit you know they we can provably say thatthey sat down in I don't know some sortof exam condition or that they wentthrough the gamma of things that theyneeded to do in order to prove that theydid this because again that would beimportant you know you've got to provethat it was you that sat in it wasn'tyou you know your colleagues sat nextyear was actually really good at it youknow those those kind of things so yeahanything elsebe on the exam you know I think we needto get behind something enough so that the certification mattersum you know not picking on Maddiebecause I've seen her writing and she'sabsolutely brilliant but how manycertified content creators have you seenthat took some class from some websiteand the certification's like oh youspent 500 bucks yaylike yeah it doesn't mean anythingunless everybody says it doessoon okay so thank you Courtney she's right back at us that's brilliantum yes I've discussed with this with uhautomatics Angela Jin training team as awhole is working on thisand okay here's a here's an interestingpiece looks like Joomla have perhapsdone this already as she says she'slearned a bit from Joomla how Joomla hasdone this down to pricing the exams forvarying Nationaleconomics yes that's a good point youknow that God is a whole range ofdifferent countries and languages wherethis might be applicable oh wow it gets complex quickly and spoken to some ofthe Drupal Community folks like Amy JuneHeinlein sorry if I've butchered yourname Amy about how their process worksum and Rob Cairns has also said we haveto be careful about certs and there hasto be ongoing upgrading as part of itokay so yeah that might be aninteresting bit like over here in the UKwhen you've got your driving licenseevery so often I admit you have to befairly old to do it but at some point you have to reaccredit yourself you haveto basically say I am still fit to driveand that might be a good way of doing ityou know your accreditation lapses afterwho knows a period of time and you haveto prove that you can still do it ahfascinating subject I think it's a greatidea I just can't say a problem in loadsof people learning things and provingthat they can do it but the uh thecertified WP thing is really interestingto me as well especially because it'sgot that real angle of you know it knows who it's people coming through thepipeline are very clearly and and whereit's going to put them out the other endthat's great hi Max he says hi all righton this uh so I have a client that runskind of so it's called XY PlanningNetwork and they run almost like theBetter Business Bureau for financialadvisors and so they charge theseadvisors a yearly fee and then thoseadvisors get listed on their like searchportal which I built with facet WP uh and so there's like a tangible leadgeneration benefit to paying for the thecertification andifyou know these problems that werecirculating here of like everybody hasto agree that this certification isMeaningful it has to be paid for I meanuh or kept up Rather if it was comingfromlike wordpress.org and on wordpress.orgthere was a database of all of thecertified WordPress professionals andperhaps when you click into a professional's profile it says whattheir certification is valid through andprobably orders bylike certification relevancy so ifsomebody's certification expired inDecember 31st 2022 maybe they wouldn'tshow up maybe they'd be at the bottom ofthe listum but yeah things like that you know Ibecause everybody if it's onwordpress.org assuming that thequalifications for it aren't just BSpeople are going to inherently anemployer if they see it came fromwordpress.org that's that obviouslycarries clout because it comes from the horse's mouth you know yeah we have wehave an awful lot of sorry I haven't Ithink somebody was about to speak sorryI was just going to say it reminds me ofthose courses you could take on LinkedInyou know and then it says like youpassed the course for awesomecopywriting the skills to test orwhatever they call yeah yeahthey I I guess the tightrope To Treadhere or the needle to thread is is ahybrid of things isn't it you know it'sit's a making sure that the the course is actually worth sitting so it's notjust some sort of Mickey Mousequalification that is you know really itdoesn't have any it doesn't hold anywater because it was too simple or itwas too easy to cheat or whatever or youcan take seven years to get through itand you still get the same qualificationas somebody that did it you know in in afinite period of time whateverbut also you need the people at theother end of the pipeline the peopletaking on board employees you need themto totally buy into it and I think Ithink putting it somewhere prestigious whether that's on dot org or some otherproperty is a is a really key part ofthat you know and if you can search andfilter for I don't know people in the USin Boston who know how to do react whoare available from February those kindof things start to make it feel a littlebit oh and you can see and they did thiscourse six months ago and passed withflying collars whatever all of thatfeels like a yeah a really great a greatidea Courtney says she's also part of the certified WP board thank you forclarifying that Courtney so she's withyou Jessum hopefully we'll soon have our owntabs on profiles okay so onwordpress.org in the profilefor each of us there will be somethingto do with the qualifications that wetook that's interesting uh when you sayhopefully do you have high expectationsof that or is that um maybe a bit of amaybe course completion doesn't equalcertification though oh okay yeah that's a good point so just because you finishsomething doesn't mean you actually passthe past the master so we need some wayof showing not just that you wentthrough the LMS if you like but youactually took the test at the other endyeah yeah yeah yeah this is a reallyinteresting really interesting subjectand I think that yeah probably we'llcome back to this many many times in thepast thank you Courtney for uh helpingus through that one that's brilliantokay let's move onum an event to mention uh the first oneI want to mention is yoastcon I believe this is the first yoseconsince the pandemic uh in realyou know in in person I don't know ifthey held the event uh virtually butthey certainly have had it in the in thereal world in the past as can be seen bythe pictures but it's back on again it'son the 11th of May it's in Nai Megan inthe Netherlands and if you go toyoast.com forward slash yoastcon ifyou're into SEO and all that good stuffwhich I'm imagining Maddie might be I don't knowum a little bit a little bit yeah uhthen it's on and obviously it's going tobe a whole load of things it saysInsider knowledge exceptional speakersload of workshops in recordings and youcan see the list of all the participantsthere okay so that's the first one thesecond one is the an event that I'mrunning page builder Summit uh we'redoing it again in February 20th ofFebruary so that's in oh what's that ahoh my Lord I've just given myself a fry that's in about four weeks time oh goodgriefum it's coming if you want to help usput the event on and you do want to helpus put the event on let's be honest allof you want to help us put the event onit's uh there's more information to befound at pagebuildersummit.com forwardslash sponsors we're still on thelookout for a few kindly individuals orcompanies there's micro sponsors you'dhave to be a giant entity who starts at300 bucks and you'll get your name inyour emails and on the website and allthat but it goes right up to the gold sponsors and so on so if you fancy doingthat please join with us that'll begreatokay this is interesting didn't see thiscoming and to be honest with you I'm abit thin on the detail here but it lookslike automatic has launched well I don'tknow if launched is the right word theythere is an ad Network called The Blazead Network and it was brought to Tumblrand if you don't know too much aboutTumblr it's a social network which had its Heyday many many many years ago Ibelieve it was bought by Yahoo and thenautomatic acquired it several years agoI mean you couldn't make this story upin terms of timing and but it was like Ithink two million dollars that's thenumber I've got in my head whichconsidering three three okay yeah threethree million dollars which consideringthat Twitter fairly soon after decidedto you know loot shed a lot of its usersand Twitter just kept get mentioning or get mentioned all over the place youknow on all of the national press herewhen they started talking about Twitterand the people that were flying awayaway from it every time that story gotpublished in all the public PublicationsTwitter sorry Tumblr was one of thealternative social networks which wasmentioned along with you know Masteredon and so on so they've probably donereally well and more recently theybrought this ad Network to life whereyou can pay five dollars a month whichgets you somewhere in the region of Ithink about seven or eight thousand Impressions and they'll promote your adinto Tumblr but now via the magic ofJetpack you can also put that that samead inside of wordpress.com websites nowI don't know a great deal aboutwordpress.com but I know that there's alot of websites on it and interestingthat Tumblr have decided to obviouslypitch this technology into into sort ofone thing now so if you goset your ad up you can get it into two things you can get it into Tumblr pluswordpress.com and you can do it all fromyour your jetpack account I I don't knowwhether this is worthy of this podcastbecause it's Edge case but I thought itwas interesting any thoughtsI think it's really interesting I meanit's a money making opportunity forautomatic I mean I guess Blaze adnetwork is probably what's going to getthe majority of whatever the ad dollarsare but I'm sure automatic gets a cut of that andum I think it's a big opportunity forPublishers too I think most like paid adum people who are new to paid ads and Idon't know a whole lot about them butit's sort of generally accepted thatfive dollars a day will move the needlewith the right targeting you know withthe Right audienceand things like that so it's it's anentry level way to testpaidyeah you get the option to I'll just putit on the screen because the the UI is easier to understand probably than meexplaining it so you get to you get tocategorize your so you create your ad onyour text and then there's a littleum editor where you can put some imageryalong with it and so on and then yougive it a category give it a budget uhfive dollars is the minimum and I thinkit goes up to a maximum of fifty dollarsthat in itself is quite interestingthere's a ceiling on there because youknow if you go with Google I think thereis no ceiling I want to spend a billiondollars a day they'll they'll take thatoff you I'm sure and then you give it aduration start date hit go basically so you're in for a maximum of well whatwould that be let's say 250 if you fivedays a weekum and yeah like you say if you can movethe needle at that point it's quiteinteresting sorry carry onthis is my one story for the week whereI get to say and pressable is owned byautomatic so I speak to myself and notthe companyum I started getting back into Tumblr um like a year ago uh because obviouslyautomatic owns it now and it's stillkind of the same as we remember itum but I can tell you when the blaze adsstarted it was mostly peopleum I can't use the word but it was spostingumthey would uh postingum oh really that one yeah and they werebasically doing five dollar promotedposts like look at my cat you know here's a picture of a shoe like peoplewere just being dumb with it and it washilarious because it was so affordableit was just okay for five bucks andhere's the other thingum Maddie mentioned targeting and thatis keyso when you're on the Google ad Networkum being ad Network you can say do notever show me on these sites only show meon these sites and under theseconditionsum Blaze is not that nuanced yet and you don't actually get targeting or negativetargeting you don't really get to sayanything except for uh this is aboutfood and beverageum which you know can lead to somehilarious results uh I do know yeah I'msure it's going to be more nuanced I cantell you that pressable is absolutelyparticipating in this right nowumcandidly I have not gotten any salesfrom it but I do get a lot of trafficumI will say I'm interested to see wherethis goes as an alternative to you knowGoogle and other AD networks but withoutthat targeting piece I feel like peopleshould really know what they're gettingintoum and then of course you knowadvertising on Tumblrsomebody said later in the post I'mgoing to read it directly it was a greatquoteum Tumblr Blaze and practice is less so inflicting a post on others and more sosubmitting your post for judgment by themasses it's like a collegeit's like a Coliseum but you pay to beeaten by a lions oh interesting so andso yeah if you post something supercorporatey and a whole bunch of peopleon Tumblr see it they're going to letyou know what they think about it rightright because it's like a regular postit can it can consume comments and all of that as well okay well and unlikeFacebook where you get people commentingon your you know sponsored post why areyou showing on my page it's those peoplebut they're funnywell let me just let me just go throughwhat Sarah Sarah Gooding in WP Tavernsays she basically says that you can dothe following things you can organize itby device so you want to be showing onmobile desktop or all devices uh you youcan according to this click a geographical area but it's not verynuanced as Jess said you've got you cando it by continent so you know I guessif you're living in Europe that's quitea lot of variety right thereum or Asia or what have you I guessNorth America might be a little bit morestraightforward in terms of targetingthere you can also pick an area ofInterest so arts and entertainmentAutomotive business and education and itbreaks down as follows what they'repromising in return for five dollars is 5900 so 6 000 let's call it six thousandto eight thousand impressions in a dayif you go up to 25 it's 30 000 to 40 andif you go up to 50 a day it jumps tomore or less sixty thousand to eightythousand a day which to me just in termsof raw numbers I I don't really followGoogleum ads and or any AD Network what theirnumbers say in terms of Impressions thatseems like a pretty good deal butwhether or not these are very cheap yeah yeah whether or not these are peoplethat are engaged I I often feel likesocial networks is a scroll yeahscrolling out I'm so immune to ads insearch results they basically are blankwhite boxes to me now there it is I knowit's an ad I can not even gonna look atitum but yeah I feel like I need to covermyself so that I don't get angry slackmessagesthere is that targeting that youmentioned it's just not as nuanced thatwas my own point but it's new right it's only come out in the earlier yeahexactly right yeah things develop overtime to start somewhere and that's whatyou say on this side boxI mean yeah for Impressions to costs itsounds like an incredible deal and Ithink to your point Nathanum it just depends on where youraudience is are they on Tumblrjust like any other any other socialmedia platform you have to consider likeare they even on Facebook TwitterLinkedIn before you spend the money yeah it does feel like uh it does feel like avery small subset compared to Facebook'saudience doesn't it and the fact thatyou can really Target it's justinteresting I'm sure this Tech if itproves profitable forautomatic I'm sure they'll tweak it andmaintain it and make it better I meanyeah why wouldn't they sorry Zach you'vebeen excluded from this one if you wantto hop in do soyeah I mean my only thought is it seemslike if if you run the kind of businessthat canrun profitable taboola ads or something like that this would work like justbroad targeting not nichy at all seemscool if you do any kind of Niche like itwould just be mostly useless leads it sowe mentioned a minute ago that I've gotthis page builder Summit coming upobviously that's like a really Slim slimsuper slim uh segment of the populationthat would be interested in that they'reWordPress but they're also kind of likeimplementing often you know that kind ofthing obviously I wouldn't be able to dothat here but still a part of me saying I should definitely sync 50 bucks intothat and see what sticks because theimpressions are just so just so greatyou know if you get 80 000 peoplelooking at it I don't know if even fourof them would actually be interested butlike you said Zach if you I don't knowif you're selling something supergeneric and you just want people toengage with your content so like youknow I've got an article the 10 bestreasons to do this that and the otherthen yeah maybe there's something thatyou can drive people that to your track to your website and annoy them byclicking continue continue continue atthe bottom of your blog posts whichnever ends uh by the way top tip if ablog post starts with a numberjust don't read it16 things you can do no don't start witha numberyeah noI don't know I just see those all the time Maddie you could talk to us aboutthis is that a thing like I see that allthe time I see copy like that's 10 bestways to every week when I put this uhpodcast together I go through an RSSfeed and it's all to do with WordPressit consumes content from all over theplace and I've just it didn't take mevery long to realize that anything thatstarted with a number was basically notworth reading and it just because it wasI don't really need to know the 10 bestplugins for the I wanted more newsy sort of content so yeahit gives you options I guess that'sthat's what I think of listicles it'snot that I'm going to read the wholething I'm going to probably skip aroundto see whatever it is that I thatbrought me thereum I will say that I will never read aTwitter thread that claims to have anyamount of substance because that I don'tlike to sit on Twitter for 10 minutesreading the same thingwe've all got our prejudices haven't weonline business I didn't even know listicle was a wordso now I I I'm right now you know you'redislike listiclesnever like listicles to be honest allthis time when I didn't even know thatwas what they didn't even know what youdidn't like yeah maybe you'll like itmore now well yeah yeahum okay so that's interesting and youadd uh network from automatic beingpushed towards wordpress.com sites anduh Tumblr interesting to see how it goes on the wordpress.com so it's anyway thatseems to be where the big big audienceis going to resideokay uh this is very much a communitything I don't really know in what way tocouch this that should have put myscreen on but it didn't oh there we goyeahum a little while ago actually back inWordPress 4.9 territory there was a afork of Wordpress which was calledclassic press classic press was a bit ofa a stand against the the introductionwhich was about to take place of Gutenbergum I never really had a problem of anyway shape or form with Gutenberg quitehappy to use it and watch it develop butthe guys over at Classic press reallydidn't want anything to do with it sothey fought the project and it would itwould seem that their in a bit of a bitof a troubled spotum in that they're trying to decide atthe moment whether or not they need tore-fork Wordpressbecause essentially since 4.9 to wherewe're at now 6.1 coming on 6.2 the the WordPress project has moved so far thata lot of the things that they would liketo work in classic Crest plugins and soon they're they're just not workinganymore so it's I really don't knowwhere you go with a problem like thisthey want to get rid of Gutenberg butfor the last several years Gutenberg hasbeen the thrust of Wordpress and sore-forking itum seems like you're gonna have a lot ofwork trying to strip that out againum and I guess in a way it spells it tells you what the what the state of theproject is when when the decision to totake this was put to a vote uh should weFork it or should we not and the votescame in at 20 on one side and 18 on theother a grand total of 38 which doesn'tseem like a great deal of interest in ain a CMS soyeah whilst whilst whilst it'sinteresting I'm just sort of thinkingPerhaps Perhaps this is the moment whereclassic press sort of disappears off the Horizon I'm not really sure I don't knowif anybody's got anything to say withthat do you do you know why classicpress existed like because from thestart when everybody hated Gutenbergthey released that disable Gutenbergplugin so why was that not enough theythey wanted an option where you didn'thave to have Gutenberg even loaded indon't even look at it yeah I don't wantit yeah not even like this not in thecode there is no there's no trace ofGutenberg uh yeah so my Approach right at the beginning when far when six camearound just because I had a bunch ofclient sites I installed that disabledWittenberg because I was just a bit of aI was a bit afraid of breaking changesand suddenly clients starting a new postor something it's like what the heck isthis so that's exactly what I did andthen you know several weeks later itbecame obvious there was you know noreal danger no nothing broke but I thinkthat was the point they just wanted alltrace of it removed they wanted tiny MCto be the thing um yeah it just seems you know they howcan you how how can a project like thatI think compete withwith the the bigger WordPress thing it'sjust doesn't seem like it's very likelyso it can't I mean I think you couldjust take the numbers from that articleand you can consider it even just likethe number of people who are here thefour of us the people who are commentingwho are all part of the larger WordPressCommunity we all contribute in some way and so if we're saying that classicpress only has 38 voting members rightnow and they're gonna try to maintain anopen source project I meanif they could if they could get more ofthe WordPress Community to be a part ofthat it wouldn't be a problem but atthis point it doesn't look like theyhave that supportI can fully see why there was thatGroundswell of people that didn't wantanything to do with it because I I canunderstand that position it wasn't likeit was a silly position it was just very differentum I think most of us just said welllet's just go along for the ride and seewhat happens andand here we are and now I'm I usenothing really apart from the uh theblock Editor to do almost everything nowand really like ityeah so there we go the article that oneis on uh it's Sarah Gooding it's WPTaiwan it's called classic pressCommunity folks to re-fork Wordpress soyou can check that out okay I think thisis going to be the piece that I'm most interested in this week this is um apiece over on a website calledjeremy.hu is uh Jeremy Herve or herveyI'm not sure he's written an article andI I've not come across Jeremy before soum I love that when that happens for astart you come across somebody who'swriting about WordPress you've neverdiscovered before and you read it andyou think well that's really thoughtprovoking he is an automatician I thinkso he works for automatic so heconfesses right from the start he says I'm pretty prejudiced here but give me agive me a shotum he said is what well WordPress issocial media where should you publishyour thoughts WordPress social mediapick one over the other and I'll veryquickly summarize social media is greatfor getting quick ideas off your mind hesays it feeds your ego you can getvalidation from others quickly and youcan get an exchange of ideas going onit's brilliant for that WordPress isbetter for longer form stuffbut he also makes the point that um he doesn't write on his blog verymuch which tells him something but hewrites on social media a lot which alsotells him something else but also andthis is the key point it's very hard tointeract with posts on your website sothe WordPress website I know that youcan put share buttons all over the placecomments don't really give you and don'treally give you your commentator thatimmediate feedback they don't give youthe notifications so let's say I write a post now on Facebook and Jess responds Iinstantly know that Jess responds and Ican do all of the little emojis and allof that kind of stuff and it gets reallyengaging WordPress doesn't really haveany of that and so it's he would sayless engaging he's got his placeobviously we love it but shouldWordPress evolve in that direction ishis question should it have more of thetools so that you can write quickly andhave that interaction with people so you know when they've responded they knowwhen you've responded you can get allcrazy with Emojis and all of that kindof stuff and I don't know I don't knowwhat I think and believe it or nothadn't really occurred to me until nowthat this was even a even a conversationto be had but the more I think about itI probably do ten to one no maybe even20 or 30 to one social media posts toblog posts I think the the difference ispretty style I tend towards social mediabecause it's quick it's engaging I can get reactions quickly what are yourthoughts I'm Keen to get into this onesodo we have a specific order can I juststart againfourth because I'm fourth in the grid nonoso I do a lot of course sites forclients ah there we go I'm firstuh I do a lot of course sites forclients and um the every every time aclient wants to do some sort of communitythe challenge is always interaction andso when someone like home rolls a forumon discourse or on one of those likeWordPress plugins that are all oldschool like BB press or whateverthe hardest bit is just getting peopleto come in and use it because they'renot there already yeah and so to me theway I see WordPress is almost like as myrepository for education and socialmedia is like a form of communityinteraction so to me I don't really see any advantage of trying to makeWordPress into something that it's notbecause even if there was all thisfunctionality for live interaction stillrequires people to bejust sitting there on my site waitingfor waiting for me to come talk to themwhich isn't going to happen and itrequires me to be sitting there waitingfor people to post comments and try tohave a discussion so I would think thateven if the functionality is there theinteractivity would always fall short ofsocial media and would frankly alwaysfall short of discourse or Circle or whatever Mighty Network StandaloneCommunity thing you might makedo you Zach um because I know you and Ihave had this conversation before in thecontext of like basically just switchingoff stuff which is a distraction so thataside do you do you have periods in yourlife where the social media platformsthe twitters the Facebooks whatever itmight be do they remain open it's insome tab on your desktop waiting for thePing to happen so that you can or do youdeliberately shot them down and you know have your time in them and move awayclose them and so on yeah I mean rightnowI was telling you about habitica when wewere having our solo episode but it'sbasically this like daily RPG habittracker kind of thing I actually have ahabitica thing to reward myself forgoing in and doing a social mediabecause my preference is to just closeit and never uh never think about it soif I I hate being interruptible franklyand so I would feel very stressed and I would get nothing done if I just hadmy blog open for comments or uh I meanI'm as a developer in a Discord for aSAS tool that I use like as a customerand that's what they use for support andI I find it so distracting to havediscourse open just waiting for aresponse back and stuff soyeah I'm probably not the best person toweigh in on this because I don't likeI don't like the interruptability and so when I want to do community interactionI want it to be like on my terms ascheduled block on my calendar this ismy hour that I am interacting orwhatever which is obviouslykind of an anti-pattern for Twitterbecause the whole thing with Twitter andmaybe the whole thing with any Communityis that it's meant to befresh and ephemeral and happening live Idon't know yeah so in the conversationthat you and I had on that podcastbasically it was all about like thepossibility of turning stuff off thatthat was a broad pattern and alsorewarding yourself for doing things that were in your interest not in not in yourinterest but umI I was saying to Zach that one of mythings which is just always remains openis email and I check it habitually andjust a little favicon which says thenumber of emails that's enough if I seethat as gone up by an increment of oneit's like what are you doing Nathan gocheck the email that's going to changeyour lifeum and I do that all the time and therewere definitely periods in my time uhsorry in my life where Facebook was open Twitter was open all these differentthings was that were open they hadnotifications enabled and a part of meliked it now whether or not it was greatfor my productivity well the answer isobvious no it was lousy for myproductivity but I enjoyed it and I gotengagement and if if that was theintention of your posts on a Blog thatwould be nice to have but I don't knowwhat the system is because nobody'sgoing to sit there with your websiteopen waiting for a response to comethrough you know in the comment system it's just not going to happen so even ifyou've got notifications enabled somaybe there's just a Line in the Sand soblog on WordPress is for you just putcontent out and see what comes back butit'll be slower as opposed to you knowthe social media platforms which is justimmediate hit get get it out there getthe reaction move on 10 seconds lateryou're on to something else I don't knowyeah Jessum buddy anything on thatback in the day I worked for copyblogger and I don't know who on hereknows them but you know there was anentire community in their comments ontheir WordPress website nice and peoplewould interact with each other and youknow again I'm definitely aging myselfbut then it kind of went out of Vogue tohave comments on your blog posts and it took some of the you knowCommunity with itum you know there were still people thatwould sign up and you'd find them inother things that you know the WordPresswebsite includedum which was like a membership communityand things of that natureum but you know we're not really seeingpeople running you know BB press likethey used to and like you knowthe the differentsocial media-esque elements are not exactly popular anymoreum it's not easy to build up a communityin comments so while I absolutely loveto guard my time and have boundaries ofwhen I get distracted and you know themore Twitter kind of turns into adumpster fire the easier it is to ignoreitumbut you know I also find thatwhen something's going on and I want to know what's happening I check socialmedia because they're usually fasterthan news sourcesso I think there's a lot to be said forwhere people gowhen it matters mostand I don't know I'd love to think thatthey're going to come to my little blogbutyeah so you carry on sorry I mean likeI'm happy for you to go first I I okay Iwas just going to say I think it's aninteresting point you make and itcircles back to the point the dude made in the article which was that he feelsmore inclined to post small stuff onsocial uhthe thought that I have is like peoplemay come to your site as the or you maygo to some other site if you habituallysaw it as the place where breaking stuffsmall stuff would happen but then to methe concern I would have isthat the line of quality you know likeif if you see a site as theauthoritative place where you go to geta deep dive and really make lifedecisions from it's I would think never going to be the same place that youwould go to get a little hot update thatthey just barfed out without thinkingabout it because they're kind of at oddswith each other so how would you howwould you be able to do both I wonderyeah it's kind of the difference betweenlike a Blog and like a news category onyour site or something like that orseparating them out between social andand your blog I think the thing thatthis article made me think about wasjust the old adage don't build your house on rented land I think we're kindof seeing that play out on Twitter withyou know people's temperature in termsof like the current leader and thedirection it's going and whether theyalign with that or not and deciding youknow if they want if they built aplatform there if they want to keep itthere and WordPress because it's opensource like it's ours it's transferableif you want to bring it somewhere elsebut nobody nobody can really like takeyour content away from you so long as it's yours and it's not like a violationof somebody else's copyrightum I I loved when you could doum and you could probably still do thisbut like my first WordPress blog I thinkI had the Facebook comments instead ofthe WordPress ones and honestly it wasbecause it was easier for people to usesome people don't want to make anaccount on your website and again I'mjust like so out of it now that I don'tknow what the current situation is but Ido think that requiring sign ups is a barrier to community on WordPress sitesum the last thing I was gonna say is Ithink of you know to Zach's Point likeWordPress or your blog is like where thelonger form content lives the qualitywhere you can really dive into a topicand I think of Twitter LinkedIn or anyother social platform as the place whereyou can then go to repurpose thatcontent in shorter form to drive peopleback to your website if they're curiousto hear more yeah that feels like the way it's goneit doesn't it over the last decade thatthe the social platforms have become theadvertising Network for each of us in away if we are producing content uh onour blog it's it's highly unlikely thatyou're going to be discovered quicklyunless you have some you know randomtelevision appearance or something likethat but through repurposing itreposting getting shares on social mediait feels like the way to to get peopledriven to your website yeah I just I am beguiled by the idea of a suite of toolswhich you could embed in WordPress maybeeven part of Wordpress core that somehowenabled some of that interaction tohappen so that there wasn't the wholelogging in to make a comment there wasjust something that you could I don'tknow anonymouslyI didn't mean to say that nobody wantsAnonymous posting that's going to be atrain wreck but you know what I meansomething where being logged in to Idon't know something on a browser perhaps as opposed to a social networkum would be would enable you to oneclick log into all WordPress sites orsomething I know that you can do thatwith wordpress.com and things but yeah Idon't know I'm interested to see whatMastodon does I mean like Nathan why didyou set up your own Mastodon instance sothe reason behind the Mastodon instancewas essentially I was just I was justhearing too many too many horror storiesaboutum about Twitter and this is going backlike two years ago so it was nothing to do with the ownership because theownership wasn't in question it was moreto do with more to do with Zach's pointabout people just getting sucked inwasting their time and all of that butalso I I just I have a sort of sneakythere's something about me I don't knowif it's my upbringing that thinks thatreally the the thing that we're given inreturn on social media is not that greatyou know we're we're getting all sortsof information sucked out we are theproduct as people keep telling us so itwas a bit of a reaction against that if I own my own Mastodon server I know thatI'm not selling anything to anybody Iknow that it's just code that I runum and and those kind of arguments Ijust didn't like the idea of me beingthe advert and I was increasingly seeingexamples of real world where things werejust going wrong in the real worldbecause social media had its finger inthe pie somewhere so it was more to dowith that really I'd love for Mastodonor something like that something opensource to be the to be the conduit for me logging in all around the web but Ido think I do think this guy Jeremy'sgot a point I would love because I'm sointo WordPress I would love for it to bethe first place I turned when I hadanything to say short long medium orwhatever but it absolutely isn'tum I just put the long stuff there yeahwell Matt mullenweger said he's lookingfor more ways to integrate Mastodon andthat sort of concept into WordPress andI kind of wonder what the future holds for that you know maybe the answer isyou have that central place where youare publishing what you are doing evenif it appears on someone else's stufflike you know when you want to leave avery long and thought-provoking commentthat you don't necessarily want thatother person to ownum it could be on yours but somehowtalking to theirs you know it's it'sabout connectivity at the end of the dayand social media works when we're allkind of on a Level Playing Field yeah and I don't know that that you knowthat hierarchy that comes when it's yourWordPress but you want people tocontribute to ithas that same feelrope Cairns hi Rob by the wayum makes a really interesting point yousaid Mastodon is not the answer to freespeech uh sorry Free Speech issues no II would agree with that Rob I think mybroader point was thatum Mastodon though is the answer toalgorithmic chaosum and what I mean by that is if I'm on Twitter I really don't know what thedevice is that's putting the next thingin my feedum it's just beyond me I don't know whatthe algorithm is same with Facebook youknow I I get I get patterns coming upand I I'm always curious how did thathow did that pattern establish itselfwhen did Facebook decide that I like Idon't know that thing and that's what Ilike about Mastodon as well is there'snone of that it's basically when did ithappenthat's it that's all the criteria thatthere is so you face you feed if you're following lots of people Scrolls pasthellishly quickly to the point where youcan't even read it so it forces you tocut down who you're following a littlebit if you want it to be readablebecause you can't you know you want onething to drop in every few minutes orsomething like that so that's what I'mthinking there also Courtney says thatshe also Jess uh was a copy blogger andthird tribe Community I don't know whatthird tribe is but it sounds coolum and Mark West card hi Mark Mark's uhfrom WS form he says hi thank you Mark and Nomad skateboarding I think I don'tknow if we we've come across you beforeNomad skateboarding yeah I likeWordPress to always be the Hub yesthat's kind of mymy thing I want it to be the Hub but Ifully recognize that at the minute it'snowhere near it seems like being able todo that I feel like in order for it towork oh I'm sorry yeah for sure Idon't know just one more comment from uhTodd Todd Jones you guys are still goingyeah you've never stopped sorry Zach carry on I feel like in orderfor it to work because again to Circleback to that people are already therekind of thingand based on on what Maddie was sayingabout the separation of newsletter andcontent and stuff it almost have to besomething where it would likeit would allow for platform ownershipwhere anyone who follows you you wouldown the platform you posted on yourWordPress site or whatever but that itwould allow the end user to interactwith it from a central place like how they could go on to Twitter when theyfollow uh if something like that existedI mean it would be quite complicated Iguess because it would require a lot ofbuy-in from users and site owners but itcould just function as like I don't knowWordPress plugin with a custom post typethat updates an API or something but itcould be kind of cool if there was aplace where you could just log in butthat service did nothing else apart fromauthenticate youyou know it literally that's all it didit was just so it wasn't like you know you log into Google that that brings theworld of Google to your doorstep you loginto your WordPress account you've gotthe if there was a way of authenticatingyourself against just a service whichhad no skin in the game but thenbusiness-wise that's not going to lastlong is it yeah but if they had like anaggregation where let's say itfunctioned just like Twitter but thedata instead of having been posted onTwitter was just posted on people'sindividual WordPress instances and youas a user subscribe to the people youlike then you give the user that same social media experience they give youthe site owner of the central placemaybe that would work that's generallywhat I was thinking with the Mastodontie-in is that how Mastodon works no notyet but I'd love for it too but that'sgenerally what I was describing if youwant to leave these thought-provokingcomments you could still own yourcontent that does seem to be aGroundswell of support uh in around souh Mastodon amongst a lot of otherthings like pixel uh fed and a bunch ofother service user use a thing called activity Pub which has been around for areally long time an activity Pub allthat you're doing when you look atMastodon is you're watching animplementation of activity pop that'sall it is and well I say that's all itis it's very clever it's a yeah it'sactivity Paul and there's been a lot oftalk about drawing a line between sothis has come from right up on high Ithink I think Matt tweeted about it youknow making connections between activityPub and WordPress posts I guess the grounds the ground seems to be moving inthat direction lots of people I thinkthree million users last time I checkedon Mastodon that's pretty highconsidering just a couple of months agoit was you know less than a hundredthousand I thinkum so it's you know there's aGroundswell three million people are notto be ignored and if there could beconnections made so that you logging incould then crossbow stuff from Mastodonand Mastodon could then there's anotherthere's a really good plug-in it's justcalled friendsum which which uses activity Pub I believe and it enables you to do a lotof this stuff as well you can create anetwork of friends but the the problemis it still requires you to well atleast it did it still requires you tohave a big presence on your own websitebefore people would discover you but nowmaybe with with Mastodon being biggermaybe there's something going on thereI'm fairly bullish about all this Ithink maybe Jeremy's on to something andmaybe activity Pub and those kind ofEndeavors aregoing to be in the background but I Ireally would love the idea of my WordPress website which I know on Icontrol I would love that to be the Hubof all of it that would make me really ahappy personand then of course I'd you know get myLastPass account hacked and uh getlocked out but you know it happens toeveryone any of you using LastPass bythe way there's an aside oh have youseen this story anyone you like I usedLastPass but I have not seen the storyor reference right okay I've seen it andit makes me really sadit here's the story stop using LastPass right now and go and find an alternativereally your Vault your Vault has beennicked oh sure um and it's only a matterof time it could be a really long timeif you've got a really long password ifyou've got a full onpseudo-random noise junk you know nocharacter is connected to any othercharacter 30 characters something likethat you have safe as houses but ifyou've got a very short password andbites Knuckles some people's settings were really horribly configured byLastPass to offer even less securitythanwas provided there's this iterationcount where they hash the the uh thepassword and it was supposed to be setat 100000 and 100 so one zero zero one zerozero uh iterations lots of people ohdiscovered that it was set to fivethousand and in some casesone and if it's one there's no point in having it you've just what's the pointit's the same as the password basicallyso yeah get I see look Rob's robsagreeing get off LastPass no uhwhoever this is uh Nomad Escapehis name is Mark Andrew and he is anabsolutely wonderful member of thecommunityyes you should check out his website heactually like makes free WordPress sitesfor people that can't afford them he'sjust like such a good dude when we finish thisum Jess can you can we can we talk aboutMark because I'd like to yes he's awonderful human being I'm a huge ManMark nice to meet you or Nomadskateboarding uh I've gone to bit Wardenas well that was the one that I decidedwas the uh the one for me so uh yeah theoriginal users that's rightum and there was the seemingly there wasno process to update those originalusers unless you went into settings andI think interacting with settings mighthave done it but um yeah yeah oh look it's all happy here now look ohappreciated yes that's nice uh rightokay right okay that's a that was aninteresting piece thank you for yourthoughts on that dude running out oftime so let's see what I can drag inJack sorry Zach were you going to saysomething about this feel free are youmeant to change all your LastPasspasswords that were in there that's noit makes no difference your whole Vaulthas been nicked no but I mean like yeahit was that a bit Ward and you shouldchange everything because yeah certainlyyeahunfortunately yes the process would be um download your LastPass Vault uh whichcom download it somewhere where youdon't have like a backup because it's inplain textum then upload it to bit warden in mycase upload it to bit Warden delete thebackupuh then wipe your hard disk or somethinglike thatum and then go around and nominate youknow start to pick out high valuepasswords inside your last pass Vaultlike it might be your banking one or whatever just go through them one at atime I've got something like 1 500 to gothrough and I'm about yeah I'm severalhundred inum but my personal hellit really is but it also demonstrates tome how much I hid behind this oneunknowable factum I've got you know credit cards canyou believe it I wrote down the numbers of credit cards and things like that inthere uh passport numbers NationalSecurity numbers all of those kind ofthings are in thereso I guess I'm doing some Googlesearches later and I will be NathanWrigley by the end of the day that'sright yeah I think what what I did was Iisolated anything I just went throughthe whole list and I I tried to isolateanything where there was e-commerceinvolved because I thought well then Imight have a credit card attached to ityeah and also things which really really mattered to my productivity so Iimmediately went and changed theWordPress website password for the adminfor all of the accounts that I've gotanything to do with Google because youknow I use email and things like thatthat's obviously another Vector if theycan knit your email account often thereset instruction goes to the email allof those kind of things but yeah yeahanyway sorry there we gouh okay so Peter is herethere she is oh pizza every single Vault has been compromised well yes Peter theydidn't say that every single Vault hasbeen compromised but they didn't not sayeverything single Vault has beencompromised and if you're a securitycompany and only 40 of the vaults havebeen nicked I'm pretty sure that they'regoing to say only 40 only a subset ofour users out there so yeah I think it'spretty safe to say uh Kathy Zan is yourbest friend here Peter she will uh shewill get you straight on all of this speaking of pizza very quickly Peter andI have got a show coming up on Tuesdaywe do this regular thing called thepizza Neri well it's called the UI uxshow and picture takes User submittedsites and we spend about an hour talkingabout them you know what she likes aboutthem from a UI perspective what shethinks could be improved she's a totalPro so it's free advice we've got Ithink enough shows for this episode butif you want to submit them go to thisURL it's wpbuilds.com forward slash UIand uh get it on for the next show it's great we also after dark patterns whichare now called deceptive designs youknow there's annoying things around theinternet where you click the button andgo oh it was the wrong one that got meI added the insurance to the cart when Ididn't want it I just wanted the flightthat kind of stuff that's all deceptivedesign so if you've got any of thatthere's a there's a field here where youcan add it as well so yeah join us onwell tomorrow in about 24 hours timethat's what we're doinguh what is the time it's 26 minutes past we're gonna have to just run out ofWordpress news let's get to the sillystuff uh first things first this oneah I love this I love the underdog uhthis week in the guardian a a completelyunprofessional guy he's not anarchaeologist he's been he's been reallyinterested in these old cave paintingsat places like lascau andsingle-handedly has discovered there's aa dating system built into the paintingsmade up of a series of dots uh for a long time archaeologists apparently havebeen convinced that there's been someinformation held in those dots but neverfigured it out and then this this guyjust rocks up and says yeah I reckonI've uh regular figured out what peoplewere saying 20 000 years ago here's mythoughts and the the archaeologists andthe pros took a little look at it andsaidyeah you're rightjust likeso that's my silliness for the week uhit's on it's in the guardian it's calledamateur archaeologists and covered IceAge writing systems very cool and we had some other stuff which I'm not going toshare this week I've got time but I didwant to share this one of Maddie's thisis yours Maddie right it is yeah tell usabout this this is coolyeah so for those who aren't familiarchat GPT is I guess the gpt4 AI modelwhich what's really interesting thatpeople don't realize is it's trained ondata from like 2021 so anything afterwhatever that training date was it hasno idea about like 2022 um so that's that's limitation currentlybut anyway so people are interfacingwith this chat GPT which is basically achat that spits out like an AI answerand so Ryan Reynolds went in and gave itum those check mark things you wanted itto specifically include those things ina script for a mobile ad and it did andif you watched the video it was likevery spot on and Ryan Reynolds agreedwhich is certainly a scary thing for for all of us to think aboutso the ad he asked it to produce an adin his own voice not not like so itsounded like him but it had the you knowthe the feeling of something that RyanReynolds would say he needed to containa joke it needed to swear at least oncethere needed to be something about uhbig Wireless and an offer that they wereputting on and uh yeah he he reads hejust reads it off the paper and it'slike yeah you wrote that there's no way a computer wrote that and I have to sayfor the first time this week I actuallytried Jack Jack uh chats GPT out just tosee what all the fuss was about I'veseen people using it left right andcenter and I gotta say I really did haveto pick my jaw up off the floor it wasin one sense amazing like there's noquestion it's amazing but in in anothersense it was alsohorrendously terrifying um because I I just thought what youknow and in your case Maddie copywritingactually I should I'll put this post onlet me see if I can find it I did haveanother post about something like thisno I can't find it now maybe it's fornext week it was a post that I foundthis weekum all about the fact that uh one of themajor news Publications I think it wasCNETseen it yeah uh seen it this week have Idon't know if they exposed it themselves but it has become exposed that over thelast six months 72 of the articles thatthey've put out about technical thingsbecause they're a tech publication havebeen entirely written byAi and you know that's 72 pieces of workwhich okay maybe they would never havebeen written maybe they would have beensquashed as titles but Maddie maybemaybe somebody's job is going out thewindow because of that does this stuffbother youhonestly not yet um I think that it is going to continueto get more and more robust and andmaybe as it does I'll get a little bitmore nervous but I think like the mainthing that I think about with stuff likethis is just the fact that a robot can'thave empathy and that comes across inthe way that you try to appeal tosomebody to get a conversion for examplefor talking about marketing writing orum to otherwise connect with the pieceof writing and you think about likeErnest Hemingway or even you know some like interesting Stephen King one-linersand it's like could like could a robothave really come up with that one reallynuanced sentence you know so you look atyou look at like AI generated copy nextto human generated copy that's supposedto elicit some kind of emotion andtypically you find that the AI generatedcopy Falls flat when it comes towhatever the purpose is that it waswritten for it's a very it's very goodat making you think that you know it it works and at first blush I think it doescome across a certain way that makes usnervous at this point I'm not nervousabout it I have a couple of thoughts onthat the first one is that I rememberGary Kasparov was playing deep mind Ithink it was called deepmind he was he'sa chess player he's a very successfulchess player and he was playing in thistournament where they were for the firsttime hitting the best chess player inthe world against a computer he in theend lost but I remember seeing this moment where the the AI moved and heliterally so imagine him staring at thethe board they're completely emotionlessaren't they you know they move a pieceand then they sit and watch he literallysort of like shot back in his chairand said no human makes that move youknow that's not a human move yeah likethat's not so what's coming out of methere iswe don't I don't even think we know whatthey're thinking what their what theiruh what their constructs are you knowyou you've gone through the whole of your life building your constructs intowhat is coherent thought and what'sclever and you know Ernest Hemingway wasable to produce that sentence based uponall of the things that happened in hislife and out that pot the a I mightmight not even like might not even wishfor that and an example that comes tomind is if you look at an octopus whichis clearly pretty darn clever but wedon't have any insight into what letwhat that cleverness even feels like youknow it's probably not modeled aroundlanguage which is what you and I are thinking all the time so I think the AIis already mocking us sorry yeah we'llgive them this little bit of stuff onthe edge of the table we'll let themhave anyway it amazes me and it worriesme at the same time is that it just justbefore we end any thoughts on thatI mean I have used AI in a lot ofdifferent contexts so I've used uh AIfor art generation for my music like foruh release covers and stuff I've used itfor Dev I've used it for writing and I've been on the wholeyou know at first I think you knowMaddie said well like At first blush itseems very threatening it seems veryintense but likethe way I can the way all contexts of itthat I've experienced boil down to islike an approximation of somethingreally freaking gooduh so the art if you if you see athumbnail you're like mind blown butthen if you look at in detail humanfigures are missing heads and stuff like that uh and I keep having issues whenI've used it for Dev where it I've usedit for some WordPress stuff so likeanything I might normally go to stackOverflow for I've been using it forbecause I was originally writing it offand then I have a friend who's beenleveraging it for research who's beenlike really encouraging me to not writeit off and I don't want to be a dinosaurwho's saying oh no there's no stupidtechnology so I've been trying to forcemyself to use it but I keep having theseinstances where I'll very confidentlyreceive a wrong answer I used it forThanksgiving recipes just got a bunch of BS that was not like I needed a factcheck I'm glad I did I've gotten someDev answers where it's like this codeshould just work I I asked it likeis this syntax correct or will this hookwork what are the parameters it uses anda lot of the time it just gives me wronginformation but it's framed as if it'stotally certain and then I'll ask it aquestion I'm like but actually isn'tblah blah blah and then it's like ohyeah well in this one sorry about thatyeah yeah soum yeah I don't know I haven't been uhsuper impressed with writing it feels like the2022-3 version of an article spinnerfrom back in the day like it's just kindof regurgitating things that havealready been said because that is itslife experience right so we were talkingabout LastPass there's a guy who uh whois he's he was interested to discoverwhat last past uh what data is in theclear because if you've got a LastPassfeel uh let's say you've got a datapoint like you'll log into Googleseveral of those fields are encryptedsome are not but that's by Design but if you dump the data out it's hard to passbecause it's just this comma separatedjust justtons of characters written to the screenso this guy asked chat GPT to write aPowershell script for Windows to pass itall and it did it first try and then hesaid and then can you put a UI on it sothat other people can use it first trytook seconds and and he just asked itthat question basically just asked it inplain English write me a Powershell script to to you know to de-obfuscateLastPass so it knew all about LastPassit knew how to write in Powershell heknew how to build a UI with all thefields apparently there was one problemwith the ui2 fields overlapped slightlyso we had to go in and make them notoverlap it was like I'll forgive you forthat thank youit's just like they're coming for us andit's exponential it's not like humanswhere we just get a little bit bettereach generation these yeahyou knowanyway on that I'm going to ask Jess to give us opinionsthese are not the jobs I'm hiring for Ineed my AI to do my laundry and to cookmy meals and to collect the food that Ineed for my meals so that I as a humanhave more time to create yeah that's theperfect use case yeah you know inTallinn here in Estonia there are theselittle robots that are self-drivingrobots that go to the store and pick upthe food and deliver it to youyou see I'm saying you put chat GPT in there and you can have a conversationwith it is it going down the street thatbanana is too mushy go back yeahum thank you so much I realize we'veoverrun I do apologize about that I'mgonna put me back in the top left of thescreen because we have to do thisslightly humiliating thing at the end ofthe show where look Jess is doing it weall wave if that's all right this isjust the thing that we do we're going toget Maddie and Zach to what yeah you seeit wasn't that bad oh thank you so much I really appreciate you joining us todayuh first of all Jess thank you you somuch Maddie thank you and Zach reallyappreciate it hope you come back thankyou to all of you who left us commentsthere's quite a few coming in there it'salways fascinating our audience arealways really engaged and interested inthought-provoking but thank you for allof the bits and pieces that you threw inthere I really appreciate it we'll beback next week talking about WordPress anice evening day Monday evening whateverit may be for you we'll see you soon, This Week in WordPress #237, WP Builds, 01gpzvqz85ehv7y8h6x4qv2hb3.