Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about people in and outside of the whole world of WordPress, which we, you know, there's 43% thousand of us, however you want to call it. With me today is Jono. Welcome, Jono.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Hi. Thanks for having me. What a treat. This is fun.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Well, thanks for being here. We had some audio issues, so we're on. We're recording on Zoom, unfortunately. So I do apologize for those listening and thinking this is not the quality we're used to.
I was trying really hard.
Jono, you and I go back quite a while. We've been colleagues, even people who have no clue what you are, which is wild. There's people there, including me.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: I have no idea.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Good, good, good. Well, let me have your best version of Jonah Alderson. Hi, welcome.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Who are you? Hi.
Nice. Yeah, I honestly wish I knew. Yeah, I guess WordPress nerd is probably a big chunk of that, but more broadly. Yeah. Let's do a recap. So I started out as a starting out, not being able to speak on podcasts. Look where that got me. Now. I started out as a bedroom web developer, as I'm sure many, many people in this space did. Yeah, exactly Right. What feels like 100 years ago and I knew nothing about anything.
And what I found quite quickly is I got very frustrated with the tooling we were using.
And it was a homegrown CMS and we were building websites for small local businesses and butchers and bakers, etc. And it was all clunky and cumbersome and slow and frustrating.
Without realizing, I fell into the world of technical SEO because I got a bit obsessed about what does good look like and what does perfect look like, and what order should I put these HTML tags in?
What's the difference between an alt attribute and a title attribute? And what is best practice around all of this? Of course, at that point in time, there isn't really a playbook. The Internet is still evolving. These are the geocities era.
Everyone's working out and winging it, and it's just a lot of opinion.
I fell from that into the world of WordPress.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Are we sure it's falling down?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Climbed into the world of WordPress.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I discovered WordPress and my life got a lot better and a lot easier. And I was still building small websites for little local agencies and little local businesses, but it was faster and it was sleeker and I kind of that obsession with what does good look like? Groom. And I think I came to the conclusion fairly early on that over however many decades we're going to see this Internet thing play out for I'm sure it's still just a fad. But if we're all, all trying to make good things and in aggregate make the web better and improve all the things that like we improve society, we improve humanity, we improve access to information, we democratise publishing, all these things are good then WordPress was probably the best bet for the tool of choice for us all to be aligning on. And that's really stuck with me. So then I bounced around about I've worked in digital marketing agencies, I've learned about politics and people and projects and pitching and business and all sorts of other areas.
Bounced around in the world of SEO across tool vendors and consultancies.
And then we met and I spent five years working at Yoast which was super interesting.
Some real roller coaster moments.
Ended up started out running essentially R and D, so working out what should we be building that is that people will need in two, three years from now, what does the roadmap of SEO look like at ecosystem level and make sure that we're aligned with that. Then by the time I left was running product and SEO and the roadmap and all the other bits and pieces and throughout all of that essentially realized that I'm fundamentally unemployable. So I'm now a freelance consultant doing consultancy type stuff much of the same flavor. So it's a mix of when I can WordPress centric work where people come to me and say hey John, we've got a site that is 6 out of 10 on technical SEO or performance or structured data or accessibility or whatever else. And I help hustle their teams and people and say install this plugin, change this config, tweak this thing much in the same way you do and help them get to good. And then the other half of the stuff I'm doing is kind of big enterprise businesses, so the big global brands who often aren't on WordPress and as such much of what I end up doing is pining about the three year roadmap that we end up putting together to get them to the point where they have something that looks like what WordPress did 15 years ago.
And I can't name names but I'm literally doing that at the moment for some of the biggest brands in the world. I'm going to spent yesterday, I think two hours scoping a requirements document for how should categories work now to look at when WordPress got categories and it turns out it's 2004. So these incredibly huge organizations I'm babysitting and hand holding them through, how do we get to where WordPress was in order that they. Et cetera. Not Apple, but not a million miles from that directionally. Okay, so yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. So I'm WordPress 2 and 3. Cut me and I bleed WordPress.
But I only really kind of encountered the community side when I started working at Yoast. So I'm still a relatively new face in the space despite having caused some kerfuffle.
And I still feel a little bit like a bit of an outsider because my background is agency, world and capitalism and commerce and still half the work I do isn't WordPress. But it's really where my heart is. Yeah, I'm a WordPress dev 2 and 3.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good bottom line. A lot of people would qualify as a WordPress dev or a WordPress builder or whatever you want to call yourself.
But yeah, we all come from different backgrounds. I mean, I see some similarity in the stuff that I've done before I started working on the web. I built stuff for the web before, but not in WordPress because it just wasn't there. This is 1999. Am I saying this correct? Yeah.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: I am old.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Yep, yep. I think I, I learned HTML in maybe 1998. As like a 13 year old teenager over a weekend, I'm like, this is the moment I can do nested tables within tables within tables and splice my JPEGs into corners. And that was just a light bulb moment.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that was 96 for me.
Like literally when I, when I got online, my first curiosity was not what can I find online, but how can I build this as well?
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that. Yep. Yeah. As somebody who's very, very uncreative in the real world, like these hands are not good at writing or drawing or sculpting pottery, but unleash me in front of nested tables in css. Yeah, just a whole honey world.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: I'll get back to that because you included writing in there. And I have something.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah. With a pen. Like I physically can't hold a pen anymore. Like I have evolved out that skill set.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: I think there's a whole generation behind us that really is never used. Depending on elementary. Anyway.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I've got to sign documents occasionally, but that's it.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Mortgages and other crap.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: What was I, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So you mentioned technical SEO. I know what it is. Some People will know what it is, but there's a lot of people who have no clue what it actually means. We generally know what SEO means. It means the optimizations you do on your site that may or may not improve SEO, but that have the goal to improve SEO. What specifically is technical SEO?
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Oh, I like that. Right. So yeah, the surface area that most, the surface level that most people will be familiar with with SEO is you search for something in Google and, or Bing, ChatGPT, whatever, and it's going to make a bunch of decisions internally about what is the best result that I should serve for that.
The very first step that happens way before that is search engines and these systems go out and they explore the web through crawlers, bots, agents, systems, et cetera, and they hoover up all the URLs, all the documents, all the websites, and they try and analyze and assess and evaluate them and the processes involved in that are affected by everything about a website.
So the type of server it's on, where it's hosted, how the CMS is configured, every line of HTML, how your images are loaded, the order of your css, the rules you have on which particular parts and URL structures that search engines can and can't enter, your yoast SEO configuration and a thousand other things like literally every aspect of how your website works and functions, both behind the scenes and in front of it, can have an impact on how easy is it for search engines to discover and find this, to be able to download and parse and understand it, to be able to evaluate it and comprehend it and blah blah, blah, all of those things. So a whole lot of it is things like determining, okay, we don't want search engines to be able to find and access our invoices, custom post type on WordPress, because for obvious reasons, we don't want that indexed by search engines.
We want this thing to be fast, we want this thing to be blocked, we want this thing to be clearer. Oh, look, the developer has implemented a 12 megabyte carousel in client side JavaScript. It looks very pretty, but search engines and AI systems in particular, they're not going to be incentivized to download that. They're going to struggle to understand it. If they do. How do we take that and maintain the business goal of a pretty nice functional carousel that engages and converts people and implements it in a way that systems can understand?
A lot of this is very, very aligned with the world of performance optimization and accessibility optimization, usability optimization. These are all facets of the same thing. Essentially, it's how do we make this inherently good? And a whole bunch of technical SEO is just web standards.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
That's probably the most easy one to relate to. Technical SEO is web standards. So the closer you are to web standards, the closer you are obviously with, with a whole bunch of configuring in the cms, in the plugins, the SEO plugins and all that combined.
But that's where the money is.
As you were explaining, I was thinking basically, you're the master of robots.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: I will get that on a T shirt. I like that.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Txt.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
Nice. Yeah. When the Android revolution comes and the robot uprising happens, I was good to you.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: I was good to you.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Well, I'll point them at my text file and see if that helps. Yeah.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Are you, are you. I mean, just to make sure that you're covering all angles, are you saying thank you when you ask AI for something and it does?
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah. But I think quite cleverly, because as these systems start to have more memory, not just because they won't execute me immediately, but because I think it's quite helpful to provide a feedback loop where you validate that the answer was useful and correct and effective. So I think actually as a behavior that makes a ton of sense, yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: I lean into it hard because like there's short prompts where it's just whatever the prompt is. But in general, when I'm asking bigger things, I have a structured prompt. And the last section is the same is where I say, this is the type of feedback that I want you to give while you're conjuring up the information I've just requested. So if in that conjuring you think there's something you need to ask additionally, this, this and that, do that before you start on the assumption of this is probably what he wants. You know, it's like a two paragraph thing I paste at the bottom of every single thing that I think.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: So you drove it back and forth. It's ambiguous.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Exactly. And the end result is that I have a perfect loop, just like you said, of not just it doing what it thinks I want, but, you know, oftentimes it's just me answering six, seven additional questions like do you mean this or are we potentially also considering this? Oh, that's a great question. Or that's a great distinction. And sometimes it comes with directions and angles that I. Oh, yeah, right, yeah, definitely. I need to think about this one. I didn't consider this one.
But yeah, playing with AI, a lot of fun, great stuff to learn there from that.
When you just Explained technical SEO and AI. We already touched it, but AI is.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: One of sorry, sorry, sorry to happen.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: No, it's inevitable. I think for the last year, every single conversation I've had on the podcast has touched AI, because it is taking over our lives. There is no escaping from it anymore. And yet we are still Maybe just the 1% that actually uses it, but it's just going to be omnipresent, if not already.
But my question was, when you look at all these things from the stuff that you do, right, so let's call it the Optimizing for Web Standards, technical SEO, whatever.
How much of an aid is AI for you in this process? Because you know how to do this without AI.
But now you have AI.
What has changed? What is.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so it doesn't change a bunch of my technical processes, which so.
So throw me a website. And I'm typically going to do a few things. I'm going to open Chrome Dev Tools and go and look at what is this page loading? And is any of that a 12 meg gif? Because that's probably problematic. And what's going on? How does this work? What are the HTTP headers? And I'll view the page's source and I'll look for, okay, this particular standard is missing, or this thing is redundant, or this thing is in the wrong order. And I will poke around and try and experience the site in the same way that Google does. And I'll look at this, this link's broken. This thing doesn't make sense. This is contradictory.
Um, those kinds of processes doesn't really involve a ton of AI, though increasingly Chrome's developer tools has some handy, I.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Was going to say, like, how does.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: This work, what's this error, et cetera.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, there's AI inside of Dev Tools now that. That's doing pretty, pretty neat stuff already.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's pretty handy, especially around performance stuff where I want to unpick a whole chain of dependencies. But where it has helped really is the other half of my job. In fact, the other 3/4 of my job is essentially storytelling.
This baffles me, but it keeps me gainfully employed.
Almost all of the stuff that I'm finding and describing to people is well defined web standard stuff like this image should lazy load because it's below the fold. But organizations, big companies and even small companies don't necessarily know that, and their developers don't necessarily know what they don't know. And quite often there's a question around resources and prioritisation and relative prioritization. Versus everything else on the roadmap, which includes lots of things that aren't technical SEO. So 3/4 of my job is writing business cases and telling stories and educating and convincing people that to fix this thing in this order is more worthwhile than this thing in this order. And here's how to do it and here's the things you should be considering and here are the caveats and the trade offs. That side, yeah, AI is really, really helpful.
A lot of those recommendations tend to be broadly similar across the sites I look at. Like how to lazy load an image is a universal standard thing. There's some of the context changes, but not much.
Having tooling for that where I can upload anonymized 10 of the recent audits that I've delivered and the recommendations, documents that I've delivered and say using this structure, using this kind of approach, this tone of voice, if I just give you bullet points, the things I find, extrapolate, expand, say, shortcut some of that work, summarize, find me patterns, write the executive summary that I'll then maybe do two or three passes after. But yeah, that kind of take my raw work and just do the, the slightly less interesting work of polishing it into a format. Yeah, that's great.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: I'm raising my hand because I'm doing the exact same thing. Because it's like I don't need to reinvent the thing I already invented of the format and the thing and the information behind it. I have.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I spend a lot of time formatting word documents. That's not valuable.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: No, exactly, exactly. So bulk. All right, have a go at it. You know what the, what, what they look like and, and work with that. Do you also. Because one of the things that I found that was like, you try to get it to speak your voice, right?
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: It has your documents, it has your instructions and all that.
And yet every single time I have a rough draft created by AI, I find myself pretty much touching every single sentence, but just ever so slightly. A comma, a little suffix, a little prefix, you know, maybe not every sentence, but every other sentence for sure.
What I've started playing with a little bit before the summer is where I would have it do that thing and then it produces something, I go and play with that, rewrite it in, in, in. In a way. And then instead of just leaving it that, that I would then copy and paste it back.
So this to it.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: What do you. What stands out? What can you learn from this and what is good for you to save to Memory and all of that.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: And so that's cool. Like a whole separate process for educating the thing. I like.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So once I started doing that, quality.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Went up, like, nice.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: And like. And I. And I kind of. And I'm. This is the part where we call it AI. It's not AI. It's not artificial. It's not intelligence. It's neither. It's a large language model.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah. It's just a patent system. Yeah.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: So if it's a language model, why don't we use language more to do it. Have it do what it wants to do, what it needs to be.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: And I was like, I love this. This is the thing that I think in this whole revolution has struck me as most profound, that we've accidentally invented a universal human to computer and computer to computer interface. And it turns out it's the English language. It is like. You would never have designed that.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: No, no. And yet a lot of programming languages are already in English, so, you know. Yeah, it makes sense.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: You just removed all the. Yeah. All the stuff. That's quite cool.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: But, yeah, a. Playing with that is just.
Yeah, the. The quality has gone. Is like, next level now. So it's. It's. I can rely on it now. And. Which is especially nice for the courses that I'm working on, the YouTube scripts, because I'm really starting to dive into that this month.
And it's just bang on, like, 80% there.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Like, yeah, nice.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Like a year ago, I was lucky at 30%. Like, yes.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And now it's. Now it's nearly like you still need an editing pass, but it's. It's getting there.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's quite nice.
And I started doing the same thing from coding solutions, debug things. I throw at it. All of the same thing. I'm having the same feedback loop thrown back at it. Like, okay, that wasn't it. This is close, but this is actually what the solution was. And taken into account that I also included this, this, this and that. How about, what do you. You know, what do you see now? And like, oh, I missed that. Let me. And then there's a whole.
But it's fun to play with how you can have a system in place and instead of thinking of it as something that takes over, it starts to work alongside you.
I'm assuming you're seeing similar stuff.
I think your audio went out. You muted yourself.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: What an amateur. Wow.
Sorry about that. Yeah, no, I see. I talk to a lot of people about this kind of stuff and how they see and manage the relationship between them and whether it's ChatGPT or whatever system they're using.
And some really interesting different approaches. Like, I see people who talk about using it as if it's a kind of assistant or a friend. I very much want to get to the point where I see mine as kind of, and this is going to sound incredibly narcissistic, but I want to see mine as a kind of reflection of me. I want it to be an extension. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe even jono one. I'll be Jono too. But yeah, I want it to act as like an extension of me. I want it to think the same way I would think to make this. And I know that's interesting and problematic potentially in lots of ways, but I find that's how I want it to behave, how I want to use it. If I want to write something or summarize something or synthesize some new ideas, I want it to produce the same thing I would have produced, but faster and better. So, yeah, I'm spending a lot of time trying to make this a version of me rather than, I don't know, an assistant or a teacher or a friend.
Yeah, super interesting.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: You, you mentioned the word writing again, and this is for sure one of the topics I, I wanted to touch. You've been doing a lot of writing on your, on your blog, and I've linked to quite a few of them in my newsletter.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Thank you, I appreciate that.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Well, they're good. So, you know, it's, it's very simple. I, my goal for the newsletter is to highlight information that helps people become a better WordPress builder, slash developer. So understanding the nature of the web better and the intent that most people don't even know the original intent of, of how this thing came to be.
And I think you're doing a great job in, in a few of those articles.
My first question is what sparked. Because I know you're busy, I know your, your week is full.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: And, and, and you know, for months to come, so.
And I also know writing myself as well, it takes time to sit down and process your thoughts and like, what is, what do I want to say? And all that. How, first of all, how did that decision come? Like, because there's a whole, there's like seven, eight, I think about that. But that amount of articles that you written, was that born out of frustration? Because some of them surely in read, like.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it is. So I think it's very much born out of frustration and I think that's a product of so much of the stuff that I'm in fact, go right back to the beginning. I am motivated by producing good things and chasing what does best look like and solving problems.
Yet so much of the consultancy work that I do and so much of the stuff I see in the WordPress space and with big businesses, etc.
Is that reinvention of the wheel which we've touched on. Right. It's the lazy learning images is conceptually and technically easy, yet every site gets it wrong and every site has to reinvent it. And every site there is a fight with a development team who think they know better, they've got to be private over and over again. That is frustrating.
And what I would like to try and do, even if it's just a little bit, is to try and take a stab at solving that meta problem that. How do we collectively get this right? How do we get better? How do we understand the human and business and organisational and political and structural and strategic problems which make the technical problems, which should be unnecessary, which shouldn't happen otherwise? I'm kind of existentially concerned that all I am is a janitor cleaning up after people, making the same mistakes over and over again. And that's not the kind of. Net positive impact I would like to have on the web and on society.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: So get irritated about stuff and frustrated about people and organizations behaving these ways. How do I try and understand what the root causes of that are and then write the thing? And sometimes, yeah, it's a little acerbic and a little tongue in cheek, but it tries to describe what those challenges and problems are.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Well, there's. There's one actually, there's two in particular that I really enjoyed.
Actually. One of them is a version of a draft that I had, which I'm not going to do now because that makes zero sense.
So that's the one on the HTTP cache, how that works.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: That was fun. Yeah. So that's the other type of writing I'm doing, is if these are solved problems and people are still getting it wrong, what if I make the resource right?
If I just sit here and complain about developers being rubbish, that's not great, it's not productive. So how do I create the resource that I would have wanted to 10 years ago or even 10 years from now? That's like the ultimate definitive thing. Yeah. So I wrote like 8, 10,000 words on every single nuance that I was aware of and a whole bunch that I went out and researched on. When you Open a web page and your browser requests resources, how do you make sure they're cached? What are the challenges with that? What are the 28 different types of caching? How do all the nuances of that interact? What about this weird edge case and just solve it comprehensively?
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna still cover everything around it and elements of it. Sure. But this version. Yeah, no longer.
But yeah, a great article.
HTTP casting is super straightforward, yet people don't get it. People think, oh, I just need to turn on the plugin, we're done. Good move on.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And so often this is one of WordPress's great strengths and weaknesses. Right. Is the out the box. It's already better than everything else, which is great.
And the kind of ubiquity of plugins like Yoast, SEO and a whole bunch of the caching ones that we're all familiar with, the WP rockets, WP, TCs, et cetera, the nitro packs make a lot of this seem easy because behind the scenes they do a whole bunch of the heavy lifting. But then the perception is this stuff is simple. So yeah, people just throw a plugin at it and they don't think about, okay, well, my site is actually a bit different from my competitor's site and I've got this weird edge case and oh yeah, I've got that third party integration thing. And you really do at some point need to look at that and evaluate it step by step and say, how do these things interact? What should the rules be? And whilst a lot of that is kind of technical, actually the business logic behind it is just business logic and you just need to apply some critical thinking around what are the scenarios in which this happens in. And then the technical stuff can be handled much more easily. But yeah, people don't think, I don't think about this stuff.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: No, I mean, in all fairness, I don't, I don't think at least going. If I'm, if I go back to when I was being taught programming and all that sort of stuff.
First, first little thing was basic in, in 1984.
But I've, you know, in the years to come I had many more chances to learn like from sequel to obviously php, HTML, JavaScript and all that sort of stuff. All you are being taught is how to build the thing. Yeah, there's, there is not much thought given into how do I optimize a little bit. But not in terms of caching, not in terms of.
Did you know there are, I don't know how many layers of caching I don't think that's 25, but you know, there's certainly more than a dozen.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Yeah, and, and more now than ever. Right. Because now the edge is a thing in a way that it wasn't really a decade ago. And now you've got agentic stuff doing things as well. Yeah, it gets more and more busy.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: It does, it does. And it's, it's, you know, it's, it's fun to, to see all the possibilities, but it's a little discerning to still see people still not getting it and just writing and, you know, it looks good, works good, I'm done. Yeah.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: And then you get 10 concurrent visits and the server falls over.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, you see those clients, I see those clients and you go, it's really not that big of a surprise why your site is going down because this is happening on every single page load. Which is fine if it's like a hundred a day, but yeah, you know.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: And again, this is why WordPress struggles a bit, I think, reputationally, because it's so easy, relatively speaking, asterisks, to spin up a site that looks reasonably good, that works reasonably well, and then which is unstable or fundamentally falls over when it gets even the most small amount of traffic. And our competitors and the whole JavaScript ecosystem and all the REACT nerds will say you should go serverless and you should do headless and you should do static and you should reproduce all of your documents. Yeah, it's bafflingly bad. And they all drink each other's Kool Aid to the point where there's no other way, as I'm sure we probably do. And they would say the same, but they're wrong.
But yeah, they all have some really good arguments around. Okay, well, if you build it using this architecture and this mentality, it isn't going to fall over when the servers hit it, but there are significant trade offs for that. But it's equally so Easy to make WordPress able to handle all of that. Like the right caching logic, the right set of plugins, the right integration with cloudflare or fastly or whatever and all sorts of.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Every single time I engage in a conversation around performance on X or Blue sky or really any platform, there's always going to be somebody saying something along the lines of WordPress.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, WordPress can be lightning fast. I will, I will screen that.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Fast. You can never be said in one sentence like, yeah, are you kidding me? That's the stupidest answer. Ever like out of the box is fast. It's the stuff you add to it that make it unfast. Like it's not rocket science. It really isn't.
But sure, if you're handling a whole bunch of traffic and the vast majority of your traffic is uncached, you need good hardware.
There's also no rocket science like this.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: No, none of this is complex.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: None of this. And I don't know, I don't engage with troll or troll like behavior, so I'll. I'll ignore or mute even replies. Just get out of my view. I don't care for you.
If you answer anything I say or comment on and then you answer me along the lines where it's clear you're curious, you want to learn, I'm happy to give you a 15 minute video even as a reply, but don't, don't, don't do the react is better because. And then come with some, some, some reason like it's it. That's not how it works. Anything WordPress has as a.
A negative like people say WordPress can't do this or it should never or all that. All of them, literally all of them are architectural problems. None of them are really WordPress, which is a wild claim claimed to stake. What is the.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: But I believe, I genuinely believe that's what it is.
Now as we are talking about JavaScript, you also had another article that was really fun to read and it touched JavaScript a little bit. More than a little bit.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: I'm sure you know which one I'm talking about.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Yeah, the one that got me into trouble. I think this, this really like a thousand comments on hacker News. I think 999 of them were from the JavaScript.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: That's hilarious.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: What was the title again?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Where was it? JavaScript.
JavaScript broke the web and called it progress.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: And this was my attempt to try and stake my line in the sand for that argument. The same one you've described that so often.
I will tell all the people that I'm a WordPress nerd and it's the right choice and they will lecture me about why it's ancient and wrong and bad and why JavaScript and React are the only options.
And yet my experience as a technical SEO consultant whose job for the last 20 years has been to evaluate websites and work out why they're bad and what's wrong with them and then to create a plan for how to fix them.
I have never ever, ever seen a JavaScript centric powered headless site achieve half of what WordPress achieves out the box and also quite often with massive overheads on performance or accessibility or crawlability or technical SEO or usability or security or accessibility and. Or of the above, and yet they remain convinced that JavaScript is the only one. And I get it. I get there are legitimate strong arguments for developer experience, which is a thing like how easy is it to pick up a code base and work with it? Okay, there are large teams and building on dependencies and maybe I want to bring in a third party front end designer who isn't going to do all the hard work to get up to scratch on my entire code base and they can just slot in a bit and work on a component and that can just get lovely. Excellent. Except there are massive costs on all of that and WordPress is still the right choice. So I wrote all of this and I outlined what I think is some of the history of how all this happened, which seems almost accidental in hindsight, which is essentially angular became a thing in what, 2011ish?
And overnight we had an influx of people who historically might have been software developers and app developers, suddenly had a way to become web developers and they started building apps because apps at the time were better than websites. They were more fluid, they had more capabilities, they were more performance.
Every CMO of every business wanted an app and they wanted their website redesign and rebuild to look and feel and have the capabilities that apps did and apps one.
And overnight we stopped building websites and started building apps. And it was a very different set of people using very different tooling, very different.
And we never really went back as an industry and an ecosystem. Now three quarters of all the new websites that get built, I don't know whether that's accurate, but certainly a large amount of them, every startup, every SaaS will already have a working assumption that they should be building on netlify and React and content headless, something, something react because it's the default, because that's where the talent pool is. And if you want developers, those are the developers you get. It's that all WordPress and WordPress has a bad reputation and isn't actively doing anything seemingly to combat that. So we lose. And all of these new websites are monstrosities designed mostly to meet the needs of the people building and working on them at the expense of usability, SEO, technical callability.
And the great irony of all of this is now those tech stacks are starting to pivot and reverse engineer to go, okay, we accept that we have introduced performance problems and accessibility problems. Let's investigate a server side first rendering mechanism. Let's investigate making things callable. Let's add add ons onto our add ons to allow for these things to work. And they're just reinventing what PHP did 15 years ago and reinventing what WordPress did 20 years ago and it's insane.
But we've got no counter narrative because we don't have marketing as a function. So they just continue to win.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: I mean that last sentence is probably the biggest problem we as WordPress have.
And for that I'm including WooCommerce and all of the larger functionality plugins and whatnot.
But yeah, I see a similar, similar trend in, in where I go.
They are choosing this but they don't really know what they're choosing because it may just work nicely for them. But that, yes. And mean it's the best choice.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: You can launch something that looks good quickly without any understanding of the long term costs of that.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Yeah, just define Vibe coding right there.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Vibe website.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's bad.
What was the biggest gripe people had in those comments?
[00:36:57] Speaker B: That React, et cetera and that tech stack can be fast and can be good, which I don't disagree with. Like in the abstract, theoretically given infinite budget and resource and the best development team in the world, I could definitely build something awesome in React and it might even be my choice over WordPress if I controlled all of the variables and could see into the future and predict all of my future requirements perfectly. Hell yeah. I will build a headless React thing that is perfectly abstracted between the front end and back end and can plug and play in. Everything's modular and componentized and it'll be beautiful and perfect. It's just never happened. It's never ever happened in the real world. I have never seen it and I've seen a lot.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: What's the CMS that comes closest to it, you think?
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Oh, comes closest to WordPress.
Yeah, Ghost. Yeah, yeah, Ghost. But riddled with problems still. And yeah, not even comparable. The gap is so wide it can't even be articulated.
Scary.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: That's a big statement.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Like, so I, I've looked at this problem a lot, particularly in my role at Yoast where you go, okay, WordPress out the box is pretty good pros and cons, but in terms of basic architecture, I'm going to get reliable HTML, it's going to be server side rendered. I have control over all the moving parts, I can filter anything I need to to alter the fundamental behavior That's a big weakness on everything else. And I can make it do or be anything I want it to be given or given a certain amount of work and resourcing.
Anything else you pick, you're going to hit walls. It's going to turn out that, oh, actually I can't filter the HTTP status of responses for RSS feeds. Oh, I can't control the whatever of the whatever. I can't change this value to whatever.
And those scenarios are where you end up compromising on business decisions and logic, which are going to affect you in ways that you could have worked around with WordPress. And six months from now you're going to say, okay, actually, we want to go multilingual or we want to add a forum, or we want our E commerce store to start supporting subscription products where the first month is free. All of these things become unachievable on many of these platforms unless you invest a huge amount of money in doing bespoke stuff from scratch for developers who don't really know what they're doing.
Or you do it in WordPress and it's a day's work to filter WooCommerce or BigCommerce or whatever else you're doing, and that the difference is stark.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: What do you think of the mix then of WordPress and React, meaning content generation and all that sort of stuff happens on the WordPress side of things.
And then with a little bit of JavaScript turned into a static version and stuff like that. That version does that. That's interesting.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: The whole kind of strategy thing. Yeah, there's been a few flavors of this. I think there's two directions. One is there is a dream that headless WordPress is somehow better than WordPress. WordPress.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: I've never had that dream myself, by the way.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: No. And again, I kind of get it in the abstract. I like the idea that maybe having a separation of concerns could make.
Maybe there's an argument that it could free up my development teams to not be the one. But again, I've never seen it work. Work. I've never seen it happen. I've only ever seen it introduce huge amounts of extra complexity. But the idea of static generation is kind of interesting that when I hit Publish or Save and there's a kind of static version of that page created and then that served to users instead of them having to hit the site. I get that to a degree for performance and security reasons. Except you can achieve all of that with a caching layer and strategy and a CDN like a cloudflare. Or fastly without any of the compromises. So, yeah, there's a nice idea there. But I think broadly it's a lot of work to work around a problem that's much more easily solved.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: I very much agree. I think it's. For me it's more like the idea was there and then Edge caching caught up.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: Yes. In 2017. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: And then most of the arguments that were rooting for the let's do this.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: The you have to hide the backend away from the world.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That then became like, huh, well, you know, do I actually still need it? If I can do it this way and play with. And my personal favorite is Cloudflare.
[00:41:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I live and breathe Cloudflare.
Sadly, no affiliate system, unfortunately.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Please. Yeah.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: I think that there is an interesting challenge though there where I struggle with this, that because I've been doing this for a while, my mindset for how do I build an optimizer? Thing is I need a server and I need some file hosting and I need a domain and I need a file system that works and works like this. A whole bunch of that maybe changes when you start saying instead, I have an Edge vendor like Cloudflare where all of my systems and code are distributed and requests are routed locally and caching is inherently built in. Azure, sales, security, performance, etc. The fundamental way in which you build things might start to change. And WordPress is behind there because all of those Systems are very JavaScript centric and not so PHP centric. So we have been left behind a little bit in this revolution which I think will continue of Edge first building. So I was thinking a lot about what does WordPress look like in that ecosystem? And maybe it is something a bit more static esque, where you use WordPress as the publishing and editing system and then you just distribute static HTML files around the world. Again, there's complexity and there's pros and cons, but I think we ought to have an opinion on what does our ecosystem look like in that world. It's interesting.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: That is an interesting one.
I've had many requests over the years. I've never been pulled into it to the point that I would like. Yeah, this is a great scenario for us to really start looking into fully going headless slash static.
I simply come back to the okay, this is the whole layer of complexity that I need to add now.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Like, yeah, everything will be harder forever.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: Yeah, like, what do you mean?
Forms don't stop working, but we have solutions.
Yes.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: No, I've got extra Layers on the AI. I don't. And it's all horrible and.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: Exactly. So every single thing that you start adding to it then becomes an extra on top of an extra on top of an extra. And I just, I don't see the trade off being worth it.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: No. And what you end up with is something that looks much more like a REACT site.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: For better or worse.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Also that. Yeah.
No, I mean, I think I should find somebody who has been building these sites for ages now and give me their lowdown of this is why and help me figure out how to debunk all my thoughts on this. But yeah, I would love that to.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: Happen, but nobody's ever managed to see these bad websites.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: I'm going to start looking around now, see if I can find somebody who's. Who's willing to share his or her opinion on it.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Nice. And then we can fight them.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: See now if I need to cut this out now because now nobody's going to go like. Yes, The, the way you approach all of the, all of the work that you do. Right. So there's consultancy, there's. How much, how much actually are you building?
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Oh, not as much as I would like that said, I've done two, three WordPress plugins in the last.
Yeah, I saw that.
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Which is why I'm asking.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So not nearly as much sad like, but I've got some side projects and hobbies and some clients where I'm hands on intentionally. So yeah, three quarters of the stuff I'm doing is consultancy and it's.
But yeah, I keep a little bit on where I'm neck deep in code and WordPress and building functionality and again with the same kind of thinking of what does good look like and how do I build stuff that is as close to perfect as I can engineer and conceptualize. So yeah, I'm still hands on, but not as much as I'd like to be, but I will try and keep that in balance over the next year or so. What's more, stuff I want to build.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: Can you share anything about that? Because one of the solutions you built is a very fun one.
Edge Images, I think it's called.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so that needs an overhaul because 3/4 of the code in that. Yeah, 3/4 of the code in that was necessary to work around a limitation of how some of WordPress internal image handling works. And there was an update in six point something which added one tiny little filter which now solves all of that. So I can just remove 3/4 of the code now, but I'll need to rework it. But yeah, that was. I think that's the most technically complex thing I've done that I'm super proud of. Where you just go.
WordPress is terribly poor at media management, as I'm sure we all know.
It generates 38 images and variations of every image you upload, and they're always the wrong size. And the HTML markup is suboptimal and the CSS is bad. Every level of performance optimization, there is a fight and it just shouldn't be.
Other platforms have solved this and generally the solution is I will have one main version of my image and I will request a rewritten version of that from a CDN like a Cloudflare and just say, you know what, give Me this at 640x480 at 2x pixel density and center the gravity on the person's face and make it blue. And all of that is done on.
[00:47:19] Speaker A: The fly at 80% quality.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And however many other parameters. And I want five different versions of that. I want a landscape, a portrait, and it just handles it beautifully.
Yes. I built a plugin that uses Cloudflare's image rewrite thing to do all that theory automatically.
Pretty close.
So mostly you just plug it in, turn it on, and as long as you've got that feature enabled in Cloudflare, suddenly you're only.
I don't turn off the rest of the image generation because that might have side effects. But you only serve and manage one version of the image. And Cloudflare does all of the work on.
Here's all the different versions and it re changes all the HTML markup as well.
So it detects what size the image should be and says, okay, here's the white HTML and the css and here's the version for it if you're on an iPhone. Here's the blah, blah, blah. All the variations just beautifully in the background. Yeah. Really tough with that. Really nice.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: I think the only downside of your plugin is that. Well, downside. What is the downside? But the only downside of that plugin Edge Images is that you need a premium version of Cloudflare.
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Yes. Which I think is still like 200amonth, which isn't ideal, but I'm hoping they're gradually on this journey where they kind of bring.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: Already does it.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: Right time. Oh, does it? Okay, well, $20 then. So that's not the end of the world.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah, 20, 25. What is it?
[00:48:32] Speaker B: Nice. And they make stuff cheap all the time. That kind of general slant for that is Good.
[00:48:39] Speaker A: When you say that, the first thing that I think of when in terms of cheap is R2 versus anything else.
[00:48:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:49] Speaker A: It's quite wild how few people know that Cloudflare has an image storage bucket thingy. Whatever.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: And the pricing of it.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it's close to free when you compare it to AWS or anything else. Yeah.
[00:49:04] Speaker A: I use it for backup storage for videos and large files and whatnot, because it's just uploading once, never touching it again until I actually have to.
But I need it as a backup.
And like the bill for that is like maybe $2 a month. Whatever.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Yeah, great. Great. Versus, yeah, any. Anything else would be 10 times that. That's nice.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: And. And we're recording this podcast with video. I store the video, I upload it to them. My Cloudflare R2 bucket. My son will then go download it, process it, and turn it into a video vial and upload it for me. All of these types of solutions. Like it's, it come to think of it, it's kind of wild that nobody's built a wrapper around it and just sold it as a.
[00:49:56] Speaker B: There we go. Off you go.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Get your cloud, turn on R2, create the bucket and then go to my app and then you have all the management stuff around it for a while. But yeah, Cloudflare is just a wonderful solutions for solution for so many of the.
The modern problems and the rate at which they're adding stuff is just.
Yeah. Absolutely bonkers.
[00:50:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:20] Speaker A: There's an article that they wrote this week, but no past week.
I don't know if you've read it. Where?
[00:50:29] Speaker B: I don't think so.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: Theo, the YouTuber. I forget his last name.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: Oh, he tore down my JavaScript argument. He did like a 40 minute. Why? Jono's wrong. So I did like him, but we're no longer friends.
Yeah. Don't share the link. It's really brutal.
[00:50:44] Speaker A: All right, I'm all, yeah, but he did a comparison between Cloudflare workers and versus.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: Oh, yes, I did see that. Yeah.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And then Cloudflare was like, this really shouldn't be the case that we're slower. Yeah, this is weird. What. What's going on?
And then they did a deep, deep dive into understanding which elements of their worker setup their framework, their hardware. The whole thing might have possibly an impact that on the test that, that Theo was running, which were flawed.
[00:51:16] Speaker B: It was the cold start issue, if I recall, wasn't it?
[00:51:18] Speaker A: I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, it's, it's like there's something wrong in the testing. Yet there's also something revealing in the testing and what can we learn from this? And that whole mentality.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: Yeah, great.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: I just freaking love it so much.
[00:51:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: And the end result is that they fixed the things they could fix and. And the end result of that was that they're now faster than Vercel.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: And I'm like, yeah, that's cool.
Of all of the great enemies of the open web, I think Vercel is one of the most.
React is trivial in comparison and much smaller. I think Vercel are invested in miseducation and in.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Yes. When you see their interactions on places like Twitter, not that that's the best. Or Reddit or wherever. And they're cults of the kool aid of JavaScript. First Vercel. First Vercel hosting Vercel infrastructure. And I get that it's. It's incredible, Incredible platform for. I just want to jump in and vibe something. But I think they're evil. I think their billing is evil. I think they take advantage of people who they should be educating. You compare that to like a Cloudflare.
They're not the good people.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: That's an interesting thing. I've never really looked into them other than generally looking into the products and what they do and this and that.
Saw the overlap with Cloudflare, but, you know, I'm team Cloudflare anyway, so, like, you know, I'm good, but that's an interesting stance. I need to revisit that and see.
[00:52:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it's worth Googling some, like, Vercel's evil stuff and going. And yeah, read the other side as well. But they're not cool.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: No. Okay, understood. I'll take your word for it.
I have a final question for you.
The question is with what WordPress is doing right now in terms of roadmap. There's a whole bunch of stuff.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: We have a roadmap.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: Well, see, this is where the question starts.
[00:53:16] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: You and I are, I think, in the same camp where we go. There's not really a roadmap other than the map we determine per version.
But generally, where WordPress is heading in terms of its integration with AI is the one I'm specifically curious about.
What is your opinion on that?
Are we doing the right things?
Is the fun nerves?
[00:53:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. I'm.
I'm nervous for a few reasons, but wearing my SEO hat for a moment, I'm mostly nervous that lowering the barrier at scale to producing undifferentiated uninteresting content. Content. I hate that word is not good for anyone.
And that whilst WordPress is incredible and liberating, I think democratizing publishing hasn't just had negative side effects. And the fact that every small business and large business on the web and on the planet has a terrible website with a terrible blog full of uninteresting articles that no human will ever read is already a problem.
And if we're focusing all of our tooling on making it easier to publish, whilst not also making it easier to come up with original ideas or build and ideate new concepts or synthesize the kinds of things that make that content valuable and interesting and useful.
Oh, I'm just nervous that we just spin out more crappy websites and more pages.
That said, the stuff on the back end is interesting. I think there's some really interesting questions, albeit quite abstract at this stage, around things like what does a CMS look like when you can just prompt it rather than having dropdowns you need to select options from? I think that's quite interesting. Removing the friction of having to deal with whatever full site good and monstrosity block thing we have to deal with whatever week we're in. I think maybe that solves some of those problems. I don't see a world where we ever really make much progress meaningfully on finishing the Gutenberg Roadmap or migrating the rest of the admin priority to the.
[00:55:45] Speaker A: Gutenberg Roadmap to begin.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Or even working out what FSE is and what the relationship between a template and a page is and all of that. And then designing a UI that normal humans are able to intuitively use to manage that. That's terrifying. That was always terrifying. And we've done a terrible job of it so far. So if there is a world where we can go actually, what if we just replace a lot of that with other types of interface interactions? That's quite cool if. If we actually do it and if we don't just end up with like a fifth half built thing, which is also the risk.
[00:56:18] Speaker A: The. I think you're mostly referring to the MCP projects.
[00:56:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. I think the idea that I'm on the fence on MCP as a standard. I don't. I don't necessarily think that it's the. The chosen one, but we'll see. But either way, whatever does come. The idea that there are easier standardized ways to make my website predictably consumable to third party systems is quite cool. And I definitely see a world where agentic Interactions are more common and those systems aren't going to want to crawl and navigate through our sites. They're going to want to come and transact with our content and our services. So yeah, anticipate that's good.
[00:56:59] Speaker A: With ChatGPT announcing their MCP developer connections, I think it was this week or last week, whatever, but very recently and with WordPress 6point now, now having an MCP first solution in there, I'm imagining the getting out, the getting the data out in different patterns is probably the first step towards what you just said.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm slightly nervous on that as well given that most sites haven't even.
Most sites have never considered how am I managing my inventory of pages and URLs and content. And we see that all the time when stuff like, I don't know, I'll go to a site, look in the Yoast SEO configuration and they will have six different custom post types which definitely shouldn't be crawlable or indexable or exposed to the web because some third party plugin or elementor add on has added them and they've not coded it properly. I think that will be rife. And if all of that starts to end up being mcp, people aren't managing. How am I telling these stories? How am I controlling my narrative and my information flow? That's scary.
Yeah. It's gonna be all sorts of noise there.
[00:58:12] Speaker A: I'm with you on that. But that's the scary side of things. The, the unscary side of things is that we'll have a much better way to get data out of it.
Compare data.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. The across sites and sections over data. Yeah.
[00:58:30] Speaker A: Find commonalities in data that you would normally.
[00:58:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly.
[00:58:35] Speaker A: Wouldn't even bother to start because I don't know how many posts I have on my blog, but I for sure I'm not going to read back every single one of them just to figure out if there's a commonality that I've missed over and should, you know, all of the. Here, here's a thing I'd like to change on every single page.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: Like that's. That's super easy. If I can tell it to do that sort of thing. I can search for it. Sure. But I then have to do the next action and go into.
[00:58:57] Speaker B: Now that's a great example. That's exactly the kind of thing that full site Gutenberg blocking is terrible for. Whereas this would make so trivially easy.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I love how you're.
[00:59:08] Speaker B: I'm only half joking because I don't know what we're calling it this week. And it's some combination of some of those words.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: I refuse to call it Gutenberg. It's the Project Gutenberg that has produced the site editor, the block editor, and is now working on collaborative.
But it has been doing that for way too long anyway.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: But.
[00:59:24] Speaker A: Yes, but it's it's Project Gutenberg and not the Gutenberg editor. But, you know, know, I'm a stickler for how it's been introduced.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Something, something marketing. Definitely.
[00:59:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:59:35] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:59:38] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.
And I think people listening have the opportunity to learn a lot. And thank you again.
[00:59:49] Speaker B: Nice. Thanks for having me. It's been a treat.
[00:59:52] Speaker A: Likewise.
