Mastering the WordPress Mic with Nathan Wrigley

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast you all love. Right, Nathan? Love is the word. [00:00:06] Speaker B: I love it. [00:00:08] Speaker A: And why do you love it? Because we talk about and we talk with all the wonderful people making up our wonderful community. With me today is somebody who, if you've ever listened to a podcast in the WordPress ecosystem, there's a big fat chance you've come across this man, this young man, I should say. [00:00:26] Speaker B: You're very kind. [00:00:28] Speaker A: I have my moments. Welcome, Nathan. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm Nathan. I have nothing more to say. My life is complete. We've achieved success. I've been on Remkus podcast. I'm very happy to be here, and. [00:00:47] Speaker A: I'm very happy for you to be on my podcast for a change, because I've been on yours quite a few times by now. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, you have. You've come onto my show loads of times, and I'm very appreciative and I hope you'll come on lots more because you're cleverer than I am and you have better things to say than I do. [00:01:03] Speaker A: I don't know about that, but you're also very kind. For those people who have never listened to you, could you please do a little introduction of who you are, where you're from, what you do? [00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely can. And the funny thing is, I don't often go on podcasts and I say that basic question the same time, more or less, at the beginning of every episode. And I have this intuition that that's a really easy question to answer when I say it. And now you've said it to me, I'm realizing, actually it's much harder than I thought. So I'll give it a go. My name is Nathan Wrigley. I am a WordPress podcaster now. That is basically what I do for a living, which is very peculiar. I didn't imagine a few years ago that that would be the case. I'm based in the uk, as you can probably hear, and I've been working with websites really since the beginning of the Internet, right back in the era when it was just, you know, you had to do dial up. And do you remember that noise that do, do, do kind of thing? And it was all just typing into a text editor, you know, P tags and image tags and things like that. And then things like CSS came along and I got really into all of that. Suddenly you could separate the presentation layer from the code and, you know, the styling was in a different place prior to that. It was all. And then the bit that really Changed my life was discovering CMSS and played around with an absolute ton of them, always the open source ones. I never shelled out for licenses for things like Expression Engine which had a proprietary license system and tried Joomla. Tried lots of different ones, tried Magento and spent a long time using Drupal and loved it, really loved it. And the only reason that I moved away From Drupal to WordPress probably in about 2015, 14, 15, something like that, was because Drupal have what is probably actually quite a good position technologically in that when they go through a point release. So from Drupal 6 to 7, 7 to 8, they say bye bye to the previous technology stack and they're quite willing to just hijack it and you've got to begin again, which from a technological point of view is really clever. But when it comes to bite you because your client site suddenly stopped working, that's a bit of a nightmare. So moved over to WordPress 2014, 15 something like that and haven't looked back. And that was the very pithy answer to your question. And I have two cats, a guinea pig, I have loads of gray hair, I talk far too much. [00:03:45] Speaker A: Are you feeding your cats the way Jamie feeds his cats? Like at the end of every video he asks for likes and the more likes the people give, the more he feeds his cats. Is that. Is that a thing you do? [00:03:57] Speaker B: No. What happens if he doesn't get too many likes to the cats actually starve? No, no, we just feed them. Although that's a whole thing. Like the environmental impact of owning cats is fairly profound. The amount of stuff we throw away every time, every time we feed a cat is ridiculous. [00:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I had one question prepared as you were explaining. So you are on WordPress now that your whole line of work revolves around our favorite cms. I was going to ask what was your favorite CMS to work with before that? You already answered that after. I'm kind of curious. You said Drupal and then you said you kind of liked that they cut off essentially version six and then start. Not a new, but certainly almost like a hard fork from 6 to 7 and then changing everything. What specifically do you like about that? Because from my perspective, perspective, the way WordPress is doing has ensured there's always a stable upgrade version. Like you never have to worry about it. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think what I was meaning by that was I did like it. I liked the sort of philosophical position that will always be on the latest and greatest thing, but I didn't like it when it actually had an impact, you know. So when the moment I stepped out was when Drupal went from 7 to 8. And it was a big, profound change and anybody in the Drupal community will know what that means. There was all sorts of libraries brought in which became the default, whereas they simply didn't exist in previous versions. And it was all about the way that the websites were styled. So what it meant was that you couldn't take a website from 7 upgrade to 8 and have any expectation that it would work. But it did mean that 8 was probably going to last a lot longer than 7 would ever do. And so I liked it from a philosophical point of view because who doesn't like things to be updated? You know, you log into WordPress and one of the first things we all do is update the plugins because we know that's a great idea. And so from that point of view it was great. But when it bit me, I looked around to see if there were more stable, long term, backwards compatible Options and immediately WordPress stood out. I had heard of WordPress lots of times, never ever installed it as far as I can remember. And it became obvious that that was probably the wrong position. But from Drupal I think I started with four or five, from four to five to six to seven, it all worked out with minimal work. But seven to eight was so breaking that it was. It was enough. So I think you're right, but I think I was able to get away with it. [00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember probably the first proper CMS that I used extensively was Mambo. [00:07:00] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:01] Speaker A: I remember that when Mumbo forked into Joomla, I went along with Joomla. And this is 2003 4. What I absolutely hated about Mambo and Joomla is the upgrade path for the same reasons that Drupal also made it quite difficult to. I mean, it wasn't just overwrite the files and do an upgrade script and then done like Mumbo and Joomla. You had a very complex SQL statements that you needed to enter into the database straight. And I barely knew at the time what a database was, let alone how to process those scripts and whatnot. And I thought that was just like the stupidest way to go about. Like, why not automate that? Because it's the same for everybody. Why not have it available in the file so that everybody can just hit that script, it runs in the background and you're done. Couldn't wrap my head around it. Started looking for an alternative, ended up with WordPress. But it's funny How? Because I think those hurdles are actually what helped WordPress in its growth. Oh yeah, Very, very large portion. [00:08:14] Speaker B: But also. So Drupal wasn't quite so bad. Well, you had to run a PHP file in the browser, so you basically had to copy and paste this URL into browser and then it would run the update script, but there was no button to press. And also there was just this fear that things were going to go wrong and sometimes they did and then there was no sort of, you know, rolling back or anything anyway. But the, one of the things that I also think contributed to WordPress's success is how now this statement is going to sound a bit stale is how beautiful it was. In that era. Drupal was pretty ugly. You know, there was almost nothing given over to the way that the buttons looked or the way that the text was spaced or the menus. You know, it was just a bit of a mess. It was made by programmers who were keen to just have some sort of functional cms. And the eye candy aspect to the back end didn't really matter because you knew where to go and you knew how many clicks to achieve to get there. And in fact, most of the Drupal community weren't using the mouse, they were remembering the strings that you would add to the end of the URL to get to where you needed to go. And that was the way that you did it. On most tutorials it would say, you know, delete this bit of the URL, type this in and that'll get you where you need to go. And that's the kind of people that they were, that they were, you know, dealing with. And I remember looking at WordPress the first time, don't know which version it was, but you know, 20, 14, 15, whatever version that was, and thinking, gosh, it's really nice to look at. Somebody's put a bit of time into spacing things out and there's a, you know, there's a font which is consistent across all of the UI and the buttons look the same and the text boxes and the select boxes all look quite nice. Now, does it still hold that same appeal? Maybe not. And we're doing things about that. There are definitely changes afoot. [00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a new dashboard in place kind of hidden in the, in the Gutenberg plugin, if you want to play with that. Yeah, but, but yeah, that's. I very much recognized the struggle and the oh, wow, this is nice feeling. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Do you know what was interesting though is that what, what came because I'd used Drupal for such a long time I had a real expectation of what a CMS was. And when I came to WordPress I was really quite surprised by how minimal the feature set was. So as an example, inside of Drupal Core was the user permissions. That's all built in. Every permission is available by ticking boxes for every user. And you can create different roles and then assign those people to those roles and say, okay, this role is. And it's basically this massive matrix of tick boxes which is a bit of a thing to get your head around, but once you've understood it, it's pretty straightforward. But also what we call custom post types was all baked and also a kind of visual, like a way to query the database, like a visual UI for creating SQL queries. And it was called Views. And once you'd got your head around it, it was sublimely powerful. And all of that was in core Drupal. And I remember coming to WordPress and thinking, okay, where's the button for the extra field that I want to add to the post? And it didn't exist. And then I would install things like, I don't know, something like Pods or ACF or something like that. And then I think, okay, well where's it gone? You know, I've filled out this meta box of information, why isn't it on the post? Where has it gone? And it was a real learning curve actually. [00:12:03] Speaker A: Oh, I believe, I believe that I played with Drupal a few times, never really took. But yeah, there's some design ideas that I like. I think, to be perfectly honest, I think the features that you just mentioned are features that should have been core in WordPress. I genuinely think that's. That would have been the better route. [00:12:27] Speaker B: We might end up user permissions bit. I think the user permit the ability to create roles in seconds. [00:12:34] Speaker A: I can tell you by heart the plugins that I would install right now, like Nimbus, ACF Pro, yeah, I'm kind of there, but I think that sort of functionality really belongs inside a CMS by default. [00:12:48] Speaker B: Right. And so it was just the fact that it didn't exist and I had to go and find it. But also the fact that the Drupal community, so the way it works in Drupal is that in the same way that in WordPress people develop these add ons, they're called modules. In Drupal, the community coalesced so heavily around some modules that they got put into Core because this, this, for example, this Views module, everybody used it like nobody would build a Drupal website without views in. So eventually everybody just said, well, let's just make sure it's absolutely bulletproof and then we'll chuck it into court. And that's the way it went. And so it would be akin to automatic saying, right, let's just put. Let's say pods. Let's just make pods part of Core, because everybody's using it, but of course they're not. We don't have that in the WordPress space. There isn't one absolute incumbent for everything, because there's like 12 of everything. [00:13:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, True, true. Yeah. I mean, I can only repeat what I just said. I think this is something that we had version 3, which introduced the menus, which introduced WordPress Multisite being part of WordPress Core. WordPress 2.93 introduced custom post types and all the availability of it. I think by WordPress 4, we should have had it in Core. Wait, I didn't mean to be a poet, but there you go. [00:14:24] Speaker B: You mean in a UI that. That was. That presented itself to the end user, you didn't have to do any kind of coding or, or copy down some sort of string that you had to then put somewhere else in a template file? You mean it would have just been in the ui? Anybody could have access. Okay, I would agree. [00:14:40] Speaker A: I think that would have forced some more professional ways of doing standardized metadata, which we ended up not having, and then having plugins like CMB. CMB2. Yeah, pods, advanced custom fields. You know, everybody created their own. Their own version. I think we kind of as a whole, you kind of lose track of where things are supposed to go if, like you just said, multiple parties have different ideas of how a particular problem should be solved. [00:15:13] Speaker B: Do you know what's interesting, and it's never occurred to me until just now, is that I wonder if WordPress, putting the brakes on bringing those features in, I wonder if it allowed something like Gutenberg to happen. Because if all of that functionality is in the core product. So let's say, I don't know this, all the permutations for custom fields and all of that, would Gutenberg have been allowed? Would it have been as easy to pull off? And I know it hasn't been a straightforward journey and what have you, but you'd have to deal with all of that in addition to just the content area. Just assuming that a vanilla version of WordPress is basically, you start a post and you've got this blank canvas and nothing else. That's all there is. Whereas with Drupal I guess there'd be the expectation, okay, we might have to worry about already created custom fields and already created user permissions and all of this kind of thing. [00:16:09] Speaker A: I think the Project Gutenberg, what it actually does is solve that particular problem. Right, Meaning it is a singular focus to solve content editing, because that's where it started. Yeah, but then there's a whole array of other elements that are connected to it. I think Project Gutenberg was not very well received when it was introduced and I think that is largely at the time, most people didn't really get it. Like, I can work just fine with my editor. What are you talking about? And if I need to do something fancy, I'll use dynamic stuff inside of acf. And you know, what are we talking about? In hindsight, I think most people, if they, if they're honest in checking it out again, they'll see that Project Gutenberg is the attempt to unify, bringing certain outside solutions, whether that be plugins or inspiration elsewhere. Bring that inside of WordPress and have a particular opinion on how and what that should look like. [00:17:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of interesting. For me, the Gutenberg Project is best exemplified right now by things like patterns and these pattern libraries that are coming along. And what that brings is just so sublime. You know, you click a button and you've got an entire page and every component of it is a little microcosm of the thing. And you know, this is a paragraph and there's an image and yeah, you can drag that bit into that bit and it's just, it is sublime. In fact, I was playing with it this morning, I was playing with patterns for a particular purpose and it just takes the breath away. It is pretty amazing actually what you can do and the ability for non skilled, non technical users to be able to create something profoundly good, obviously with you know, with the help of third parties, in many cases by clicking a button is amazing. Really amazing. [00:18:17] Speaker A: We've come a very, very long way and I'm quite happy to see where we are and what you can do with it. It requires a different mindset from how you would approach building a site and content within that site. Um, but I've said this many times before, but I'm a fan. I switched two years ago, two and a half years. Said going forward, this is what I'm going to use and if there's limitations, I'll find ways around it. There's not been a limitation that I couldn't find a way around it yet. So I think it works fine. Does that mean there aren't limitations. Yes, there are. But you can also be creative in how you solve certain things. There's. There's always the way of entering or creating a block that just is basically just PHP logic that you would solve, have solve other ways in a normal classic theme. You can still do that inside a block theme. You just need to be a little bit more creative in how you do it. But I think. Yeah, go ahead. [00:19:20] Speaker B: Well, I was just going to say I think we're at a period of. It's profoundly brilliant, but also we're at a period with full site editing or site editing where it's also quite confusing. The sort of. The fact that you've got this one UI and then you've got this other UI and if you click this button, you'll end up in this thing, which looks a little bit different. I think it's, yeah. Discombobulating. It's just. Especially for inexperienced users, it's difficult. And then you've got things like the fact that the core menu doesn't really do very much and you've got things like the fact that it's not really wysiwyg. It's kind of. It's very, very close, but it's not quite. Yeah, it's wysiwyg. Ish. Yeah, that's good. That is something we should call it. But it's, you know, if you're careful in what you do and once you've done it a few times, you can realize, okay, that bit of padding is not actually going to end up looking quite like that. It'll probably be a bit smaller when I click Publish and it's live. But once you've got your head around there. But it would be nice if they did. Those little things didn't exist. [00:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But you know, building sites with it for two years now, seeing the differences then over two years where we are now, just give it two more years and we're. I mean, that doesn't sound very hopeful, but I mean it. [00:20:41] Speaker B: Can I ask you a question? You asked me to ask you questions, so I'm going to ask you a question. What is. If I installed a vanilla version of WordPress and said, I don't know, you've got to copy this site, would you stay true to core WordPress and just use the core blocks? Or are you. Would your tooling as of November 2024, would your tooling involve third party stuff anywhere? [00:21:06] Speaker A: I tend to only want to use third party stuff when it's needed and not just added because I have decided that this is the standard toolbox that I work with. [00:21:16] Speaker B: Right. [00:21:17] Speaker A: I'm a big fan of keeping sites lean and mean as much and as long as I possibly can. Having said that, there are. So there's. There's two base block based themes that I use a lot, which is Rock Base and which is Ollie Ali Pro specifically. [00:21:36] Speaker B: Okay. [00:21:37] Speaker A: Just because of the patterns that are in there, I can just build out most of the desires client has. Just works in a very nice and a very complete way. And then there's two other themes that are very close to being used frequently. One is Generate Press and the other is Grade Suite. [00:22:01] Speaker B: Oh yeah, right. Okay. Yeah. [00:22:03] Speaker A: Some of them have different advantages to others and I think a fifth option of something that I am, I have inherited but I, I am enjoying working with it is Cadence. [00:22:20] Speaker B: Okay. [00:22:21] Speaker A: Different approach. Generate Press and Cadence approach things a little differently. But I, but you know that that mix is basically my tool set and if I need to have certain blocks extra, there's two plugins by Nick Diego that I use basically on any site. So if I were to say this is my tool set, it'd be icon block and it'd be block visibility. [00:22:45] Speaker B: Okay. That's like. [00:22:47] Speaker A: But those I end up using. Yeah. Conditional logic for when to show a block or hide a block or whatever. [00:22:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the, the, the one that is a bit of a, of a new one to me that I've not played with. In that stack there is Rock Base. And actually you and I had, I guess maybe we had an email or something recently and, and it must have been. You mentioned that. And I went and had a quick look. That tab quickly got closed and I never really installed it. But the, yeah, the, the ones that you mentioned there really interesting. Fascinating that it's all, you know, it's all not. No longer the classic themes you're going for. The. Although I think Cadence is a classic theme, isn't it? [00:23:27] Speaker A: And I think. [00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. The only thing that I'm installing at the moment, the one thing is Generate blocks. [00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, Generate press. Generate blocks. Yeah, those two together. Yeah. [00:23:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And I. Basically it's a suite. I mean suite is a real over exaggeration. You know, a lot of these plugin suites, they really do have a lot of blocks. [00:23:53] Speaker A: It's a suite suite. [00:23:54] Speaker B: But yeah, it's a very small. It's only got six blocks. But my, my, my intuition so far is that I can do more or less anything with those six blocks. [00:24:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:04] Speaker B: And, and I found that to be really great. And the, the thing that I was playing with this morning, I was saying about playing with patterns was Ollie, and man, he has nailed that experience that pops up. And the. [00:24:21] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, they've built a beautiful, very flexible solution out there. [00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's really nice. And I was, I was particularly playing with this podcast, Patterns, which are really nice. I think it's. It gave me a few intuitions of how things can be laid out in a. In a podcast, because my site is very old and needs a bit of a. Needs a bit of an update. [00:24:45] Speaker A: Speaking of, Your site is wpbuilds.com it is on your site, there's mostly podcasts. How did, how did Nathan go from building sites in Drupal, switching to WordPress, and then all of a sudden, hey, I'm doing podcasts. [00:25:04] Speaker B: Serendipity is how it happened. And I was in a Facebook group. So I landed on WordPress and at that moment the page builders had just begun. And many of the ones that are now really, really popular, like Elementor, that didn't exist, but there was a fairly new one, I think it was more or less brand new Beaver Builder, which I'm sure most people have heard of. If not. And I thought that that UI was really interesting, the idea of being able to like click a button and be in a thing where you could drag things around and click save. And it basically looked the same. And. And so I started hanging out in their Facebook group because I wanted support, I wanted help with how to make that product work for me. And I bumped into a chap there called David Warmsley, and He was making YouTube videos about beaver Builder. So I was watching his videos and then at some point, I can't quite remember how, at some point I messaged him and said, do you want to make a podcast about WordPress? And he went, yeah, all right. And so we decided we'd give it a go. And I said, let's just make three or something. Let's just do three. And if it's any, you know, if either of us don't like it, we'll just back out at that point. So he said, yeah, all right, let's give it a go. So we did. We did three episodes and I'm, oh, gosh, I don't know what the number is, but it's probably close to 7 or 800 now with all the combined different shows. Yeah, yeah, well, more if you add in. I've done a bunch of other project which we could get. Yeah. Anyway, and. And so I just kept going. I. It turns out I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it and did. Just kept doing it every single week. And firstly it was just me and him talking between each other. And then in the end I said, shall I just invite some other people on? And I did. And then him and I would interview this other person. A few weeks after doing that, he said, I don't really enjoy the interview, so you carry on doing those and I'll just meet you every other episode and it'll just be me and you again. So that's what we did for years and years. And then about a year ago, he decided he wasn't going to use WordPress anymore. He's going all in on HTML and CSS and it is fascinating what he is learning. Oh, my Lord. If you haven't looked at CSS lately, oh, what the heck. And so, yeah, that's the story really. And I've been doing it ever since. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Well, you have. There's two podcasts. Well, it already gets complicated, me explaining what I think I know about you. But you have this week in WordPress, which airs live on the Monday, where you cover basically anything I write in my newsletter on the Friday. [00:28:00] Speaker B: That's what I do. I read your newsletter and then just regurgitate all the links in that. Yeah, it's brilliant. In fact, could you just release that a whole day earlier? That would be less, less rushing. [00:28:15] Speaker A: But you covered the previous week. That's this week in WordPress. You also have a podcast on WPTAven. [00:28:23] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:28:25] Speaker A: So what's. What, what's that? [00:28:27] Speaker B: Okay, so I'll, I'll give you the. I'll give you the rundown. So, yeah, Monday we do the this week in WordPress, which is turned into a pod. So that's live. Feel free to join us. Honestly, it's quite a lot of fun. Yeah, it really is. We often mess things up, but that's part of the tapestry of life. And then that gets released as a podcast on a Tuesday. So I edit it and, you know, all the ad bumpers and all that kind of stuff. And then on a Thursday, I do the. The regular podcast, which is just me interviewing somebody like you, just one on one. And then also, yeah, do ad hoc shows like, you know, video tutorials with. It's never just me. I honestly have nothing to add by myself, so I always do it with somebody else. So I'll have somebody like you on explaining their product and we'll record that. And then, yeah, there's this. There's an organization called the WP Tavern, which has a long, rich history of writing news. Writing news. But we, we started doing a podcast. I think we're on 146 episodes now. Yeah, I think it's 146. This week's coming out with Calvin Alkin with, from Sneaker with his Command UI product. And yeah, that's wptaven.com and forward/podcast and you can check it out. And that's, that is actually owned by Matt Mullenweg. And so that's a different, yeah, different flavor to it, shall we say? I, I, I have to. How to describe it? I try a little bit harder to edit out the ums and the Rs and things like that for that podcast. [00:30:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Is that because of the type of audience that it reaches or the more official status that it gets? [00:30:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think with my podcast I'm gonna like, okay, when we've recorded this episode, then it's totally over to you, isn't it? It's your intuition as to which bits you want to include and which bits you don't. And you can take the view that, okay, we said 500 times, it doesn't matter. Whereas I just took the view that I wanted this to be the best experience for the listener. And by that I took the, you know, I just took the, the notion that I would get rid of all of the bits that weren't relevant. So if we go down a bit of a blind alley in the conversation and then we some somehow said, you know what, that probably wasn't worth saying. Rather than keeping that in the audio. I'll take it all out. I'll take the, I'll take the OMs and the Rs out. I'll maybe move things around a little bit. Basically, there's more editorial in it, but that's, that's all because I want it to be like that. I've had no instruction as to how it should be, but I feel that it delivers a really nice experience to listen to. You know, it's the best. [00:31:08] Speaker A: I would agree. I, from, for me, I mostly remove the long arms and the pauses behind the long arms and shorten that a little bit, tighten it up a little bit. But I keep most of it in because I think it's, you know, this, this particular podcast is a conversational one and a conversation you'll have. [00:31:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, I'll tell you, it takes a lot of time. So I use just like you do. I think you Do I use descript? And I go through it word by word and make sure that, you know, if I change anything, it still sounds just like it should have sounded like. If a word sort of glides into an, then I. I won't get rid of that because it would sound weird. But if there's just a. [00:31:55] Speaker A: This will be fun and I'll get rid of that. [00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, brilliant. Can I do that? Really? Wait, hang on, let me think about this for a minute. What am I going to say now? I'm not sure now. This is. That's not good because you'll just edit this one bit out. That's easy. I needed to have done it over the last 20 minutes. [00:32:12] Speaker A: Yeah, you could have been more sneaky. [00:32:14] Speaker B: Yeah, done. [00:32:18] Speaker A: So the switch, I'm assuming was a gradual one into full on podcasting and recording. Was it always the case that you were a bit of a gadget freak? Because, you know, we both have a location where we sit, where we record. We have quite a bit of gear, I would say. Has that always been turned on or did that get turned on when you started doing this? How did that go? [00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so I started the podcast with no equipment at all, apart from. I had a computer, I had a Mac, you know, fairly beaten up, old Mac, which was totally fine for the work I needed, I needed an ide, basically. And so I bought a cheap mic on Black Friday and I think we recorded our first episode like a few weeks after that. And it was a, it was a. Oh, what are they called? Yeti. Blue Yeti, kind of big clunky thing. Brilliant, but also. Has many limitations, but good enough for me at the time, that's all I had. I just plugged it into the Mac. And honestly, if you've got the intuition that you want to start a podcast, don't. That you don't need. You don't need almost anything. If you want it to sound like tv. Yeah, you do. But no, so I didn't, I wasn't obsessive and I've just acquired all the gadgets over time and I, I do, I do obsess about it. I mean, over my shoulder is just like a bunch of stuff that I use and some of it not that often, and I feel a bit bad, but. But you know, there's an edge case where that might come in handy often. Convince myself that, yeah, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna record things outside in a street somewhere, so I must have this mobile. Yeah. Need this thing. And then of course, it's always Done like this. Actually, I do record live because I go to. I go to quite a lot of WordPress events and record people there. So I do need something smaller than what you've got and what I've got. Like we're both recording into a mic, which is attached to an arm, which then goes into an audio interface, which then goes into a computer. The stuff over my shoulder allows me to just do all that with stuff that you hold in your hand. Really. It's not as good, but it's good enough. [00:34:33] Speaker A: Let's be specific. You say it goes from the arm into a audio processor. What version do you have? Because that's the question people are going to ask. What does Nathan use? [00:34:43] Speaker B: Well, okay, I think we know why this question's coming, right? Because you've got version two, haven't you? And I've only got version one and I feel bad. How's that supposed to make me feel? It's the Rodecaster. It's brilliant. It's the Rodecaster Pro. And I've got the. The first version, which actually, in many ways I think is. Is going to stand the test of time for a decade, or I think it'll still sit there for ages. I've got a cheaper mobile version of it. It's called the Zooms. What's it called? The P4. I can go and get it and show you, you know the one. So I don't need to show it to you. And that does a very similar job, but in a much more compact form that kind of would fit in your pocket if you were a giant, but, you know, it's pretty portable. You can hold it in your hand and. But yeah, I have the version one and you have version. [00:35:41] Speaker A: The road. The Road Pro 2, which has cool features. I can talk like this. [00:35:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:48] Speaker A: You see me on helium. [00:35:53] Speaker B: This. This is the reason it was bought, right? You're watching the promotional video. What does version two do that version one doesn't? It does that. I've got to have it. I have to have it. It allows me to sound like Vader. [00:36:05] Speaker A: I didn't have version 1, but if I were to have had version 1, I would have bought version 2 anyway. Also. [00:36:14] Speaker B: Sorry, I interrupted. I thought you'd finish. Also, I've noticed that you've got the. You've got the. The very nice mic and I've got the poor man's version of the. The same mic. You've got the Shure super duper. What's it called? The SMB7. Is it? [00:36:29] Speaker A: Yeah, the SM7. B, yes. [00:36:32] Speaker B: Okay. The SM7B. And I've got the MV7 which is not as nice, but pretty. [00:36:40] Speaker A: I have that one as well, but I use that in my office. [00:36:43] Speaker B: So you're just showing off now. What the hell? It's got this redundant good mic just hanging around. That's great. It's really the reason I got this mic, the reason I really like this mic is, is because it has. So in audio there's this connection called an xlr and I'm pointing to it now and it's a three pinned audio, which no normal computer user would ever use. But it also has a USB which obviously you can go straight into your computer if you want. And that's actually the way I've got it running at the minute. And. But it. But it. So it has both. Whereas the one you've got, you have to have an additional audio interface like the. Yeah, but it's. But this, you've got the one that. All the. All the pros. I think that's basically the industry standard, isn't it? The one you've got. [00:37:30] Speaker A: It is. It's not a cheap one, but having had the MV7 first and then kind of go like, this is nice. But somebody then demonstrated this one to me. The. I keep forgetting the name. [00:37:45] Speaker B: It's SM7B. [00:37:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And then I went like, oh, this is a lot nicer now I feel bad. I know I gotta fix that. I mean, as a. As somebody who likes gadgets and understands the technical difference between one and the other, it's difficult not to grab it. I mean, do you technically need it to start a podcast or record courses for WordPress or whatnot? Not really. [00:38:20] Speaker B: I mean, do you know what's really interesting about the whole podcast thing is that the, the demographics of a podcast, obviously depending on the niche that you decide to go down, your audience will differ. But typically people are listening to podcasts when they're doing something else. It's that kind of format, you know, it's not like watching the TV where you're satisfied you sat down. The fact that it's visual requires your head to be locked in a particular direction. Really a podcast audience are probably doing something else. It's probably on the phone and they're out in the garden doing something. You know, they might be in the kitchen preparing something at work on the way and commute is a really good one because it's like a. Often a solid amount of time every day. The point being that there's background noise, there's usually something else going on in their life and they're not giving it their full concentration. So whilst the audio needs to be good, I don't. If it was a course that you'd made and visuals, I think that the audio that would have to be exceptional. But I think often for a podcast, given where it's being consumed, I don't think it needs to be the very, very best all the time. And the software nowadays and the AI behind the software can take genuinely terrible recordings and make them sound good. It's beyond understanding. [00:39:40] Speaker A: That's the descript, right? [00:39:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:44] Speaker A: You know. Yeah. I've had people on my podcast, which I'm sure you've had as well, where they don't have a proper mic and they use maybe their iPhone headset, the AirPods or whatever, and that recording is okay, but it's not good. You can hear the metallic sound of it, I guess. And to then turn on studio sound inside a descript and hear it, that magic be done to the audio is just. I'm amazed every single time that I process that and go like, whoa, how could it possibly enhance it this much? [00:40:21] Speaker B: It's crazy. I think if I could point to one piece of software that's changed my life the most, it's WordPress. But beyond that, it would be descript. You know, if you're into. If you're into creating video content or audio content, it really is phenomenal. And I don't know how you do that. Honestly, this is getting so nerdy. If you do, you render all the video on their side as well, so that. That it doesn't even, like, consume the CPU resources of your. Your device. So typically, if you use like Final Cut Pro or Camtasia or whatever, then you would render a video and the fans would come on and you'd wait an hour and it would do it all in the background. And, you know, your computer might become unusable with descript. It does it all in on their cloud and it takes seconds. It's ridiculous. [00:41:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's crazy. [00:41:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Sorry. We went down a complete rabbit hole of audio nerdness. [00:41:20] Speaker A: But, I mean, I'm pretty sure these are the questions people have when you have one podcasting person talking to another podcasting person. [00:41:31] Speaker B: Oh, that's true. Yeah. [00:41:32] Speaker A: What are the differences? What do you use? Well, we've established that I use a better mic. But your mic is awesome as well. We've established I have just a newer version simply because I started later. [00:41:44] Speaker B: I see a pattern emerging here. Oh. Oh, yeah. And you've got a nicer like environment. My. My environment is anything. Well, don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but I. I don't really. I haven't really put a lot of thought into the. The room that I'm in, whereas you've. You've got it all, you know, you've done the playbook. It's really nice. You're a pro, Remkas. That's the thing. [00:42:11] Speaker A: No, so I. I pretend to be a pro and I learn from pros like you. Come on. [00:42:16] Speaker B: You're very kind, but I think the. What's the words? The. The teacher has. Sorry, the. The pupil has become the teacher or something like that. [00:42:25] Speaker A: In this case, maybe on a few elements, but not really. [00:42:29] Speaker B: I think it's nice. Although I am about to. I think I will do something with this space. I've got this intuition in the near future. I'm going to paint it up a bit like. A bit like yours, but I'm going to go with tartan or paisley in the background. I'm gna have loads of flashing, moving lights, you know, lots of strobe effects that. Are you. [00:42:51] Speaker A: Are you going to change your position like 90 degrees? Like have. [00:42:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gonna. Yeah, I think I'm gonna. I'm gonna sit with my back to that wall, which currently has a whiteboard. I don't know if you see that. It says. Well, it says all sorts of disparaging things, but my kids come in here and write things that I then forget to delete at the moment. It says, hi, dad, love you. Which is quite nice. That's quite a nice one. And then it says. I don't know why this one's there. It says, visit corndogcorndog.com which I actually did. It's really good. Well, I mean, it's. It does one thing and it shows you a corn dog with really interesting music. So that's what happens. I come in and there's just this screed of nonsense. [00:43:44] Speaker A: I can see the desire to professionalize that. Yes. [00:43:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You don't want. Corn dog. Corn dog. [00:43:49] Speaker A: So this will be your winter project. This is something. [00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Honestly, Remkas, I'm. I'm. I do like the 12 year plan, you know, so anything that I say now could well be. It might come to fruition in 2038 or something like that. Now this is a lick of paint, a new and turn the table around. So, yeah, I think I'll probably do it quite soon. But I. I have. Before we hit record, I pestered you for quite a while and learned how you'd got everything set up. And Remkes was kind enough to show me what it's like when you turn the other side around and it's messy. That's all I'm gonna say. [00:44:29] Speaker A: This is it just appearances. This is just. [00:44:33] Speaker B: It's the same for me. Just over there is I. That's where I throw the stuff that's not supposed to be behind me, just. And it just piles up. There's a lot. [00:44:42] Speaker A: I'm fortunate enough to have a dedicated space there where I have my studio. I used to like when I started, I needed to have it combined in the one room. That's. That's a challenge. I now have a separate studio from my office. So when I. When I get here, it's the. The mindset of I'm recording, which automatically starts as soon as I walk in. Right. Because everything is set for recording. My. My camera doesn't move, my lights don't move. The lights in the background. I just turn on or off. I even have that on my phone where it's. I basically hit one click and it's. Everything is turned on. All of these things just make it easier and lower the barrier. Because I think it's important to realize that most people. What most people don't get that recording a video or actually a podcast or whatever, it's not. No effort. It's most certainly effort. It's most certainly adding another layer of. There's a camera in front of me, I'm looking at a big black hole and I'm recording myself. It's one of the stupidest things you can do. And I. Well, not because of you, Nathan, but. [00:46:02] Speaker B: For the. [00:46:03] Speaker A: For the. For the audio listeners. Nathan was grimacing and making. [00:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [00:46:08] Speaker A: But it's the. The. That needed to be as low as a barrier for me as I possibly could make it, which is why I have what I have. [00:46:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. I think it is nice. [00:46:17] Speaker A: But that's how it works for me. [00:46:19] Speaker B: Yeah. If you are going to. If you are going to commit to doing a podcast and honestly, I think it's such a fun thing to do ultimately, then, yeah, do recognize it's going to be a bit of work. It's not going to be necessarily difficult. In fact. That's true. Right. Not a single thing that we do is individually difficult. [00:46:39] Speaker A: No. [00:46:40] Speaker B: But it is time consuming and sometimes it can be a slog and you have to fight the. The apathy monster. You have to fight like, you know, because there's Nobody telling you you must do it. It's just you're, you know, you've set yourself up to do it, so you're going to do it at the beginning. There's probably going to be no financial requirement to do it because you probably won't have any revenue stream from it. So you just commit to doing it and you've got to keep that whole thing going. It's one of the few things I've been able to do like that. But having everything in one space is. Is really nice. It's really nice. [00:47:16] Speaker A: It's a game changer for me. [00:47:18] Speaker B: Yep. Yep. So I'm gonna get all of your. I'm gonna. Okay. I have a new plan. I've just invented it. I'm gonna buy all the same stuff as you. [00:47:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:30] Speaker B: Including right down to the shelf behind you and the little banners that you've got there and the lights and all. And I'm gonna just have what you've got. And I'm gonna start a podcast, but it's going to be called within WordPress 2. It's gonna be like one version higher. [00:47:49] Speaker A: I. I would applaud you for that. I mean, if you actually do that, you will become Internet famous. [00:47:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm gonna buy all the domain names with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, all the way up to like a thousand. I'm not going to do any of that. I'll probably be staying exactly as I am for the next 12 years, as I said. [00:48:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's fine. But I think. I do think it's a great idea that you use that wall to the right of you as the backdrop. [00:48:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:48:17] Speaker A: Because you can. [00:48:18] Speaker B: Then I can remove this. This thing here, which has the. [00:48:21] Speaker A: The children's messaging on it, painted a nice color. Have some interesting things in the background. I mean, it's a great. Every single thing I have. Well, not every single thing I'm looking at and go like. No, no, not every single thing. But most of the stuff that I have is in some way it says something about me. There's either WordPress related stuff or the Pacific Coastal highway one was one of the best trips I've ever driven. You know, this. It's just fun stuff that I have here. And then that works for me again. For me, it's all about lowering the barrier. Don't have to think about it. It set, touch it. Just turn it on, sit, and then get into record mode. [00:49:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice. [00:49:04] Speaker A: In terms of what you do currently and what you will do in the next phase of whatever is happening Next in Nathan's career, do you anticipate doing different things? Additional things? [00:49:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:49:19] Speaker A: You super happy? Yes. [00:49:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I am. Oh, interesting question. Would. I'm not going to go back to being like, hopefully. Oh, gosh. I mean, I'm saying this like it's definitely going to. Who knows how the wind will blow. My intention isn't to go back to building client websites. I did years and years of that and I enjoyed it. But I now realize that I enjoy this kind of approach to life and this kind of work much more. My intention is to keep creating content, but I think in the. In the not too distant future, I'm going to be doing something that's not related to WordPress, which will be a departure for me. Like totally nothing to do with WordPress at all. So that'll be interesting to see how that goes. I. I stumbled into this, so I don't really have a particular plan of action. I was saying to you before we hit record, I don't even know what it is yet. I won't get into that. But it's. By this time next week I'll know what it is. But I am going to try different avenues, but it will be based around making content interesting. Thank you. [00:50:25] Speaker A: Interesting. Particularly the part where you say it's not going to be revolved around WordPress. [00:50:31] Speaker B: No. Or web or anything like that. [00:50:33] Speaker A: Or web even. [00:50:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If I knew, I'd tell you. Yeah. But I don't. And there is. Honestly, the minute I know I'll tell you. But there's a weird element to it that obviously you can gauge is that I don't know that's it. But yeah, it's confusing for me as it is for you. [00:50:56] Speaker A: Okay, good, good, good. That. That's the confirmation I was looking for. Okay. But that's exciting. So that means you are looking at expanding whatever it is you do. I was. So the reason I asked is I. You already answered my second question, which was are you actually still doing client sites in any way, shape or form? Form. But I was kind of curious if that switch from building stuff WP builds, if that transference into recording content in various ways, if that sort of line is still happening, like, are you continuing even deeper down that path or not at all? Was basically the question. [00:51:43] Speaker B: So one of the nice things about doing what I do is that I get to talk on a more or less daily basis with people in the WordPress space and many of them are making things like products and services and what have you. And part of the. Part of the procedure for understanding what they've done is to try it out. So I'm really good at spinning up local environments and installing this one plugin and then trying it out and experimenting with it and then having the interview and then putting it to one side and out comes the next one. So. But also given that I do this WordPress weekly news thing, that also means that I have to play with core WordPress quite a lot and try it and you know, try to do things. But that's, that's all driven by my own curiosity. So there's, you know, there's no client in this case breathing down my neck saying, this thing has to achieve this. If, if I run into a roadblock, I'll try and fix it, but if I can't, I just think, okay, that's the, that's the road and that's the way it ended for that particular plugin. Can't make that work. That's fine. I'm not going to try and write some custom code to make it work. So it, I'm still very much into tinkering and playing with WordPress, but it doesn't have a client website at the end of it. It doesn't have a finished goal of a website at the end of it, if that makes sense. And it's quite, it's a nice position to be in. I really enjoy that, that tinkering and honestly I probably recycle about, oh, 30 WordPress websites a month, something like that. Just playing with things for 10 minutes here and there. And Playground is my new best friend. [00:53:19] Speaker A: I was going to ask, what do you use to build those sites or just Playground? [00:53:26] Speaker B: Yeah, without a doubt. I've been using Local for years and years and years. In fact, when it was, what was it called? Like years ago it was called Press something and then Flywheel bought whatever that was and it's not, I won't say pressable, but that's a, you know, well known hosting company and it's not that it's. It was Pressmatic. [00:53:48] Speaker A: There you go. Yep. [00:53:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so it was called Prismatic and it was built by this guy and he sold it to Flywheel, Flywheel then sold it to WP Engine. Who are the. Maybe there was other owners in between, I don't know, but that's where it resides at the moment. And. But then about, I don't know, seven or eight months ago, Playground came along. No, I mean in a way which was like reliable and usable and so I'm using Playground and Studio, but for me the use case is usually install a plugin, play with it, play with it, shut it down. So I don't need all the studio bits or the local bits typically anymore. It's usually fine for me to just install via. What is it, playground.WordPress.net you can do it that way. So that's usually what I'm doing. [00:54:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a. That's a very cool use case for Playground. I think the WordPress community as a whole still doesn't have a full grasp of what you could do with Playground. I mean, just consider that WordPress is just your CMS, meaning it's a content management system. That's it. You can add to it whatever you like, you can make it look like whatever you like. And thus a WordPress installation could be a standalone app, if you would like it to be. If you consider that perspective, My Lord, is there any limitation to what you can build? [00:55:17] Speaker B: I did an interview with a chap called Adam Zielinski and Adam Zelensky. [00:55:22] Speaker A: Before Playground, right? [00:55:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So he, he was the guy that conceived Playground, really. Just built it in a couple of weeks, just on a whim, and then showed it to a few of his fellow colleagues at Automatic. And I think the intuition then was, yeah, it's interesting, but so what? But he pursued it and then I think enough people saw it that they thought, gosh, actually, do you know what, this is profound. And that interview probably took place about, I don't know, six months ago, something like that. There's so much that has happened in that six months, including the ability to kind of retain the website, so you close the browser and it now no longer dies. But I got a strong sense that the, the App Store to the iPhone is akin to Playground, what it is to WordPress. What I mean is that you're going to be able to do things inside of WordPress that are hitherto unimagined because of Playground, in the same way that Apple launched the iPhone. And do you remember the very first version of it? I mean, it was fascinating. The UI was brilliant and it was marvelous to see that big screen in your hand, but you couldn't do much. And then the App Store came along and suddenly it was like, oh, yeah, interesting. And I know we've got plugins and the repository and all that, but I do think that on a, on a fairly profound level, the Playground is going to enable organizations to use it in ways hitherto unimagined. And maybe a really good example would just be, I don't know, coding for Kids, here, kids, today's lesson is all about doing, learning how to do this. Click that link that I've just sent to your, your, you know, the, the shared class email account and, and up comes a website with all the information that you need, including all the videos and everything kind of just disposable for that lesson, you know, so that was a fairly trite example I just thought up on the fly. But, you know, you can imagine that a thousand ways. But I. But also the capacity for developers to riff around it and come up with what, what it can do is going to be pretty profound, I think. Amazing. Amazing. [00:57:36] Speaker A: I agree. I think it's. For me, it's my. The project that I'm most excited about, what it will allow us to do. Yeah, yeah. I don't. It's hard for me to pin a timeline to it, but I think somewhere in 25 we'll have a version of Playground where we can just really build anything into it that you would like. And it needs, if it needs outside connections for this and that you can. If it needs to stay active all the time, it can, you know, all of these limitations that we kind of are still kind of working around and whatnot, but I think it's going to be wild to see what Playground will, will allow us to do. [00:58:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Like I said, in the same way that, that we didn't know what iPhone developers would do, but they invented a whole new way of just interacting with life, basically. I feel that it's going to be possible to do that, you know, and imagine, imagine just like pressing a button on your phone and you've got a WordPress website on your phone and you mix AI in the blend with there. And I don't know, it really is difficult for me to get a hold on what the possibilities are, but I just see this sort of bright vista, this horizon, which is just, you know, really, really encouraging and, and I don't see any other project like it elsewhere. It is pretty unique. Anyway. There we go. [00:59:01] Speaker A: I agree. I agree. So bright futures ahead. [00:59:05] Speaker B: Nice. We've had some good news in amongst some interesting times lately. It's good to focus on the fact that, you know, there's a boatload of really fun stuff happening as well. [00:59:17] Speaker A: There is. And I think I'd like to say on that bombshell, thank you so much for sharing your story. [00:59:26] Speaker B: Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Join us next time on WP Builds, when we'll also have a different guest, but it's been absolute pleasure chatting to you today. Remkus. See you next time on WP Builds. [00:59:42] Speaker A: Thanks so much, man. [00:59:44] Speaker B: You're welcome. [00:59:46] Speaker A: Sa.