#406 - Build what you know - Dan Maby & Nathan Wrigley

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host Lee. And on today's show we have two very lovely chaps. We have Dan, we have Nathan. Fellas, how are you both?

Speaker C: I'm very good, thank you Lee. Really good to, to get connected with you again.

Speaker B: It's going to be fun, isn't it? Everyone talking over each other. I always love interviewing two people at once. I'll let you two argue over who answers what but uh, very quickly if we start with uh, Nathan, if you could give us 32nd who you are and where you're from and then we'll follow on with Dan.

Speaker A: Okay, so, uh, Nathan Wrigley. I run a couple of WordPress podcasts, WP builds and WPTAven and I basically create content in the WordPress space. More recently joined forces with Dan to create the plugin Podcaster plus which Dan has kindly built for me because I'm not clever enough. And um, that's where we're at now with a plugin to help podcasters. So that's probably what we're going to discuss.

Speaker B: And Dan?

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, so I'm Dan Mabey. Uh, I've been in and around the WordPress space for I think coming up to nearly 18 years now. I've been delivering in person events for 14 of those years so been very focused on community aspects around the WordPress community, the WordPress community and uh, as Nathan mentioned, we've partnered recently to uh, bring something into the podcasting Space, uh, within WordPress. Uh, it's something that sits, I think really aligns well with the sort of open source aspects and the uh, um, decentralization of uh, content for the community.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, let's jump straight into it and tell us. I'll let either of you answer what is podcaster in plain terms and who have you built it for?

Speaker A: Um, okay, I'll take this one. Um, so Podcaster plus Blocks, which has been built by Dan, is an endeavor to separate out a podcast, ah, player so that you can essentially have a very pretty and beautiful, completely bespoke designed podcast website in uh, a heartbeat. It leverages the WordPress default block Editor and in a normal situation if you've got a podcast like you do, Lee, typically if you want to put that on a website, you'd go and copy and paste some player and you'd have very limited control over what that player would look like. Well, we've made it so that each component that builds up a player, so for example the play button, the skip forwards, the description, the image These are all separate blocks, which enables you to pick them up and drag them and put them anywhere on your WordPress, uh, website so that you can have branding which is completely unique to you. And, um, it's kind of hard to describe in words. It's one of those things where once you play with it for a little while, you get the gist of why it's really useful, but it enables you to kind of completely automate things. You set it up and then you forget about it. You put your RSS feed in. We'll consume that content. Every time you create a new podcast, we will auto publish a, uh, post for you and it will look exactly pixel perfect how you want it to look, so you don't have to rely on any kind of defaults that come out of your podcast hosting company or anything like that.

Speaker B: Well, that's interesting. So, so for example, I use podcast co, uh, for this podcast. And, uh, they provide a player which is not the most attractive player on the planet. Um, so I end up just kind of linking to the MP3 and using the default HTML5 player, which also is not the most attractive in the world. So I think what you're saying is, is I could plug in my RSS feed to Podcaster plus and you guys would then draw down my show notes and everything else, uh, including the, the MP3 URL, uh, and then put that behind an attractive player that I've designed with Podcaster Plus. Is that right?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly right. So you feed in. The one thing that you've got to do is have an RSS feed. So the basic setting is put in an RSS feed and then we'll monitor that periodically, you know, every few minutes or whatever. And then when a new episode pops up, it will then, um, get put onto your page, uh, or post or whatever it is that you want. You might use a custom post site, for example, and you would, uh, yeah, you'd spend a little bit of time either using one of our default templates or you would build one yourself. And you can make everything go literally everywhere. So, I don't know, you might want the play button at the far left. You might want the sort of the audio scraper where you can jump through to 30 seconds and a minute or whatever. You might want that to be a certain set of colors and a certain height. You might want the featured image to be the background image to the whole player. You can basically customize it in any which way. Your imagination and your capacity to spend time building it is the only Limitation, really?

Speaker B: Oh. Uh, so for most of us listening, that is absolutely, ridiculously ours, because most of us go down rabbit holes that we rarely get out of.

Speaker A: No, we hope to.

Speaker B: And just to clarify then, uh, is this predominantly focused on the player? We're not talking about the rest of the page layout?

Speaker A: Well, given the way that the block editor works, the answer to that is no. It can be the entire page layout. So as an example, you could, for example, you could have a hero section which you just customize. Um, it could say anything you like. You could then put the bits and pieces that make up our player. You could do a typical sort of letterbox rectangle, which you often see as a podcast player out there in the wild. Or you could, you know, you could put the play button so that, I don't know, you could make it mimic a YouTube video or something like that. Or you could make a full, full screen background image from the featured image that you upload to the, um, the podcast host and what have you. No, but then you could have whole rows and sections and entire pages of content, whatever the heck you want. If it'll fit into a WordPress block, it will go on that page. Um, so you can, you can do the whole thing. You can customize it in any which way. And you are not limited just by the podcast content. Any content that you can put on a WordPress post or page, you can add to, to the podcast.

Speaker B: Fabulous.

Speaker C: Our suite of blocks include things, uh, like the podcast description, uh, podcast title. So all of that gets pulled in from the RSS feed. So it enables you to actually build out a template for your page that has, uh, as Nathan mentioned, whatever layout you're looking to deliver, uh, but also that dynamic content that's coming directly from your RSS feed, which is super helpful.

Speaker A: So a good example might be that, for example, you might have a player towards the top, the description, the featured image, that kind of stuff. And then you might have your archive directly below it so that when somebody has consumed that particular podcast post, they can see all of the other ones that you've done. And obviously you could exclude that post, you could offset it by one and what have you. Um, or you could just put, I don't know, you've got a Black Friday sale, you've got a course or something. You could put that in buttons, links, menus, anything can go onto that. And we will just insert the player into all that content. However you.

Speaker B: And then who's the ideal kind of candidate for this plugin? Is it just any podcaster or is there a certain type of podcaster? I mean, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience might be developers or like. Yeah, but I kind of want to get into the code and do a bit of jiggery pokery. So who's the ideal?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a really nice sweet spot actually there because of the audience that you've got. And that is to say that, you know, if you've got clients who have the need for audio on their website, particularly podcasts at the moment with the RSS feed. But I'm pretty sure that at some point we'll just tackle regular MP3 files or, you know, WAV files or whatever as well. Um, it could certainly be end users because once you've got it set up, it is set it and forget it. You'd obviously have to know your way a little bit around WordPress to make sure that that was all configured. But it's fairly straightforward. But then, um, if you've got an agency and you've got clients wanting this stuff, this really is kind of perfect because it enables you to offer a really, really credible entire website for your clients, podcasts, and really minimal work on your part.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's actually the way, um, the way this is developed is using the uh, WP Interactivity API. Uh, so if you want to get into a very technical aspect of it, then there's actually the ability there for a developer to um, initiate any piece of content on the page could become the play button, for example. So it's actually, you're not restricted to just our blocks. Uh, so there's some really, if, uh, you're looking to get very, very technical with this, there uh, is that option. But equally if you're looking for a set and forget solution, it's available as well. All within the same suite of blocks.

Speaker B: Phenomenal. And my next question is literally blocks. You've leaned really heavily into blocks. So why was the block editor the right foundation for this given? Uh, A, there's a little bit of controversy, pardon me, controversy still, uh, about blocks, and B, there are also an awful lot of page builders out there.

Speaker C: So this solution will be available to work within page builders as well. Uh, but initially we're focusing on the block editor, so we're really looking at core WordPress here. How do we develop something that aligns with the current focus of uh, WordPress, hence the focus around blocks. It also enables us to focus, uh, heavily on things like accessibility within the solution. Um, because for example, if you take some of the off the Shelf, um, audio players, you'll find they'll have maybe an H1 tag or an H2 tag sitting in the top of the player. Obviously you don't have no control about really where that's being rendered on the page. Um, so the ability to use blocks and change the layout of that page through the core um, workflows of WordPress really was our focus.

Speaker B: No, that's really good and very uh, encouraging as well with regards to accessibility as well. I interviewed Jen just yesterday around accessibility and I was really surpri. Excuse me, really surprised. One of the things she shared, I asked the following question. I was like uh, you know, why is accessibility so important when you know, probably only 2% of the people accessing the website have any form of disability? And she absolutely um, learned me m sharing um, the actual percentage of people that do have some form of disability and are not able to access the content that you have or understand it because it's not structurally in the right way. And um, you know, we, we. She was essentially highlighting, you know, that these disabilities, most are invisible. And it's not 2% that I've made the assumption. It's not people who walk around with a cane, uh, or are in a wheelchair etc. There are many people uh, that struggle to access content and you're right, a lot of these um, third party services don't really consider that at all. Um, and it makes it really difficult for a much higher percentage than 2% that I'd assumed to access people's content.

Speaker C: And I'm fortunate enough to uh, have access to a um, mouse and to be able to use a mouse uh, on a daily basis. However I actively choose to use keyboard navigation on a regular basis. So even though I have the ability to, I tend to default to uh, ways of working that maybe uh, a keyboard user would usually would work as opposed to somebody that has the access to use the ability to use mouse.

Speaker B: So workflow wise, as a uh, as a podcaster does, would this be something that I would install, configure and then essentially forget? Because I'd be able to go to podcast co and upload my podcast to it knowing that within whatever times I'd set, uh, say within the next hour or two, um, my website would go ahead and check um, that podcast feed and pull it down and publish it on the website. Does it go that far?

Speaker C: It certainly would, yes. Yeah. We've built a content, what we call the content automation add on um, which actually allows you to do two things initially. It allows you to import your entire back catalog from your RSS feed, uh, so you can go through the process, install the plugin, um, set up a template for your, for your page or your post, depending on how you want to render it. We uh, do have a custom post type add on as well that allows you to set a specific custom post type for your podcast. Then once you've set your template, you can go through, uh, run through the uh, import process which will, as I say, crawl the back catalog of your RSS feed and actually publish every single episode on your website with the template that you, uh, that you selected. Once you've done that, you can go through the um, automation steps which will allow you to basically set what time frame you want the plugin to be checking against your server. So that might be an hour, that might be every eight hours, depending on your preference. Uh, and then every time you publish a new post via your RSS feed, so every time you upload your new audio, uh, the plugin will crawl that RSS feed and publish a new episode on your website.

Speaker A: Dan built something really cool and slightly unexpected. I woke up one morning and Dan had sent me an email and said, check this out. And he's also built in some automation so that you can have different templates based upon different criteria. So just as an example, a whole variety of my podcasts start with the word the. I have a show called sorry, with the word this. I have a show called this week in WordPress. And so with, with this kind of, um, if this, then that approach you can say if the title begins with the word this, then use a different template to all the other ones so that page will look completely different in whatever way the template suggests for particular episodes. Um, and obviously, you know, if, and other things like, I don't know, it might contain the word Christmas. If the title of the podcast contains the word Christmas, use this template instead. And again it's set it and forget it. You set it up once and then every time you produce a podcast it will poll that and set a different template. So you know, you could just modify, I can't remember if it does more than inspect the title, Dan, does it do more than the title?

Speaker C: So at the moment it's focused on the title. Uh, however there is foundational, uh, um, settings in there for using the new 2.0 podcast 2.0 categories. Um, but that really hasn't been adopted widely enough yet for us to uh, go through and enable that. But it is there as that as those technologies become more, um, adopted then we can obviously turn that setting on.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. Now, it's an interesting dynamic, isn't it, when you've got an absolute coding nerd. Um, hi, Dan. With somebody who self confessed is not a coding nerd. So how do you.

Speaker A: An idiot. That's what you're trying to say?

Speaker B: I was being polite.

Speaker A: No, thank you.

Speaker B: What's the working dynamic like? Who's the ideas person? Uh, how do you work together? How does it work?

Speaker A: Uh, it goes like this. Dan does everything and then I appear on a podcast and kind of imply that I did things.

Speaker B: That's kind of how it. Admire your honesty.

Speaker C: No, no, no, it's been really good. It's been really a really good partnership because, uh, Nathan obviously is a podcaster. So it's been about solving real world problems, looking at stuff that Nathan. How does Nathan work? What are the workflows? What are the challenges? Um, and basically scratching that itch, you know, how do we make sure that we build something that solves a problem that is being, uh, that is that a real life podcaster is running into?

Speaker B: And just to highlight, for folks who don't know. Sorry to interrupt, but Nathan has published hundreds of episodes, uh, on multiple podcasts for many, many years. So just to highlight how much experience you are, you're getting access to there.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I never really think about the numbers, but it's a few.

Speaker B: It's a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah. The wider sort of project. We've got ideas to go a little bit further than just the plugin. I don't know really if we want to go into that, but there's this whole. I mean, Lee, you will know we obviously had a little sort of session just before you hit record. This, this whole bit of getting a podcast organized is also in our sites as well in the future. Not just the displaying on a website and making it look pretty, but.

Speaker B: Well, I remember your first version of that. Yeah, well, it's many years ago you had a stab at trying to solve that problem. So I presume you're going to bring the lessons of that in. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker A: And we're kind of building on top of that hopefully in the near future as well.

Speaker C: But yeah, ah, we're looking at automation essentially. So podcast hosting, they're ten a penny, unfortunately at the moment. But we want to make sure that we're looking at providing something that provides genuine value for the podcaster. So time saving is really a focus for us. How do we automate that of guest booking, guest allocation how do you make sure that people are where they need to be at the right time? Um, I'm sure that both of you have. Well, I certainly know Nathan's had this, we've had this many, this conversation many times. But trying to make sure that we've got a guest at the right URL at the right time, uh, can, can often be challenging. And making sure that we've got um, the tools in place to automate workflows is really where Podcaster plus as a hosting platform, uh, is focused on.

Speaker B: And what I also like, I mean you said it there that there are podcast hosts are everywhere, um, but they all adhere to a certain standard because they have to if they're going to be published in say itunes, Spotify, etc, or Apple Music I think it's called nowadays, or Apple Podcasts. I have no idea what it's called.

Speaker A: But anyway, yeah, I don't know either actually.

Speaker B: Yeah, out there you have to have a specific RSS feed. So the great thing is what you guys are doing is you're working to the standards, you're making sure that you're supporting the standard RSS feed, et cetera, which all uh, services are going to have to use and continue to use. But also uh, you're doing the same with WordPress. You're following um, the standard pattern, the way that WordPress is built so that you can provide something that's future proof and uh, has longevity and is going to continue to be supported both by the third party services, WordPress, um, and these podcast hosts, uh, as well as your own plans, which I think is super encouraging.

Speaker C: Yes, it's been an interesting journey actually looking at rss. It's a bit of a wild, wild west out there to be honest. When you're looking at the RSS space. It's been some interesting challenges have been thrown up uh, through this process. But yeah, we've built the uh, or building the hosting um, platform using web standards. We're building the uh, components. So the components within Podcaster plus Blocks are uh, focused uh, on web components. So again it's looking at standards really across everything that we're doing to make sure that we can uh, tie all these pieces together in a way that um, is technically possible these days.

Speaker A: There's quite a lot of stuff, Dan sort of alluded to it a moment ago, but there's quite a lot of stuff coming down the pipe. Um, and it's called podcasting 2.0. And it's probably invisible to most, even most podcasters I would imagine. Probably don't know about it, but there's a whole load of other things coming which is going to be available to podcasters in the near future. So other things that you can do apart from just publishing an MP3 and then that being consumed by podcast players and then ultimately listened to by people, there's going to be a whole load of other data bound to your each individual podcast episode. So for example, categories, monetization options, all sorts of other things, and they're slowly getting adopted. But it's a bit of a trickle and we're being fairly mindful of that as well, because it does feel that if you, if you're serious about podcasting in the future, those are the kind of things that you're going to have to know about. No doubt search engines and things like that will be using those to figure out, you know, whether or not your podcast, uh, fits a particular search that somebody conducts, or your podcasting app, if you search on that, whether or not your podcast is a good fit for that as well.

Speaker B: So have you guys shipped version 1 then, or are you launching. Where you at on the process?

Speaker C: Podcaster Plus Blocks is launched, is available@podcasterplus.com uh, that, that is live. We've got, um, that is available for, uh, public consumption now. We do actually have a nice little launch discount available on the website. Um, up to 55% in fact.

Speaker B: It's crazy. Yes.

Speaker C: Podcaster plus itself, the hosting platform, uh, that currently is, is not publicly available. Uh, we're still working through and making sure that is, uh, uh, essentially we're dogfooding this process. So making sure that we are utilizing these tools as we go to test and to try and make sure that they' fit for purpose.

Speaker B: What was that? Dog Fooding.

Speaker C: Yes. So what does that mean, actually using the products ourselves?

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Uh, for our own, uh, making sure that they are fit for purpose before they get released to any of our beta users.

Speaker A: I have a podcast called Dog Fooding. And uh, each week I go and, uh, taste a variety of different dog foods and rate them from, uh, 0 to 10.

Speaker B: The problem is I'm very gullible and I would probably have believed you had I not heard the slight jest in your voice that have been like running a search for it. Dog Fooding podcast. I can't find it, make it.

Speaker A: It's not real.

Speaker B: Sounds fantastic. No, that's, that's good. And using the product that you're, you're building, um, uh, it's a fantastic way of finding all of those bugs. Because um, I build things for other people to use and it's them that often find the issues that I've missed because I've just built something, you know, as quickly as possible to a deadline, etc. And there are obviously things that I've missed because it's not something that I use on a day to day basis. Even if it's something as simple as just a save notification so that you know it's saved. I know it saved because I coded it. But some people don't know, uh, when you hit save, if you don't tell them with a nice big notification. That's actually something that came up the other day. I did that. I forgot to put a notification up. The client's like, I don't know if it's saved. Oh yeah, sorry about that. So you guys dog fooding, I like that are doing that.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's also enabling us to go through the workflows and determine what are the pain points where, where do things fall down in some of the workflows and can we then put in place, uh, automations that will support that? I mean, I've mentioned it a couple times, but guest booking is one of those that can often be a challenge. How do we make sure we've got the right, the other person in the right place at the right time?

Speaker B: So if we just think about other page builders, just quickly, is there a way to be able to. So for example, in Beaver Builder, I believe I can create a page template and I could in theory use the ID of say a layout or a template. Is there a way to at least kind of use a shortcode to be able to plop, um, some blocks, some podcaster plus blocks onto a Beaver Builder page, for example, or a bricks page. Um, or is this just very much. It's, it's blocks or nothing at the m moment.

Speaker C: Sure. So at the moment it's blocks or nothing. Um, the, there are various solutions enable you to run blocks within some of the page builders.

Speaker B: I think that's what I was trying to say. Uh, I just stumbled over myself.

Speaker C: But so from our perspective, we, we haven't built out short codes as a solution, uh, just because there are an awful lot of settings that are available within the, within the blocks.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So trying to equate that to short codes could create what would create, um, horrific short codes that just become unwieldy and just unmanageable to be honest. We'd rather build like the days of Divi again. Yes. Yeah, we'd rather build dedicated Integrations. So um, and this really comes down to the audience you know, asking for so do we requests for elementor, do we hear requests for um, bricks? If so then obviously that's where we then put uh, the time into uh, building out those integrations because the, if you install the, if you install the plugin you'll see uh, we ship a container block for example. So that container block is a very, very powerful block that enables you to create responsive flex ah, based layouts within the page. Uh, to try and accomplish that with ah, a uh, short code or something similar would be um, just wouldn't be very user friendly. And that's really what we want to focus this on. How do we make this something that both a non technical and a technical user can, can make use of?

Speaker B: That's super helpful. And the good thing here as well is even if you are using a page builder, um, if you want to set up at least a template for the automation, um, then the block editor is already built in anyway so use it for that post type or whatever it is or page.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, and then continue to use your page builder for everything else because you can still use your header footer, sidebars and all that. Anyone still use sidebars? I don't know but anyway, um, yes, it sounds, it sounds great folks. You can check everything out over on podcasterplus.com there are some deals uh, like uh, were mentioned including I believe you guys. I saw somewhere something to do with a lifetime discount I think or something like that as well. Was it a lifetime deal or a lifetime discount? I can't remember.

Speaker C: Yeah, we've got, we've got access to lifetime, lifetime licenses on the site and we've currently got up to 55% off

Speaker B: on our launch price as Nathan uh, is very old now feeling it. How many years is that roughly?

Speaker A: Uh, I've probably got about eight months left Lee, so.

Speaker B: Oh, I hope not mate.

Speaker A: I'd be better with the annual license. But there we go.

Speaker B: This podcast took a dark turn. That's fantastic. Podcasterplus.com Guys, thank you so much for your time. It's been fascinating to learn uh, about kind of. Well first of all to understand the problem that you're solving, um, but also to learn how a coder and a non coder have gotten together using the, you know, the combined experience to create something that sounds really quite unique. I've not actually seen anything like this before, so it's very, very cool and I appreciate your time sharing your journey with us so far. And I'd love to chat with you again in maybe a year's time to see how the product has developed, uh, and also how it's been kind of, uh, adopted by, uh, the podcasting community, if you guys don't mind. Uh, well, just.

Speaker A: Just referring to what I said a minute ago. If we go for seven months, I've got a fighting chance.

Speaker B: Yeah. All right, well, in seven months, let's have you back on, mate.

Speaker A: Eight months, that's. That's me. I'm done.

Speaker B: Fellas, thanks so much for your time. What's the best way for people to connect with you both individually, other than podcasterplus.com and then we'll say goodbye.

Speaker A: Dan.

Speaker C: Uh, so, um, Dan, maybe anything. Pretty much anything at Dan. Maybe, uh, D A N M A B Y is a good place to catch me. Um, I'm not particularly active on social these days, but yeah, I still, uh, still do connect predominantly on LinkedIn, I would say.

Speaker A: And then for me, I've got a few, uh, wpbuilds.com is the website for the podcast. Or you can find me on X at WP Builds, or you can find me on bluesky@nathan wrigley.com.

Speaker C: uh-huh.

Speaker B: You're on all the cool platforms. Well, fellas, thank you very much. Have a fabulous day and I'll talk to you in seven months.

Speaker A: Take it easy, Lee.

Speaker C: Thank you very much.

Speaker A: Cheerio.

Speaker B: Mhm.