In this podcast episode, host Corey Maass and Michelle Frechette discuss a variety of topics, focusing on their recent travel experiences, encounters at the Canada border, and interactions with the WordPress community. The guest shares insights into their work with WordPress, including creating open graph images and developing tools for image cropping and batch multi-image generation. They also introduce Open Graph Online, a tool for archiving open graph data. The episode highlights the importance of user-friendly tools and previews an upcoming online conference where the guest will present on maximizing image engagement in WordPress.
Top Takeaways:
- Use of Tools: Both Michelle and Corey emphasized the importance of using specialized tools like character counters and image generators to enhance efficiency and quality in their work processes.
- Product Development Insights: Corey discussed his approach to product development, highlighting the shift towards user-friendly features based on user feedback, rather than focusing solely on technical capabilities.
- Event Promotion: Michelle promoted Corey’s upcoming presentation at the Stellar Sparks event, showcasing their collaborative effort in preparing for and marketing the event.
- Casual and Engaging Communication: The conversation between Michelle and Corey was informal and engaging, incorporating humor and personal anecdotes to maintain interest and connection with their audience.
- Continuous Learning and Improvement: Corey’s ongoing refinement of his presentation content for the event demonstrates a commitment to continuous learning and improvement in their respective fields.
Mentioned In The Show:
- Word Counter
- Grammarly
- OMGIMG.co
- Yoast
- Open Graph Online
- Crop Express
- Basil Hayden
- Underrepresented in Tech
- Stellar WP
- Stellar Spark
- Blossom
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🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Corey Maass
- Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Michelle Frechette (00:00:01) – Hey, Corey. We’re live.
Corey Maass:. Hello, hello.
Michelle Frechette: You’re shifting in the world there.
Corey Maass: Yeah, yep. The camera. I keep moving the camera around to show people stuff in the room, so it’s all crooked. But there we go.
Michelle Frechette (00:00:14) – That’s what happens to me, too. What? You can’t. You can almost see the very. I can’t always point right here. See the tiny little. So that’s the bottom of a Euro plate design that says WCEU 2024.
Corey Maass: Nice.
Michelle Frechette: That was it’s a giant magnet that Google had made for the little fiat that they had in their space. They had two made not knowing which style license plate it would be. And so they gave me the one for my scooter that wasn’t that didn’t fit the car, which I thought was super, super kind of them, but doesn’t show up. Look at me.I’m like, trying to see in the window, and I know.
Corey Maass: Ha ha ha!
Michelle Frechette: I might be a little tired. Wait, let me see if I can. There you go. See it up there?
Corey Maass (00:01:03) – Yes. Nice. Yep. The Euro style license plate.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:08) – Yeah. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:01:09) – That’s really cute.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:11) – And it’s fun because I got to drive my scooter on the rooftop of the Lingoda Center, which used to be the Fiat building. And so you’re not allowed to drive around there anymore. It’s just a walkway. But because I am motorised, I got to ride around the track, which is kind of cool.
Corey Maass (00:01:29) – That’s awesome.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:30) – So we haven’t met in a while. I mean, you and I chat all the time, but we haven’t met met to do this in a while. Between being sick, you being sick, me being sick, other people being sick, travel, vacations, all of that. So it’s nice to be back. Hello.
Corey Maass (00:01:45) – Good to see your smiling face again.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:47) – Likewise. Always nice to see yours as well.
Corey Maass (00:01:49) – Old friends back together.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:50) – Yeah. We were supposed to see each other in person last weekend.
Corey Maass:Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: But it didn’t happen.
Corey Maass (00:01:55) – Once again, the Vid struck. Thankfully. Neither of us personally, but.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: Yeah it hit our household. So I made the choice not to go. And I am it. Of course, it was a hard choice, but it.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:13) – It was the right choice.
Corey Maass (00:02:14) – It was the right choice. And I’ve even had people reach out and say like, hey, did I miss you? I was looking forward to seeing you. Which of course hurt even more a little bit. But they also, when I told them what was up, they said, you know, we’ll thank you for like, thanked me for making the, the conscientious choice and whatnot. And I was like, okay. I mean, like, I knew it was, but, you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:37) – I have also had Covid, I don’t know, five times since 2020. And every single one, I live alone. So every single one of those times I can’t be like, can you get me a glass of water? Because it’s only me.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:49) – I’m like, yes, I’ll get myself a glass of water. Right. So, so it’s good.
Corey Maass: The cats don’t.
Michelle Frechette: They do not. So it’s good that you were home with your wife, especially if she was feeling icky that you could take care of the, the pups and and help her along. So I think you made the right decision. But just for the record, I did miss seeing you there.
Corey Maass (00:03:08) – Yeah. You too. And, Well, and I think I the punch line that I sent you and everybody was if I had the by not going. I did not get sick.
Michelle Frechette: True.
Corey Maass: But but by had I gone. I had this vision of, you know, being pulled over somewhere in the Canadian prairies, curled up in the back seat, you know, throwing up out the window, out the the window, you know. And I, my extended families said, well, you should have gone. We’d happily have come got you. Mainly because they wanted an excuse to, you know, make the drive, the pretty drive themselves. But anyway.
Michelle Frechette (00:03:50) – It was a lovely drive on the way back. We drove up the day before, and, Jeff, you see the background here? He travels with me a lot. We’re co-working today, so he’s working happily behind me. Every once in a while, he reaches up and strums one of the guitars and catches my attention. Reminds me of those old books that you used to read as a kid. That like the chime to turn the page?
Corey Maass: Nice. yes.
Michelle Frechette: I’m like what?
Corey Maass (00:04:12) – When it’s time to turn the page Tinker Bell will. Will.
Michelle Frechette: Yes.
Corey Maass: Do her wings or whatever it was.
Michelle Frechette (00:04:17) – Exactly. And so anyway. But, on the way up there, we had tornado warnings. And so we got a lot of, a lot of not like those really scary phone announcements that even if your phone is silenced, goes find cover. We’re like, we’re in a car. But, and we did have tornadoes touched down just south of Buffalo, so.
Corey Maass: Wow.
Michelle Frechette: But not for us. But we did encounter a lot of bad rain and things on the way.
Michelle Frechette (00:04:44) – The drive home was absolutely lovely. Everything was beautiful. The sun was shining. It was a great day. But, yeah. So if even if you had been pulled over on the side of the road, I might not have seen you going past you because the rain was so crazy.
Corey Maass (00:04:58) – Yeah.
Michelle Frechette (00:04:59) – Yeah, exactly.
Corey Maass (00:05:00) – No, it was, it was the the 90 seconds of other updates is like, I’ve been struggling pretty much the whole first half of this year with just feeling really down, unmotivated, stuff like that. And the good news is in the last couple of weeks, like, finally feel like I’m coming out of the funk, to be trite about it. But, one of the things that I was looking forward to, honestly, was the drive for me. It was five hours each way. And, you know, you’re alone with your thoughts kind of thing. So I was I honestly think I, I mean, it’s no comparison to seeing friends, but I was a close second was definitely like, okay, I’m alone for 11 hours, you know, just.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah
Corey Maass (00:05:53) – Thinking especially I love driving in the rain. yeah. Not when you have not one. Not white knuckled rain, but, you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:06:01) – Gentle, gentle rain.
Corey Maass (00:06:03) – No, but I think it would have been, that that would have been. But I but honestly, like, I made the best of it at the. It was a nice weekend for us and, and a nice weekend for me and and did some good thinking and did some good work. And you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:06:19) – I have to admit, I am, although I do love your company and I was looking forward to, like, a whiskey or a bourbon or something with you. I really missed the debut of the jacket.
Corey Maass (00:06:30) – Yeah.
Michelle Frechette (00:06:32) – I was so excited to see the jacket of up close and personal, which we will do. We will celebrate the jacket at WordCampUS.
Corey Maass (00:06:41) – Correct. September. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t seem to be any other camp near me manifesting this year. at least not that I’ve heard.
Corey Maass (00:06:51) – I keep hoping that Boston will pop up, but, I’ve stopped asking, and I. That’s not any sort of criticism like organizing any sort of camp, especially in a in a big city. I, I do not envy anybody that kind of task. So, but obviously I’m just hopeful because it’s probably the closest there used to be. There used to be Montreal. That’s three hours. They used to be Portland, Maine. That’s 2.5 hours. But they’ve all gone away for the time being, post-Covid. So.
Michelle Frechette (00:07:24) – And I’ve spoken at both of those and Boston. Pretty cool.
Corey Maass (00:07:27) – I spoke at Portland, I think?
Michelle Frechette (00:07:33) – I wonder if it was the same year I’d have to go back and see what year it even was that I was there. I don’t even recall. I think it was before I was working with Give. So it was a while ago.
Corey Maass (00:07:45) – Yep. Yep. And I have I have mixed memories, I swear. I’ve, I met you a number of times. And, and maybe I did.
Corey Maass (00:07:55) – Right?
Michelle Frechette: Coud be. Yeah.
Corey Maass: As you, as you were tweeting about, and the snarky, snarky followers of yours responded with dad jokes, but. yeah, I was a little proud of that one, by the way.
Michelle Frechette (00:08:09) – That was good. That was good.
Corey Maass (00:08:11) – But,
Michelle Frechette (00:08:12) – And for anybody not who doesn’t know I have, I have this. I think we all do. Right? It’s like you see somebody, you don’t remember meeting them or you haven’t met them, and you say, oh, it’s nice to meet you. And I did that to Michelle Blooma up in, in, Montreal. And he said, actually, we’ve met it was at, I can’t remember WordCamp Toronto or something, right. blah blah. And and I was so embarrassed by that that I hadn’t recalled meeting them. And, and now that I’m even, like, more people know who I am, that I know who they are because I’ve never met them. Perhaps I I’m always afraid now to say, oh, it’s nice to meet you.
Michelle Frechette (00:08:50) – And they say, I met you in Asia last year, or I met you in Europe because I see thousands, literally thousands of people a year now in the WordPress community. And so my new thing that I have trained myself to do, this is to say, it’s so good to see you, because it is true whether you’re meeting them for the first time or not, I am happy to see them.
Corey Maass: Exactly.
MIchelle Frechette: And then it removes any doubt whether or not I’ve met them before, because I’m not saying, oh, I don’t remember you. Which it’s always so good to see you. So and so. I have changed my vocabulary. And I tweeted about that today. And. And your response was what?
Corey Maass (00:09:25) – Something. Some terrible pun. I’ll let other people go find it, but, No, I’m I’m I think that’s very understandable and smart. I just, I would say I would you’re you’re a very nice person for feeling badly about that. Because you are. Forget the gender-ism. But the boy about town.
Corey Maass (00:09:51) – And so I would hope that anybody meeting you would chuckle and say, well, actually, we’ve met these places and, and I and you being you upon being reminded, you know, especially if you if there was a conversation had or something, you’d go, oh, right. Yes. I’m so sorry. It’s so great to see you, but not feel bad about that because you’re a rock star and you see so many people, you know, I mean, it’s like I’m I’m half joking, but it it is a numbers thing.
Michelle Frechette: I mean, fair.
Corey Maass: And we just have to all be okay with that kind of social awkwardness. It’s only awkward if if somebody doesn’t have the the wherewithal to be okay with, you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:10:37) – Sure. Now that makes perfect sense. And I and to be I mean, to be fair, I’m not overly embarrassed by it, right?
Corey Maass:I just figure, its a courtesy.
Michelle Frechette: I don’t want anybody to feel unmemorable. But when you meet literally thousands of people, how do you remember every single person you’ve encountered and every selfie you’ve taken? And so I just I found a way to error the side of caution and just say,
Corey Maass: Perfect.
Michelle Frechette (00:10:59) – It’s so good. It’s so good to see you. And that’s what I do now.
Corey Maass (00:11:01) – I love that kind of thing. Like I did that for years. Like I still do it occasionally, but like it’s just fun to, play with language, right? Like, I used to do that a lot with figuring out phrases to say and like, It’s it’s fun to have that many options. You know.
Michelle Frechette (00:11:22) – Absolutely. So we didn’t get to do our stickers. I was not a sticker girl over Canada. I don’t think I handed out. I had them in my basket and completely forgot I had them with me. So no stickers for any of my stickers collection were handed out to anybody. So I apologize for that. But I don’t even know where we are on our sticker count. I swear though, you have a program or something. You’ve got something going in there. Because every time I get ahead of you, like all of a sudden you catch up. So I don’t know what’s going on.
Corey Maass (00:11:55) – I can’t possibly, because I haven’t. Who have I given a sticker to?
Michelle Frechette (00:12:02) – I think people feel bad, and they just go in there and click it.
Corey Maass (00:12:05) – Yeah, well, then that’s true. They’re probably testing it, you know?
Michelle Frechette: Probably.
Corey Maass: Because obviously, like, this is for fun. And so we are not worried about accuracy.
Michelle Frechette: No. not at all.
Corey Maass: You’re five. You’re five ahead of me. I mean, and and that means, like, that means people have given me credit for five, because I’m pretty sure we both stopped at 50 just so that we basically primed the pump, but we both stopped at 50. And and that means people have in yes, been too kind and given me credit for five that I have not given them. And you ten that you actually have.
Michelle Frechette (00:12:41) – There you go. That’s okay.
Corey Maass (00:12:42) – So but your prize is, is in the mail. So there, there will be a package arriving, soon for you. I don’t know.
Michelle Frechette (00:12:54) – Is it more stickers?
Corey Maass (00:12:57) – No.
Michelle Frechette (00:12:58) – Oh, well. I’m excited. I’m intrigued. Do I know what this is, or is this a surprise?
Corey Maass (00:13:02) – You do not. It is a surprise.
Michelle Frechette (00:13:05) – Very cool.
Corey Maass (00:13:07) – So hopefully and hopefully.
Michelle Frechette (00:13:08) – And of course we will. We will have a beverage together in Portland.
Corey Maass (00:13:13) – Yeah, I finally moved it downstairs. I actually bought, a little bottle of Basil Hayden, just like the little guy or whatever, but, that’s a favorite one. Easy to travel, easy for most people to drink. And, because I was like, am I going to really try to find a liquor store in Canada? And do I trust that they have a decent selection, or am I going to smuggle this across the border? So I decided to, bootleg? Is that the original, you know, like prohibition era, but I’m smuggling it the wrong way kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette (00:13:45) – Smuggle it in. Yeah.We didn’t have any trouble at the border. We had, every car that it didn’t seem to matter. Which car we pulled in behind both directions, the car in front of us was detained for anywhere. I think it was like, 10 to 15 minutes. One was 10. One was 15. We just. You can’t really when you’re in a queue, you can’t really get out easily. Right? Especially not at the border. You don’t want to look suspicious or whatever. So we just waited. We thought, oh God, we’re going to be here forever. And they were like, so do you come to Canada for? A conference. What was a conference about? It’s a tech conference. WordPress. How are you going to be there? Going back on Sunday. Okay. Have a nice weekend. Like that was 40 seconds and the way back in was just as pleasant. So it’s like I don’t know what those other people were doing to get pulled over for so long, but that’s all right.
Corey Maass (00:14:31) – I believe. Last time. Last time I went, I went up for a concert.
Corey Maass (00:14:37) – Or it was a DJs, playing at what the essentially the central, the big Central Park in, in Montreal. And so coming back, going to Canada, the guy was like, yeah. Like, you know, rave on my brother kind of thing. And by coming back, the American. Well, the person for me going into America, though, I swear he sounded more Canadian than the other way around. but he’s like, you know, why? Why were you there for 24 hours? Which, okay, admittedly, that sounds questionable, but it’s like I went to this concert. Like, these are the these are the artists I saw. Like, you know, I obviously actually went but he’s like that park is really, really known for, for drug use. And I’m like, okay, like if I was going to bring drugs back into the right, well, and if I was going to bring drugs back into the US, would I go buy retail? I mean, come on, people, I’d go to, you know, I’d go to some neighborhood where I’d buy bulk.
Corey Maass (00:15:39) – but I didn’t. I decided not to try to rationalize that with him.
Michelle Frechette (00:15:46) – No, just the basics. Stick to the basics. I heard. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:15:49) – It took two minutes.
Michelle Frechette (00:15:50) – People that over talk are the or the suspicious ones. Right. Like like. Oh, and we just saw such and so beautiful there. Oh my gosh, blah blah blah. You know, they like. No, they don’t care. Just.
Corey Maass (00:16:00) – Tell me where you’re from?
MIchelle Frechette: Yeah, exactly.
Corey Maass: So the, the two times before, my, so my Brother in-Law was living in Montreal and needed a new laptop and to have a MacBook, and he. And to have the MacBook shipped, there was going to be an extra $500, in tariffs. And so me being three hours from Montreal, he said, can I pay for you to come to Montreal, and stay in a hotel as it will all, and bring me a MacBook. It’ll all still be cheaper. And I said free weekend in Montreal. Hell, yeah.
Corey Maass (00:16:36) – SoI took it out of the packaging, stuck it in my backpack, and and and drove it up. Right. But at the border here’s like the the mistake that every criminal makes, you know, is the, the, the guy at the border says, do you have anything to declare? No. I’m not going to admit it. Right? But he goes, you know what? What do you have with you? And the first thing out of my mouth, of course, is, well, I have my laptop, I have, snacks. I have, you know, but of course, the first thing out of my mouth is the thing that I’m trying not to think about, because that’s psychology.
Michelle Frechette: Right. Right. Right.
Corey Maasll: But, I mean, I what do you have with you? Well, my laptop, my. You know, and that everybody has it. He has a no idea that it’s not mine, you know.
Michelle Frechette: Right. Right, right.Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:17:24) – So, so, yeah, that was my I said it’d.
Michelle Frechette (00:17:28) – Oops I didn’t mean to say that is probably the wrong thing to say at that point.
Corey Maass (00:17:30) – Ha ha ha! Well, what’s on your laptop? I don’t know, I haven’t turned it on yet. It’s not for me. I’m really sorry. Here’s $500.
Michelle Frechette (00:17:41) – Oh, well, let’s get things over to OMGIMG because we could talk forever about Canada, which was a wonderful experience. Last time we talked, I was talking about the fact that I was having difficulty being able to save a new or to create a new open graph image if I had cloned a previous post. Sorry, I’m struggling for words today. You have corrected that. So now if you go to UnderrepresentedInTech.com, all of the featured images that have the name of the article or the posts across the center of them, those have all been created by OMGIMG and saved as the featured image and I’m having no difficulty with that anymore. So I wanted to like kind of close that loop on those things.
Michelle Frechette (00:18:30) – And you have done something since we last talked about bulk. So can you talk about that a little bit?
Corey Maass (00:18:37) – Yeah. A little aside here. This is one of those funny. So ages ago I posted a screenshot of so in WordPress. I assume everybody listening to this knows is familiar with WordPress. Otherwise, thank you for listening anyway. I mean, we are hilarious, charming, beautiful people, so why wouldn’t you? But, but in WordPress, on the left hand side, in the admin, it says, you know, posts and or even pages, and then you click on add new or all pages or all posts, or if you have custom post types, all those zingers, whatever, right? And so I posted a picture of that screen, which is a list of all of the posts, and I said, what do you call this screen? And it is one of my most replied to tweets ever, probably 50 replies with no. I was like, there’s got to be a consensus.
Corey Maass (00:19:39) – And there 100% wasn’t. In fact, it was worse after the tweet, like the universe was worse off because I asked this question.
Michelle Frechette (00:19:48) – I did not reply to that, but I have an answer for that. I call that the post dashboard and the pages dashboard and the media dashboard. What do you what are you calling it now? I would be.
Corey Maass (00:20:01) – Reasonable. The problem is, is that there is a dashboard. Right. So to say to a client who doesn’t think technically, like go to the dashboard, they’ll go to the dashboard or go to the post dashboard, they’ll go to the dashboard and look for posts or something maybe. Right. And obviously I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that’s my that’s what I kept running into. So, so either broadly speaking, either the edit. No. What was it? So I think WordPress behind what’s also interesting is to is to see what what a developer how they will name their variables. As because that often becomes a name or that, you know, they’re going to stop and think to themselves, you know what.
Corey Maass (00:20:50) – What is this? I want to name a variable something meaningful. So generally in, in, in at least behind the scenes WordPress parlance, post list is what that table is, at least because it. Which makes sense. It’s the list of all the posts. So. But the post is it. So either the post list page, awkward post’s list page. Even more awkward, right? The all post page. The page, the posts dashboard, the. I mean again. Weird. Awkward, right? So but an interesting experiment I found because we, this is a thing we all look at most days as WordPress people and there isn’t a name for it.
Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass: So then as that’s a, that’s a better example than me then going in and okay, so what. So the, the, the big update was our far and away the most generated or the, the most requested feature is generating images for multiple posts at once. So is that batch image generation? Is that bulk image generation? Is that multi image generation?
Corey Maass (00:22:16) – Is that so? I wound up renaming it like three times while coding it. and, and finally decided that as a developer, I would think of it, originally I’d called it generate, but I’m like, but you’re generating other places so that I went with batch, but I still find myself calling it bulk.
MIchelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: Anyway, it’s just one of those weird things, you know?
Michelle Frechette (00:22:41) – So I used to do a talk called the what was it called? The Hidden Features of WordPress revealed. And this is so long ago that this the slides are, like, more square as opposed to long, like they are now. Right. So this was probably 2015, 2016. And I was like, what did I call it? Because I talk about screen options on that page. And I called it this for screen options for the posts list. And I say that’s right. But that’s what I was going with eight years ago. So yeah. Who knows.
Corey Maass (00:23:12) – Yeah. It’s funny. but yeah.
Corey Maass (00:23:16) – So all that to bury the lead. what what has been introduced is a paginated version of most of multi post image generation. Multi image post image generation. Anyway, you can make images for many posts at once. The first version that I got out the door, you can do12, 24, 48. Because I wanted to test how I was doing it. I wound up introducing for the nerds in the back. I wound up introducing background processing. Thank you, delicious brains, for normalizing a library that is very easy to implement. and I’ve now actually gone and where I’m going to go and add that to basically everywhere an image is generated and saved, it’s now going to happen in the background. So it’ll take even less CPU processing, less likely to slow down. You know, your admin. But also like, well, we’re introducing a feature like that. I want people to at least have the option and they always will. But I kind of wanted to force people to take the option of, like, you choose a template, you choose your posts, you make sure that all of them look good and then hit save because my fear is it will happen down the road.
Corey Maass (00:24:42) – I’m going to introduce essentially a progress bar version. Like if if you’ve ever, you know, imported or exported dozens of or thousands of things, you just have a big progress bar that you watch go across the screen. Yeah. And so it’s this idea that.
Michelle Frechette (00:24:59) – Progress is important. Yeah. Right.
Corey Maass (00:25:01) – But, but there’s going to be a version where you’re not previewing each one. And that’s fine, except that, like, so, you know, for the magazine that my clients run, we have 12,000 posts. Like, I would beg and plead nobody to ever run this thing. Not that it couldn’t technically do it, but how many bad images are you going to end up with? Because somewhere in there, there’s a title that is 200 characters long that will break the template that they’ve chosen to use. And a couple of bad images is fine, but like, that will fill up your hard drive space that will, you know, dot dot dot. So I.
Michelle Frechette (00:25:46) – And how far back does somebody need to go right? So so if you have a blog that’s been running for 12 years, maybe a year is all you really need to go back to do this in bulk. Right? So and batching it. So that makes sense.
Corey Maass (00:25:57) – Although I just thought of another feature. So I’m going to add that to the list.
Michelle Frechette: Ha ha ha!
Corey Maass: If a post how about a a what would you call it? A flag. If an old posts as a request for an open graph image and doesn’t have one. So if you like generated for the last year and then basically we’re able to I don’t know if this is technically possible, but if you were able to say, okay, if a, if an old page is requested, like if an old page becomes popular again, ping me so that I know that it doesn’t have a dedicated open graph image and I can click go, generate one, or even generate one automatically, which takes me to the sort of the bigger talking point here is, in the month or more since we’ve talked like my thinking about my much of my.
Corey Maass (00:27:00) – It’s been okay that to me now it’s been okay that we’ve taken our foot off the the marketing gas pedal, so to speak.
Michelle Frechette: Right. Yeah.
Corey Maass: Like high level in theory, as we’re since we’re building a company, like, we should be priming the pump. I’m full of metaphors today, but, you know, always trickling out content. Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass: Google likes it. General SEO best practices like it. It gives people anybody who does come to the site, it gives them an excuse to come back or keep, you know, we want our name to keep popping up in front of people. and so I’ve been, as I’ve become reinvested more in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been trying to tweet more. I’m trying to essentially engage more with the world as, OMG, as you do. There was a I had a really funny meta moment the other day where I as OMG interacted with you as Stellar WP. and I realized that we were we were like.
Michelle Frechette (00:28:15) – Yeah, it was you and me. Ha ha ha.
Corey Maass (00:28:18) – And then we both went under Michelle and Corey and liked those tweets because that’s what you do.
Michelle Frechette (00:28:22) – Yeah, yeah, that is what you do. Yeah. Which reminds me, like, have I ever mentioned like, I run I run lots of Twitter accounts between Stellar, between my side projects, other projects that I’m involved in, people I help with. So my advice is always, no matter whether you’re logged in on desktop or your or your phone, always reset to your personal account. Always. Because I know people have lost their jobs by saying things they shouldn’t have said as a company they were hired for. So always reset yourself. Just that’s a little word of the wise in between there.
Corey Maass (00:28:57) – Yeah. And and check and double check and triple check and and hesitate before you hit tweet and somehow build that muscle. Build that habit to check and check and check.
Michelle Frechette (00:29:09) – if it’s your own company, that’s one thing you can maybe recover from it. But if you’re I mean, if I’m tweeting for Stellar and I comment as Michelle and I use a word or something I shouldn’t have, not a good idea.
Corey Maass (00:29:21) – Yeah. And and I mean, I think, like you are a consummate professional and conscientious thinker. And so it would be pretty hard. And you, you totally could create a faux pas by saying, you know, I don’t know, I, I, you know, my purple hair or whatever as Stellar WP, but nobody’s gonna one would hope nobody would be offended by that kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass: But I hear like but you’re right. Like, it’s it’s not professional.
Michelle Frechette: Correct.
Corey Maass: And and I have the advantage of, at least in this instance, owning the company. But like the other thing that I’ve, I’ve mentioned to a number of people specifically younger than us is for me, the internet was never not and this is me individually as well as an age thing. But like the internet was always, a business thing. Like from the moment the first website I ever created was to promote myself as a musician. And so I certainly put myself out there, but I, I was never I, I was always aware that I didn’t want to put a picture online or say something online that would not get me a gig, or would have people not like me on a personal level, even if they liked my music or something.
Corey Maass (00:30:42) – So. And not that my record is spotless, but that’s in the back of my head or back in my mind. Whereas I think a lot of people who have truly grown up with it, they don’t think about they don’t have that kind of filter you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:30:57) – Right. Plus I always even on my own account silly is okay. Inflammatory is not, right. Like I try not to be a follower I will skirt it sometimes. I will admit I got called a pile of.
Corey Maass (00:31:10) – Something.
Michelle Frechette (00:31:12) – Poo. This morning by somebody just for saying I will not, I will not use Sticker Mule anymore because of their political status.
Corey Maass (00:31:19) – I was wondering if you were.Going to bring that up. I’ve been wanting to bring that up.
Michelle Frechette (00:31:22) – So they not only did they post on their own Twitter account, the co-founder.
Corey Maass: But the email.
Michelle Frechette: They emailed it and made a part of the email. Also said, use this coupon to show your support for Trump. And I was like, oh my.
Corey Maass (00:31:38) – My goodness, you are dead to me.
Michelle Frechette (00:31:40) – There is no way to delete your account with them. So I had to go in. I changed my account from Michelle Frechette to no longer a customer I went to. There’s all these little burner accounts you can make, like, you know, 15 minute email addresses, change the email address to that, and then, you know, long enough so that I could confirm it, remove my credit card information that I had was don’t remember storing in there, but must have and removed my phone number and all of the things my address, all of those things just deleted them. And then now they just have an account with a weird email address that no longer works. Not, no longer a customer. Because that is not the way that would be like me logging in a Stellar and then saying, I think you should vote this way. This is the way I think everybody’s doing it. Don’t be a PC. You know what? And blah blah blah. Right. I’m never going to do that.
Michelle Frechette (00:32:34) – So I just made a comment that I’m not going to patronize them anymore. It wasn’t actually inflammatory, but there must be people searching for that term.
Corey Maass: And somebody still came at you.
Michelle Frechette: Well, there are not people that follow me and they’re not people I follow. So clearly. There are people that are searching the term because I didn’t even tag Sticker Mule in my post. Right. So they were looking to be inflammatory, both of them. I went to their accounts very right wing, very, super Christian, whatever you want to call it. And so, the one person said, oh, yeah. So you’re going to cancel the person that says that they believe on both sides, blah, blah, blah. I just just found out I said this was not a message of peace. They said the message of peace. This was not a message of peace. It was a cloak of peace over the rest of it. And then the other person just called me a pile of poo. And so I was just like, has been a while since I’ve been called that to my face. Haha.
Corey Maass: I know, right? Eighth grade or so.
Michelle Frechette (00:33:24) – At least. Right? So yeah. So anyway, I did respond to this.
Corey Maass: Charming.
Michelle Frechette: But I would never do that under any brand that I represented.
Corey Maass: Right.Exactly. Good example
Michelle Frechette: That is me, right? That is me taking a stand for my beliefs and even then, not really politicizing it, just saying I’m not going to put money in somebody’s pocket who turns their business into politics. Right?
Corey Maass (00:33:49) – Yeah and certainly and certainly not politics that are certainly politics that you personally don’t agree with, I assume.
Michelle Frechette (00:33:53) – Exactly. But even if it was politics I agreed with, I don’t think it’s the right. I would probably still unfollow and unsubscribe because I don’t want my money going into political things like that. I choose where I give my money to, right? And so I don’t have I could choose to do to go elsewhere.
Corey Maass: Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: But yeah. So it’s like even with Underrepresented In Tech, which, you know, I was talking about earlier because my cat, I was like, get down, get down.
Michelle Frechette (00:34:17) – She’s gonna make me crazy. Completely derail me. Stupid cat. Anyway, it’s one of those things where I just wanted. I needed to say something out loud and be part of that conversation without being inflammatory.
Corey Maass: Yep.
Michelle Frechette: But I also get silly, right? So like the silly post was the screenshot of the guy calling me a pile of poo and then being able to be like, actually, I’m okay with people like that thinking that of me because they don’t matter, right? To me. They don’t matter. So anyway. Be silly if you want. I will often post just silly polls and little ideas and thoughts and whatever crosses my mind, like the idea of not saying, nice to meet you, but good to see you, that kind of thing. Plus those little nuggets of wisdom. But, but I keep that to my personal and obviously not in my. But I get silly with my other brands too. Sometimes I think I’ve done a couple if silly post for OMG.
Corey Maass (00:35:12) – It’s on brand. Exactly as well you should, you know.
Corey Maass (00:35:16) – But but I think you have a strong, The muscle is strong. The filter is strong where you’re like, you’re without doing without having to think about it much. You’re like. Is this likely to offend anybody? Could I say this a different way? Is this the best way to say it? Not only is it the funniest and the most effective and the most internet-y, or the most meme-y or the most, you know, all these things, but also the is this on brand is this, you know, you know, am I going to wake up like, I’ve, I’ve had a couple of tweets in the last year that I, that I actually posted and then actually deleted because I, I as hard as I thought about it before I hit send afterwards, I realized I, I actually realized that I like misinterpreted the the original post or things like that and, and then also like again, one of them was me as a musician responding to somebody, in England talking about American politics.
Corey Maass (00:36:21) – And, and my comment was really nothing more than, you know, everybody’s welcome to their opinion. But your, you know, I don’t feel that your observation is accurate as an American. And then I was like, I’m a I, I’m here as a musician. Like, why am I even? And the nonpolitical, in this case a nonpolitical, like, why am I getting into it with this person? Not even why am I why am I even engaging with this tweet? You know, it just doesn’t matter. I’m not going to change people’s minds. I’m not gonna dot dot dot anyway.
Michelle Frechette (00:36:56) – Well, let me give you another tool. I’m going to put a tool up on the screen. This is a website that I use every single day. First of all LinkedIn and Facebook and other platforms, they they have a character cap that live it, but it’s well into the thousands, right? A thousand or more. And so and I think even Mastodon has like just this huge, character limit.
Michelle Frechette (00:37:22) – But Twitter X only allows 280 characters unless you have paid to verify, etc.. So I use this word counter net slash character count. If you’re listening and not watching. I go to that site and I put all my tweets in there so that I can craft them off of this, off of the actual platform or scheduling tool, make sure it looks good, reread it there, catch my mistakes there, and then copy paste back into either the platform again or the scheduling tool that I use. So this is just a really good way to have those checks and balances that you just talked about. And also make sure that you’re not like trying to figure out later, like, where can I delete five more characters to fit on Twitter, you know, kind of thing. So this is just a nice little, I’ll probably post this on Twitter again today or not. Again, I’ve never posted it. Probably posted on Twitter today so that people can see how they can figure things out and craft those messages without doing it in the moment, whether it’s on the phone or on the desktop.
Michelle Frechette (00:38:22) – So that’s a nice little tool that we can share there for you.
Corey Maass (00:38:25) – And I’ve got Grammarly installed. And so it immediately starts checking my grammar as I’m typing too. So I’ve got that extra that added advantage. This makes me chuckle though, because I am. So we have our social preview tool, social tester tool, which anybody can find in the footer of if you go toOMGIMG.co we have a few a couple of tools. One of them is so that you plug in a URL and you see what it’s going to look like on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn before it goes. not Instagram. Excuse me. But I’m always I’m a developer more than I’m a writer these days. And so I’m always looking for micro tools, utility, web utilities, whatever you want to call them niche tools. and especially for underused, undervalued keywords, or cheap to, you know, like there’s tools that will find you a keyword that is searched for but doesn’t have a lot of competition. And Word Counter and Character Counter was one that I came across recently.
Corey Maass (00:39:41) – So it’s funny that you said that because it which is weird to me because there’s got to be a million and one of those types of counters.
Michelle Frechette (00:39:50) – I just like it.
Corey Maass (00:39:52) – Yeah, totally. And I, I won’t, I won’t build us one because it’s not relevant to images. But I keep looking for some similar things that have any sort of relevance to images, just to kind of build out the tools that we could have on the website that will help people, you know, represent themselves better online.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:10) – So I’m showing you this because I’m not seeing it in the footer anymore. Did it just did it.
Corey Maass (00:40:15) – Uh tools? Yeah. Third. Second row. Third item. Tools.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:19) – Oh, tools. Okay. Oh, there it is. Okay.
Corey Maass (00:40:21) – Yeah, we had to bury it a little, but maybe we loaded or.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:25) – That’s okay. So you can open graph, test it, put your URL in there like let’s see if I put WP Wonder Woman, which we are listed as the sponsor for.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:43) – It’ll tell you it’s a missing image, but there it is. We have the image and it shows. That’s what it shows up like. And the same thing for Facebook and the same thing for LinkedIn. So you can see what your image is going to look like. And it looks nice looks good. And then we have the other tools are. Remind me.
Corey Maass (00:41:01) – One that nobody knows. I’ve never I’ve never totally. Yeah. Crop Express actually gets a good amount of traffic.
Michelle Frechette (00:41:08) – Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:41:09) – Lets you not only crop images online, but it but you can you can save this as this configuration as a preset. And then send somebody specifically like if you work with clients, you can send, send the URL to a client or you can bookmark it, obviously. But so the next time you come back, it will only let you crop as a square. And you can also set up one that’s 16 x 9. And so then you can only crop a 16 x 9. and it’ll guarantee a certain like the, you know, the size on the right that was thousand by thousand.
Corey Maass (00:41:48) – You can set that to other ones, or custom like podcast images have to be 3000 by 3000. So you can essentially set that as a preset. And then you will always be guaranteed a 3000 by 3000. And then the other tool that nobody knows about, that I actually built at WordCamp US last year in a day, is OpenGraph.Online, which will become relevant at some point. Nobody, to my knowledge, nobody is archiving open graph data.
Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass: And so you you can’t go back in time to see, like I just opened it up and it and and the top one is Fox News, New York Post, ESPN, Walmart. If they you know, what did their open graph look like a year ago? What did their open graph look like now. And so I’m just storing it over time. And so I think it’ll become an interesting at some point if, if to some people open graph is an interesting conversation anyway. But at any point, if open graph becomes a, a, a point, a talking point like this will historically show, how big brands in particular.
Corey Maass (00:43:04) – Handle open graph data.
Michelle Frechette (00:43:09) – Let me get that information. Look at that. So TEMU has a lot more information in here than,
Corey Maass (00:43:14) – You’re still showing the tools. Not that new tab.
Michelle Frechette (00:43:17) – Share this tab. Sorry. Thank you. I forget that I didn’t realize it. Open in a new tool. Okay, so I’m on TEMU right now and you can see TEMU or Teemu or how we pronounce it has and it has all their open graph data, previous ones, you can toggle them open. This is very cool.
Corey Maass: Isn’t it neat.
Michelle Frechette: And then if I go back yeah, it’s very cool I love it. Hulu. You can get an idea of what they look like. Yeah. The first one I looked at though didn’t have any other thing. Which one was it? I looked at Yelp and I think Yelp had not changed in quite a while. Look at this. So Yelp doesn’t have anything. That’s it.
Corey Maass (00:43:56) – Yeah. They have an image, but Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it, it my recollection is they, they, I only try, I only store it if it changes.
Michelle Frechette (00:44:08) – Yeah. And then I.
Corey Maass (00:44:09) – Also go to if you go to Amazon, for example.
Michelle Frechette (00:44:13) – Yep. Hold on. That was towards the top.
Corey Maass (00:44:16) – I just saw it on the left column there. I also flagged them if they’re missing things. Hahaha.
Michelle Frechette (00:44:24) – Oh, yeah.
Corey Maass (00:44:25) – So we can actually like flag. So because at one point I think Cory and I talked about like also reaching out to various brands or because at some point when the tool is a bit more, when OMG is more mature. I, you know, you can use there’s a website, there’s a few different tools that are like what, what uses, what kind of thing. And so we can essentially find all the websites that use Yoast. We can find them, the ones that use Yoast but don’t use don’t have correct open graph images. And then we can send them a nice email that says, by the way.
MIchelle Frechette (00:45:05) – Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:45:05) – By the way I think you should buy our plugin.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:07) – The Washington Post has something to be desired. There’s nothing there.
Corey Maass (00:45:13) – Whoops.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:14) – Before I stop sharing my screen, I do want to switch over and just show you if anybody’s listening. So this is what I was talking about with Underrepresented In Tech. So this is the one from last week. I’ve already generated one for this week, but it doesn’t publish till like Thursday night, Friday. So we’ve got this one digital divide. And then this is where I was having difficulties. And this one, the image, the words went right across the bear’s face. So I just decided not to do it. But here’s the first one I did. I said language supports community, so.
Corey Maass (00:45:45) – I love it.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:46) – I think that was the very first one. And I was just like, help me, I don’t understand how to do any of this. You walked me through it quite kindly. So that’s awesome.
Corey Maass (00:45:56) – So, so going back to like to bulk batch multi image generation where I’m at now is because I received feedback from a few people who very kindly have said like the tool is great, it it saves me time, which is obviously the point, time and effort.
Corey Maass (00:46:18) – But far and away what everybody requested and then has continued to emphasize is what they care more about is essentially one click or no click generating of images. Image generation on on publish or, you know, or just before publish. But one click and it’s and it’s funny, I realized typical developer. I was so fascinated by the tech that let me.
Corey Maass (00:46:54) – Essentially build a template that generated an image. And nobody cares. Like I expected everybody to come I, I said, let me, you know, in, in, in the image builder and in the image template builder, which is the same thing. here’s, you know, you can make it bold, you can change the font, yada, yada. There is a, you know, there is maybe 4% of all of the options that are possible. And I was like, okay, so over let me but it’s usable. But so let me wait for people to come back and say, like, I really need, you know, borders.
Corey Maass (00:47:36) – I really need, you know, gradients. I really need whatever. And then I’ll add them as people request them. But I focused so much on that, and I and it’s important, but most people have gone in, set pretty much the default template, tweaked it twice slightly, to make sure it’s on brand. And then off they go. And they never. And if it doesn’t have options there’s certain options. They live with it and and they and off they go. And so it’s one of those like I was. So I’ve spent so much time on that. And I’m not saying nobody cares, but nobody cares. Right. Or certainly nobody cares after a while.
Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass: And and I think I just had to wrap my head around like it’s a semi somewhat. It’s a re-emphasise of the tool. So I’m replacing like there’s a bunch of places where like right now to for each on that post list page, there’s a button that takes you to the bulk batch multi image generator. But next to each post if there doesn’t have an open graph image, there’s a button.
Corey Maass (00:48:51) – And right now that button opens up the image builder. Whereas all anybody cares about is the same window that opens when you’re in the editor. That lets you pick a template that you’ve already built. Generate an image, save it however you’re going to use it and be done already.
Michelle Frechette (00:49:09) – Absolutely.
Corey Maass (00:49:10) – And so that’s kind of the small pivot of where I’m taking the product, which based on that emphasis, changes a bunch of screens. And so I’m working on changing all of those screens, and, and changing the onboarding, to say like, what you need is a template. Let’s build your first template, and now you can auto generate all the images you need anywhere.
Michelle Frechette (00:49:40) – I love that. And that’s the hardest part when you when you use new software is like, I mean, I’ve been working with you and I was still like, please show me, like, soup to nuts. How do I do this? Because it wasn’t intuitive to me. And so having that onboarding that walks you through that is really important.
Corey Maass (00:49:58) – And it’s not. And it’s not that it’s not intuitive to me, but it’s not user friendly. Like I’m I’m tolerant, but I’m I’ve trained myself over 20 years of building product to There’s always a separate objective little voice going, okay, so later you really need to clean that up because that’s awful. And so I’m pretty well aware of the shortcomings of the product, which is fine. Like it’s it’s still a new you know, it’s still a technically only six months old, but working. But I’m, I’m, I feel like I have better focus on what actually needs to happen, what people want, what how it needs to work. Which helps me redefine a bunch of these screens. And then ultimately we it will help us, I think redesign like we talked a few we talked a couple of months ago like somebody nicely redesigned our homepage and then very nicely has said, why haven’t you implemented the homepage that I designed you? And I’m like, well, this year and I have to think in terms of months and at this point, but this year we will use that new design.
Corey Maass (00:51:10) – But I think most of the wording is going to change because again, fewer people are interested in the razzle dazzle of the page builder than I thought. And more, I think care more about, you know, just here are the images you need. Full stop.
Michelle Frechette (00:51:28) – Right.
Corey Maass (00:51:29) – You know. Yep. and we build a few more. Nice. Go ahead.
Michelle Frechette (00:51:34) – Like I say, we have to we have to talk about one more thing before we finish up. We have seven minutes left. So finish up this thought so we can move on to the last one.
Corey Maass (00:51:44) – Bananas are awesome there. The thought is done go ahead.
Michelle Frechette (00:51:47) – I love that. That’s good. Okay, I want to talk about the fact that you are presenting at an online conference so you can see Corey Friday at Stellar Sparks event. You’re doing a talk called Picturing Success Maximizing Image Engagement in WordPress. And so anybody that’s interested in that should go to stellarwp.com/stellar-spark. So tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be talking about Friday.
Corey Maass (00:52:15) – It has been a nice coincidence that digging deep into a product about images, I have learned an unbelievable amount about images and thought an unbelievable amount about images online, things that I think I and most publishers internet people take for granted.
Corey Maass (00:52:36) – So, going deeply into quickly but deeply, into essentially the what makes a good image online, how to choose an image, how to enhance the image and then and optimize the image, essentially whatever you’re going to use an image for blog posts or product pictures or things like that. So come and learn how to make your images work the hardest for you.
Michelle Frechette (00:53:04) – So stellarwp.com/stellar-spark to register. It is a free online event Corey you you go on at.
Corey Maass (00:53:14) – 3 p.m.
Michelle Frechette (00:53:15) – 3 p.m. Eastern. So wherever you are in the world if you want to see it live, it’ll be 3 p.m. Eastern. And should you not be able to attend please still register because we will then send out the recorded videos. in the week following. Once I get time to dice them all up, turn them into their individual packages, and then put them on the Stellar blog so we will be able to share those out with you too. So make sure you go ahead and sign up for that. It is again a free event, and we will have also, a Zoom room open all day for our hallway track.
Michelle Frechette (00:53:47) – So if you’d like to talk to other attendees and hopefully Corey will hang out for a little while either before or after his talk to answer questions there as well.
Corey Maass: Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:53:56) – And how do I.How do I go.
Corey Maass (00:53:56) – I will literally be in there all day.
Speaker 3 (00:53:58) – I know. Right.
Michelle Frechette (00:53:59) – And how do I know all this information? Because I am the organizer. So I will be in the green room. I will be on screen as an MC for one of the tracks all day and interacting with folks, so I’m looking forward to that. So yeah.
Corey Maass (00:54:11) – I’m excited for it. I’m I’m a little nervous for the talk. I’m still honing it. and, but it’s one of those like getting I gave it the beginning of it or the first version of it, the raw version of it for, Rochester’s Meetup. Presenting it here, and then I’ll be presenting it again in a month in Keene. And it’s one of those where I’m, I’m it continues to evolve and exactly. You know, so I’m, I’m fun to be working on that.
Michelle Frechette (00:54:42) – Of course, the question on everybody’s mind is will you be wearing the jacket Friday.
Corey Maass (00:54:49) – Should I?
Michelle Frechete: Yeah. Of course.
Corey Maass: All right. All right.
Michelle Frechette (00:54:53) – I need to get a hat and OMGIMG hat that I can wear. So maybe like a bucket hat or it’s printed on the brim and I flip it up like Blossom from the 90s, I don’t know, I’ll figure it out.
Corey Maass (00:55:04) – That’s the best reference I’ve heard all day.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:09) – That’s right. It was the 90s, wasn’t it? Was the 80s. I don’t even know 80s.
Corey Maass (00:55:12) – 80s. Blossom was 80s
Michelle Frechette (00:55:12) – Okay. Excellent. Well, everybody, we’re gonna wrap it up here. I think we’ll look forward to seeing you, Corey, at Stellar Spark on Friday and hopefully a bunch of other people too. To learn all about maximizing image engagement in WordPress, which, I’ll tell you the the improvements you’ve made just since you and I have been working on this product or marketing this product. Clearly I don’t work on the product, but that you’ve made just, since January, February, whenever it was we started, this, have made it so much easier for me to use.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:45) – And I think that if if even I can use it, everybody else should be able to do so. job well done.
Corey Maass (00:55:54) – Thank you.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:55) – All right. Yeah. So we’ll see people on Friday hopefully. And if not, we’ll see you definitely next Tuesday. This is our new time 4 p.m. Eastern. And looking forward to seeing everybody. All right. Take care.
Corey Maass (00:56:06) – We’ll see you Friday. Thank you. Bye.
