Post Status Happiness Hour Session Twenty Three

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Roger Williams from Kinsta. Who serves as the Partnerships and Community Manager for North America. They discuss various topics including the WordPress community, Kinsta’s new affiliate program, and their global sponsorship of WordCamps. The episode also highlights the creation of collaborative music playlists within the Post Status Slack community and the importance of concise, engaging content. Additionally, the guest shares insights on supporting WordPress contributors and the launch of Kinsta’s new automatic updates feature for themes and plugins.

Top Takeaways:

The Importance of Thorough Testing in Software Development and Releases: Michelle emphasized the critical role of testing and feedback during the release cycle of WordPress 6.8, particularly as they approach its official launch. Despite having a dedicated testing community, the need for more testers is constant to ensure compatibility with a wide range of plugins and themes. The takeaway is that comprehensive testing is vital for minimizing issues at launch, and encouraging more community involvement can help ensure smoother releases.
The Value of Consistent Community Contribution and Support for Open Source Projects: Roger highlighted the importance of documentation in open-source projects like WordPress, noting that it’s often underappreciated until something goes wrong. He also spoke about Kinsta’s involvement in supporting the community through contributions, such as sponsoring WordCamp and supporting documentation initiatives. The takeaway is that consistent, behind-the-scenes contributions, like documentation and community support, are crucial for the sustainability and success of open-source projects, even though they are often taken for granted.
Kinsta’s Automatic Updates Feature Enhances Site Reliability: Roger introduced Kinsta’s new Automatic Updates feature, which ensures WordPress sites remain updated while minimizing risks. The system takes a before-and-after screenshot during updates and automatically reverts changes if visual differences are detected, helping prevent website issues that could impact business operations.

Mentioned In The Show:

Build and manage professional sites with secure managed hosting on WordPress.com. Beautiful themes, built-in SEO, and payment tools, and access to over 50,000 plugins. Everything you need for your business, plus 24/7 support from WordPress experts.

Roger Williams (Community Manager, Kinsta)
Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02 We’re live. We’re live here on the Post Status Happiness Hour. Okay. First questions first. What’s on your head?

Roger Williams 00:00:11 Oh.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:12 I see, I see rainbows.

Roger Williams 00:00:14 Yeah. So, I was just at a conference last week, and there were a lot of podcasters there, and they told me to stop using Bluetooth headphones when I’m podcasting. and so. So I switched back to my old school wired in headphones, and all I’ve got are these really old sennheiser’s that I had to tape with, rainbow duct tape years ago.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:39 It looks like you have a pretty little bow in your hair.

Roger Williams 00:00:43 Perfect, perfect. That’s what that’s that’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m going for.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:47 I mean, but you know what, Roger? On you it works.

Roger Williams 00:00:51 Well, thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:54 And thanks for joining me today on the Happiness Hour. I it’s it’s always a pleasure to talk to you for multiple reasons, chief, of course, is that you’re a wonderful person to talk to. But also, I get to see those pictures of your dog in the background and like, who wouldn’t love those pictures? The dogs, I think one, two dogs, right? Yeah.

Roger Williams 00:01:13 Two dogs. Yeah. So, Daisy. Well, Daisy over here and then Enzo’s over here.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:17 Yeah, yeah. Just adorable. Adorable. I would love to claim all of the wildlife as my own and my pictures, but alas, they do not live with me.

Roger Williams 00:01:27 Well, that’s that’s a lot cheaper. You don’t have to maintain as much.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:29 True, true. I do have a cat that lives behind my monitor because she has a little bed back there. She likes it back there because I can’t reach her and she can stay out of it. Like I can’t make her accept my hugs and kisses, basically. But she comes up and stretches every once in a while and, you know, let’s me pet her for a second. But anyway.

Roger Williams 00:01:48 So she represents cats very well.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:50 Yeah she does. She’s got it down pat. She realizes I’m the staff. I’m not the owner. So it’s all good.

Roger Williams: Nice.

Michelle Frechette: So first let me say welcome not only to the show, but Kinsta we got everything in the works right now. Any moment we should be able to. I’m going to officially announce the soft launch of the sponsorship of Post Status. So welcome. As a sponsor, we created our own little sponsorship channel with you all today, and I’m open for those conversations. It’s really great.

Roger Williams 00:02:21 I mean once there’s a sponsor channel in Slack that makes it official, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:02:25 It does, it does. It’s just the the just. And we signed the contract. It’s just that little payment thing. And I know that you guys are good for it. So we’re gonna announce it anyway. So so welcome.

Roger Williams 00:02:36 Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Excited to be part of the community and and help. you know, I know it’s $50 a year now. Like, what, a smoking deal.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, right.

Roger Williams 00:02:47 I am encouraging everybody to join. I actually just had a great conversation with Joost, and we talked about, you know, his kind of goal and mission with, you know, making Post Status into a nonprofit and really making it that community that can have all of the conversations, you know, and have the spicy conversations, right. And, and still manage to be a group of people that get along. And so that’s really encouraging.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:17 And we do fun stuff, too. I don’t know if you saw it, but we started a new channel today called The Music Channel.

Roger Williams: Okay.

Michelle Frechette: And I got an official like, I paid for an official Spotify account today called Post Status, and I have two playlists in there that are open to collaboration amongst our community. So if you’re in Post Status Slack and you go to the music channel, you will see you can add to those playlists. One is for folks who like mellow music when they work, and the other is for people who like upbeat music when they work. So you can just add to that playlist or building playlists two playlists together as a community for for fun, right? Because you can do that. We can do those fun things there. And I really enjoy that too. So it’s pretty cool stuff.

Roger Williams 00:04:04 That’s really awesome. I love the initiative there. It’s always interesting to hear what other people listen to. When their getting work done.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:13 Yeah. Can I tell you my biggest fear was that because I had to seed it with something, right. So I put like two songs in each one and I thought, I’m going to be judged so hard by these four songs.

Roger Williams 00:04:24 Okay. What were the songs?

Speaker 3 00:04:26 Oh, now I gotta go back and look.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:27 Okay, hold on a second. I put in You Don’t Know Me, which is a Ray Charles & Diana Krall song. This is the mellow one. Yeah. which I think nobody but I’m a huge Josh Groban fan. So the other one was When You Say You Love Me by Josh Groban.

Roger Williams: Okay.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:42 And then the upbeat songs. I actually did a little research. See, I listened to 70s music all the time, like 70s and 80s. That’s what I was doing. So I did a little research. I’m like, what are upbeat songs that people like to listen to? And even though Coldplay gets a bad rap sometimes. Viva la Vida was the number one song on multiple lists. So that and On Top of the World by Imagine Dragons. Were the four that I seeded. Two each, you know two each into those things. And I thought nobody so far has said, Michelle, your taste in music is awful. So we’re gonna let it ride. We’re gonna let it ride. If I need to, I can always delete them.

Roger Williams 00:05:16 I feel like you went with some pretty safe choices there.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:19 I mean, I tried.

Roger Williams 00:05:20 Good songs, good bands, so. And. And now it’s up to people to, proliferate the lists with their ideas. And I’m looking forward to see what people start sharing.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:33 Yeah. Well, on the upbeat songs, I will say Corey Maass went to work on it because we got we’re up to 18 songs on that playlist and we have five on the other playlist. So yeah. So if you are not a member of Post Status and you want to be, it’s only $50 a year, you can influence these playlists. Us. I mean, I’m going to start listening to him tomorrow and see, you know, how much work I get done. We’ll see.

Roger Williams 00:05:54 I’ll tell you what. I feel like we’re in a telethon type situation.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:57 I know right?

Roger Williams 00:06:00 You’re standing by to take your call. Let’s let’s see what you let’s get joining up here, people.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:05 Oh, my goodness. I’m old enough to have grown up on the Jerry Lewis telethons where he’s like, let’s see that tote board. Right. As the numbers flip over and like, the old alarm clocks did. It was so.

Roger Williams 00:06:16 Funny. Absolutely. No, I used to remember they would always come on, like, PBS and stuff when I was one to watch the new Star Trek series or something. And I’m like, you guys are killing me. I’ve got no money. I’m just a kid.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:28 Yeah, and all of the people they would bring on were like the old Love Boat type people. Like, it’s like, I don’t want to see Charo. I know she does good flamenco. Show me somebody I care about. Like. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, it was what it was. Donald O’Connor dancing at 78 years old. No, I don’t need to see that. But anyway. James says hello to both of us. Hey, James. Good to have you here.

Roger Williams 00:06:53 I haven’t seen James in a while.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:55 He’s a pretty awesome dude.

Roger Williams 00:06:56 Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:57 He really is. So tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at Kinsta.

Roger Williams 00:07:03 Oh, boy. Okay, so, so at Kinsta. I’ll just start there. I recently actually got, kind of a title change, so now I was Community Manager. Now I’m Partnerships and Community Manager for North America. And so what does that mean? So I get to go to a lot of events, and kind of try and engage the community, get feedback as far as, hey, you know, on the hosting product, get feedback about how what people are thinking about WordPress in general. And then I take that information back to the home base and share it with the powers that be and my coworkers to help improve the product and then also see how we can help. the WordPress project overall. And so one initiative that we’ve got going relatively recently is we’ve started sponsoring contributors to WordPress. And so that has been just a lot of fun, reaching out to different contributors and seeing, you know, how we can help them, help their work, and really improve WordPress. Because if WordPress doesn’t keep improving, there’s not a whole lot for Kinsta to do. So that’s kind of a new initiative. Other things. So with the partnership side, I talk with different companies that are adjacent to Kinsta.

Roger Williams 00:08:30 So agencies are a big one. We have a lot of agency customers. And we also have a lot of customers that use agencies. And so it’s very important that we have a dialogue with agencies as far as what works for them. What we could improve with the product and how we can help them grow their business as well.. And then also with like plugin makers and theme designers and, you know, the whole ecosystem of WordPress companies kind of works in there. And then also just going one step further is open source in general. So at Kinsta one thing that we’ve utilized for many years is Linux containers for each of the sites, isolates them, gives them a lot of resources. And so we help support the maintainer of the Linux container project, which is changing into Incus and getting a little in the weeds here. But so that’s really exciting too, is being able to reach out to the people who make the tools that allow us to make WordPress and allow us to host websites and help them get their work. Continued and supported. Jeez. And, you know, it’s a pretty nebulous position. So there’s there’s a lot of things going on. I do a lot of videos. I make videos on LinkedIn where I interview people in the WordPress ecosystem as well as.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:57 Those are compelling, by the way, because you keep them concise, right? They’re not they don’t go on for hours. They also are fun. You have topics that you put right there and and they just show up in your newsfeed. So you’re like, oh, what’s this all about? Those are awesome. I mean, even if I’m speaking from having been on the other side of your microphone.

Roger Williams 00:10:16 Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the feedback and the encouragement. It it started as just a fun way to get to know presenters before WordCamp US last year. And then I went to WordCamp US and everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people wanted to ask me if they could be on my podcast. And I was like, well, first of all, it’s not really technically a podcast. But, Yeah. No, I wanted to interview more people, and I like, you know, LinkedIn imposes the 15 minute time rule that I have, which is kind of nice because it allows me. I’m only interrupting somebody’s day for 15 minutes, to do the interview. And then I’m only interrupting your day for 15 minutes if you want to watch the interview. So I feel like it’s very courteous of me in some ways.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:06 Yeah, absolutely.

Roger Williams 00:11:07 But. And then there’s just a lot of fun. It’s an opportunity to get to know people in the industry, people that I maybe have known for a while and learn more about them and then meet new people and hear their stories and then help share their stories. So, that, like, that was like kind of an afterthought activity. And it’s really turned into a pretty considerable amount of my job. And, again, I get a lot of encouragement from my bosses to keep doing those.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:36 Yeah. It’s great, I love it. You’ve talked to some pretty awesome people. You’ve talked to a lot of people that I’ve never heard of or met before, too, which I love because you’re introducing people to the WordPress community that we want to know because they’re doing cool stuff. So I love that component of it as well, for sure.

Roger Williams 00:11:54 That’s great to hear. And I’d like to say that that is all by design. A lot of it is just because I don’t know the big names in WordPress, and so.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:04 That’s okay too.

Roger Williams 00:12:05 I haven’t connected with them yet. But then also there is has been a little bit of a conscious decision to seek out people who are not getting as much exposure and maybe aren’t as well known, but who I’ve met one way or another. And I know that they’re very interesting people. And I mean, everybody’s got a story to tell. And I and I think the nice thing about 15 minutes is it makes it easy for people to tell their story and not run out of things to talk about. And so we, can we can put something together that’s pretty interesting.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:37 Well, I will tell you that you did inspire something I’ve been working on, which is starting, last month. It is April now. Yep. Starting last month. Last month was Women’s History Month, and so I got it in my head on like the fourth or fifth day of the month. Oh, it’s women’s history. We should interview women in WordPress. I thought I would get maybe ten people, right? I have over 50 interviews now that I’ve recorded.

Roger Williams: Wow.

Michelle Frechette: They average about five minutes. Some go as long as 12, some as short as like four. Which I guess is not really an average of five, but there’s about five minutes. Six maybe. And, they take out the outliers, but then, it’s been really awesome. And because there’s so many of them, I’m continuing it for months and it might just be a regular feature we have. We have a YouTube playlist. Now that’s these, women’s interviews within WordPress. And I am so proud to say that we have interviewed somebody on every inhabitable continent of the world. So I’ve got women from literally everywhere, which is so cool. But it’s because I saw your shorter, you know, concise interviews that I thought I could do, like Roger does.

Roger Williams 00:13:44 That’s awesome. I and I, I’m sure you’re blowing it out of the water. you’re way more composed.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:49 I’m having fun.I don’t know about that.

Roger Williams 00:13:53 And I you know, I’m excited to hear that. And I think that, you know, in the age of these two and three and four hour podcasts, I really like seeing the shift back towards the shorter. You know, it’s the same way with like, streaming media, right? Like my wife and I, we really get excited when there’s an episode that’s only 25 minutes long. Right? Because, like, I just I got to go to bed at some point, people. You know.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:18 It’s it’s I call it consumable, right? It’s like you don’t feel overwhelmed. You could actually consume it on social media as opposed to having to go someplace and download or look longer or pop popcorn first, you know?

Roger Williams 00:14:31 Exactly, Exactly. No. Yeah, yeah. Having these little bite sized nuggets. And, you know, there’s also the whole concept of, you know, do you need two hours to really say what you’re trying to say? Can you can you sum it up for me? And and I, you know, one of the approaches that I’m kind of doing with my show is once I have somebody on and I get to know, like, who they are and how we interact, then, you know, maybe I invite you back and we do a longer show if there’s something more for us to dig into. So, yeah, there’s just a lot of variability. I, I really I talked with Matt Medeiros, I think, last fall about my philosophy on doing the show, and there’s a lot of a salesman’s mentality to it. So in sales, to be successful at sales, you just have to deal with rejection and no’s.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:25 Absolutely.

Roger Williams 00:15:26 And so one of the things I learned early in my sales career was to collect 50 no’s a day. And then I would get to a yes. Right? And and you know, the math sometimes worked and sometimes it didn’t, depending on what I was selling. Right? But I think with doing episodes, doing a show like this, especially when you’re starting out and you’re not sure what you want to talk about or how good your interviewing skills are, then go for numbers like just start. Do a lot of interviews, talk to a lot of people and figure it out as you’re going. And yeah, just getting the repetitions in and and seeing if you enjoy it too.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:05 Yeah, absolutely. But I do have to say it as a podcast, if you call it a show. So you’ve, you’ve officially tipped over to that territory.

Roger WIlliams: Okay. I thought.

Michelle Frechette: I don’t make the rules. I don’t make the rules. Roger.

Roger Williams 00:16:19 Okay. I thought that in order for it to be a podcast, it had to have an RSS feed.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:25 I don’t think so. I think it has to be called a show and put out an in regular format somewhere. I make my own decisions here, so maybe I do make the rules, I don’t know. But,

Roger Williams 00:16:35 You know, in your defense, you know, people are calling these shows on YouTube podcasts now, even though there’s no RSS feeds. So. All right, we’ll go with it. We’ll go.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:43 Okay. Absolutely. So much fun. So if anybody doesn’t know what Kinsta is, what is Kinsta?

Roger Williams 00:16:51 Oh wow. Okay. So if you don’t know what Kinsta is then what what’s going on?

Michelle Frechette: I know right.

Roger WIlliams: Seriously, so Kinsta we’re a managed hosting company and we focus on WordPress. And then we’ve actually got a new product for application hosting and database hosting called Sevalla. And if people are interested, they can look that up. But I’ll really talk more about the WordPress side. That’s the majority of our business. We’ve been in business for over 12 years now. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of sites under management that were, helping people deliver to the world. And, you know, to back up for a second, what do I mean by managed hosting? So with managed hosting, we’re handling all of the infrastructure outside of WordPress. So the nginx server, the MySQL database, Linux. And then we’re also integrating with Cloudflare Enterprise. So every site on Kinsta has Cloudflare Enterprise protecting it from DDoS attacks. But also we’re utilizing their CDN and edge caching and image optimization services to really help speed up your site and make sure that anybody in the world that wants to view it can see it really quickly.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:08 Excellent, excellent. And you have an affiliate program, I noticed I’m actually going to put this banner up on the screen here. I’ve been digging into, it’s like I know what I’m doing sometimes, I don’t know, I surprise myself. I’ve been looking into doing more affiliate sales. Right? And I’ve signed up. I think I signed up for Kinsta. I did a whole bunch in one day. As you know, I was laid off from my last job, and I was like, where can I find some passive income? So I’m building a website, I’m doing reviews, I’m doing all the things.

Roger Williams: Excellent.

Michelle Frechette: And so, yeah. So here’s a way to do that. What does your affiliate program look like for people who might want to, you know, get involved with that?

Roger Williams 00:18:43 Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, and I at at risk of making this sound like a whole sales pitch all, all day. I apologize to everybody. You’re asking the questions.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:53 I am of course, we didn’t talk about this and we didn’t talk about this beforehand either. These are just my curiosity.

Roger Williams 00:18:59 No, I’m I’m enjoying it. So, our affiliate program is quite generous. You just go to the link that you see on the screen. kinsta.com/affiliates get signed up and we have our amazing affiliate team will review your application. And, once you’re signed up, you it’s pretty standard from an affiliate program. You get a link that has a specific code in it. So when somebody clicks that link and then signs up, you get credit for the sale. So that’s pretty standard affiliate program stuff. The way that you make money is pretty straightforward. We pay you on signup so it’s anywhere from $50 to $500 depending on which plan somebody signs up for. And then you get 10% of whatever is billed for each month for the life of that account.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:52 There you go.

Roger Williams 00:19:53 So our cheapest plan is $35 a month.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:57 Least expensive marketing. Least expensive.

Roger Williams 00:20:01 Sorry. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:03 That’s what I’m here for.

Roger Williams 00:20:04 Our least expensive plan is $35 a month. So 10% of that’s $3.50 a month for the life of the account. And, you know, we don’t put any limits on when that’s going to end. We just keep paying you, as you know, you brought the business to us. So we’re going to pay you for that. So and thank you for it. You know, other than that, it’s it’s really straightforward.

Roger Williams 00:20:26 We have, like I mentioned, a dedicated, an affiliate management team. So if you know, as you’re an affiliate, there’s ever any concerns or questions about a sign up, all you have to do is reach out and we’ll take a look at it and work with you. The, you know, one key time frame to put in there is about a two week limit. So if somebody signs up and they should have gotten credited to you, you need to reach out to us, you know, within two weeks, which isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to ask you to reach out.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:58 Not at all.

Roger Williams 00:20:59 And and we’ll work with you to figure all that out.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:02 yeah.

Roger Williams 00:21:03 And then we’ve built, the, the affiliate dashboard in-house. So it’s very snappy and.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:08 Nice.

Roger Williams 00:21:09 You know, and if you have feedback on, you know, in the improvements or suggestions, you know, our developers can take a look at those and choose to implement them. If, if it sounds like a good plan.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:20 Nice. I have pulled up on the screen, as I’m sure you saw. Not only do you have the affiliate, you know, information on the affiliate page, but you have 17 pages that talk about doing affiliate sales and doing affiliate marketing. So it looks like a very well supported plan as well. 198 results when I just search affiliate on your blog.

Roger Williams 00:21:38 So yeah. So backing up a second, so who is Kinsta big component of who Kinsta is, is our blog. The way that I first learned about Kinsta was when I was working for one of our competitors, and I was in tech support and in tech support. You get these issues that you haven’t seen before a lot. Right? And so you Google, hey, here’s the error code that just got thrown at me. And you start looking through stuff. And a lot of times you go to StackOverflow and these types of sites. Now you go to AI, but back about like 6 or 7 years ago Any time I would google a WordPress issue, this one blog would keep coming up with these amazing blog posts that would not only, like, explain the issue, but walk you through how to resolve it, usually in multiple different ways. And that blog was Kinsta.com.

Speaker 5 00:22:37 Nice.

Roger Williams 00:22:37 And. And so that got me. I mean again and again the same blog kept coming up with different answers for all these issues. And so eventually I was like, well, I should just go work for these guys. They seem to have it all figured out. And so I applied and I started off in the migrations team, worked my way to client experience, then to sales, and then we created this community position. But yeah, it really is amazing how much we work to give information back to, you know, the community, to the industry as a whole. Yes. It drives a lot of sales, but I mean, there’s still a ton of people I know that get value out of the blog who are not our customers. Not yet. Not yet. But your affiliate program is going to work on that for us.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:29 That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely. Now, I believe this is fairly new announcement as well.

Roger Williams 00:23:36 Yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:37 Kinsta is now a global WordCamp sponsor.

Roger Williams 00:23:40 Yes. So this is pretty exciting. This just came out yesterday, April 1st.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:45 And it was not a joke.

Roger Williams 00:23:47 No. And it was not a joke. It was funny. We were talking about how the you know, it started April 1st, and all these reasons. And I was like, oh, do we want to hold off on doing a press release on April 1st? Probably. So it does get dismissed, but no, just really excited to again find a way to support the community through this. For those that aren’t aware, the the global WordCamp sponsors, what that means is we’re now a gold level sponsor for all of the local WordCamps around the globe. Everything except for the flagship three. And, and so that helps immediately get funding to all of those WordCamps and helps them put on those shows. It’s one less phone call that they need to make to get a sponsor signed up, and all the paperwork and rigmarole that goes through that.

Roger Williams 00:24:40 So now carte blanche, we’re just all Word Camps that aren’t flagships we’re a sponsor of and so help helping get those Word Camps to happen. And then we’re also helping the Meetups happen. So there’s I don’t know the exact number at this point. It’s it’s in the thousands, if not more of Meetups around the globe. And I think these are where the the real magic happens with WordPress, right? I help run a small Meetup here in Durango once a month. We have like anywhere from 4 to 9 people show up. But every time we have great conversations and we talk about WordPress, we talk about digital marketing, we talk about how our lives are going, where we’re going to go on vacation, and we really connect. And so Meetups are just a really exciting way to really get that super local connection happening. And as a global sponsor, we help with the fees responsible for Meetup.com, which love it or hate it. you know, I’m not going to tell you my judgment right now, but it is a useful site for organizing things.

Roger Williams 00:25:51 As an organizer, it makes it really easy for me to quickly get stuff posted up and then get people to come to the event. And then there’s another aspect of the Meetups that a little bit less known, apparently, because I keep on having people asking if we can help them with their venue costs. And I always ask, hey, did you reach out to WordPress Foundation yet? Because as global sponsors, we also help with the funding to help get some venue costs covered. and so that’s just really exciting to help promote both of those programs, WordCamps and Meetups.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:35 Absolutely. That’s awesome. and it’s really nice that there are organizations like Kinsta that, you know, are so all in on the WordPress community that you’re sponsoring, contributors. You’re sponsoring the community at large as well. I, I, I’m signing the paperwork today as one of your most recent contributors that you’re sponsoring. And I want to thank you for sponsoring my time in the WordPress community. So, yeah, I had a little snafu with signing the paperwork, as we talked about before, but it will be signed as soon as we’re done here today. So it will be official very shortly, and I’ll be able to post it on social and say how wonderful it is to have organizations like Kinsta sponsoring the work that I do in WordPress. So thank you for that.

Roger Williams 00:27:21 Well, you’re welcome. And, you know, and we’re proud to sponsor you and the other contributors because we know it’s an all volunteer project. Right? And, and it’s open source and it’s this is how open source works is the companies that are benefiting off of the projects. You know, you don’t have to write it’s open source software. So there’s no obligation to support the software. But I mean, it just makes sense that you you do realize, hey, our income is based off of these volunteer led projects. We really should be reaching out and helping to contribute in some way. And the thing I really enjoy about sponsoring contributors like yourselves Is its immediate impact, right? You’re not it. We could turn to a bunch of employees at Kinsta who have never used WordPress, let alone worked to make WordPress Slack and tried to contribute.

Roger Williams 00:28:24 And you know that that could be very helpful for those individuals to learn more about WordPress and how to contribute to it. But as far as the project’s impact, it’s just not going to be as impactful as sponsoring people who have already been contributing, who know the ins and outs of the project, and then who can even, you know, in a force multiplier effect, help that many more people become part of the project. You know, we help a lot of people. We sponsor a lot of people that that do a lot of documentation work. And, you know, as somebody who kind of ran the documentation program at Kinsta for a little while. I mean, it’s it’s the most important work and it’s the most thankless work that can happen, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:29:10 And it can be tedious. Right. So to have some incentive to have some to nobody does it because they’re expecting anything back. But to have a company like Kinsta to say, I see you and I want to support that as well. It’s just a wonderful thing.

Roger Williams 00:29:23 Agreed, agreed. 100%. And I mean, it is tedious, right? I mean, because you’ve spent all this time putting some sort of documentation together and you miss, like, one step and that’s the first thing somebody points out to you. And so like, there’s a gut punch there. But but it’s important work. Right? And documentation is one of those things that it gets taken for granted. Right? When it’s there. You don’t think anything of the fact that somebody had to put a lot of work into creating this, but the fact that it’s there is literally allowing you to use some aspect of the tool. And so it’s so important. So important.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:02 Right. We’re coming up on a new release soon. We are less than two weeks away from 6.8 being released. We’re in release candidate two right now, one more week after this to work on it. And then it’s like out for for being updated. And and we do know that people find more bugs once it’s been released, but we’re in that bug squashing right now. So, and the work and, and that’s part of the work I’m doing is on that release squad. And so our others. So that’s the work that you’re supporting, not just the work that I do in the community, not just the work that I do with the photo directory, for example. But, but every release as well. So, yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Roger Williams 00:30:40 You’re welcome. And thank you again for that work that you’re doing there, because it is really critical. And again, it’s like the documentation, WordPress can get taken for granted so easily. Because it’s something that’s just there. Right. It’s been there for we’re at like 22 years now. You just go to WordPress.org and you download the software and you can get to work on it. But there’s a lot of time and effort and people involved with making that happen. As far as 6.8 is going. How are you feeling about it? I know that there’s been like some, you know, Matt has put out some ideas that maybe we’re going to do one release a year or something. Do you think that there’s enough people helping with testing out and and checking for bugs at this point?

Michelle Frechette 00:31:29 I mean, there are right there. There’s always people who are in there testing. We have, you know, quite a few people who are doing that kind of thing. You can always use more because we can’t test every scenario. We can’t test it against, you know, you we don’t know how it interacts with every single plugin in the world because we can’t test it on all those things. So the more people test it with those things now never, ever, ever updated on your live site please. I mean, take our word for it. That is not the right way to do it, but open it in a test environment. Use the playground to do that. Use the there’s a plugin you can use for testing. It’s all in the guidelines on the 6.8. If you go to WordPress.org /news you will see it there. the most recent release, candidate two, has all of the information to do that.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:12 so the more people I mean, I’m never going to say we have enough testers, never. So get out there and test it. If you haven’t tested it yet, we want to hear your feedback. Good, bad, ugly. We want to know because we want to make sure that what gets released on April 15th, it just happens to coincide with Tax day here in the US. What gets released on April 15th? We want it to be the best it can possibly be. And although you can never foresee everything, the more that we can take care of prior to that day, the better. Everybody will have it on release day, so.

Roger Williams 00:32:44 No. Absolutely. And I, you know, I know one of the things that encourages me Kinsta we include staging environments with all of our sites. So people like, go ahead, create a staging environment.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:56 Test it out.

Roger Williams 00:32:57 Install the beta plugin and just like. Look at the site like and test it out. Are your forms working? If you have a calendar or something like that? Test everything that’s really critical for your business and make sure that it works. You know, make sure that when you fill out a form, you get the email because.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:17 Test it against your themes, all of those things. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And so yeah. So that’s the work that we’re doing right now. It’s it’s always something. Right? We just onboarded new a whole bunch of new photo moderators. And the queue has been sitting at zero at the end of every day. We have so many people moderating photos. We have over 20,000 photos now in the photo directory. And yeah, it used to be sometimes I would log in and be like, oh, there’s 300 to moderate. Well, let me see how many I can do in 15 or 20 minutes. Now I log in. I’m like the only ones I have to look at are the ones that are held in moderate or held as flagged. Because other people in the United States or outside of the United States can’t see those. It’s something to do with laws and things. And so usually it’s a picture of an animal. Not always. sometimes it’s things that cannot be released. Of course. for any number of reasons. But, I would say and all of the photos I have not allowed through out of the hundreds that get flagged only two. So it it’s AI driven. What gets put there versus other and AI is very conservative and so but other than that you know we just have people just getting in there and it’s all volunteer, as you said, moderating the photos under the photo directory. All of that is voluntary. So it’s a great program. Open source is great as long as people are contributing to it. And companies like Kinsta to make that a lot easier to do. So thanks for all that you do in the community. So you’re sponsoring Post Status, you’re sponsoring, globally. You’re sponsoring contributors. Goodness gracious. That’s awesome. I’d love to hear that.

Roger Williams 00:34:56 Oh, well. Yeah. No, it’s it’s really exciting. It’s something that a lot of us have been pushing for, for, you know, some time and then, Yeah. No, we we realized, hey, this is a good decision to make. not just for Kinsta, but for the community. So, yeah, it’s we’re happy to help.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:14 So any questions? I know we’ve had a couple of comments, but if you have questions, we have just a few more minutes before I let Roger go back to petting his dogs and doing his work. I will say, WordCamp Canada says “Kinsta docs and tutorials are among the best. Super useful.” I don’t know who is logged in today as WordCamp Canada, but those are lovely words that they’ve had to share with you, which is awesome.

Roger Williams 00:35:37 Know that. Thank you. And I’ll make sure that that gets passed on to the team. We’ve got a team of we’ve got multiple full time writers on staff. Then we also do, contract people to help with writing as well. But, It’s a very full time project for us. We have in Slack. We have a content feedback channel that’s internal. But any time, like a customer lets us know and support. Hey, you know, this documentation or something is. Seems a little off. All of us at Kinsta can go into the content feedback channel and share that feedback. You know, and do our best to kind of try and help make suggestions that are helpful for the writers. But the turnaround on those is really quick, and we want to make sure that the documentation is is up to date and useful.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:29 Sounds like a great team.

Roger Williams: Oh, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette: My my last comment is that I think only the best podcasters also have lava lamps in the background, because I have one and I see yours.

Roger Williams 00:36:42 Yes. No. The lava lamp was an absolutely critical piece for the set. It’s just fun to have. It always reminds me, though, I think it was Cloudflare. Who, I don’t know if it was an April Fool’s joke post, but I remember years ago they had released something that the way that they do their random number generator is they have a series of lava lamps, and they use that for actually they scan those and then that’s how they come up with their random number generation.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:12 That’s funny. Claudia says “that the lava lamp is also a critical piece of equipment in her office” So. Absolutely. I don’t know if you can tell, but right in front of my lava lamp is a chicken lamp.

Roger Williams 00:37:23 Okay. Just barely.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:24 And the egg behind, like the egg coming out of the chicken. Is the light bulb.

Roger Williams 00:37:31 Perfect, perfect.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:35 Yeah. There’s always something you can focus on in my background to talk about, that’s for sure. Anyway, anything else, go ahead.

Roger Williams 00:37:41 You have a great diversity background there. I’m just I’m really happy that it’s not a bookshelf of books, that that you’re trying to project that you read.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:52 I never read. No, of course I do. and I did, once upon a time play the guitar. But, those belong to my father. And I joke that when I put them on the wall, I suddenly became a developer because every developer has guitars in their background.

Roger Williams 00:38:10 Okay. All right. I didn’t know about that theory, but it does. It does seem.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:14 Now you’ll now you’ll notice. Now you’ll notice. I’ve we’ve also been asked here “how’s your Durango WordPress meetup going” since you are an organizer out there.

Roger Williams 00:38:23 Yeah. Thank you for asking. You know, it’s going well. I think we’re now I think we’ve done eight, in a row, so consecutively, I almost dropped the ball, on this month on April’s, but, we have it. It’s happening on Friday. It’s going good. You know, organizing events for any event organizers out there, is challenging, And I feel you and you know, the Meetups are a much more simplified, simplified version of an event than like a WordCamp or something. But it does still take work, right? You need to find the venue. You need to get people to show up. You need to try and have something worthwhile to talk about while you’re there. And so, and so it’s a lot of fun. It’s also a challenge. And, I think one of the best pieces of advice somebody told me was to get co-organizers as soon as possible.

Michelle Frechette00:39:19 Yes.

Roger Williams 00:39:20 And I say it’s the best advice. I still don’t know if it is because I haven’t gotten any co-organizers yet, but I feel like, wow, that would probably help a lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:30 So it does, I promise.

Roger Williams 00:39:31 Okay. All right.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:32 Absolutely.

Roger Williams 00:39:33 If anybody has any tips or tricks or advice, please feel free to reach out. Kinsta buys the lunch. So that’s a pretty cool little perk for coming. And we’ve got a really cool venue. It’s EsoTerra Cidery. They have a taproom in downtown Durango, and it’s a really wonderful venue. Lots of nice seats. They have a nice little lunch menu and they give us the space for free to use. They’re very happy to host us. So big shout out to Eso Terra. Thank you so much. They make really good cider. if that’s your jam. But no alcoholic drinks purchased for people during the lunch, by the way.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:18 Makes sense.

Roger Williams 00:40:19 But, yeah, I think, you know, one of the challenges is coming up with topics that apply to the group as a whole, right? And so we’ll have a variety of people, from beginners to advanced WordPress users. How do we come up with topics that attract all of those people and engages all of them?

Michelle Frechette 00:40:41 That is the challenge.

Roger Williams 00:40:43 Yeah. Any advice, any tips you figured out?

Michelle Frechette 00:40:47 Um, mostly I figured out to just aim for the middle, basically. And the people, you know, the people that are overqualified for that will tend to either just not come. Which is sad, but they tend to contribute to the conversation. And people who have not reached that level are still learning it. So that’s basically the best advice I could offer. Or to split, you know, and have a couple of discussions, per conversation, you know, per, per event. So.

Roger Williams 00:41:19 Okay, okay. No, I like that. And I’ve kind of tracked towards that. The other thing I’ve done is I’ve, I’ve brought in some people from outside of WordPress a little bit to talk about like marketing and branding strategy. And really helped to expand the group and the topics a little bit. So it’s.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:38 I even had somebody come once and talk about business insurance.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:43 Okay. And errors and omissions. Which is a big thing for website developers. So.

Roger Williams 00:41:48 Excellent, excellent. Yeah. No I and I think getting more people from the business community involved is great. Durango and I’m outside of Durango. I’m in a little town called Minkus. We’re very rural. I think Durango’s got 17,000 people. Minkus got 1200 people. And one thing that still just drives me crazy is how few local businesses have a website. even, like, even a Wix website, they don’t even have that. They’ll have a Facebook page. And, and so that it breaks my heart a little bit. You know, I want to at some point be like, hey, I’ll build your website for you, but I’m, I’m kind of not in this stage of building websites right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:29 Same.

Roger Williams 00:42:31 Yeah, maybe I’ll help. Maybe I’ll help.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:34 Probably. and we do have, what do you call it? Justification? Vindicate. I don’t the right word. But anyway, “right about the developers having guitars in their walls. Roger could confirm he doesn’t have any on his office wall but four on another wall.” So there you go. I mean, there’s just something about it. And it’s interesting because development and ma and music go hand in hand because of the mathematical equalities to both of those. So it makes sense that somebody who is, you know, mathematically inclined, would be interested in both of those things. Chords are very math, mathematical.

Roger Williams 00:43:10 So absolutely. And maybe this explains why I’m not a good developer because I do not know how to play any music.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:17 That’s okay. You can go to our Spotify and add some songs that you know and, and contribute musically that way.

Roger Williams 00:43:24 Absolutely. Yeah. No, I love listening to music, but yeah. No, just I tried learning piano a bunch of years ago. I want to say like 12 years ago, had an instructor come to the house, got full weighted keys and everything. And, Yeah, I just couldn’t get past, like, Tinker, tinkle, tinkle a little bell or something like that. Oh, man. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:45 No, I have an upright grand in my other room that I. It was my grandfather’s from the 20s, 1920s. Not not 2020. So it’s a oh, gosh, it’s over 100 years old now. My piano. But yeah. And I learned when I was little. So I don’t play very often. I live in a condo. And my neighbors would not be happy if I was banging on that piano at night, but, but it is nice to have around. So, any last any last words? Anything last things you’d like to share with us Roger?

Roger Williams 00:44:12 you know, I it would I’d be remiss without mentioning that, we just rolled out a new product called Kinsta Automatic Updates. This is an add on feature to your website at Kinsta, and this does automatic updates of your themes and plugins, with the caveat that it does visual regression testing. So we take a screenshot before the update. We update it and then we take a screenshot afterwards if there’s a difference that means something went wrong. We revert the update and then we notify you of of which plugin caused the issue so you can start troubleshooting it.

Michelle Frechette: Oh nice.

Roger Williams: I’m really excited about that. You know, I was really excited about WordPress 6.5 when we came out with the auto rollback feature. that only catches PHP errors, which is I mean, it’s still massive. You should at least have that automatically on, I think. but with this feature, it just adds a little bit more to it. So it’ll catch, you know, maybe a plugin breaks a CSS, feature or something. And, and so the site’s not necessarily throwing up PHP error. It’s still running, but it’s broken. And if you’re spending a lot of money on your marketing and advertising, having a landing page broken is really annoying. So this helps wit that.Yeah. So if you have questions about it, come to kinsts.com and take a look to automatic updates. That’s pretty exciting. The team did a really great job.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:34 And if people want to follow up with you, what’s the best place to get in touch with you Roger?

Roger Williams 00:45:38 LinkedIn. I’ll be honest with you. So I’m in the Post Status group. You can DM me there. Thank you for giving me more time in Slack. But honestly, like LinkedIn, I love getting contacted there. I enjoy spending time in LinkedIn. So yeah, reach out to me there. And if you want to be on a Kinsta talk, reach out and we’ll work something out.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:59 Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Again, if people are interested, they can go to Kinsta.com and if they’re interested in the affiliate program it’s Kinsta.com/affiliates. So thank you for all your sponsorships, all that you’re doing and all that you do to highlight some pretty amazing people in WordPress. I appreciate your time today and all that you do.

Roger Williams 00:46:19 Thank you very much, Michelle, and I appreciate you and all the work that you’ve done. And thank you for having me on the show.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:25 My pleasure. Thank you. We’ll see everybody else next week.

Roger Williams 00:46:29 Bye

Michelle Frechette: Bye.