EP455 – Happy 20th Birthday, WordPress!

Sé Reed
Hello, how are you?

Jason Tucker
This is episode number 455 of JPWatercooler.

Sé Reed
Happy birthday WordPress!

Jason Tucker
Happy birthday 20th birthday for WordPress.

Jason Tucker
I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website at jasontucker.blog. birthday or WordPress. I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website at

Sé Reed
Happy birthday 20th! Woo! Happy birthday! Hey, I’m Say. Hey, I’m Say. I do stuff on the internet @SayReadMedia on all the things. See you there.

Jason Tucker
jasontucker.blog. And speaking of which, subscribe to us as a podcast.

Sé Reed
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Cosper
♪ WordPress, it’s your birthday ♪ ♪ Happy birthday WordPress ♪ ♪ Simpsons, please don’t sue us ♪ [silence]

Jason Tucker
podcast and hang out with us in our discord.

Sé Reed
Come hang out with us ’cause we’re real people

Jason Tucker
I had fun.

Sé Reed
and we’re just the spirit in real life.

Jason Tucker
I had fun setting that up this the last night. That was that was a lot of fun.

Sé Reed
You were being way too quiet.

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
I knew there was something up ’cause you weren’t, like, checking in, you’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna do some things.” You always go quiet when you do it. Hey, happy birthday WordPress tomorrow, but also soon in some places.

Jason Cosper
Yeah. Not here. It’s going to be like, it’s going to be like

Sé Reed
Real soon.

Sé Reed
I’m wearing my swag. Do-do-do-do. my sweatshirt which you know I was like oh it’ll be too hot but no because climate change so California is apparently becoming Seattle and uh getting good use out of the sweatshirt

Jason Tucker
So weird.

Sé Reed
it’s happening I also oh

Sé Reed
yeah that’s nice um I have something to show you too and I will tell you about it those of you who

Jason Cosper
84 here today, which is lovely. Like, yeah. Right.

Sé Reed
are listening while I do this look at that I know it’s dangerous to hold up a white oh it’s like making my color weird too. Um, dangerous to hold up a blank white thing, right?

Sé Reed
Because then you can put anything on there.

Jason Cosper
Oh, yeah.

Sé Reed
Uh, but this is an envelope. It’s a sealed envelope. I thought we could do a little unboxing of my, my swag. My 20th.

Jason Tucker
>> Watch out.

Sé Reed
Is this so exciting?

Jason Tucker
Oh, that’s cute.

Sé Reed
Oh, it’s in it. I don’t even, I don’t remember what I ordered.

Jason Cosper
What’s in the box?

Sé Reed
It’s in this tiny box. This is not a box. This is a thing. Should we see? Okay. What’s in the box?

Jason Cosper
Oh.

Sé Reed
Oh, look! it’s a little Wapukee chain with his little hat and his little balloon and then some micro pins.

Jason Cosper
Oh. OK.

Jason Tucker
Alright. Nice.

Sé Reed
Oh you want to see up close? Here you go. There’s some pins. Now these have a second life that is

Jason Cosper
What’s that?

Sé Reed
going to happen for them. Do you want to hear about it everybody? So this design here on this pin

Jason Cosper
Please. [silence]

Sé Reed
is open sourced. It is, you know, you can go get it. You can go get this design. You can make your own t-shirts. You don’t even have to buy the official swag if you don’t want to. You know all about that, right, Jason? Cosper? You did. You do have a history of that. And not just,

Jason Cosper
Yeah, I have a history of making my own t-shirts, that is correct.

Jason Tucker
The

Sé Reed
you know, recent history. Long time history. You used to have a, fun fact everyone, Cosper used to

Jason Cosper
True. Right. Absolutely.

Sé Reed
have a t-shirt blog. So if you’re a long-time listener of the show, you might know that. So this dovetails in so many ways. Okay, so this design, which, you know,

Sé Reed
this kind of looks like a little badge, right? Doesn’t it? Little badge, little badgey badge. So we’ve got a ticket going, and I am very hopeful that through pressure, community,

Jason Tucker
(silence)

Jason Tucker
(laughs) [silence]

Sé Reed
through community desire and collaboration that we will actually be able to begin, have some little commemorative badges that will be on your WordPress profile, your WordPress.org profile. So that’s the

Sé Reed
plan. I’m hopeful that that will happen, not soon, but at some point. You may have noticed

Jason Tucker
[LAUGHTER]

Sé Reed
WordPress moves slowly when it has issues, but I will not give up.

Jason Tucker
[PAUSE]

Sé Reed
And in order to get, I mean this is probably going to change. Oh, are we wearing our same shirts today? Courtney’s chiming in in the chat. So if you participate in the From Blogs to Blocks campaign

Sé Reed
by tomorrow, any time tomorrow, and really it’ll probably be any time ever because who likes to hold a boundary?

Sé Reed
Tomorrow is the day you want to go, you want to get in the marketing, you want to go to the marketing blog,

Sé Reed
and you want to participate in tomorrow’s prompt, because you will probably get then participant badge that says, essentially, I was here.

Sé Reed
I existed in the WordPress ecosystem at this time, which is really all it’s gonna do. But you don’t have one for WP 15. You don’t have one for WP 10.

Jason Tucker
Is it be on a podcast and talk about it?

Sé Reed
So you might get one for WP 20. So I think you should try it, which means we’ll be putting out the last day sooner we’ve been putting out the other one.

Sé Reed
And I need you all to know, anyone who’s listening and tell your friend, it’s an easy lift. You can do this last one, okay?

Sé Reed
I promise. No, definitely not.

Jason Tucker
Because ta-da!

Sé Reed
Definitely not that one.

Jason Tucker
(crying)

Sé Reed
And I want also people to know

Sé Reed
that I have not actually formally participated yet. I mean, I’ve definitely participated, but I have not done my answers yet. But I’m gonna start tomorrow.

Sé Reed
So I wanna set an example for everyone who is a procrastinator. So that’s my little plug.

Jason Cosper
I was, I was telling Tucker in the pre show before you before

Sé Reed
That’s my plug. You’ve already– I believe you meant

Jason Cosper
you, you showed up and joined us say that. Absolutely. But I was

Sé Reed
to say before I graced you with my presence. That’s what you’re trying to do. Right. [laughing]

Jason Cosper
like, I have been getting tagged every single day as to blogs and

Sé Reed
[laughing] Mm-hmm.

Jason Cosper
blogs and into helping y’all come up with some developer

Jason Cosper
Stuff like that, but I have yet to actually do a post.

Sé Reed
Here’s the thing, you’ve already done a multitude of the prompts themselves.

Jason Cosper
Sure.

Sé Reed
Uh, my fav- one of my favorite prompts, and this isn’t all gonna be from blogs to blocks today,

Jason Cosper
No, no, no, no.

Sé Reed
maybe it will be because it’s like my favorite thing ever.

Sé Reed
It’s not like my favorite thing ever, but I’m very proud of it.

Sé Reed
But one of my favorite prompts has been and continues to be the dev prompt from earlier on, which was your suggestion,

Jason Cosper
Yes.

Sé Reed
which is to fork Hello Dolly and change out the lyrics, which I just think is just the most like pure, the purest activity,

Sé Reed
but also just has such potential for funny. And you’ve already done that. It was inspired by your activity.

Sé Reed
So really all you have to do is post your fork.

Sé Reed
You don’t even have to do anything extra. There was also the one also inspired by you about designing a t-shirt and offering it for sale.

Sé Reed
You may have already done that.

Sé Reed
And so I don’t know if you want to post that one,

Sé Reed
but there are some other ones you could post.

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
So anyway, I’m just saying, like,

Sé Reed
if you think about it, folks, you’ve already done a lot of this stuff. If you’ve written your WordPress origin story,

Sé Reed
that’s the first day. Look at that, you’re done. You participated. You are part of it.

Sé Reed
So if you haven’t done it yet, that’s my pitch. Tell your friends. It’s actually really fun.

Sé Reed
And the team that put these together,

Jason Cosper
Oh

Sé Reed
it’s a bunch of collaborators, helped put the prompts together.

Jason Cosper
Okay

Sé Reed
And then the tinier team, we’ve been just like getting them out every day.

Sé Reed
And I think they’re really fun. I’ve really enjoyed them. And it’s not over tomorrow. you have until August to WordCamp US to complete the set. So yeah, the idea is all you have to do

Jason Cosper
Sure, sure.

Sé Reed
is by tomorrow you just have to do, you know, chime in on tomorrow’s ticket. Yeah, that’s exactly

Jason Tucker
See he’s giving herself some runaways, what’s happening here. [laughter]

Sé Reed
what I thought. I mean, I could say that it was for the community and I understand how busy

Jason Tucker
(laughing) Aspirational runway. (laughing) (laughing)

Jason Tucker
(laughing)

Sé Reed
everybody is, it’s for me. It was just for me. No, I know I’m not the only one who has like you know

Sé Reed
a job thing and like some like familial obligations and maybe a pet you know maybe laundry to do. So

Jason Cosper
Sure. [silence]

Jason Tucker
(silence)

Sé Reed
like you know WordPress is already so much of our lives. Panic attacks, panic attacks they happen.

Jason Cosper
Panic attacks, personally, but yeah. Yeah.

Sé Reed
Yeah so the plan here is not to put pressure on people to do another thing because this is

Sé Reed
supposed to be fun. It’s really just about connecting. Like I’m just monologuing here,

Sé Reed
I apologize. But it really is about reconnecting to what WordPress is all about and remembering

Sé Reed
why we’re here, why we’re doing this. Sometimes it can feel really thankless, except for not, I was going to say not skinny bowling wig. I don’t know if that works the same way.

Jason Tucker
(laughing)

Sé Reed
Matt Mullenweg gave out coupons.

Jason Tucker
(laughing) [silence]

Sé Reed
I don’t know what the criteria was, but I’m a current contributor, as I’ve mentioned a

Sé Reed
few times, I’m an active contributor, and we got a little swag coupon in the email.

Sé Reed
So if you are an active contributor, check your spams, because everything from WordPress goes to spam.

Sé Reed
We need to work on that, people. And anyway, that’s my from blogs to blogs monologue. I will now step off of my soapbox. Here we go.

Jason Cosper
Well, let’s, let’s, let’s take something about kind of, since

Sé Reed
Boop.

Jason Cosper
we’re, you know, this is this can be a reflective time. Like, do y’all remember, like, when you first came across WordPress,

Jason Cosper
like when you first, like, got your like, the first like, I had played around with b2k log a little bit, and it was kind of

Sé Reed
[silence]

Jason Cosper
pain in the ass. Like I liked it, but there was just something

Jason Tucker
Yep.

Jason Cosper
to it where I was like, this is like, this is enough of a struggle that I was going to continue to, to work on like

Jason Cosper
blogger, which is what I was using because it was hosted, I pushed a button, it pushed my site up to like my web host FTP.

Sé Reed
[silence]

Jason Cosper
But then I discovered WordPress and specifically, like, I played around with it a little bit. And it was it was rudimentary. I still liked blogger. But then I came across a one click install

Jason Cosper
of it at dream host where I work now. And they were they were one

Sé Reed
[whispers] Oh, cPanel memories.

Jason Cosper
of the first people who had this kind of like one click installer that I seriously I hit a button. Yeah, I hit a button.

Sé Reed
I would say memories except for I’m literally in a site right

Jason Cosper
Trauma. Yeah, I hit the I hit the button. And then within

Sé Reed
now for a client who’s still on cPanel, so it’s not really memories so much as like, yeah, current times also. Anyway, you hit the button.

Sé Reed
(laughing) Ding.

Jason Cosper
about five minutes, the five minute install, I had a site and could start playing with it. It already had something to import

Sé Reed
Is that your, what was your OG domain there?

Jason Cosper
content from blogger. But I decided to do kind of like a fresh start and I started playing around with it.

Jason Cosper
Yes, it was I at the time, really liked having very

Sé Reed
Do you remember? [silence]

Jason Cosper
difficult to spell domain names. So I had a William Gibson Neuromancer reference. It was Ono Sendai. Ono Sendai.info was

Sé Reed
Neuromancer! Oh my gosh, it’s amazing.

Jason Cosper
my original. Yeah. Right. Um, yeah,

Sé Reed
Also, uh, sidebar apologies to everyone else listening who’s not me or Cosper. Have we never talked about Neuromancer before? This is like an obsession that I have from childhood because I never finished the game on the Apple IIe.

Jason Tucker
I loved it. It was great. Yeah.

Sé Reed
How have I not talked to, have we talked about this before? Have I? Okay, we’ll have to talk about that later. See, this is what happens when you like,

Jason Cosper
I sure that that was that was my Yeah, that was my my early kind

Sé Reed
think about your memories, you’re like, oh yeah. Remember that? No, I actually, Neuromancer, I could never get off the freaking planet. Anyway, okay.

Sé Reed
Not the point, but the, I got that reference. It’s my point.

Jason Cosper
of foray into WordPress, I eventually brought my t shirt

Sé Reed
Just selling my eyeballs. Genius.

Jason Cosper
blog that I was running on Blogger into pre-shrunk, was

Jason Cosper
the name of that and brought that into WordPress. And I mean,

Sé Reed
Genius title. [silence]

Jason Cosper
yeah, I built up fortunately, thanks to some coverage on my

Jason Cosper
boing boing and cocky.org and stuff like that I had enough of an audience that at the height I had like 1000 t-shirts with crap printed on them that had–

Sé Reed
You’re like, you’re like the early threadless. [silence]

Jason Cosper
I was the top referral person on Threadless. I was the top of their leaderboard for four years.

Sé Reed
See, we’re in the company of greatness here.

Jason Cosper
Well, my presence is the present.

Sé Reed
And just like– it really is.

Jason Tucker
That’s rad.

Jason Cosper
>> I wasn’t.

Sé Reed
You know, like, there is something

Sé Reed
to be said for all those– like, we’re in that special age cohort where we were just like, kind of like, really into the internet.

Jason Cosper
Yeah.

Sé Reed
Like, we were just like, kind of like the– before it got all, you know, glossy and sealed off

Jason Cosper
Yeah.

Sé Reed
like fancy car engines now, you know,

Sé Reed
we were like in there with our oil and our whatever, just like, oh, look at, I can soup this thing up to do that.

Jason Cosper
>> All Right.

Sé Reed
And I think that I love thinking about how much time was spent

Sé Reed
like trying to make things work. Like, I, and long, for a million reasons, but I just realized that I still have Zamp on my computer. Did I mention XAMPP?

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
XAMPP? I still don’t know how to say it.

Jason Tucker
This just shows you that Say never rebuilds her computer. The day she opened it is the same

Sé Reed
My computer is actually older than WordPress.

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
But no, I remember we had to really set up

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
a whole thing that was for local servers. And I used to teach that install.

Sé Reed
I taught it at WordCamp Phoenix. and I would teach it even to small business owners. Like, here’s how you go into your FTP

Sé Reed
and you’re moving these things up.

Sé Reed
And then when they introduced the quick install, I was like, look, you just hit this button and then you do this and you ignore all of this stuff.

Sé Reed
And then you just keep going. Anyway, what were you saying about pre-shrunk? So sorry, so many tangents, million tangents.

Jason Cosper
No, no, no. So no, I just kind of brought everything into WordPress. I started like

Sé Reed
[silence]

Jason Cosper
bringing sites into it and the importer worked so well that I was like, well, I think this

Jason Cosper
This is my way forward.

Sé Reed
I think that’s a key thing to remember, that the importer was

Jason Cosper
And you know that.

Sé Reed
really important part of that.

Jason Cosper
Yes. Absolutely.

Sé Reed
That was, it would not have, you know, everyone doesn’t want to

Jason Cosper
Yes.

Sé Reed
start over and so just having that, that, that immediate thing

Jason Cosper
Yes.

Sé Reed
from Blogger, which is still in there by the way, that it’s, I think it’s still in there, isn’t it? Or is it Blogspot now? I don’t know. But I think it’s still in the like auto import tools. They’ll like come in. Now. I want to like go look. I haven’t looked at that in a while. Anyway, so what about you?

Jason Cosper
(silence)

Sé Reed
What about you Tucker? Oh.

Jason Tucker
Oh boy. Um, let’s see here. So I think, uh,

Jason Tucker
Jen and I were, I already proposed to her and I needed a website built for our wedding website.

Jason Tucker
So I own Jason and Jen.com and we needed a wedding website.

Sé Reed
Number five or sorry?

Jason Tucker
So I installed the Mambo and, um,

Jason Tucker
hated now is number one. And, um, and, um,

Sé Reed
That’s so funny.

Jason Tucker
Um, I, I fricking hated it.

Sé Reed
[inaudible]

Jason Tucker
It was, it was the worst. It looked the backend look like it was PHP BB, which was this, you know, like forum software and it had the exact same time to kind of look

Jason Tucker
and feel to it and it sucked. Like everything about it sucked. And then what it became, um, which one did it become Jumla or become Drupal?

Jason Tucker
I can’t remember which one it was, whichever one it was.

Sé Reed
either. [laughter]

Jason Tucker
It became one of the two.

Sé Reed
[LAUGHTER]

Jason Tucker
not my cup of tea. So, um, I ended up, uh, using, um,

Sé Reed
I was going to talk about LiveJournal.

Jason Tucker
B2 and then ended up with WordPress and ended up starting to use the WordPress

Jason Cosper
(silence)

Jason Tucker
stuff. And I already had my own personal website that was running on WordPress, um, as well. But the, the main website that kind of really started it off was that, um, you know, that, that wedding website and yeah, yeah. I mean, my origin, my origins in this were like using like live journal back in the day and using

Jason Cosper
(murmurs)

Jason Tucker
movable type and doing all the movable type stuff. And um,

Jason Cosper
(coughing)

Sé Reed
[PAUSE]

Jason Cosper
Okay.

Jason Tucker
yeah. And then moving my stuff from live journal into WordPress cause there was an importer for that. And then I’m running some crazy like Pearl script that would like help you move

Jason Tucker
all of the content as well as the images. And that was funky.

Sé Reed
Question for both of you about this.

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
When you moved back in the day from LiveJournal or Blogger to WordPress, did you consider or was there

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
an impact in losing the kind of the community or like the web circles that had developed there because that you know is much more of like that you know the web circle time and I don’t really remember I know there were comments on

Sé Reed
obviously on blogger and on live journal but I don’t remember if there was like a

Sé Reed
greater community that was like a forum or anything like that I was not really

Sé Reed
like into live journal I dated a guy who was into live journal and so I was I

Jason Tucker
Yeah. Yep.

Sé Reed
I like, you know, had secondhand LiveJournal stuff,

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
but I never really got into it because it seemed weird to me to be typing all my feelings into the computer. I had, I was like, I was like, but, and I’m still,

Jason Cosper
[AUDIO OUT]

Jason Tucker
No, it was just bought by the Russians.

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
by the way, still feel this way. It’s like, I still don’t want to put all my feelings onto the internet. I don’t think LiveJournal was ever hacked though, was it?

Jason Cosper
>> Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have so many — I have so many

Sé Reed
That’d be interesting. Was it?

Jason Tucker
Yeah, so that was the whole reason why my whole community left it was the fact that

Sé Reed
Really? [silence]

Jason Tucker
it had a huge like Russian cohort.

Sé Reed
No, wait, wait, wait, wait, no wonder they’re so good at psychoanalyzing America. They have like all of the inner thoughts of the millennials

Jason Tucker
basing everything off of like 2000s.

Sé Reed
from like the teen angst years.

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
They’re like, we have all the data. [laughs]

Jason Cosper
live journal posts that are very much like–any time one of my friends would get emotional in

Sé Reed
[silence]

Jason Cosper
the early 2000s, we would just tell each other, “Go tell it to your live journal.” It’s just like,

Sé Reed
Oh my god, I’m going to start saying that now.

Jason Cosper
“Hey, we’re just trying to have a good time. Just go tell it to your live journal.”

Jason Tucker
Yeah. And, and I moved, I moved all of my live journal stuff to my personal

Jason Tucker
website, my, my, you know, my Jason Tucker site, which has moved and changed domain name so many times now, but all that content still on there, which is,

Jason Cosper
[ Pause ]

Sé Reed
Feeling.

Jason Tucker
which I think is hilarious. Cause like you could go back and just like read about how like Jen and I were starting to date and all this stuff. And the thing was, is that account back on live journal was private.

Jason Tucker
And so that whole thing was written in a way knowing that it was private and only my friends would be able to read it.

Sé Reed
believing it was private you mean?

Jason Tucker
Right, right.

Sé Reed
[laughs]

Jason Tucker
So, and all of my friends accounts were all private as well.

Sé Reed
Mm-hmm.

Jason Tucker
And all these friends that I was talking and I’m talking about are, um, are like personal, personal close friends at the time.

Jason Cosper
– Right. It didn’t all just get pushed to you. You had to actually actively

Jason Tucker
So we all would just read each other’s live journals and stuff.

Sé Reed
Yeah, that’s what I was, that was part of the community because you could, did you get like a

Jason Tucker
Hit refresh.

Sé Reed
notification or something? It’s like something would pop up and you’d be like, oh hey, here, or you just have to go check. Remember how you have to go check the internet? Check, go check stuff, go see if they refresh the page, yeah exactly.

Jason Tucker
because yeah, yeah, I will say it is weird that, you know, thinking about this on the

Sé Reed
I… Which you know is interesting in terms of like

Jason Cosper
go check.

Sé Reed
information bombardment, just as a thought.

Sé Reed
[silence]

Jason Tucker
live journal side of things is that even before that with my space, my space had, I mean, they were probably in the round the same time as well, but like I put a lot of stuff on Myspace, but Myspace was definitely not like live journal. Like I treated live journal like an actual journal where Myspace was kind of

Sé Reed
No. [silence]

Jason Tucker
just like, here’s some stupid stuff that I found on the internet. I’m going to share it with other people, which is like Twitter. Yeah.

Sé Reed
Yeah. Early meme sharing.

Jason Cosper
Oh, like Twitter.

Sé Reed
[silence] Yeah. I don’t want to talk about Twitter anymore.

Jason Tucker
(laughs) Oh my gosh, isn’t that true?

Sé Reed
Every time we talk about Twitter, we should have like a moment of silence for Twitter

Sé Reed
because this is like sad. Okay, one tiny sidebar on Twitter. This is not even political. I opened a tweet the other day and it was a literal blog post.

Jason Cosper
(silence)

Sé Reed
I was like, what is happening while I’m scrolling?

Jason Tucker
(laughs)

Sé Reed
And I’m like, this is not Twitter. I am on this guy’s blog. And like I’m reading it and I’m just like, like the people used to try to be concise

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
and like fit their words and now it’s just like blah blah blah blah blah. I’m like wow. So Twitter has now gone full circle and is now LiveJournal? That’s what I’m feeling like.

Jason Cosper
Sure. [ silence ]

Sé Reed
LiveJournal hmm I don’t like it at all. Anyway sad times for Twitter. Let it be known. This

Jason Tucker
>> Right.

Sé Reed
is why it is so kind of cool essentially that WordPress is 20 because you know Twitter’s

Sé Reed
not even 20, right? Like Facebook, Facebook is like about the same age, right? As WordPress,

Jason Tucker
Right. [ silence ]

Sé Reed
I think, I don’t know, something like that. But like, um, MySpace, you know, it’s dead and gone,

Sé Reed
you know, might still be there, but it’s dead and gone. And the fact that there’s still, you know, a community happening, there’s innovation happening, there’s, there’s,

Sé Reed
you know, momentum, there’s stuff going on new things, still old things. But that is, that’s kind of a huge deal because you can lose stuff like we have lost Twitter, we have

Sé Reed
lost MySpace and is that because it’s open source and they can’t, they, whoever

Sé Reed
they are, can’t, someone cannot take it away, buy it and change it and I think probably yes but that is really a big deal like it’s a it’s like if a dog were

Jason Tucker
But there is Space Hay, which is actually a MySpace clone.

Jason Cosper
[PAUSE]

Sé Reed
to live to 20 years old it’s like a big deal you know what I mean like a tech a a tech company living, what is that? Space hay. Space hay.

Jason Tucker
(laughs)

Sé Reed
I just think it’s a really big deal that, you know,

Jason Tucker
(laughs) [ Pause ]

Sé Reed
WordPress is still here, still ticking, still growing, still, you know, I would say in its development stages, honestly. Like, I don’t feel like we’re, like, peaking.

Jason Cosper
Right. WordPress is going through, it’s, I’m sorry,

Sé Reed
Maybe we peaked, but now we’re re-peaking. I don’t know. I just think that’s something to be commended, the community, but also like–

Jason Cosper
Wordpress is going through its like awkward teenage years. And

Sé Reed
no, no, please. Yes, yes.

Jason Cosper
now we’re like kind of in college trying to find ourselves, trying out a few new personalities. You know, maybe

Sé Reed
Experimenting with authoritarianism,

Jason Cosper
having like, yeah, right, Scarface poster up on the wall, you know, maybe a Big Lebowski

Sé Reed
you know, like a little bit of communism, a little bit of socialism, a little bit

Sé Reed
of authoritarianism, just for fun, just to see. [laughs] Yeah. You know.

Jason Cosper
or Usual Suspect, something like that, but just, you know, one of those movies you really get into in college.

Sé Reed
There might be some psychedelics in some corners.

Jason Cosper
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Sé Reed
There just might be. Not this corner, ’cause I have a toddler, but, you know, some people don’t, and, you know,

Jason Cosper
Not bad. Right. So… I’m… Okay. So… I’m going to go ahead and do a little bit of

Sé Reed
some people are going to Burning Man. That’s fun for them. No, not it.

Jason Tucker
No, not a not millionaire enough

Sé Reed
I’m just saying, there’s a lot.

Jason Tucker
Yeah, it’s called glamping

Sé Reed
Not rich enough to go live in a place to pretend I have no money for a week.

Jason Tucker
(laughing)

Sé Reed
But all of those, you know, we really are in like,

Jason Tucker
[ Pause ]

Sé Reed
and even the WordCamps, experimental phase, right? Like the recent announcement that we’re going to experiment

Jason Cosper
Yep. WordPress, the college here. Say, you haven’t talked about your origin story though.

Sé Reed
with the WordCamp format, it’s like, just seeing who we are, man. We’re just like seeing what works for us. I love it. Oh my god, yes. You know, honestly, I mean I’ve told the story before. I came across WordPress because of my

Jason Cosper
Where did you come across WordPress? Sure. [wind]

Sé Reed
beloved friend

Jason Tucker
[ Pause ]

Sé Reed
Brianna who is available at Technosiren and Brianna org on all the things. And she was an OG. I keep thinking about

Jason Cosper
Oh. This isijke.

Sé Reed
she was doing a thing with her then partner in San Francisco and I went up there for that and

Sé Reed
They went to like I couldn’t see them the day before or after I think was the day after the event because they were going to work

Jason Cosper
Oh. Oh. Oh.

Sé Reed
So I like saw them on that day and then they were like, okay. Bye we’re out. I’m going to work him

Jason Cosper
Oh.

Jason Tucker
Mm.

Jason Cosper
[AUDIO OUT]

Sé Reed
so I you know, I knew about it and I was like, what are you you’re going to a what a thing like this was like 2007 I think so I was you know 26 or so and

Jason Cosper
(wind whooshing)

Sé Reed
I

Jason Cosper
(water bubbling)

Sé Reed
Remember that like that was my first introduction to the community component. I don’t actually really remember

Sé Reed
it was 2006 when Brianna started helping me host my website for my

Sé Reed
My bookstore, but I had already really been into the internet for a very long time You know basically since I was 12 and on Geo cities and all of that

Jason Tucker
Uh huh.

Sé Reed
My first, my first best number one domain, I registered on

Sé Reed
Network Solutions, and I lit, I just lost it. My card expired in November and I didn’t, I didn’t do the right,

Jason Cosper
Oh. Yes. That is a late ’90s, early– a late ’90s

Sé Reed
you know, thing of checking because Network Solutions, I can never remember to log in there. And there’s one account, one domain on it that I just could

Jason Tucker
Aww man.

Sé Reed
never remember. Yeah, and I lost it.

Sé Reed
Do you want to know what it was? I’ll tell you. Ideosyncratic.net. That’s what it was. It was beautiful. Isn’t it? I was like, ah, so idiosyncratic. I also had one of those like email makers that was like, you had like a, it was like

Jason Tucker
Nice and short. [LAUGH]

Jason Cosper
early 2000s domain name right there. Lovely. [silence]

Sé Reed
when the domain names for emails first started coming out and there was like, you could get,

Sé Reed
you know, some fancy names. So I had @mindless.com.

Sé Reed
I thought that was really like, that was like so, you know, so transcendent.

Sé Reed
But yeah, my first idiosyncratic was on there. It’s in the Wayback Machine.

Sé Reed
I’ll be posting that. That’s actually one of the prompts is go back in time on your, you know, find the oldest

Sé Reed
website that you’ve worked on in any way on the Wayback Machine.

Jason Cosper
Yeah. Yeah.

Sé Reed
See if, you know, that you can find and then post about it. Remember it. So we are verbally, I’ll just post this. Then I’ll be able to do my prompt. Um, yeah, it was, it’s gone. I also had my bookstore website, um, again, available on, uh, on, uh, what’s that thing called?

Jason Tucker
Go back, Machine.

Sé Reed
Way back machine. Yeah.

Jason Cosper
Yeah.

Sé Reed
Um, I, I started early on trying to figure out how to do a, like

Sé Reed
an e-commerce component. Um, I built out a whole, uh, I got really convoluted into it and then like broke

Jason Cosper
(silence)

Jason Cosper
(silence)

Sé Reed
like so many sites because they were just so the, you know, cause I was in the

Sé Reed
database early times and it was just, it would get so

Jason Cosper
[Pause]

Sé Reed
tangled I just had to like blow it up.

Jason Cosper
[Pause]

Sé Reed
And I never, I never did it. I never finished and, you know, put together my book

Sé Reed
inventory and database system that I worked on for a very long time. It was a lot more complicated then. It was like trying to build something with like sticks

Jason Cosper
>> Yeah. >> Okay. I’m going to go to my next slide.

Sé Reed
and now there’s like, you know, I had no glue, just like string and sticks and then now there’s like glue and nails and like saw and like nice wood and you know so I always I always feel like I’m a little bit ahead of my curve. We try to do things before they’re like possible and then I give

Jason Tucker
[laughs] This is easy. Here we go.

Sé Reed
up and then other people come along and they’re like oh these tools are new and easy and I was like I should have waited like 10 minutes. That would have been great. Yeah yeah. Pain

Jason Cosper
Oh wow.

Sé Reed
points of being a slow adopter. Anyway, that was my my entrevue was as a user, but then trying to make it work. And I had already been, you know, building websites with Dreamweaver and Front Page. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, moving the little pixels around for my spacers,

Jason Cosper
Oh.

Jason Tucker
Yes, yes. As a home site user myself and windows. Yes.

Sé Reed
Which to this day, okay, every time I put a spacer block in, in Gutenberg, every time,

Jason Tucker
(laughing)

Sé Reed
every time I think I am putting a pixel in to block this off, like, it’s like, literally,

Sé Reed
I feel like we haven’t evolved.

Jason Cosper
It’s like the CSS ZenGuard never happened.

Sé Reed
So I don’t know.

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
Like, why are we ignoring CSS?

Jason Cosper
[no audio]

Jason Tucker
(sobbing) [silence]

Sé Reed
I actually saw, I’ve been experimenting a lot with blocks and block themes, as we all have to. And I saw, who was it? I think it’s the Genesis site. They were talking about

Sé Reed
how the new way to build themes is to build them with modules. And I, you know, build

Sé Reed
them block by block and have the styles in the individual blocks. And I was really just

Sé Reed
struck with this. Like, where’s the CSS? Like, where? Like, why are we like inline styling?

Sé Reed
It’s what we’re doing here. Like, what’s going on? Anyway, I’m sorry we’re in overtime and I’m ranting about inline styling.

Jason Cosper
[Pause]

Jason Tucker
No, that’s all right.

Sé Reed
Every so often I have to go on a rant about blocks and inline styling.

Jason Tucker
I do have, I do have a couple of questions.

Sé Reed
So here it is. That was today’s rant.

Jason Tucker
So what is the, since we’re getting nostalgic, we might as well just go full

Sé Reed
Yes. You are getting very sleepy.

Jason Tucker
nostalgic. What, what’s the, what’s, what’s a common word domain name that you

Sé Reed
I’ve had a lot.

Jason Tucker
used to own? Do you have like a, just a normal, just common word domain name that that you

Jason Cosper
Well, I mean, pre-shrunk.org was basically the common, yeah.

Jason Tucker
used to know you stone? Stone. And that one’s good.

Sé Reed
I still have a lot. Yeah, it’s good.

Jason Cosper
common, yeah.

Jason Tucker
That is good.

Jason Tucker
Yeah.

Sé Reed
I was never good at, again, not good at getting them ahead of time. So, you know, I don’t know.

Jason Tucker
Uh.

Sé Reed
And then I can, you know, if I have an idea for something, I would have come up with it.

Jason Cosper
[Pause]

Sé Reed
You know, I never was a squatter. Like I would never be like, oh, someone will want this.

Jason Tucker
Yeah. In 98 I owned hatchback.com which was hatchback.com.

Sé Reed
It never occurred to me to like resell things. Like I could have resold so many things, but that didn’t like occur to me at all. That people would buy internet stuff.

Jason Tucker
Yeah. Um, I drove a civic hatchback and so I wanted to have, I wanted to have a

Sé Reed
Hmm, no. Hatchback?

Jason Cosper
Whoa.

Jason Tucker
website devoted to hatchbacks and then I, and I ended up realizing that like,

Jason Tucker
that’s very like, um, you know, I’m not a fan of the word hatchback, but I

Jason Cosper
[Pause]

Jason Tucker
then I ended up realizing that like that’s very like narrow.

Sé Reed
Bummer. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Jason Tucker
So I ended up getting another domain name called import style.com. And that was like a whole website devoted to, you know, cars and all sorts of fun stuff. So

Jason Cosper
So what did you did you just end up letting hatchback calm laps

Jason Tucker
I did, I did. I was never, I was just like, say,

Jason Cosper
Sure

Jason Tucker
I was never good at like paying for something that I wasn’t going to be using, especially way back then. Now I have tons of domain names that I don’t use

Sé Reed
Let’s be clear. I am great. Yeah, I was like, I’m great at paying for things I’m not using.

Jason Tucker
that I pay for.

Sé Reed
That’s not what I said.

Jason Tucker
Yeah, I have never sold the domain name.

Sé Reed
I’m just not good at thinking about that I might sell them someday.

Jason Cosper
Sure

Sé Reed
Great at throwing money down a hole though, totally.

Jason Tucker
I’ve never sold the domain name, it sucks.

Jason Cosper
(coughing)

Sé Reed
Yeah, I realized that if you’ve held on to a domain name like

Jason Cosper
(coughing)

Sé Reed
idiosyncratic for, I don’t know, literally like almost 20 years,

Sé Reed
you should probably not let it lapse and just put it on the auction and let someone buy it. This is what I learned.

Jason Tucker
Yeah. Yeah.

Sé Reed
when I did not sell my bookstore but closed my bookstore, you should not do that, you should sell the business. You could make this WordPress adjacent by saying if you have a plugin or a theme or a website, don’t just disappear it, like transfer it. Disappearing it will not take it out of your consciousness,

Jason Cosper
Sure. Yeah.

Sé Reed
will not, just give it, make it, help it move on. That’s what you gotta do.

Jason Tucker
Make sure it’s really popular, sell it to somebody else, then they’ll change it

Sé Reed
Anyway, that’s my two tips.

Jason Cosper
The one thing–

Sé Reed
Yeah, but the point is,

Jason Tucker
into a whole different product entirely, and then push out an update. Yeah.

Sé Reed
is that that thing won’t exist anymore living in your subconscious forever. Because let me tell you, I was gonna do all sorts of cool stuff with idiosyncratic.net. [laughs]

Jason Cosper
Sure. One of the things that just going back to old domain names, and you mentioned network solutions, I am enough of an internet ancient, where I remember that you used to be able to pay network solutions with a check, you could mail them a check for your domain name.

Sé Reed
Back in the day. (laughs) (laughs)

Sé Reed
(laughs) Wow.

Jason Cosper
funny thing was, is they would register your domain name, and with the promise of a check. So there was a brief period in like

Sé Reed
Oh my lord.

Jason Cosper
the mid 90s, where some friends and I had worked out a trick where we would say we were registering the domain name,

Jason Tucker
(laughs)

Jason Cosper
never send a check, and then the domain would lapse and then

Jason Cosper
someone else would come along and register the same domain name point it say they were sending a check. And we’ve, we We floated at least three domain names that way for…

Jason Tucker
[Crying]

Sé Reed
You’re the reason they’ve implemented this stupid 60 day

Jason Cosper
Yeah.

Sé Reed
window on either side of the domain name registration and

Jason Cosper
Right.

Sé Reed
also the reason I never transferred idiosyncratic.net off of stupid network solutions because I would never remember 60 days later to do it or 60 days earlier. I blame you.

Jason Tucker
Oh, God.

Jason Cosper
Yeah.

Sé Reed
I’m glad that we got there so that I could know that that was

Jason Tucker
[Crying]

Sé Reed
your fault. That makes me happy.

Jason Cosper
My bad. K

Jason Tucker
Hey it did. Boost.

Sé Reed
All right, well, I just want to tell everybody that I’m going tweet it out and maybe Watercooler will, you know, do the retweet thing or the remastodon or remasticides or whatever. What do you mean you say? Boost! It’s gonna boost it.

Sé Reed
The last post, which is gonna actually go out our time this afternoon, which is like, you know, other time zones’ later time. So I encourage, I ask, nay, I beg. Not really beg, I don’t beg,

Sé Reed
But like, I strongly recommend that you find the announcement somewhere or check the marketing

Sé Reed
blog and participate because you just want to, you know, put your mark on the internet.

Sé Reed
Because in 20 years, the likelihood that the make site still exists is probably pretty

Jason Cosper
(water dripping) (wind blowing)

Sé Reed
high.

Sé Reed
And it’s probably higher than whatever the odds are for whatever tiny website you’ve

Sé Reed
going on with your blog. So you know let’s it’s like a it’s like it’s gonna be like a

Sé Reed
little time capsule right so participate in the time capsule today knowing that in 20 years we’ll all be way older and much more nostalgic. Oh my god we’re gonna be so old in 20 years. Um whoo that was a little scary just for a minute

Jason Cosper
Yeah. Happy birthday.

Sé Reed
there. I love it. So happy birthday WordPress. Thanks for bringing us all together. Happy birthday WordPress. We love you

Jason Tucker
>> Happy birthday, WordPress. Here’s our outro. See you.

Sé Reed
and hate you but also mostly love you. Listen on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify,

Sé Reed
YouTube and TIL vids. Also join us in the discord. That’s where the chats are at.

Sé Reed
And there are also lots of emojis. Happy birthday WordPress!