Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Start your week smiling with your friends. Kathy's aunt and Michelle Frechette. It's time to get ready for some weekly motivation with WP motivate.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: But even if you do, it's all okay.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Happy Thursday. Cathy.
What day is it?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Thursday.
It's a day where I actually feel okay.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah. I woke up this morning thinking, oh, thank God it's Friday.
Tomorrow morning's gonna suck when it's not Saturday.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: But that's okay.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: It's okay. It's all good.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah. See, Thursdays are garbage days, so it's just like chaos of a Thursday morning. And I'm always okay with that because it's like end of the week. And, yeah, I'm okay with Thursdays. And I get to talk to you on most Thursdays, so.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: That's true. That's true. All good for you. It is what I. It is the highlight of my Thursday when we get to talk.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: So me too. If we do it on Wednesday or Friday, then it's the highlight of those days. So. Yeah, same.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: So I got to talk to you yesterday, too.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: I know. That was for me. It is the same. Likewise. Absolutely.
Okay, so I have learned this. Okay, I'm going to sound like an idiot if I say just learn it. I didn't just learn it, but I've been thinking of this, like, idea of, like, full stack developer.
I post jobs, places, and I see full stack developer and I'm like, it's so weird that we call it like, a stack. Cause it isn't like a stack of books and other things. Right. But it got me thinking, like, I'm not a developer. You know that I know, everybody knows. Michelle's not a developer. However, I do use tech, and I use tech on a regular basis. I have hardware, of course, like my. We all remember when I. My cat ruined my Apple keyboard a few weeks back, right? So, like, I use tech. I have a lovely microphone that was gifted to me by a dear friend who I might be talking to right now.
But the tech stacks that we use. Right. So one of the questions that we ask the wonder women that we highlight in the WP Wonder Women newsletter is, you know, what are a few tech softwares and things like that that you swear by that really kind of keep you sane? I can't remember how we word it. But anyway, that kind of thing, it's like, got me thinking about tech stacks and the kind of tech we use. The tech I use, as in marketing, might be very. Well, it is very different than somebody who's a developer or somebody who's an accountant or, you know, there are very few people in the world today that don't use tech in one way or another, of course.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: And so I was just curious, what are some of the tech things that you and I both use? And I wonder, you know, where we might overlap and things that we swear by. And I know people. Like, for example, I don't know. I know people that absolutely love Evernote. Tried it for a while. I didn't love it. So, like, Evernote's not in my tech stack, but Apple notes is because I can use it on my iPad, my iPhone, and on my laptop. So wherever I am, I've got access to those notes. Right. And I will. And you can share notes with people who are also on Apple devices. So, like, I have a recipe list that I share with a couple of friends, and we add things to that.
If I've done work for a friend, let's say, so ws form. Right. We all know I'm good friends with Mark. I came up with a whole bunch of marketing ideas for him on a plane. One time. I put it in an apple note and I just shared it with him. So now he's got access to it, too. So Apple notes is definitely one of my textx softwares.
But, yeah, let's kind of do the, let's volley back and forth, if you will, about things that we enjoy using.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: I've tried all the notes, too, but I do love the fact that you can share notes. So, like, this year has been my year of, like, getting back into some physical shape. And my trainer, every Sunday night, Apple note comes through with all of his suggested meal items.
Wink. Wink.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Suggested, yes, exactly. I caught that.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: I didn't exactly follow all those. And then also, like, what my, the exercises that I was supposed to do for the week and then. So I get that. And. Yeah, but it was great because now I've got access to everything. It wasn't complicated at all. Notion is another one that I've used. You know, we've used that. We used that when I was at stellar with you, and I kind of still have some stuff in there. And then I've been doing some joint work with other people, and notion has been really helpful for that, too. But I. My personal notion is a disaster area, an absolute disaster area. My notes are also a disaster area, but I can search them very easily. And. Yeah, but the other thing I do for notes is day one, the journaling app. I use that for notes, too. Like, if I just have stream of consciousness stuff. It goes into day one and I just like, gotta get this out of me. And then, but sometimes I'll be, like, listening to a call or like doing some research and I'll put that stuff into day one too, because it's also very searchable and very easy, and I've got it on all of my devices and everything too. And day one is also really cool because you can also, like, do shared journals. So, like, if I. But when I first got on the web, one of the things that I loved was people had, like, web journals and there was, everybody had, like, crazy names for them and it was like, they have web rings and there was no, like, google back then. And it was like really early days of the web and everybody had their personal websites and they got counters.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: The counter on the footer.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Yes. And it was like before WordPress, before, you know, all of that. And people just journaled. And so people would share journals, and then everybody moved over to live journal, and then the Russians bought it and everything. But I loved that. So I love the idea of, like, shared journals, of just like, people just like, being able to, like, privately share, like, their intimate thoughts and, like, have, there was something really special about those days. So I love journaling for that. But I don't share any of my journals, really.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: And I wish I was a journaler. I just can't get into it. But I write other things. Right. So, I mean, just that my birthday. But I am almost afraid to admit as a wordpresser that I still have a blog spot.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: So you.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: It's got a lot of my poetry and my writing on it, so I've never just, like, pulled it all off there and put it someplace else. So I still have a blog spot. If anybody's interested in reading my lovely little poetry, it's accidentalwordslinger dot blogspot.com.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: The last time I put anything in there was 2020. So it's been a few years, but a seven letter word for Modlin. That's the last entry that's in there.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Interesting. I know. I had blogspots, too. Yeah, I wonder.
Just go to blogspot.com and I could probably see what I. Oh, look at there.
2008.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: A few years.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Have you published anything? Oh, my stars. Well, I guess I know what I'll be reading tonight.
I'm not being melodramatic for a fact.
Okay. There's, there's some juicy stuff in my blog spot.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: I feel like I need to, like, you know, oh, look, I have four followers and my name is still in there as Michelle Ames, and I'm a 50 something wannabe writer and crafter. I enjoy writing short stories, poetry, essays, et cetera, and love working with paper, felt, fabric beads, et cetera, creating crafts. I've discovered that if you listen well and keep your eyes wide open, life can be fun, educational, and quite a ride.
How did I think I was five years ago?
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So.
But I will say what I used notes for, Apple notes is I put things there that I want to be able to copy across devices. Right. So, like, I have in there all of my ideas for wordcamp pitches, for wordcamp talk pitches, so that I can, like, edit it there. I can also just copy paste when I, I don't have to open. I don't figure out, like, which, which of my Google accounts that I put that in a doc. Right. And those kinds of things. So all of that kind of stuff goes in there.
Not passwords, in case people think I put passwords in there.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I have multiple blog spots. Oh, my gosh. I have one called baby blog from 2001.
Holy crap.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a while ago.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: That was Max. That's when I had Max. Oh, my gosh. I had a baby blog for Max. That wasn't. Yeah.
Okay. I wasn't expecting all of this, but.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Past tech stack for sure.
Yeah, I do use the Google products, right? So I like most other people in the world, except my mother, who only has one email account. Can you imagine what it'd be like to have only one email account? It must have a dozen email accounts between the different companies I've worked for, work with now, you know, my other ventures and whatever. So I've got a bunch of different, which is sometimes problematic to figure out. Where did you keep a document? Like, which account did you file it under when you created it? But I had sent to me today a Microsoft Word document, and I was like, how the heck am I supposed to open that? But, yes, they actually talk to each other now. And my whatever Mac pages or whatever it's called, opened it up, and I was able to copy and paste it into the blog I needed to post it to. But at first I was like, oh, what's, what's going to get lost in the translation? Like, formatting wise, whatever. It all worked out. But I was just like, well, I haven't opened Microsoft in a million years because I'm, you know, working on a Mac nowadays. But I used to buy Microsoft for Mac, but I first switched over. I don't do that anymore.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. Wow.
You can import docs into Google? Google, yeah, that's what I, which I do. I. I can't even, like, I'm just so used to all of the shortcuts and stuff with Google Docs, and I'm trying to get off of Google as much as possible for some certain things, like trying to not completely break up with big tech, but minimize my exposure to big tech as much as possible just because of privacy concerns. As I'm looking at a blog from 23 years ago that, yeah, no privacy concerns there, as I'm, like, reporting that I am. The last thing still dilated. Only two?
[00:10:57] Speaker A: What was I writing?
[00:11:00] Speaker B: I am so embarrassed.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: They couldn't get in your bank account, but they knew everything about your vagina.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: The Internet was so different back then.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Was it was the wild, wild west. You could hide easily back then.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Oh, do you remember the days when, like, like, most people weren't online? Like, it was just a few. Like, like, if you were online, it was a unique thing. And then you had all the AOL people, but they didn't really go online. You know, they just went to AOL chat rooms and sent each other, like, animated gif roses opening up and stupid things like that. Right?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: I. Yeah. Remember aim AOL instant messenger? Like, I would be, I would be on, and I'd suddenly get this message of somebody I'd never heard of before. ASL, like, age, sex, location. I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't speak american sign language online. What?
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh. Aren't you glad that's not your tech stack now? Could you imagine?
[00:12:02] Speaker A: I can't even imagine.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Although all the cds they would send out with the AOL, it's like every time you open your mailbox, it's like, well, there's another AOL CD.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: There were entire craft blogs dedicated to what you could do with spent cds, including those AOL ones, right? AOL. AOL at home or whatever they were called back then. And you've got mail and that for sure. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, the wild, wild west days of the Internet were wild for sure. You know, I had Dreamweaver and front page on cds. I don't even have a cd ROM reader on my laptop anymore. Right. Like, for my dad's funeral, two years. I had to buy one so my aunt could play the thing that she wanted at my dad's funeral. I had to get an external drive. I should have kept it. I sold it to my cousin. He's like, oh, I'll buy that off you. And I'm like, I came across a couple cds the other day. I'm like, wonder what's on these. It's probably like my daughter's baby pictures or something. I don't even know.
She's 32 now, so. Yeah, yeah, life is crazy for sure.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: Too funny. Yeah, I'm, the Internet has definitely evolved, as has our tech stacks have evolved as well too. Like, I used to be 100%, like, I would use Photoshop for everything. Yeah, I mean, literally everything image related. And now canva is just so much easier. And I've really, that's just in the past few years, I've really made the transition where it's just so much easier. I mean, I still know all of like, even all the shortcuts and everything with Photoshop very habituated. I've been using it for 20 years. But canva just has taken its spot as my number one image thing.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: I am still heavily an Adobe user a little bit for Photoshop when I just need to touch up some things because canvas that good for like picture, photo touch up and things like that. Right. But I still use, I mean, I probably still use Photoshop two to three times a week, if I'm being honest. But I do a lot with photography. But I use Lightroom all the time. So every time I come home from working with, you know, with my cameras out, all those pictures behind me, that kind of stuff, that little sd card comes out, goes in the computer and I edit in Lightroom. But also for podcasting, I use Adobe Rush for all the video editing.
And then for our audio I use audacity, which is a free download you can get online and do.
And then I use castos for all of the podcast storage and things. So that's kind of like my tech stack for creating and canva, I do use canva religiously for all kinds of things. I needed an image yesterday for an invite I was putting together and I was like, I don't have time to go through the proper channels and get somebody else to do something, so I'm going to do something that looks similar. I just went into canva and worked up an image and was able to throw it on the web real quick. Right. So there's, there's a lot that you can do for sure with canva. And I know people are making entire slideshows. I'm still a Google Slides girl. It's just easy. They're there and I can edit and.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Duplicate, but they're simple. Yeah, it's so easy to just simply do it. Canvas and their slides are, there's, it's just, there's, it's quirky. It's very quirky. So I'm not a huge fan, but I have transitioned over to doing a lot more slides in canva just because I can do much prettier things than I can do in Google Slides because.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: You can use, you can leach off of other people's creativity for design, which is nice, too. You're not copying it, but you can get design inspiration really easily in canva, whereas sitting in front of a blank screen and Photoshop is like, well, now what?
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: For sure.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah. For content creation, you know, for, I use descript for recording videos and recording audios and then I'll some stuff descript just, I can't figure out how to do. I probably just don't know the tool well enough, but I'll use Adobe premiere for that. And then my son, who does video editing for me, I'll send him videos and he just does everything in premiere. So I just have like the account that I kind of share with him for premiere and I try to do stuff in there and he's like, what are you doing?
I don't know what I'm doing with the video editing as much, but in descript I can do so much. And they have this new tool called underlord, I think not overlord, but underlord. And it's so cool because you just pop in a video or that somebody else did and it'll give you the whole transcript and everything. But then the, the underlord part of it will use AI and come up with all your timestamps and then it will come up with the description and it's, it's nice. You don't have to write descriptions anymore for like your YouTube description box. It comes up with all of that for you. So it is a super handy tool for all of that. Love description.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: That's awesome. I couldn't get into, I tried to use script for a while, but maybe it was too early on and I wasn't understanding all of its capabilities. I should probably revisit it. Somebody recently told me about now I'm going to forget what it's called. Mac whisper for Mac, which is a way that it'll take and create, pull all the words out of whatever audio or video that you have. And I thought, oh, this could be a great way because it's a one time, you know, buy it once, dollar 59, whatever it was, and I don't have to pay per transcript I don't have to pay for that. But it created one giant paragraph.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: I was like, really?
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And so if it was you and I talking, it wouldn't even specify, like, Kathy, Michelle or voice one, voice two. It was just one giant paragraph. And I was like, ew, nope. This is not being added to my tech stack. I tried the free version to see what it would look like and I was like, oh, I am not upgrading this at all. I'm deleting it, as a matter of fact, from my computer.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah, there's some AI, there's a bunch of AI tools that have been super helpful, too. There's one called Merlin, but it was a little too, like, let me help you. Let me help you. And it's summer, like, if you're on a YouTube video, it, it'll summarize it for you so you can just, like, see what the video is all about. And we'll do that for, like, web pages and. But it was like, just everywhere. And I'm just like, I kind of want it there when I want it, but not there when I. Yeah, let me just watch the video. Let me just enjoy what this is. Maybe I'll put it at 1.5% or 1.5ft and. But just.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Okay, Clippy. Remember clippy? Okay. Clippy get away.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yes. Yes, exactly. It's a little clippy ish, but there's so many. Would you use AI for, like, for writing and things like that?
[00:18:49] Speaker A: So I don't, I mean, I really pride myself on being a good writer, so I try not to, like, use it to write things, but I will say that I've used it as a tool. So let's say that I wanted to write an article ten ways to, whatever, use AI, right? And I've thought of eight, but I really want it to be a listicle of ten. I will say, what are ten ways to use AI? And then I'll see what's there that I could add to my article. So I kind of use it for gap filling. And then when I'm really stuck, I love to say I'm really good at naming things, but I also have creative dry spells. And so I'll say, what's a great way to, this is the title. Make it more interesting. And then it'll give me several options. And sometimes I'll go with it. Sometimes I'll say, oh, that's a great idea. And I'll play with it from there and not use it word for word, but definitely helps with, you know, idea generation. I'd say for sure.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Cadence amplify was named by Chat GPT.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: It was one. It was one of 30 things that came back. But amplify just. It stuck. You know, it just kind of felt like, yeah, that's what I wanted. That was my intent with the whole, you know, I told chap, gBT, my intent with this is to, you know, bring forth many of the voices and help them grow their followings and grow their businesses of what they're trying to do. And amplify does that. It was just like the perfect word for it. So, yeah, it was a chat GPT exercise, much in the same way. Just like, I didn't know what to name it. I'm terrible at naming things.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: But speaking of amplify and tech stack, last year's amplify, after I helped you Mc all day, I said, hey, I will volunteer to chop up those 20 hours or whatever. It was a video into individual talks, and I needed to add bumpers. Right. The intro and the outro. And we had the video, but we didn't. But it was just silent and it was like, it felt weird when there, when you have video with nothing behind it. So I used canva to add audio to that video and then use those as the bumpers, intro and outro. So I use canva for that, too. Yeah.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Nice, cool stuff. Yeah.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Lots of good tools. I'm looking around at, like, other things that I use. Well, there's zoom. I. And I have to use zoom.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: We're using zoom right now.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Right, exactly. So Zoom is my preferred. I do not like Google Meet. I hate it.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: As a matter of fact, I'm not a fan either. And the resolution is not great.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: And the audio is not great, quite honestly.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: So, as somebody, I can ask you a question.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: I was going to say I am trying to use big talk, much less, and I'm so I'm trying proton for stuff for, like, calendar and I really. It's definitely for more privacy minded people and people who are, like, understand security and understand all of that stuff and can set up their own DMARC and DCAM and all of that fun stuff. So I really like protonmail because I've got, you know, it's like. And I pay for it, too. It's like I've got tons of email addresses that feed into it, and it's got, like, the same phone app and the desktop app. Kind of flaky sometimes, but it's. It feels enough like Gmail in terms of, like, how I can organize things and everything, and it's not Google. I know it's just another company, but I. I'm not going to be hosting my own mail server. I know for sure my career, so it's the next best thing. And they are privacy focused, and, I mean, there's some other ones out there, but I really like Proton and what they're doing.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: So nice.
As somebody in the tech space, what are you using? If you were using anything for password management, I know what you recommended to me earlier. I don't know if you're still using that or what's going on. Are you using anything in particular? Like, I used to use Lastpass, and then they had a huge data breach last year, and I switched from Lastpass.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yes, and you should stay off Lastpass.
It depends on what you're doing. For people who are just, like, just getting started with a password manager. I know there's a lot of people who are. Bitwarden is great because it's one open source, and if you want to pay for it, it's only like $10 a year. So bit warden is like the gateway drug into being more secure. If you're a really into security and you're really, like, doing. Sharing passwords with other people, and you're managing a team, and there's passwords and everything. One password, and they're just. Their talk is. Is exceptional. So one password, be, like, my number one choice, but they're much more expensive. But bit warden is great. And then I know other people who are like, they love keeper, and they love dash lane, I think it's called. Called and stuff. And Nord Pass has a decent system, too, so there's a lot of options, but the primary ones are, like, bit warden and one pass, I think one password, but lastpass. Yeah, yeah, I can't. I mean, I know people who have, like, they have had their vaults breached and lost things.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: That's scary.
Very scary.
You had turned me on to Bitwarden, so that's what I use personally, and then I use one password for several different organizations that I'm. Yeah, a part of where we're sharing.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Bitwarden's all right, though, isn't it? It's pretty.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great. It is. It is. For some reason, it won't talk to my browser, so I can't just auto populate passwords, but I can copy and paste them, which is probably safer anyway.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: It's probably better. There have been vulnerabilities in some of those browser extensions where it auto populates your password and if you have it. Where, what were they doing? They had a iframe in a browser and it would populate the password, but it was like a malicious frame. Like, what was being framed was a malicious site. And so there were a couple of password manager browser extensions that were vulnerable. Like last year, I think I did a video on that.
I do some more videos.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: I like your videos.
You're welcome. As a matter of fact, one of the new things in my tech stack is to take your course on monster secure. But I forgot what the other one is that goes into.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah, go safely online.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Go safely online. Yep. So I signed up yesterday for go safely online, and I am one of the first ten, I think we determined yesterday, affiliates for that program as well.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: So awesome.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna take that class this weekend.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: I hope it helps. I really hope it helps, you know, especially with agencies and just like, you know, to try to, like, educate everyone on just like, some foundational strategies of, like, how to think about WordPress. Security is. It's a lot, but just to say, hey, just go take this course and then we'll get you that login right away. And. And it's not you having to tell them what to do. It's like they're taking the course, they're getting all of the information, they're getting the understanding of how their security decisions, or their decisions, secure or not, affect the security of their site. So.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: And they can never say, you didn't tell me. They can't. And you can't say, did I forget to tell them that part? Because you just put them onto a thing and you know exactly what was taught to them, so. Right, yeah, no, I love that we talked about that yesterday in the post status happiness hour, and so, yes. Happy to promote that with you. For you all, for sure. That's exciting.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Exciting new things.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Trying to think what else is in my tech stack. I use WhatsApp to talk to people all over the world because I don't want to use, yeah, WordPress is not strangers, but I use WhatsApp for that. I use Asana for keeping track of tasks at work, but I use todoist for my personal tasks. So, yeah, just different things like looking. What else have I got in here? Oh, and my favorite thing of all was, I think, a six dollar purchase. I don't know how much it costs right now, but it's a text and I can have. It'll generate whatever you tell it. So, like, for example, if I hit apostrophe is apostrophe. Yeah, apostrophe. No, it's whatever the little under the. Oh, my God. I can't think of anything today. Anyway, it's a character. The character right under the escape, the little accent character. And then bio. It'll type my entire bio with the links and everything in it so I don't have to copy paste that from anywhere. If I just type, like, that same symbol and then me, it puts my whole name right so I don't have to type in Michelle freshet, like all of those different things. So I use a text religiously for so many things, even when I'm doing things like work Camp Rochester, and I'm typing the acceptances and the unfortunately, we're not taking your talk kind of things. I can just make a temporary thing and then I don't have to copy and paste it. I just hit those characters and everything fills in the way it's supposed to. And so I use that for a lot of things, which is real time saver, actually.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
On the iPad. Good notes.
What? It's called writing that. I love good notes because just I got. I mean, I remember things so much better if I write them down with a pen.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, same.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: So. But I would get these stacks of paper or these binders full of stuff, and I'm like, where the heck did I write that? I don't know where I wrote it down. I know I did, though. And good notes. I have multiple, like, notebooks within it, so I have personal ones. I have ones for work where I, like, take notes in meetings, or I take notes when I'm watching a video, or if I'm, like, trying to sketch out, like, how I'm going to do a video or something like that, I can do. It's as good as paper, but it's all digital and I can search it and it spell checks. Me, too. So it's like, nice. Awesome.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: That is awesome. I learned of a new plugin yesterday. So part of WP coffee talk, one of the questions is, what are two or three plugins you'd recommend to somebody building their first website? And I was talking to Kerry Dills last night, and she told me a plugin called plugin notes.
And she explained that plugin notes is where you go. You go to the plugins page of your dashboard, and it'll tell these plugins, and you can make a note to yourself next to the plugin saying what it was for, why? You know, any note you want to put in there, which is super nice, right? Especially if you're not the only person in the website.
So, like, if you and I, like, we have WP motivate together, if we were doing a lot with that on a regular basis, and I could be like, what's that plugin? What does that do? Where is it? What is, how is it implemented? Could make a note that says, michelle, you know, put this here on this such and such a date for this particular purpose. And then you'd be like, oh, Michelle, put that in there for this purpose on this date, you know, kind of thing. So I'm going to be looking into putting that in because I don't always remember on my own sites why I put something there, what it does.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: And there's so many people that I, like, help with their WordPress sites and like, say, well, I complained on Twitter. I think at one point a family member was like, on a Friday night asking, I'm just like, you're gonna have to deactivate plugins one by one. And they're writing me and saying, well, which ones are important? I'm like, I don't remember what you got in there. Like, you're just gonna have to put it on a staging server and deactivate one by one until you find the culprit. Welcome to the reason why I don't do this for you anymore.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: It would be. And he didn't remember. Like, what? Like, did I install the plugin? Did he? Like, he had no idea. So I need that for this family.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Member who, and she said, it's in the repo. You don't even have to pay for it. So I'm like, thank you, Carrie Dills, for that. Absolutely.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you, Carrie. And thank you to whoever developed that because I need that now.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: I'll find it. I'll put it in the show notes. So if anybody's interested in finding it, I'll try to remember. Help me remember, Kathy.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: I'm circling it on my, my note.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Yes. I make notes of things sometimes, but yeah.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: So I have another mention notion calendar. Notion calendar. Because. No, okay. I've got multiple organizations with my Google calendars, and I never know what the heck's going on. I up on my little thing on my Mac, I've got an ocean calendar, and I can just click on the little calendar thing. And so it like, all right, I don't have anything for the rest of the day, but tomorrow I have three meetings and they're on three different calendars. And the zoom link is there, right there. It just, oh, my gosh, that saved me. You remember how many times I've been like, I don't know what I'm doing.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: Where is it? What am I doing?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah. I can't get it to talk to the proton calendar, so I have to, like, copy that over to the gmail calendar. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it's still awesome.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: Calendly for me is definitely in my tech stack. I live by calendly because I can create multiple. I have a calendly for scheduling on WP coffee talk. I have a calendly for scheduling on the post status happiness hour. I have a calendly for an hour with Michelle during the work days. I have half hour one. I've got a special calendly just to meet with me during the times I'm free at work campus. Like, I have built calendars for so many things in calendly, and some of them I charge for. Right. So if you are scheduling a pick my brain session with Michelle, I'm charging you $150. You can't schedule it until you've put your credit card in and paid me $150. So I like calendly for that reason. I pay for it. It's not that much a year. I also pay for canva because I like the features. And for like 100 whatever dollars it was a year, it made sense.
And I am grateful to be in a position in my life now where I don't go, God, how am I going to afford $100 a year? And I appreciate that. There are people who are still going, how can you pay $100 a year for something?
And I'm grateful to be in a position now where I don't worry about that. And I do recognize that some of the things we're talking about today are we have privilege for. Absolutely.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
I used to have calendly, but then as I was untangling all of my husband's talk, I found that he had a lifetime deal for book, like a boss. And since it was a lifetime deal.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: And you may as well use that.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Anymore, but when I go and I look at my meetings, I have to. Oh, yeah, no, don't look past old ones from him. But yeah, I just kind of took it over, so I don't blame you there at all. Yeah. Save a few dollars.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think that's pretty much it for me. There is a new one. There's WordPress studio. I don't know if you've seen that yet. I've got it on my computer. I haven't used it yet, but WordPress Studio actually spins up a local version of WordPress for use. And, you know, you don't have to worry about putting in xampp or mamp or whatever you're using.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: And it's free. You can just download it from WordPress and you can actually even share it out. So if I've built something on my local server, I can share it to somebody else that's going to put a static copy out there for them to be able to see without actually compromising my computer at all. And so I'm playing around with that.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Like it? Yeah, but so far it looks really cool. I just haven't had anything to build in the time since I put it down there. I'm not trying to build a million things right now, but I'm already in a million things. So, anyway, I think that's all the tech I got to talk about today.
Like, me, we're looking at the bottom bar on our laptops. Like, is there anything else I missed?
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I've got closed everything, so I can't even remember. Cleaned my Mac. I use that kind of keep everything clean.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: And I will say, if somebody's using Norton antivirus, please be diligent about all the scam emails. Like, I don't use Norton antivirus. So I know that all the scam emails that come back come through that. Here's your receipt for purchasing and all that. Those are scams. But if you actually use Norton antivirus, don't open the things that look like they're from Norton because they really aren't. Be very diligent on that.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, I will say that. Yeah, I got, I got nothing else. I'm looking at all of the apps on here, and I don't think anybody really, Filezilla is still there.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: And of course, I still know how to use terminal, and only because I.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Haven'T mentioned it yet today. Tick tock.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Tick tock.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an app. I. Oh, I made my first money on TikTok.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Did you really?
[00:35:58] Speaker A: Yes. I got notified. You know how much?
[00:36:00] Speaker B: How much? Seventeen cents.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: Thirty one cents.
[00:36:05] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: No, actually, like, almost double what I was.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: I'm like, maybe. Would that, like, afford the cream in my coffee? I don't even know. But anyway, it was kind of exciting to see that I was on somebody else's live. I received gifts on TikTok, and now I have $0.31 sitting in my TikTok account. So there you go. You can all be jealous.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: I mean, it's not going to get me on vacation or anything like that, but it still felt like an accomplishment. Like, not everybody makes money on TikTok, but I can say I did.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Not at all. I just gotta. I gotta do the. I gotta go find some, like, food to test and see if I'll rank my foods, and then I'll get go.
Oh, my God.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Also, I'll do a live. And because I have over a thousand followers now. They're probably all bots, but I have over those bots. You can come on my live and we'll see if we can make some money together.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: There. There we go. We'll rank foods. Well, I don't even know how they were. That must have been a tic tac thing where the food was going over the guy's head.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: I don't.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Yeah. All the different.
I don't know. I'm a tech person, but I don't even understand. Yeah, I mean, I just like to look at it, if I'm being honest. I don't create a lot of stuff, but anyway. All right, well, if you want to hear us talk about something else next week, let us know what you want to hear talk about, because we'll go on and on and admonish you about anything, apparently.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Apparently. I kind of felt bad because two of us were just kind of going yesterday, and Nathan's like, what are these two? Where are they? Like, oh, we're just. This is what we do. Sorry. I'm so sorry. We love you so much.
[00:37:45] Speaker A: I think he had fun. Even so.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:37:48] Speaker A: He has women in his life, too, who are, I think, very similar to us, so he's probably used to it.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Yeah, probably.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Anyway, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Bye bye.
[00:38:05] Speaker A: This has been WP. Motivate with Kathy's aunt and Michelle freshet. To learn more or to sponsor us, go to wpmotivate.com.
