Mike Little, Episode #17

Transcription

1. Gary Jones: Good afternoon, this is Gary Jones. You are listening to the UK Genesis Podcast, the show that typically showcases Web professionals from the UK who use the Genesis Framework. This is episode number 17, I think we’re up to. My co-host for today is Jo. How are you doing, Jo?
2. Jo Waltham: Hi, I’m doing well.
3. Gary Jones: Excellent. And we have got an absolutely amazing guest. I’m really excited. I’m really nervous. It’s going to be a fantastic show. My guest today is WordPress co-founding developer, Mike Little. Good afternoon, Mike.
4. Mike Little: Hi, good afternoon. Pleased to meet you.
5. Gary Jones: How are you doing today?
6. Mike Little: I’m doing well, thank you.
7. Gary Jones: Good, thank you for taking the time to join us, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in today. If you’ve got any questions for Mike, which I’m sure you have, and I’ve already been collecting a whole load of questions already, then put them onto Twitter with the UK Genesis hashtag (#UKGenesis) and we will see if we can get through them throughout the show.
8. I was trying to think of a good introduction for you, Mike, and the only thing I could come up with is, if you consider WordPress to be a computer game, then you are kind of like the Easter Egg inside of it. The people that know about you just think you are amazing, but there are quite a few people who don’t know who you are or how you fit into the history of WordPress. Can you give us an introduction about who you are, what you do and what has brought you here today?
9. Mike Little: Sure, yeah. I have actually described myself, in the past, as the evil twin that nobody knows about, as one of the co-founders of WordPress. Yes, so I’m the co-founder of WordPress. I started with it almost thirteen years, are we going now, ago. with Matt Mullenweg over in the States, and literally kicked off with a comment on a blog post of Matt’s, because the software we were using, the B2 cafelog blogging software, was almost abandoned. The author of that had disappeared off the Web and Matt posted a blog called “The Blogging Software Dilemma”, and in it he described, almost the same route that I had gone through in terms of looking at blogging software, and kind of said he had considered forking it, and I responded, said, “Yes, if you’re serious about forking it, count me in, and in fact, literally, we kicked it off at that point.
10. Strangely, only the two of us worked on it up until the first release, and in fact, somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago that the next comment on that blog post was a year later, celebrating the anniversary. Literally, nobody else commented. I got involved in that, but then real life took over, but I have always continued with WordPress. Then, a few years ago now, almost seven years ago, I started working for myself as a WordPress consultant, WordPress specialist, and I’ve been doing that ever since. Is that enough? Does that get across what I do?
11. Jo Waltham: I really like the story you told at WordCamp London about the first WordCamp that you went to and what happened and what effect that had on you. Do you want to just tell us about that?
12. Mike Little: Yes, sure. The first WordCamp, in Birmingham, WordCamp in the UK, which had been organised in Birmingham, I joined the mailing list, I was involved in terms of just making suggestions and so on. And I got there, and I think it was the first or second speaker of the day asked for a show of hands in the room for people who made some or all of their living from WordPress. And about half of the people in that room of sixty or seventy people put their hands up and I didn’t. And I was astonished and I was just really at that moment said, “Why on earth am I not making money out of WordPress, making a living out of WordPress?” Literally, at that point, I was all ready to leave the company that I was with anyway, with no idea what I was going to do afterwards, and decided that yes, somehow I would start making a living with WordPress.
13. It took a few more months to get going, that was July 2008, and I didn’t actually leave my job until December that month, despite the fact that I was only supposed to be working a three-month notice. But yeah, I kicked off my own company in November that year, and quit my job, had my last working day in December and went on from there.
14. Jo Waltham: Looking at the business side, then, what is it that your business does?
15. Mike Little: It’s just me, I’m a one-man company, although I do work with other people when I need to who have got skills that complement mine. I do an a range of things from building sites for people, although not so much now, unless it’s a particularly complex site. I do custom plugins, I will build themes as well, but generally from a design: I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. But I also do a lot of training as well, which I’m really enjoying, from classroom-based training,5 and I run a beginners and an intermediate and an advanced course, through to developer training. I’ve done theme development training, and I’ve done plugin development training, and I do a lot of one-to-one training as well.
16. And then consultancy, as well. If someone decided they want to use WordPress for a project, not really necessarily sure how they can work with it and the kind of plugins to use and what custom code needs to be customised, then I can give advice and all of that kind of stuff. So, just a mixture of stuff, really.
17. Gary Jones: Which of those tasks do you enjoy doing most?
18. Mike Little: I still enjoy the development the most, although I’m beginning to think that my skills are not as good as they used to be, because there is some really, really clever stuff that being done with WordPress which is amazing. I’m so pleased that it’s come on so well. But I love the training, as well, especially the classroom training. I really get it when people’s eyes light up and they figure stuff out and the realise just what they can do with WordPress and how far they can go with it. It’s great.
19. One of my courses, the advanced course, there is a bit in there where I talk about custom post sites and go through one of the plugins that allows you to create custom post sites without needing any code. I remember on one occasion, two guys from one of the local universities actually giggling at the back of the class because he was so excited about learning this and how it was going to apply to what they wanted to do. It’s just moments like that that really, really make a huge difference.
20. Gary Jones: When you are marketing your training courses, do you put yourself out there as, “Hey, I’m the co-founder of WordPress come and learn how to use WordPress or come and develop with WordPress,” or is it you keep that in the background and say, “This is the training, and as a matter of fact, I helped contribute to some of the early code”?
21. Mike Little: It’s a bit of a mixture. Most of the classroom training that I do, I do for a local tech place in Manchester’s northern quarter called MadLab. And they absolutely do promote it that way, you know, “Come and learn WordPress from the WordPress co-founder” sort of thing. I tend to use it in a pitch, so if I’m pitching directly to somebody, I might say something along those lines, “As the co-founder of WordPress, I’d hope that there are few with as much experience as I have”. But yeah, it’s not something I particularly push that much. I mean, to me, WordPress is as good as it is because of the people after me. In fact, most of my contributions are probably not there any more, the odd one or two I still spot in the code, but yeah, they’ve moved on and been reworked and made better. There are some really clever people in the community contributing to it. So, I tend not to push it that much, but lots of people tell me that I should.
22. Gary Jones: Do you find that having that title, which obviously you will have forever more now, is a benefit or a burden, not just for your training courses and your marketing, but in the wider, not quite personal life, but a wider scenario, as well?
23. Mike Little: I think on the business side, it can be a benefit. On the personal side, I don’t think it has any effect at all. I think most people I know that aren’t in the tech industry don’t even know what WordPress is. My other half’s seriously unimpressed. So yeah, it doesn’t really affect me on that side of things. But I have never particularly seen it as a burden, other than people make an assumption that I must have something to do with WordPress.com, or that WordPress is WordPress.com, and that I’m probably a multi-millionaire. Apart from getting that wrong, and that’s some journalists as well have done that, otherwise it doesn’t seem to be anything that I would describe as a burden.
24. Gary Jones: This was going to be one of my later questions, that Jo said, “No, I’m not going to ask that” but we’re on the point anyway, you mentioned kind of money there, do you sometimes consider what if? You’ve seen where Matt Mullenweg has taking WordPress, and his status and his wealth and everything that he has been up to: do you make comparisons sometimes and say, “Well that could have been me,” or, “No, I don’t want that”?
25. Mike Little: I’d say no, not really. I mean, yeah, kind of it would have been nice, but not really, no. I actually would describe myself as a poor businessman, to be honest. I love the techy side of things and I have never particularly been interested – I wasn’t particularly interested in running my own company: it’s probably why it took me so long to actually get round to it. But no, I don’t – I certainly don’t envy Matt. He’s worked really hard and he runs a great company. I mean, you only have to look at some of the things that go on there, the way he’s built the company, and in particular the coverage he’s getting, or the company is getting, Automattic is getting, for remote work and things like that, it’s clear that he’s doing a good job.
26. I think that sometimes people forget that whilst Matt might be remembered for his saxophone, he was SaxMatt on the original B2 forums and learning jazz at university, I don’t think that was his major. His major was Economics and Politics, so he was always going to be a businessman of some description, and I think that shows. I think that training that he did, that learning, shows in the way he’s approached building up his company.
27. Jo Waltham: One of the most popular questions that people have asked is if you were going to fork B2 again, right now, if you could tell your younger self, what would you have done differently?
28. Mike Little: I think cleaning up the code earlier, in terms of the architecture and in terms of the structure. Michel Valdrighi, who originally wrote the code, he was learning PHP when he was writing B2. So, WordPress has a legacy of some badly structured code. I won’t say poorly written code, because the code has been worked over so many times anyway, I don’t think there’s poorly written code in there, but there’s certainly badly architected code, badly structured code. And I think it would have been good to perhaps concentrate on improving that earlier on in the process, and there have been some great leaps been made now, but I think it may have made it a little bit more respectable amongst the professional developers’ world, because I think for many years, WordPress was a bit of a joke to people who perhaps developed in Drupal, other languages besides PHP. I mean, I went from Java to PHP and you know, I did Java, J2EE, all the enterprise-level stuff, and still found value in programming in PHP in a system like WordPress.
29. Gary Jones: Where do you stand on the current minimum version of PHP for WordPress being 5.2? Do you think you agree with the argument about the backward compatibility, or do you think we need to move forward for developer benefits? Where do you stand on that discussion?
30. Mike Little: I agree with holding off until the minimal effect. I mean, the thing is, I can’t remember off the top of my head what the figures are now, but if we say ten per cent are still on a ridiculously old, on that minimum version, that’s a huge number of websites, that’s millions of websites that potentially would break. And I understand now that WordPress is so huge that you just can’t make those sweeping decisions, particularly as its largest audience is, by far, is a non-technical audience. It’s a different world from, say, Drupal, who seem to change everything every release and break all the old stuff, but people who use Drupal are technical people who’ve built sites. And so I think WordPress is different in that way.
31. But yeah, I really wish the hosts would catch up. It’s more an issue with the host catching up, but WordPress is ready for many of the new features, in fact can use many of the new features, doing dynamic version testing and checking for capability, and it will work in a more modern way on a more modern version of PHP. And I also have to say that’s really impressive, the way that some of that has been coded because I wouldn’t have known how to do that.
32. Gary Jones: How do we address that problem then? Whose responsibility is it to push these hosts on?
33. Mike Little: I think it’s people who use those hosts, for sure. If they understand that they need to move on and understand that a particular host might be holding that back, then make the request on support, see if it can be done, and, you know, make your choice known with your wallet if you need to and move on to any of the tens of thousands of other hosts who are more up-to-date. It’s a tricky thing, but at the end of day I think it has to be the customers of those hosting companies that make their thoughts known, whether that’s by bugging them until they fix it or moving away to somebody else. I know Automattic do try and establish relationships with the hosting companies and that has been successful, but only with the bigger ones that have that ability to move. I think the smaller ones, it’s not so much the ability, it’s the will to do it and whether they can be bothered rebuilding their servers.
34. Gary Jones: A question from Angie Vale: Why do you think WordPress is the most popular CMS?
35. Mike Little: I used to say because it’s easy to use, but now I do beginner’s training in WordPress, it’s actually not easy to use until you know how to use it, and then it’s easy to use. But compared to some systems, it is a low barrier to entry, but also the community around it is very good and very supportive, and in fact all the themes, all the plugins, everything around it that helps make it better, just seems to be so much bigger than all the others. It’s a kind of chicken and egg thing, but we are now in that situation where it is a big community, it is a big set of plugins and a huge variety of themes, and it just gives people the choice.
36. But a few other things, I think it’s stayed, relatively simple, at its core. At its core, it still satisfies that personal publishing platform that it started as. You don’t have to add a ton of plugins to just make your voice heard on the Web, and I think that that’s still one of its most powerful things.
37. Gary Jones: How do you think that it might change in the next five to ten years?
38. Mike Little: That’s a good question! And I have to say, I don’t really know. I was asked that, probably five years ago, and what I thought was completely wrong. Although I still think there is an element of that going to come along, actually, it has happened a little tiny bit. The thing that I mentioned a few years ago, as I thought would be one of the futures of WordPress, was vertical versions of WordPress. So, WordPress bundled with a whole bunch of themes that satisfy particular niches, plugins to support that. The one that I thought I saw it happening was with churches, there seemed to be a few different people creating church-related, almost packages of WordPress, with a nice theme and a few plugins that were an almost install and go. And I thought there would be a lot more of that. I think that hasn’t really happened; however, people have done a similar thing with the software as a service-type model, so your HappyTables, and those kind of platforms are almost doing that. They’ve effectively made WordPress into a vertical platform just for their particular audiences.
39. Jo Waltham: Have you seen RainMaker and where it’s WordPress, its Genesis, it’s the Copyblogger products all linked together. That’s something like that. A question that Jackie’s just asked, what about forking a version of WordPress for an enterprise client so we can get rid of some of that having to keep that backward compatibility and just have an enterprise version? Would that serve larger businesses better, do you think?
40. Mike Little: I don’t think so. I think, maybe, that could have, with enough backing behind it, but I actually don’t think that’s necessarily the case. One of the interesting things about the architecture of WordPress is that WordPress uses its own book system. So in fact, you can, even in a sunrise script, or in an early new plugin, for example, turn off most of WordPress functionality and not have to worry about any of the legacy code, all these old wrapper functions and things like that. You can actually really turn off a huge amount of the thing that WordPress does and yet still take advantage of the things that it gives you out of the box and the things that make it, for me, a great starting place for any kind of application, so the authentication, the user management, the basic content management, I think makes it: I think it is already an ideal platform for more enterprise-level solutions. Yes, you have to be cleverer, and you certainly don’t want to just throw in a load of off-the-shelf plugins, but yes, some enterprises are doing some very clever things with WordPress.
41. Gary Jones: A related question from Dave Dean, one of our future guests as well, says, do you think that the WordPress core or the WordPress community could do anything specific for enterprise-level solutions.
42. Mike Little: I don’t think there’s a will for a start. Certainly, I don’t believe that Matt has a will to do that. He still wants it always to be that personal publishing platform. And I think that, if anything, what could be done is sharing the knowledge of how to effectively start with WordPress, but then quickly and easily throw away the things that you don’t need, so understand what all of the bits are and then how to turn off the things that you don’t need, maybe even examples of how to replace the things that an enterprise solution might want to replace. And more knowledge, I think the codex has seriously outlived its lifetime, and the replacement is still not the right replacement, I don’t think.
43. Gary Jones: In what way?
44. Mike Little: I think the same reason that the codex isn’t good, or most of it isn’t good, is that it is a reference and the problem with references are that they are great if you know what you’re looking for and know what you need to look for, then you can look for it and find out. If you don’t know what you need to look for, you’re lost. Now there are some really good “getting started” tutorials on the codex, but at the developer level, it’s reference and it’s like those seven hundred page books we used to buy before we had eBook readers or that used to even ship with software. They are references of every single nook and cranny, but they don’t tell you how to use the system or how to build on the system, and I think that’s what is missing.
45. Gary Jones: Do you think that the WP REST API will be a significant improvement or benefit to the moving forwards?
46. Mike Little: Absolutely, yes. I’m really excited about it. I keep trying to play with it, with my own projects, I’d love to get a client project that allowed me to have a good play with it, although one that I’m starting to work on, we might use the WP API for it. But yes, it’s the future of WordPress. It will make WordPress into a, literally just a starting block. I think all of the super-new, constantly changing, faster than WordPress itself things that are coming along for, especially the JavaScript-based things that allow you to do very clever things on the front end, can all make use of that API. I just think it’s absolutely the future. yes. I’m really excited by the possibilities.
47. Gary Jones: Question from Claire, do you think there are any plugins that should be incorporated into Core?
48. Mike Little: No, bizarrely. I actually agree wholeheartedly with keeping Core as simple as possible, because it’s not even an 80/20 rule, it’s so big that it’s a 90/10 or 95/5 rule, is that whatever you can think of to incorporate into Core that’s a plugin that’s more complicated than perhaps a limit login attempts or a – I remember when Tags was a separate plugin – then it’s the majority of people won’t need it. And I think the system we’ve got now where you’ve always got a choice of how to implement something, even if you’re not a developer, because there is always two, or three, or four, or ten plugins that will do that, I think is absolutely the best way to go.
49. Gary Jones: In that case, tell me, do you think there’s anything in Core that you think should just be a plugin?
50. Mike Little: Well, although they’re still there, nobody sees them any more, but the Links, which was one of my add-ons, is still in there and somebody, I thought I should do it as well but never got around to it, should just make it a plugin and get rid of them, and that would save a table and save a chunk of code. I’d just move that into a separate plugin. But the key thing that they need to do, and I think this is sometimes one of the hardest things when you change existing systems that have a huge user base is that you need to manage the upgrade in a sensible way. So people who are still using, for example, that Links functionality and I know some people use it hugely, because if you put the work in it, it’s quite a good system, you can’t possibly break everything for them, so if it’s a plugin it has to do the right thing and either turn them into custom post types or something else.
51. What else might be ripped out of WordPress? I don’t know, it’s not too bad. I quite like it. I like the fact that they’re now starting to take things out that are being replaced by the customiser.
52. Gary Jones: That was pretty much my next question, is what do you think of the customiser?
53. Mike Little: I kind of like it. It’s been a little bit awkward, because I saw it appear and it seemed to be meh, and then almost before, within two to three releases, it seemed to do an awful lot more. Actually, I saw a figure a while ago about the number of themes on the repository that were compatible, and I realised that actually I had to change all my course around setting things up and to point people at the customiser.
54. So, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s go a few more iterations yet to make it better, but it does worry me that it relies almost completely, as far as I can see, or if we are not careful, it will end up that way, on JavaScript and that always is a potential for excluding people and stopping people being able to use things. If it can be constructed the right way, and technically there is no reason it can’t be, so that if you take away the JavaScript, it still works with forms and clicks and links and horrible and slow and page refreshes, but has that fall-back if you like, then I’d be more pleased.
55. But yes, I think it’s a great thing and it’s certainly, I tell people in my beginners’ class, it saves you having to go through three, four, five, six different admin screens to set your site up, and it also allows you to get it all done in one go, rather than having your site in this half-finished state where you are making these changes piecemeal. So yes, I think it’s great.
56. Gary Jones: Moving forwards then, is a couple of questions from Davinder and Paul related to what are your thoughts on page builders in terms of plugging in theme page builders.
57. Mike Little: My biggest issue with them is the ones that are built into themes basically lock you into that theme, and that’s just not a good thing. The same with any themes that lock you in whatever for features of the theme implements that should be plugin territory, I think is a bad thing. And then the fact that most of them still work as short codes I think is just a bad thing. There’s a couple that I believe are now getting better, one that I know for sure is the Beaver Builder one, which if you disable the plugin, so it’s a plugin base, so it works with any theme, if you disable the plugin, all the content you’ve generated on that front end in the page builder is actually in your Pages. It’s not styled properly, but you’ve not lost that content and that’s the key thing, is that if you turn off your plug-in or you change your theme, all the work that you’ve done to build those pages on the front end is lost, unless it’s a really, really good tool, and most of them don’t seem to be. At worst, or almost for some of them, at best, you’re left with a page full of square brackets that makes almost no sense apart from you might just be able to spot some of the paragraphs.
58. Gary Jones: We are the UK Genesis Podcast. If anyone has any questions, you can get them in on Twitter using the UKGenesis hashtag (#UKGenesis). Speaking of which then, what do you think of Genesis? Why do you use Genesis? What do you like about it? Dislike about it?
59. Mike Little: One of the things that I really like about it is that pretty much all of the themes, and certainly the last twenty or so themes, are all really nice out of the box, and as a non-designer, it means that I don’t have to do lots of work to tweak them make them look how, perhaps, a client might want. I also like the fact that they are customisable with code. So, although the themes that you use are child themes, I tend, in a number of cases, to not actually modify that child theme so that I can take the updates, and I actually tend to write a companion plugin that will make the modifications to it where appropriate. In fact, there’s not a huge amount that you can’t do with code and with plugins to change the behaviour of the themes, and so yes, pretty much most Genesis themes that I work with, or work on, I very rarely modify the original child theme.
60. Gary Jones: Obviously one of the most recent updates was the 2.2 set of releases, which focused on accessibility for Genesis. Is accessibility on the front end something that you take a key interest in for your client projects or within your developer training? Or is it something that it’s there and …?
61. Mike Little: So, accessibility is something I’m very, very passionate about. So I’m really pleased that those moves have been made to improve accessibility, in WordPress itself as well as in Genesis. Yes, it goes back to that thing about potentially excluding people. For those who were at WordCamp London, one of the questions – it wasn’t on the video, unfortunately – one of the questions somebody asked was about accessibility.
62. Whilst WordPress is great for empowering people to have their voice on the Web, all over the world in oppressed countries, in rural Africa, all kinds of places where people are able to use WordPress to have their voice, if somebody who lives on your street who can’t use a keyboard or can’t see a screen is unable to use WordPress, that would be a terrible, terrible thing, and so accessibility for me is absolutely huge. You can’t exclude people for technical reasons.
63. So, any progress in accessibility, I’m really, really pleased about, and it’s great that Genesis is catching up, but equally great is that WordPress core itself is catching up and in fact that it’s officially an important part of all development should be that all things get looked at and looked over by the accessibility team, that team of volunteers to do a great job of keeping people on their toes.
64. Gary Jones: Absolutely. There are certainly a few within the WordPress accessibility team or within the Genesis community as well, so we get that two-way benefit as well. Do you use Genesis for the majority, say, of your client projects or do you prefer standalone themes rather than child-parent themes?
65. Mike Little: When I am building sites – as I say, I don’t do that as much – I do tend to use it, as much because I think people tend to stick to themes they are familiar with, but yes I do tend to use it. And any test sites or experiments that I throw up myself, I will tend to just throw a Genesis theme on there and do minimal changes to it, because it’s already a good-looking theme. I am somebody who appreciates the simpler side of designs, so I like lots of white space, nice-looking fonts, things that are clear and readable. I know the designers will hate me, but after that initial impression, whether it’s wow otherwise, it is all about the content and how easy the site is to use and how useful the site is to yourself. Apart from that initial “wow,” first impressions and all that, I don’t have great things to say about design generally. That’s not to say it’s not good.
66. Jo Waltham: What’s the biggest site that you’ve worked on or most prestigious client that you’ve done?
67. Mike Little: In terms of probably most prestigious, my very first client after quitting my day job was the number 10 Downing Street site, so the website for the Office of the Prime Minister, so that was quite interesting as your first job!
68. Jo Waltham: Baptism of fire!
69. Mike Little: Yes and that was originally maintenance. It was built by a design company who really didn’t really know WordPress, and I was kind of brought in to fix lots of bugs, but then I developed features for it and so on. At one point I rebuilt it and rebuilt their infrastructures as well, which was quite good fun. Then they took it back in-house and then eventually they took it off WordPress and used the new system that GDS had built.
70. Probably the most complex or biggest one is one that’s an on-going project; it’s been going since 2010, so over 5 years now, and that’s the “I’m a scientist get me out of here” site that I built for my client Gallomanor, and that’s a science engagement site, so basically in school science lessons, kids come onto the site, it runs as a two week event: kids come on to the site, there’s a whole bunch of scientists have signed up to the site, and they put their profiles on there and then the kids get to ask them questions, anything at all, which is really good. And then they also do live chats after the first week, they do live chats from the beginning, so they get to chat real-time and then after the first week, they get to vote for their favourite scientist, and one a day gets kicked off the site, off the event. The eventual winner wins £500 to promote science in whatever way they want. It’s absolutely brilliant. It has been, and still is, a honour and a privilege to work on it. I love what it’s doing for science engagement and I love what it’s doing for kids’ attitudes towards science.
71. It is also just incredibly, incredibly complex. I think we are up to about 16 custom plugins now. The custom theme, or rather the custom theme and its 9, 10, maybe 12 child themes are huge and horrendously complex, but it is an incredibly functional site. I should probably write a book about it, there is so much on that site and so much it does5. I had a conversation with the client yesterday about lots of exciting new things we are going to be adding to it. It’s been really, really huge, and it’s gone all over the world as well. We’ve done it in Malaysia, Australia, the US. I think it’s coming in Spain next year, which is going to be interesting because we need to make sure that everything is translatable.
72. Jo Waltham: I was going to ask you about that. Translation-ready and all of that side of it is quite an issue.
73. Mike Little: It pretty much is and if you ever need to work out whether something is translation-ready or not, the Pig Latin plugin is awesome for that. But yes, I think it is. What’s really interesting is that I already use the translation facility for the application itself. The original application was for “I’m a scientist get me out of here”, but we also have run “I’m an engineer get me out of here”, and just started, either this week or last week, “ I’m an astronaut get me out of here”, and those are implemented using language translations.
74. Jo Waltham: Oh, wow!

Mike Little: So, the wording and the functionality of the site, and the

76. look of the site, changes using child themes and different pretend languages. So, we have an engineering language and we have an astronaut language. So, yes that’s going to be interesting to then actually mix that in with a real other language!
77. Jo Waltham: That’s true. Gosh! Jackie asked, How can we make how to make a website more accessible, be simplified, for people who are learning to develop websites? Because I have looked at that documentation and it’s like, “Whoa!” So, have you got any tips?
78. Mike Little: I think start with the basics. Too many people start with looking for a theme with as many bells and whistles as they can find, and I think that’s the wrong approach. For example, with my courses, I start with just all the built-in WordPress functionality and just show people just how far you can go with that, with custom menus, with widgets, with perhaps a couple of additional plugins. You can actually go quite far in terms of building a site with its functionality, laying out its architecture, the navigation, splitting up its content in ways that make sense to you and your visitors, all without even having to think about getting into coding or even the more complex plugins.
79. So, I think build things up, and again I try and emphasise that it’s about content. It’s no good having the best-looking site in the world if you actually haven’t got round to putting any content beyond your About page and the Hello World post, but some great-looking sliders. So, yes, to me, it’s get started with the content first, build your architecture, build your interaction in there, whether that’s comments or contact forms and all that kind of stuff, and then start adding the functionality that you need and the complexity. Does that answer the question?
80. Jo Waltham: Yes, take it one bit at a time: that’s kind of the approach that I have taken so far with the improvements in Genesis. It’s basically reading everything about that and how that’s implemented and making sure that all new sites now are using that, and it’s a case of once I’ve got that under my belt, we’ll be looking at what else is there that we need to consider and so on. So, Andrew asks, Are you surprised by the demand for WordPress business consultancy services? Just how successfully developers can sell their services?
81. Mike Little: I’m not really surprised by it. Not now, anyway. I was surprised by the whole thing around just how the business had developed around WordPress. I really actually missed out on that key area of growth when companies like StudioPress and Woo and people like got started and grew big, and the agencies and so on. That was surprising really when the first big survey that Matt ran came out. That was a big surprise.
82. But now I’m not surprised, because it’s such a popular tool, but the majority of people who need to use or want to use WordPress are not technical and so they need someone to help them out. They can struggle along and manage a few bits, and there’s some good and some bad videos YouTube to help you out with things, but I think the problem is is that – as I mentioned earlier on – it’s only easy to use once you’ve learnt how to use it, and that learning how to use it can be quite hard, and there is so much that is not discoverable. That’s one of the things, I think that WordPress can improve in, is making it discoverable, or making the functions and the functionality that’s built discoverable.
83. Now here’s an interesting thought that’s just occurred to me now as I said that. One of the things that annoyed me with 2015, besides the fact that I had to change my courses, is that it doesn’t have the automatic menu any more, and I used to tell people at the beginning of my course, “You start a page and it automatically appears on the menu and you don’t need to go further than adding five or six pages and then doing a blog or News or whatever, your site is built and you don’t need to do anything”. But actually, by not having the automatic menu, you now have to discover about custom menus, and therefore you now know you’ve got that flexibility to do whatever you want in terms of navigation and things like that. So maybe, maybe, that is a good thing that I’ve been complaining about for several months.
84. Jo Waltham: It’s funny you should say that: I was literally just building a site for someone and she added new categories, and she wrote to me saying, “I’ve added new categories and they are not showing on the menu, why they are not there?” And it’s like, “Well, because you have to add them to the menu”. So, some non-technical people just assume that it will automatically add. Then again, sometimes you don’t want it to automatically add, so you’re kind of- it’s difficult.
85. Mike Little: It is difficult, yes.
86. Jo Waltham: Do you think that the power of WordPress, the reason why it is so popular, comes down to the introduction of plugins and themes? Were you involved in that decision, because that must have been an early on decision?
87. Mike Little: Absolutely that’s where a huge amount of WordPress’s power comes from is that you don’t have to modify the original, and these days you don’t have to get involved in any kind of coding or to add huge amounts of functionality. And that is really, really huge, and there’s not many systems out there that are like that.
88. I was not directly involved in adding that functionality in there, although interestingly, filters already existed in B2, which I did not know at the time. Filters already existed in B2 before we forked it and created WordPress, and in fact, the actions that are perhaps the key things for plugins are, under the hood, treated the same as filters, just without returns, although I do wish they did return as well.
89. So, yes, I was not directly involved in it; it’s actually no different than things I’ve written a dozen times before in different languages and different organisations that I’ve worked for. At the end of the day, for those of a technical mind, they’re just call-backs. You register call-backs and the system calls you back at the appropriate time, and in other languages that’s exactly what they are. But it’s actually done in a really clever way. It is done in a particularly flexible way, and again that is the type of thing that I love doing is to make things configurable by name so you’ve got that wonderful thing that if you hook onto a whole bunch of actions and those actions don’t get called, nothing breaks. And it’s just a great way to mean that you can tinker about with code and if somebody turns off a plugin or the plugin gets disabled for whatever reason, stuff doesn’t break if you are using actions and filters and things like that.
90. But yes, that ability to effectively modify pretty much anything and everything that WordPress does in lots of different ways is the reason it’s so great, it really is
91. Jo Waltham: I think it’s the presence of all the action hooks and filters and everything in Genesis which is one of the main reasons why I know a lot of people love Genesis, because it gives them that flexibility as well.
92. Mike Little: Absolutely, without necessarily having to hack into all the individual code files and make those changes directly in a dozen different templates like you might have had to do in a standard theme. You just hook on to the one action and you are good to go.
93. Jo Waltham: One question we ask most people who come on the show is the reason behind the name of their business. zed1.com? Why is it zed1.com?
94. Mike Little: My very first domain that I bought was ampersoft.com.uk, because I used to have, when I was young, an obsession with ampersands. I thought they were great, they looked great and I thought your name was brilliant. At one point, I decided I was going to have lots of different companies, all based on that. I had Ampersoft, Ampersound, because I’ve always been into music, and various different plays on the word I could come up with. That was my first domain, and then I kind of realised that it’s rather long and nobody knows how to spell it. In 1999, this would be, I think. I thought, “I need a short name and a dot com”. And pretty much already all the three and four letter names were already gone, and so I went with zed1 as being, whilst it’s a dot com, it’s kind of English, with it being zed. In fact, for a long time, many years, there was just a holding page on that domain that said “zed1.com, the Americans call it zee but we call it zed,” or something like that. It was literally just I wanted to buy a short domain name. Nothing more than that.
95. Jo Waltham: Have you thought about all the top-level domain names coming out, have you thought about trying to grab something that’s nice and punchy?
96. Mike Little: I’ve got a few of the newer ones that have come out. But actually some of the obscure ones are quite good fun as well, so I now do have a four-letter domain, so wp.tl is one of my domains, which I then had to make up what it stood for. So now it stands for WordPress Training Lab. That was quite nice to get that. The new ones, whilst I’ve got a few of them, some around the training, they are absolutely about making money unfortunately. Whilst, yes, we really were running out of names that people could use that were short and snappy and findable, adding however many hundreds and hundreds, is it thousands that we’re getting up to, of top level domains didn’t make any sense. Maybe adding 10 or 20 would have made sense, but yes, most of it is just about the money, and especially from the big corporates, who have now got to buy I don’t know what, 50, 80, 100, 200 domains in their trademark name.
97. Jo Waltham: I have a lot of clients who’ll sort of say, “Oh, should I also get this version?” and then if they say, “Should I get the hyphenated version?” and I’ll say, “Look, you’ve got to stop unless you have got lots of money to throw at this”. I am looking forward to when dot web comes out, because my business name is Callia Web, and part of the reason it’s called Callia Web is because I wanted a short name, and I’m looking forward to being able to have Callia.web. I ‘ve said that live now, because someone might go and try to get there before me”
98. Mike Little: Yes, you still want something that’s short and snappy, and that’s memorable. I would love to get Mikelittle.com but although, I was going to say, unfortunately somebody has had that for a while, there’s a guy, a realtor in the US. But actually the site has actually been down for 6 months or more now.
99. Jo Waltham: So you are monitoring it?
100. Mike Little: Yes, it would be nice to get hold of it. I have many variations on Mike Little, I have to say. And, you know, renewal time comes around and I think, “I’m not using this, should I spend this again?” but most of the time I do.
101. Jo Waltham: How many domains do you own, do you think?
102. Mike Little: Oh, maybe 40 or 50.
103. Jo Waltham: Oh, good.
104. Mike Little: Yes, something like that. I mean, I know people who have hundreds and hundreds. I mean, I actually manage a lot more because I often manage domains for clients, especially the DNS side of things, because it’s just, again, something that’s complex and people don’t necessarily know how to do that technical side of things, and there’s actually quite a bit more than just pointing your domain at your website that you need to do with DNS that many don’t.
105. Jo Waltham: Yes. We noticed on your website that you are using HTTPS. Do you think it’s essential for all websites to start using that?
106. Mike Little: I don’t think it’s yet essential. The first one I did, I did purely to see if I could, to see if I could actually set it up, especially because I’m using nginx and I haven’t used Apache in a while, so setting up HTTPS on NGINX was a mysterious thing to me, especially on a shared server, so I have a dedicated server with multiple sites on it. But I managed to get that working, and then managed to tweak it for the bits where it didn’t work. Luckily, I actually realised it wasn’t working on my phone fairly early on, because, believe it or not, the Chrome app on an Android is a little bit stricter than the one on your desktop.
107. So, that’s what I started with, but around the same time Google started saying that they would, all other things being equal, which is a phrase that I use all the time when I’m talking about SEO, they say that having a secure site potentially can be a little bit of a boost, all other things being equal. And I think these days the technology behind website hosting means that it’s not the performance hit that it used to be. And it did: it used to be absolutely that you could be looking at a 10 or 15% slowdown by running your site over SSL, or LTS, whatever it’s called now. These days, I’m going to be doing it more and more. I think we’ve got five sites now that are running secure, and I will probably do more.
108. Gary Jones: Just before we talk about your workflow and the tools you use internally to do that, just one thing I want to touch on. Obviously, recently we had Alex King who passed away due to cancer very unfortunate. At the start of the year, we had Kim Parsell, who was one of the major contributors to the Docs Team. Had you had any involvement with those folks, and do you think the WordPress community is established enough now that we are unfortunately going to see more of these key personnel leaving us? How do you suggest that we best remember their contributions to the community?
109. Mike Little: So, Kim I didn’t have any contact with, and in fact although I had seen her name about, I didn’t know much about her until unfortunately she did die. Alex, yes, I remember chatting with Alex on the B2 forums before even WordPress started, and him being involved in the early days, running the theme competitions and I actually entered his second theme competition that he ran!
110. I mean, it’s not so much about age, because Alex wasn’t any great age. It can happen. I remember who’s the chap, Dunbar with the eye patch, he had an accident, so anybody can go at any time. I think it’s great that we’re a huge community and probably more than in some other areas, the fact that everything we do is open, it’s open source, all the forums are there and searchable, the codex and all those things, so we won’t necessarily lose people’s contributions. But also, what you touched on about how do we remember them, I think the fact that we’ve done one of the things that Alex asked, which was about your thoughts, your memories of him, we publish what we can, we publish information about people, and because most of us manage and own our own sites, those things will stay up as long as we want to.
111. On an even more sombre note, it’s something we all need to think about, one, from a business point of view: what will happen to our business if something happens to us? But also what kind of legacy of control do we need to leave for our online properties? I mean, I know there’s already been issues with Facebook accounts of people who have died, where spouses or parents have been able to get access to the account whether that’s to close it down or to turn it into a memorial account or something like that. It’s actually a huge question that these online presences are something that we’ve never had to think about or deal with before, and, yes, that is actually something we need to think about.
112. Gary Jones: Thank you for that. OK, changing tack completely now. What tools do you use for creating invoices, organising training with clients or project management, time tracking? What sorts of tools do you use for any of those?
113. Mike Little: At the moment now for accounting I use KashFlow with a K, which I’ve used since its early days ,although now it’s been bought by a big company. I use Receipt Bank, which is awesome. It has absolutely saved me many, many hours. I actually originally got the option where I could put all of my receipts in an envelope and send it off to them for free and they would just enter them into the system, which then ties into KashFlow. But now I either take photos of stuff with my camera, with the little app on my camera, or PDFs and even emails, I just print them as PDFs and drop them in a specific Dropbox folder and they put them in my accounts for me. I love it, it saves me so much time.
114. Other things that I use: for project management I tend you use Basecamp. I have had a Trello account and have had a play with it, but Basecamp is the one that I’ve kind of stuck with for quite a long time, in particular, Gallomanor, the “I’m a scientist“ project, the client behind that, they use Basecamp hugely. They have a massive, massive set of projects on Basecamp, because, as I say, everything is still on-going.
115. Other tools: I love Zapier, so I use Zapier to tie bits of things together, which is quite nice. And that’s everything, so for example from when somebody fills in a contact form on my site, it also add them to my CRM, as well as sending me an email. One of the things I do with my training customers is give them access to a private support forum for after the two days of lessons are finished, and that’s actually a Gravity Form, and it registers them on the site, it adds them to the right forum, it adds them to my CRM, and it adds them to my MailChimp mailing list as well. Some bits are done with Zapier, other bits are done directly.
116. So, yes, those kind of tools that I use. I use Toggl for time tracking (no e). I thought we had given up dropping vowels from names, but apparently not.
117. Jo Waltham: What do you use for your to do list?
118. Mike Little: Oh, Todoist. No, I did use Todoist, Toodledo is the one that I use at the moment. They have got to be number 6 or 7 in a series. They all seem to work for a while, and then I get fed up with them or something’s not happy, or occasionally something more shiny comes along, which in the case of Todoist didn’t last long. Yes it was shiny, but I didn’t like it. So yeah Toodledo I am using at the moment, but I’ve got some automation with that as well, so I’ve got a couple of forums I watch for new software releases, for example, a new version of a piece of software comes out then it ends up creating a to do with Zapier on my to do list. So things like that are quite good.
119. Gary Jones: Do you think there’s an immense amount of value in automating things like that to run your business efficiently?
120. Mike Little: Absolutely. yes. I mean, just everything, so, for example, I use Freshdesk for support, for client support, so when a client raises a ticket on Freshdesk, it gets added as a task in my time tracker, in Toggl, so that then I just need to type the ticket number in and know what item I am tracking for my time. Similarly, I create a new project in Basecamp, it gets added into Toggl and so on. And yes, tying those things together, for me it, it’s like the assistant I don’t have or can’t afford to pay doing all those little regular things that I keep forgetting about which should be written on pieces of paper somewhere. But yes, getting a computer to do it is so much better.
121. Gary Jones: Do you track your time, do you kind of charge hourly or is it to track your time to see how you can make your business more efficient?
122. Mike Little: A mixture of both, really. Some jobs I do I charge hourly, so I will track my time for those, and others where I may be doing something that’s a fixed fee then I will still track my time to make sure that I’m not doing too much. I also just track my own tasks, again just to look at efficiency and look at just how much time I’m spending on things. I started using one of the ones that monitor what websites you visit and what apps you use and things like that.
123. Gary Jones: RescueTime?
124. Mike Little: Yes, RescueTime. I started using RescueTime because I thought it would be great to tell me to stop using social media and all the rest of it. And then I discovered, well, two things. One, I actually don’t use social media that much, and two, I was doing 50, 60 and 70 hour weeks. And actually it helped me stop doing that. That was quite useful, not for the reason I thought it was going to be.
125. Gary Jones: I think we mentioned on the pre-show notes, obviously you live with your family there. Is having a nice work / life balance critical to everybody’s well-being?
126. Mike Little: I think it is, I think it absolutely is although I’m not very good at it still! I still tend to work 8 to 9 hours and still do a bit in the evening. But it definitely makes a difference, and it’s as much the balance in terms of time, but also the separation as well. I’ve now got an office at the back of my house, which is actually a physically separate building, and that has made a huge difference in terms of not being disturbed, not being tempted to wander off into the kitchen and grab a snack and this and that and the other. It makes a huge difference. It can be isolating as well, but in terms of getting more work done, that has made a difference. And that then makes it easier to walk away from that office, and lock the door, and then I am done working – mostly!
127. Gary Jones: In terms of trying to avoid the isolation there, what involvement do you have with the local – not exactly in Stockport, but say the Manchester WordPress community?
128. Mike Little: I actually run the Manchester WordPress user group, which I’ve been doing for 6 years now, I think, or 5 years. That is great, a monthly meetup, and that is pretty huge. We have about 500 on our Meetup group. We regularly get 30, 40 people. That’s quite interesting, that has grown really, really well, and I can definitely say that I am friends with quite a few people that I have met through that. I also try to be involved in various other things. We’ve got WordCamp Manchester coming up this weekend, which actually I haven’t been involved with the organisation, but I was last year, I sort of spearheaded that last year; this year I have kind of just stayed to one side as a mentor.
129. There’s that and then as I say I do work for MadLab in terms of running training courses. And that’s a brilliant space for lots of techy groups and creative groups and so on, and I’m also actually on the board of advisors for MadLab as well, so that is quite useful. And then there is a couple of work spaces in Manchester that I occasionally visit. There is an interesting one called Ziferblat, which is you pay for your time there and everything in there is free: coffee and biscuits and cakes and stuff. You just pay by the minute, which is quite interesting. And then SpacePortX, which used to have a different name that I can’t remember. They have very kindly given me a hot desk in there that I can use if there is space available at any time, so I do tend to try at least head up to Manchester every couple of weeks and spend an afternoon there or a full day there, so that helps, absolutely.
130. Gary Jones: Do you get to many WordCamps throughout the year? Are you planning to go to WordCamp US?
131. Mike Little: I’ve not been to any that were outside the UK, actually. I always have plans to do more but never get around to it, in fact in front of me, I can see it now, is my expired passport that I just need to renew and sort out.
132. Gary Jones: In time for Vienna, at least!
133. Jo Waltham: So are you going to come to Vienna?
134. Mike Little: It would be great, I would love to sort it out. Hopefully I can, and get myself in gear and not have too much work on. But I do try to get to the UK ones. Unfortunately, I was actually supposed to speak at London or manage a panel, I think, at the last London one, and unfortunately at the last minute a problem meant that I couldn’t go. But yes, I have done a few. I have done Sheffield and all the WPUK organised ones, I’ve been involved with those, so yes.
135. Gary Jones: OK, we have gone past our usual time, but Mike said he would graciously go a bit longer, as we’ve got still quite a few questions that we can ask. So if you’ve got any more questions, send them in on Twitter. Let’s see how we’re doing. Yes, we’ve got one or two extra questions coming in there with the #UKGenesis hashtag so we see them, and we’ll try to get them all asked. Jo, did you want to do the quick-fire round?
136. Jo Waltham: You know, I was just about to say that, shall we do the quick-fire round?
137. Gary Jones: A nice chance just to….
138. Jo Waltham: OK, are you ready?
139. Mike Little: Yes!
140. Jo Waltham: What did you want to be when you grew up?
141. Mike Little: Oh, I had no idea. I literally had no idea. And in fifth year at secondary school, we had a bunch of career advisors come in, and my career advice was, “What are you interested in?” I said, “Well, a few years ago I got an electronic set for Christmas and that was really good”. “Oh, you should be an artificer in the Royal Navy”. And that was it. I didn’t even know what that was. And the reality was that the school that I went to, everybody was actually expected to go on to university and not have to worry about careers. But it’s not something that I ever thought of at all, strangely.
142. Jo Waltham: Do you use a Mac or a PC?
143. Mike Little: I now use a Mac. I am three years into my Mac, now. I’m onto my second one, because my first one broke after two years which I was really unhappy about. Prior to that, I used a PC, but Linux. I was 100% Linux for about six or seven years and whilst I do like the Mac, it still annoys me every single day with the keyboard and the keys are just wrong.
144. Jo Waltham: Are we talking about the hash key?
145. Mike Little: Oh, well, I’ve got a reprogrammed keyboard for that. That was silly. But, whilst I use the MacBook, I’m an Android phone user. I do not have an iPhone, thank you very much.
146. Gary Jones: Same here.
147. Jo Waltham: I’m saying nothing. What code editor do you use?
148. Mike Little: I have been using one called Epsilon from Lugaru.com for more than 20 years, believe it or not. It’s now more than 20 years that I’ve been using that editor, from before Windows when it was a DOS program and I still use it every single day, because it is always worked on all platforms, it works in the terminal remotely on my servers, and I don’t mean it connects remotely, I mean it actually runs on my servers, so that’s great. However Mac doesn’t like it, it still runs under OS X, under XWindows on the Mac. It’s a little bit painful, so recently I have been playing with Sublime Text, which I know is wonderful but my fingers have been doing the same thing for 20 years, and that is hard. But I’ve also been playing with PHPStorm as well, which is really impressive when I need a full IDE.
149. Jo Waltham: OK, and how do you manage your code snippets?
150. Mike Little: I have a folder called Sandbox, which is where all the work happens, and I have a bunch of PHP files in the sandbox and literally that’s all I do. My editor allows me to search across as many files as I want and that’s where I find stuff
151. Jo Waltham: Do you develop locally? And what do you use for a local host if you do?
152. Mike Little: Yes absolutely. I do almost everything locally. I use varying Vagrants now. Prior to that I used to use VMware, but when I discovered VVV, I just completely stopped using VMware, even though I still have a licence for it. I do everything in that. I actually run all my own servers, so I don’t do any shared hosting at all, and all of my servers run Ubuntu, and in fact my client servers as well, when I can persuade them. And so running VVV on an Ubuntu platform, it just makes lots and lots of sense, so that’s the one I use.
153. Jo Waltham: And what do you use to deploy sites?
154. Mike Little: I have a mixture of things. If it’s a simple site, where maybe there’s not actually a huge amount of customisation, I will just use Rsync, so I don’t bother with FTP generally, I use rsync, which is a remote synchronisation, again, because everything I’ve got, I’ve got SSH logins to, so I will just rsync stuff across that way. Some projects, I will check out from either Subversion or Git: now I’m grown up and using Git now, like all the kids do. I use that and particularly on the “I’m a scientist” site, because a couple of designers work on it as well: everything there is deployed via Subversion, so the roll-backs are quick and easy. As I say, I’ve been playing with Git, and recently I’ve been playing with Ansible, which is straight over the top of my head, but the people behind Roots.io have built this system called Trellis that puts it all together, and it just works. I’ve just been playing with that, and it seems to work, so I’m very excited by that, because it has nice things where just on the command line you can deploy to staging and you can deploy to live and it handles lots of things like different configurations and stuff like that. So, very exciting, but I’m still just about dipping my toe in that particular water.
155. Jo Waltham: What are your must-use plugins? What are your favourite plugins you tend to use on sites?
156. Mike Little: Yoast SEO, WP Super Cache, I’ve been playing with W3TC, is it, the other one? Total Cache, yes, but I find it too complicated. I’m a very technical person, I’ve been doing this computer thing since 1978 when I wrote my first program, but I find W3 Total Cache too complicated. Super Cache I use the most, and external caching, I’ve been playing about with external caching with Nginx and things like that. Other plugins: Limit Login Attempts used to be my favourite. It’s just gone over two years old now, which is a bit of a shame, so it’s not going to turn up when people search for it, and of course in the those situations where Jetpack is a really good answer for a simple site that just needs a whole bunch of functionality, Jetpack now has that functionality to limit the logins, although I don’t like the fact that they have a Kaptcha without you having any choice about it.
157. What else do I use? Update Notifier is really useful, so I have a folder full of daily emails that tell me what plugins need updating, because I manage between 80 and 150 sites, depending on how many tests sites I’ve got running as well, so yes, just being able to manage those is great, and Update Notifier’s really useful for that. And then others, it’s more specialised, depending on the type of site I’m building.
158. Jo Waltham: OK, and do you use any particular starter theme for Genesis?
159. Mike Little: No, I don’t, actually. I tend to stick to the simpler ones, but, again, because I’m not a designer, so if I’ve got any choice in the matter, I’ll start with the simplest ones, and I can’t even think what they’re called. There’s one called Minimum, there’s one that has a little Parallax front end, so I’ve used that on a couple of sites. Yes, just the simplest, nicest-looking ones in terms of just font and white space. The simpler the better for me!
160. Jo Waltham: I feel kind of embarrassed asking this question, but have you ever written a public plugin?
161. Mike Little: Aha! Yes, but only about two months ago, amazingly!
162. Jo Waltham: What does it do?
163. Mike Little: So, besides the stuff – oh, it was somebody had a specific question about turning off something in 2011, I can’t remember, or maybe 2014, so I wrote a plugin for them rather than explain how to do it and put it on GitHub. It’s not gone on the WordPress Repository, but it’s actually the first plugin I’ve ever published. I used to publish three or four themes, many years ago, that were incredibly popular for quite a while: I still have in excess of half a million links to my old blog from sites still using those themes, amazingly. Rather embarrassingly, they seem to be very popular with amateur porn sites! I have no idea why! I think they’re good for SEO, but it’s just like, “Oh, a new site’s using it … oh, no, don’t want to look there!” Yes, really weird. Really weird. I’ve not made any for years now.
164. Jo Waltham: You made sure you had trackbacks switched off from that, I would have thought, yes.
165. Mike Little: Yes, that was odd, that was odd. But yes, so just the one, and only recently, surprisingly.
166. Jo Waltham: Is there anything you’d like to see changed for the Genesis Framework?
167. Mike Little: Yes. All the top-level code in functions.php needs to be inside a function that’s called from the theme-loaded action, whatever it’s called. Yes, stop that top-level code: that is so old, and it means that some things are hard to over-ride, really hard: you have to jump through lots of loops to override things. So, that’s the one thing I would change. I would hope they would have done it in the last big update, but alas not.
168. Jo Waltham: OK, and what would you say are the benefits of using Genesis as a developer?
169. Mike Little: As I mentioned earlier, just that ability to change things in code, so I very often write a plugin that tweaks the theme, even to add a little bit of extra CSS to suit a particular site. But that’s as much because I’m not really making huge design changes.
170. Jo Waltham: OK, and what would you say are the benefits of Genesis for your clients?
171. Mike Little: I really like the mobile responsiveness out of the box. Of course, now we’ve got the additional accessibility capability that’s really good. I have occasionally played with the additional markup that they added for the Semantic Web, so I’m quite impressed that some of that’s in there and that there’s a nice little plugin that adds a few other bits for that as well. So, yes, I just like that.
172. And they’re well-maintained, nice and secure, I trust the code, and I like the fact that you can make them do more and make them more complex, but by adding plugins instead of it all being in the theme from the start.
173. Jo Waltham: Did you watch GenesisCamp, that was back in July, I think, wasn’t it? Did you see any of it?
174. Mike Little: It’s on my to do list, it’s on my to watch list, along with a zillion other videos. I think I might have watched one thing, and I can’t even remember which one it was now, but yes, it was one of those where I wish I’d been – I can’t remember why I couldn’t watch it live, but you’re then suddenly faced with overwhelming six or seven hours’ worth of videos to watch, and it’s like just finding the time to do it.
175. Jo Waltham: Do you think they should run it again next year? I suppose it’s difficult to say if you’ve not seen it.
176. Mike Little: Yes, I mean, just the idea of it was great anyway, and I think, as the technology has improved enough that you can actually run something like that – I mean, I remember the recent BuddyCamp had people speaking from the other side of the world, then yes, I think it’s a great way to run conferences that make it easier to manage, still give the value, without that overhead of people spending lots of money to get to places and things like that. Of course, you lose the physical interaction, but yes, I think it’s a great way to run a conference.
177. Jo Waltham: Yes, it was quite good fun, actually. Do you prefer www or non-www domains?
178. Mike Little: Non-www! Goodness me!
179. Jo Waltham: Why?
180. Mike Little: Because it’s six extra syllables for goodness’ sake. And just every newsreader and every radio advert that I think, “You’ve just lost three seconds or five seconds saying www,” so yes, turn it off please.
181. Jo Waltham: This is the last question. What is your preferred tool or plugin for post types and custom field implementation?
182. Mike Little: For custom fields I use Advanced Custom Fields now. I use to write all my own code, and now I rarely write any code for custom fields. I tend to start a project using the custom post type UI, which is the Brad Williams one, to define my custom post types, but I love the fact that it will spit out4 the PHP code out for you, because at some point I will end up putting that into a plugin when I start building the rest of the functionality, and then turn off the plugin and throw it away, as it were. That’s generally what I tend to use.
183. Gary Jones: Excellent. OK, then, we have gone way over our time now so we’ll start to wrap up. Who would you most like to see on this podcast in the future, and how many of our previous podcasts have you watched?
184. Mike Little: I think I might have watched two, I am sorry to say and who would I pick? Actually you have already done the person that I would have said, which was Sue Fernandez. You’ve already done Sue. I am not sure actually. I can’t think of anyone off the top pf my head, I shall try and think of somebody.
185. Jo Waltham: I think it needs to be Gary. I think Paul, who sometimes co-hosts as well, Paul and I need to interview Gary, but he keeps squirming out of it. Hey, Twitter, if you think it should be Gary, please let us know!
186. Mike Little: Yes that would be a good one.
187. Gary Jones: We might have scheduled me in for next year. Once we get to our one-year anniversary, I have actually scheduled myself in for that one on request. Where can we find you online, Mike?
188. Mike Little: I am on Twitter and I do check it occasionally, so it’s @mikelittlezed1. My website is mikelittle.org and there’s a contact form on here that comes through to my email. Those are probably the main ones. Otherwise, if you are in the Manchester area, trot along to the Manchester WordPress user group on the third Wednesday of the month, and come and say hi. We have a great community there and always welcome new people.
189. Gary Jones: Excellent, sounds good. Thank you very much for joining us today, Mike, thank you so much for your time, and thank you to our listeners as well and for all your questions during the show and before the show. Thank you to Jo for joining us as well. Any final words of wisdom for our listeners?
190. Mike Little: Keep plugging at it, it gets easier, whether that’s using or whether that’s developing for WordPress and Genesis. Yes, learn something new every day, and help somebody else, because that’s a great way to solidify your own learning. There you go. Sweet. Thank you very much.
191. Gary Jones: And on those fantastic words, we will see you in two weeks’ time, where our guest is Dave Dean, WP Musketeer, and we shall see you all then. Until then, bye-bye.
192. Mike Little: Cool.