The #PressForward Podcast

I’m sure that we’ve all been through times in our lives that we could describe as ‘difficult’, and we’ve all managed to PressForward and carry on.

The thing is that no two people are leading the same lives and no two people experience difficulty in the same way. What might be a simple thing for you, could be a major obstacle for someone else.

Our best-loved stories are all full of difficulties that the characters are trying to overcome. Humans seem to have a very deep interest in listening to stories about overcoming difficulties, and I hope that you enjoy listening to Alex tell you about his life.

He’s been through a lot, but has been able to find a way to manage in difficult circumstances.

Family, friends, professional support and the WordPress community have all been there at times to offer guidance and allow Alex to find a way to focus upon a bright future.

Please remember to visit headto.org and have a look around…

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re talking to Marieke van de Rakt, the CEO of Yoast. We met at WordCamp in Berlin earlier this year and had a fun and wide ranging chat.

She’s fairly new to the CEO role, having recently taken the helm from her husband Joost who started the company many years ago, but she’s got some big ideas.

The conversation is wide ranging… we talk about the history of Yoast SEO and how it was that she came to be CEO. We also chat about what she wants the company to do in the near term; changes that she’d like to make.

We also discuss some of the areas that WP and UP is interested in and she shares some of the things that they do at Yoast to ensure that their employees are happy at their work.

Conversely, we also get into the subject of how Marieke makes sure that she is able to cope with over 100 people who depend upon her and the decisions that she makes.

It’s a lovely chat and I hope that you enjoy it!

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have a topic that’s completely new to me. Mobile phones and the way that apps can impact upon your well being.

Zoe E Breen is developing her own mental health and mood app and so started upon a journey of investigating what apps are already out there and what it is that they do. She was surprised that there were so many!

It’s really interesting to talk about the benefits of mobile phones, because we’re often fixated upon the negative impact that they might have; the amount of time that we spend in front of our little screens and the way that it disconnects us from the world around us.

It turns out that there are apps for just about every possible thing that you could imagine… so we cannot talk about them all, and so we focus upon the ones that Zoe has found to the the most useful, or most intriguing.

We talk about the ways in which these apps might be able to positively impact your mental health or mood as well as the ways in which they are limited.

The discussion also gets into the future of apps such as these with developments in A.I. and how machine learning is being used to work out more about us as individuals and what we might need at any given time.

Given that these apps are using a lot of data, we also have a brief chat about the importance of thinking about privacy, and ways that Zoe has been able to categorise apps so that she feels like she is able to trust them.

Not being experienced with apps such as these I wanted to know exactly what kind of things they actually do. It’s all very well downloading them, but what do they give back to you and in what form. Some of the apps require quite a lot of manual input and push notifications to your device, so it might be worth thinking about whether or not this is going to be a benefit for you, or just another distraction in an already busy day. I suppose that the proof will be in the pudding.

Although this list might not cover all the apps that we mention, it covers most of them:

orcha.co.uk

psyberguide.org

Producthunt

Talkspace

Woebot

Calm

Headspace

Realifex

Replika

AiMei

Remember that these apps are not intended to be a replacement support.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we talk with Josepha Haden, the Executive Director of the WordPress Project, and what a wonderful conversation it is! This is another one of the talks that the WP&UP team recorded during WordCamp Europe 2019.

We’re back in the corridor, surrounded by approximately 3,000 WordPressers, so you’re going to have to cope with the background noise… and children!

Josepha has such a broad overview of the entire ecosystem, as it’s one of her roles to make sure that the WordPress Project has what it needs to flourish. That might be connecting with team leads and contributors to understand what they need, or making sure that funding moves where it needs to go for events such as WordCamps.

We speak about how she got started with WordPress; and interesting story in which her mother was the key influence, as well as how WordPress has changed as it has grown over the last 15 years.

We then chat about what it is that continues to attract Josepha to WordPress, which it turns out is teaching people of all ages how it can be used to bring their ideas to life.

We discuss current initiatives that she is interested in such as the increased focus upon diversity and bringing children into contact with WordPress.

It’s a great conversation, and a little window into the past and future of WordPress, brought to you in under three quarters of an hour!

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over the last couple of weeks we took the #PressForward podcast in a different direction – we brought you some live interviews from WordCamp Europe 2019. There are more of these to come, but we thought that we’d go back to the recorded interview format for a few weeks, just to change things around a little!

Today we hear from Phil Morrow. He was our guest in episode number two, but today he’s talking about a different subject. You see, over the last year or so Phil has seen growth in his WooCommerce agency Happy Kite. They’ve taken on some new members of staff and have been working with clients who have larger budgets.

When we think about the trajectory of a business, this seems like it’s exactly what you want. Bigger budgets, more staff – everything must be fine right?

Well for Phil, not everything about this growth was fine, and that is what we talk about today on the #PressForward podcast.

Not having experience of growing an agency before, Phil was not too sure how to proceed. Who should he hire? What kinds of skills should they have? Turns out that you can hire people who do the exact same work that you love, the work that makes you want to get up in the morning. If people that you’ve hired are doing that work, where does that leave you? You’ve become a business manager when you never intended that for yourself. You’ve cut out the aspects of work that you like and handed them over to others to do instead.

We talk about how Phil might have grown his agency differently were he able to roll back the clock and start all over. We also talk about the journey that Phil has had in this time of growth with his own mental health. In what ways did it manifest itself and how he’s been managing it?

Family has been important; Phil’s wife was able to offer support at just the right time and allow Phil to concentrate upon himself and have time away from the business. Time that he needed to reflect about how he wanted to work in the future.

Phil see’s the need for family support, but also for the kind of support that WP&UP can provide. The kind of support that can help you work on and not in your business. He’s excited about the possibilities that WP&UP offers, especially regarding how it can be useful for his employees now and into the future.

Towards the end we explore briefly how Phil has been working on his physical health, getting regular exercise and getting himself out of the house; key components for his own happiness.

Join Phil on this very honest and informative journey with WP&UP.

Interviewed by Nathan Wrigley.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the second of our live WordCamp Europe 2019 interviews.

It’s with Robby McCullough from the popular Beaver Builder Page Builder plugin.

As is the case with all the WordCamp interviews they are are off the cuff, non-scripted discussions in which the conversation flows freely and there’s no specific objective. I really like this format and I hope that you do too.

We get into quite a few topic with Robby; we discuss the purpose of WordCamps for product owners. Are events like this approached with a ‘show up and see’ mentality, or is there a more organised and methodical list of tasks to accomplish whilst in attendance?

We also get into whether or not Page Builders have a future in the era of Gutenberg. Robby addresses the fact that Page Builders and Beaver Builder in particular offer a host of features not currently in (or ever wanted in) the default WordPress editor. In short, Robby is bullish about Page Builders in the future of WordPress.

We chat about the social side of WordPress. How you can make real and meaningful friendships from events like WordCamp.

Finally, we talk about Robby’s decision last year to make travel a real focus of his life. He’s working with a distributed team and so he thought that it would be fun to explore the flexibility that this offered him. He’s been hopping all over the globe for a year and, as you’ll hear, thinks it’s one of the best decisions that he’s ever made. He knows that it’s remarkable that this is possible and that it’s all down to the possibilities that WordPress creates.

I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it!

Interviewed by Nathan Wrigley.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So far, the PressForward podcast has brought you 10 regular episodes and 13 mini PressPause episodes. We’ve tried to bring you a variety of guests speaking about a wide range of subjects.

Over the next few weeks you’re going to get something a little different. You see towards the end of June 2019, five members of the WP&UP team flew out to Berlin. Those people were Dan Maby, Giles Hales-Tooke, Barbara Saul, Paul Smart and myself, Nathan Wrigley.

My task was to find a place to record interviews with some of the 3,000 attendees. The chats were impromptu and recorded in one take. Some of them were long, others short. Some were in groups, many of them 1-2-1. Some of the names might be familiar and others you might be hearing from for the first time. But all of them were fun to record and I’m thankful to all in our community who took time out of their schedule to talk to me.

There were no pre-arranged talking points and everything was off the cuff which led us in some unexpected directions. The order that I’m putting them out is not the order that they were recorded.

We made all of the recordings in one of the main thoroughfares at the event, and at times there were hundreds of people milling about in the background. So you’re going to hear our guests as well as the hum of the interactions taking place around us. Personally, I like this, it makes it seem more real in some way.

So today is the first of our WordCamp Europe interviews. It’s with Andrew Palmer the co-founder of Elegant marketplace. We talk about a whole range of subjects… his work creating products for the WordPress, we also talk about the WordPress community and what events like WordCamp mean and how he’s going to be contributing to WP&UP.

At various points we do mention #depression and so this is a trigger warning.

So without further delay, I bring you Andrew Palmer…

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week the team from WP&UP had the pleasure of attending WordCamp Europe 2019. This year it was held in Berlin and it was a really remarkable event.

Nearly 3,000 people travelled from all over the world to gather together in the largest WordCamp to date.

There were dozens of talks on just about every subject that you could imagine. There were social events and people hanging out in the hallway. It was thousands of interactions all brought together for three days under one roof.

To say that I was impressed does not do it justice; it was amazingly well organised.

There are several things that you could describe as a common thread running through each WordCamp Europe – speakers, WordPress and Remkus de Vries! You see Remkus was there at the start, and in many ways, he and a few of his friends were the start. They got the idea that uniting Europe in a single place once a year would be a good idea.

Eventually the idea took off and the wonderful event that just happened is, thus far, the culmination of that effort.

So today Remkus talks about his relationship with WordPress. How he likes to attend and organise WordPress meetups and WordCamps, as well as what he does to ensure that WordPress does not completely run his life!

It’s a story of what you can achieve if you are prepared to invest the time and effort into the community, and how that community can repay you over the years.

This kind of commitment is not going to be the goal of everyone, but it’s lovely to hear a story about someone who was able to expand the WordPress community in ways that has touched literally thousands upon thousands of people.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sadly this is the last of our mini-series of podcasts in the run up to WordCamp Europe. In one way that’s really sad… I’ve really enjoyed working with Micah from WPMU Dev. Hopefully in the future we can find other ways to collaborate. Another way to look at it is that the ending of this series means that WordCamp Europe is about to begin, and WordCamps is what this entire project has been about.

We’ve tried to bring you stories from a whole variety of WordPressers. Some of them have been funny, others, thought provoking, but the message has always been the same… attending WordCamps can be a great way to meet new people and reconnect with others. Sure, you could view WordCamp as an event about WordPress, the code, the plugins and the themes, but it’s so much more than that. At its heart WordPress is about people and the interactions that they have. Often those interactions are distributed, carried out in emails or Slack, and WordCamp is a chance for you to meet those people in person, face to face, to get to know them and see the whole of them, as they truly are, in real life.

So today we hear the wonderful story of Marcel Bootsman. It’s not like any other that we’ve featured thus far.

A while ago Marcel decided to walk to WordCamp, which on the face of it seems like a reasonable thing to do. Until you learn that Marcel does not live all that close. He’s not even in the same country! Marcel’s journey is long, very long… 500 miles long.

We hear how he came up with the idea of doing this, of how he’s raising money for DonateWC, a charity that could have been invented for this walk. DonateWC is helping get people to WordCamp, people who might no otherwise be able to attend.

We hear also about how Marcel has been committed to WordPress and WordCamp over the years as well as some of the highlights of his journey so far.

If you’re going to be attending WordCamp Europe in June 2019, make sure to seek out Marcel and head over to his Walk to WordCamp Europewebsite and donate to show your appreciation!

I hope that you got something useful out of this podcast mini-series. It’s been a great experience bringing the episodes to you.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we have a nice story for you. It’s a story about breaking new ground and trusting in people… WordPress people.

Sabrina was getting a little frustrated with the fact that there was nobody in her location who understood her passion for WordPress. She’d heard about a WordPress community, but where she was that didn’t seem too real.

She decided to take some affirmative action and if the community wasn’t going to come to her, she was going to go to it! So she set her sights on a WordCamp as the best way to do this. WordCamp London to be specific.

What makes this story more remarkable though is the fact that Sabrina is from Kiev, and so there was going to be a little bit of a language barrier. So, I guess the best way to cope with that is to show up and hope that not too many people talk to you so that you can acclimatise? Not Sabrina!

She decided that the best way to get started with the WordPress community would be by applying to talk at WordCamp London, which she did and of course, she was accepted.

The story develops from there. New friends were made. People who she never met made remarkable gestures of kindness towards her.

The experience was so great that Sabrina decided to attend more WordCamps and the friendships strengthened and flourished.

It’s a great story about doing something new, attending a WordCamp and seeing what comes of it.

We hope you enjoy the show, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We’re always looking for feedback, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do reach out.

And remember… Together we can #PressForward

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.