Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast about the people,
the human beings behind the commit.
I am here today with Michelle Frechette.
I'm your host, Chris Reynolds.
Michelle has done a lot of things.
It's hard to not see your
name in anything relating
to WordPress or WordPress community.
I will let you introduce yourself.
Michelle, go for it.
The floor is yours.
I'm more the community part
of the community and code
than the code part of community and code,
for sure.
Although, I do have...
a plugin in the repository.
It is a fork of Hello Dolly.
So I know that doesn't get
me a lot of street cred.
But and I understand CSS a little.
So there you go.
I'm Michelle Frechette.
Right now I am serving as
the executive director of
post status that's been
going on for a few years now.
I also have a bunch of side
projects that I work on,
including some podcasts of my own.
And I have some things that
are coming out even this
week that are going to be
interesting for people to
learn about me and they're
not public yet.
So you'll have to wait and
see what those are,
but that'll be coming out shortly.
And I'm starting to create
some of my own side projects as well.
Some things like it's already come out.
People can go ahead and see
speed network online.com,
which people are making
reservations for now for
our first tech speed networking online,
which we're going to have
people in breakout rooms and zoom.
So you'll get to meet up to people.
During that.
Seventy-five minutes of time
so that you can learn more
about what people do and
maybe make some connections
for networking for work.
And then I just really love
WordPress and the community.
So I do a lot with the photography team.
I do a lot with the community team.
And I was one of the co,
I forgot my title.
What was it?
Co-release coordinators for
six point eight that came out this year,
which makes me sound a lot
more code than I am because
you don't actually have to
know code to do that job.
But yeah,
so I do a lot in the community
and I just really love this
community a lot.
I also have a fork of Hello Dolly.
My fork of Hello Dolly is
called Hello Ziggy,
and it's the lyrics of Ziggy Stardust.
Oh, cool.
So you're not alone.
I think that's sort of a
little bit of maybe a rite
of passage to make your Hello Dolly fork.
What got you involved in
WordPress and what got you
involved in the sort of
community side of WordPress?
Yeah, so in WordPress itself,
I had forgotten that I when
I tell people I've been
using WordPress since twenty eleven,
the truth is I had used
WordPress for a few years prior to that,
probably a good five years prior to that,
without even knowing it was WordPress.
Right.
Because I was blogging for
our local newspaper.
And so it was it was a very
early version of WordPress
that they were afraid to update.
It was probably always breaking as well.
But I was, I say hired,
but it was a no-pay job, right?
I was recruited to be a
business blogger for our
local Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
And so I was writing things
and then putting them on that blog there.
but in earnest started using
wordpress when in my best
friend and I she was a
massage therapist I had
helped run a massage
therapy school I was the
campus director for that
before I got into tech at
all and she wanted to start
a non-profit that would help
massage therapists continue in their jobs.
They were taught how to massage,
they weren't taught how to
have businesses.
And so and be good business
owners and those kinds of things.
They also had to have
continuing education units,
things like that.
So we started a nonprofit,
it's no longer in existence.
But if you want to check it out,
you can go into the archive.org.
And you can type in New York
State massage.
I was actually Rochester
Massage Alliance was the
first one.org that it was
New York's Massage Alliance after that.
We went statewide and while we did that,
we didn't know how to build a website.
I didn't know how to, I mean,
I knew how to like, you know,
I could put something on a web on a pic,
you know, on my computer,
but I had no idea how to
actually build a website.
Her husband was a WordPress developer.
So he, you know, gave, put it together, uh,
using Genesis, uh, a web,
a website for us and.
He's showing it to us,
and we're oohing and aahing
and everything all over it.
And this is even before
mobile responsiveness, right?
So it would not render well
on your phone at this point.
But we're oohing and aahing,
and so we start sending him the content.
And his response was, whoa, ladies,
I built it.
You have to put the content in.
We're like, how do you do that?
He's like, here's your login,
figure it out.
Basically.
It's not that hard.
Right.
And so I logged in and I
started putting information
on the homepage and I did
one of those things.
Like, you know how,
like when you put the
Christmas tree up in the front window,
you run outside to see what
it looks like.
You go back in, you adjust a little bit,
you run outside, see what it looks like.
So I was putting things on
the homepage and then quick
opening another tab to see
what it looked like to the
rest of the world.
And I was just like, mind blown.
that I could put something
on the web that anybody in
the world with Wi-Fi and
open borders kind of thing
could actually look at.
I mean, not that they were,
but they could.
The idea was I could put words on a page,
and people could be like,
I see what she is doing there,
no matter where you were in the world.
And that was pretty heady stuff.
This is pretty cool.
And so I wanted to learn how
to do more than just put
words on the page.
I wanted to learn how that happened.
And he says we would buy the domain,
get hosting, blah, blah, blah.
I said, OK, I understand that.
But I don't understand
because this is before our
one button right installs
on sites are already just
done installs on sites now.
I said, I understand how to buy a domain.
I understand how to purchase hosting.
What I don't understand is
how does the WordPress get
on the domain so that I can
actually put the information into it?
And so he says,
if you come over on Thursday night,
Christine's working late.
If you cook dinner for our four kids,
I will show you how to build a website.
And so that's what we did.
I went over there.
He walked me through base for basic steps.
One of them included salt keys.
Remember when we used to
have to put salt keys in our,
because he wouldn't let me
run put button anything.
He made me understand how to download it,
how to upload it,
how to use all those things
so that I had a true
understanding of how WordPress operated.
And by the end of that week,
I had created a domain, bought the domain,
bought the hosting and had
the start of a website for myself.
And so that's how it kind of started.
It was very like the kids
were like eating spaghetti
and he's showing me on his
computer how to purchase
hosting and how you
actually get WordPress on the host site.
So that was pretty cool.
Yeah.
And then I remember the bug bit.
I remember before I started
really using WordPress,
I had a web blog before
they were actually called blogs,
and it was all in HTML,
and it was running on a
server that I had at home,
and I used a dynamic DNS
thing to give myself a URL
that could be accessible to the internet,
and that's what I used for
a number of years.
And at some point, I decided...
hey it would be easier if
there was some kind of cms
thing uh that I mean I
didn't call it a cms at the
time but it would be really
cool if there's some sort
of script that did this for
me um but I didn't that
wasn't when I uh actually
started using wordpress
what actually prompted me
to start using wordpress
was um I had a site I found
a I found a blogging platform
on a website called hotscripts.com,
and it was called Sblog,
and it was just a blogging platform.
The front end of the site
basically looked like it
had the Kubrick theme.
It wasn't the Kubrick theme,
but it was very, very similar.
That's just sort of what
blogs looked like at the time.
Uh, and, um, and I was,
I was using that to post
pictures of my newborn son for family.
And then at some point, um, similar to,
to sort of Matt's own origin story of, of,
you know,
he was using B two cafe log and
then there,
the developer kind of went
missing for a period of time.
And he was like, okay,
this isn't getting updates.
So I need, I want to do something.
Um, the,
the lead developer of S blog kind
of just was, uh, uh,
you know, missing or like, you know,
not responding to support
requests for a while.
And I was like, OK,
so there's probably
something else I could use.
And I think a friend of mine
had been using WordPress.
I was like, OK, well,
maybe I can I can spin this thing up.
And I just migrated
everything over manually.
This was like in the, I don't know,
two point something days.
And and yeah, the rest is sort of history.
So that was about twenty years ago.
It's been a long while.
I still have poetry on
blogspot.com that I should
probably pull down there
before blogspot.com goes
away and put it on my own website.
So thank you for helping me
remember that so that I can
go and pull all those things off there.
I'd be like, damn,
that was such a good poem, too.
I mean, who reads other people's poetry,
really?
I mean, if you're not Emily Dickinson,
it's just for yourself.
But, you know, I had my moments of angst.
Haven't, haven't we all, I mean,
I had a live journal at some point.
Uh,
I don't even know where that is anymore.
And, and yeah, all, all that stuff,
the early, the early days of the web.
You asked me how I got
involved in the community.
That's an interesting story too.
So I had, uh,
I had never heard of meetups
and I never heard of word
camps and things like that
when I was just working, um, on our site,
but her husband.
So you should come to our meetup sometime.
I went to the meetup.
I was the only woman in a
room full of men.
The room was darkened so
that they like this
projector could show up.
And they were talking about
like digital ocean and CSS
and things I had no concept of.
So let's just say it was
several years before I went
back to a meetup.
At that point,
they were saying things like, you know,
they'd say, hey,
we haven't had a meetup in a while.
Is everybody available on Tuesday?
Like, who thinks like that?
You know, so like, not me.
But then they said they
needed somebody to run the meetup.
And I took over doing that.
And I was like, OK,
first Monday of every month
from six thirty to eight thirty.
Go kind of thing, you know,
so it was kind of some regularity.
You could plan for it.
And then I went to my first WordCamp,
which was WordCamp Buffalo
back in twenty five.
Those are the fourteen or fifteen.
I think I might have been
fourteen and I was so like
blown away by back then it
was twenty bucks.
You got lunch,
you got some coffee in the morning,
you got to meet all these people.
There was an event afterwards,
the after party I didn't go
to because I was like too
shy to do that kind of.
I mean, it's hard to think of me as shy,
but at the time I felt shy
in that community because I
was not a techie.
And so the thought of like
hanging out with tech people,
I was already kind of at my
mental limit by the end of the day.
And it was in a city I had
to drive home from.
I wish I'd gone because now
I know how great the after
parties are and how great
networking happens.
From that,
I went to WordCamp Toronto that year.
brought my daughter with me,
drove up to Toronto, got a hotel room,
did that for the whole weekend.
That was a blast.
That's when I got my first WordPress swag.
It was a sippy cup from GoDaddy.
And I was like, I've heard of GoDaddy.
And now I have their swag.
I felt like I had arrived.
And so I said to the guys from Buffalo,
I'm like, if you ever want
we could think about having
like Rochester and Buffalo
combined and just do
WordCamp Western New York.
And they're like, no, we like ours.
I was like, okay,
but you can help us plan one if you want.
So I started,
jumped in and I started
helping them plan the next
one and applied to speak at it.
when I was really not doing
anything more than just the
social media for them and I
played to speak at it and I
I gave my first word camp
talk called uh the hidden
secrets of wordpress
because these were things
that as a new user I
discovered I didn't know
how to do things like um
screen options right so like
if you're on a page and
there's screen options or
you're looking at unless
you're in your menus the
screen options and menus
allows you to put those
targets and things like
that on there and I was
like other people need to
know about these things and
so I like went down this
this wormhole of all these
the you know alice's rabbit
hole of all the things you
could do in wordpress that
I didn't know how to do and
including one that there's
no button for which was a
you know um php um
I don't remember what it was now.
Something, something PHP.
Anyway,
there's where it gives you like all
of the,
everything you can change on one on your,
on your site,
which you could do a lot of
damage there if you don't
know what you're doing.
But I, I, I was talking and I had like.
Forty people in the room and
it was the only time I was
worried that I might be an
imposter like that.
I, you know,
I didn't actually have imposter syndrome,
but I was also worried that
what if I'm wrong?
What are some of the things I'm saying?
Aren't actual,
even though I tried them and
I done them and whatever.
And after I gave that talk, it's like,
and I'll be out at the
happiness bar if anybody
has questions and wants to follow up.
I had people lined up to
talk to me for about forty
five minutes afterwards.
And it was none of them were
saying you're wrong.
None of them were saying imposter.
None of them were saying
like ringing the bell and
Game of Thrones.
Shame, shame.
Like none of that happened.
Right.
And I was like.
This is pretty cool.
Instead, people were asking my opinions.
They were asking me,
what was that thing you
said about this again?
It was just options.php.
That's what it is, options.php.
That's the one that'll get
you a lot of trouble.
You're welcome to anybody
who wants to actually F up
their whole website, have at it.
I had developers in the room, they're like,
I never heard of options.php.
I was like, oh,
I taught a developer something.
That's pretty cool.
um because here I am feeling
like this person who's
giving a tech talk who has
a background of twenty
years working higher
education so from there it
went to I went to where the
first ever WordCamp US and
I sat down at the community
table with um Andrea
Middleton and I said you
know we're thinking someday
of having a WordCamp in
Rochester she says why are
you thinking about it
someday why don't you just do it
I was like, well, I don't really, you know,
I've only been to a few
myself and I don't, you know,
I don't know.
By the end of the conversation,
I was committing to have a
WordCamp in Rochester the next year.
And so we had our first
WordCamp Rochester.
I started applying to speak
at more and more places.
I started getting accepted
to speak at more and more places.
I still was freelancing for myself,
but it was at WordCamp Rochester.
uh pittsburgh that I met the
team from give I met jason
canal and devin walker and
I was just really impressed
by the product that they
had and so I learned about
them I bought give for one
of my clients who was
running a non-profit uh
implemented it the
following year or probably
later the same year
actually I was talking to
them again jason canal was
at uh work in ottawa
And I was telling them about
how I implemented it on
this website that was
raising money for kids to
have food in South Sudan.
I showed them the pictures
and showed them the website
and they thought it was really good.
So they interviewed me about
that website to put on their blog.
And then at the end of it,
I shook Jason's hand and I said,
if you're ever looking for
somebody to join your team,
yours is the product that I
would give up my freelancing to do.
And by January of the next year,
I was the head of customer
success at GiveWP.
And then from there, I just kept growing.
I was able to speak in more places.
I was helping organize WordCamp US.
I had my podcast,
and I had done a bunch of
things like that.
And I created outside
sources of things that were
helpful to the community.
Like I tweet once a week, usually.
It's been a little crazy lately,
but once a week,
I tweet about ten companies
that are hiring in
WordPress so that people
who are looking for jobs
have some place to start.
It was during COVID that I
had to take a vacation,
but I couldn't go anywhere.
So during that time,
I built WPCareerPages.com
so that I wasn't,
I don't know how to import things.
I didn't know how to do APIs
and all of that.
But I knew that if you went
to this website and you're like looking,
I want to find a job in WordPress,
all of the career pages for
all these different,
like a hundred different companies,
you can click through and
see if they're hiring.
And so it was all in one place.
And then I started,
and then Allie Nimmons and
I started underrepresentedintech.com,
which was a database so
that people who are underrepresented,
whether it's by racial minority,
by LGBTQ status, by disability, whatever,
whatever makes you underrepresented,
you could join that database to be found,
to be an expert in your field,
to be hired, to be on podcasts,
things like that.
And then it grew to me
starting WP speakers,
which I just recently sold
to post status and doing
those kinds of things.
So I like to provide.
opportunities for the
community to grow without spending money.
And I have fun doing those things.
I like when I take a
vacation and I create
something that people can use.
And so like WP Speakers,
I started building it Monday night.
Wednesday,
I soft launched it at the
Adorama Summit that year.
By Friday at seventy five,
people signed up and I'm like,
I haven't finished building it yet.
People wait.
Now I've sold it.
I still get to run it
because it's part of post status.
But those are the kinds of
things I think that are
really helpful to community.
Yes, I work in the community too.
I'm on the community team.
I've been on release squads
three times now.
I am on the photos team and
I do photo moderation and
I'm table lead a lot of
places when we have contributor days.
And those are wonderful.
And I think we all need to
get more involved in those
kinds of things.
But there are things outside
of WordPress.org that we
can do to uphold and
support the community as well.
And those are the kind of
projects that I love to
spin up because I think
that it's something that
will help people understand
how to use WordPress for themselves,
how to be involved,
how to really be part of the DEI.
um, DEIB network of people to help, um,
underrepresented groups and
also feeds into the
wordpress.org community as well.
So it's not an and, or it's an and,
and right.
So that's,
there's this really kind of cool thing.
So to create, um,
a career for myself where
I've been able to be a
resource to others has been really,
really rewarding to me.
Yeah, and you started the virtual stage,
post-tax virtual stage recently, which,
you know, spoiler,
I was the first guest on that.
You're going to be the first
guest on this because
you're the first one that
replied when I was asking
people to come on the show.
Talk about, I mean,
I know the story of the virtual stage,
the post-tax virtual stage,
but for anyone who might be listening,
tell the story about how
that got started.
Yes, we've had two so far,
then a little bit of a
hiatus because I lost my
job and trying to figure
out how to do all these other things.
But it is coming back.
I've got like twelve more
people that want to do that
right now without even
advertising it much.
But I have like my bucket
list of things that I want to do.
And one of them is to speak
at all three flagship events.
And as of last year,
I've spoken at WordCamp US,
I've spoken at WordCamp Asia three times,
and I have never once been
selected to speak at WordCamp Europe.
So every year I try and I'm not mad.
It's not like, I mean,
I know there's a million
people that apply and I
don't think that I should
be given any special consideration.
If you don't like my topics for that camp,
that's fine.
but the thing is I keep
wanting to right and it's
like oh did you see that
debbie downer music like
you know when you get the
the letter saying thank you
for your lovely submission
however right we had so
many blah blah blah so the
the idea was there's got to
be people like me
who have this great topic
and they want to talk about
it and they think it's
great for other people to hear.
And the one that I had
pitched over to WordCamp
Europe this year was how to
take your blog and turn it into a book.
Because that blogging that I
had done for the local
newspaper is now a book
called A Good Firm
Handshake and Other
Essential Business Tips on
Amazon and other places.
But I also give it away as a PDF.
So if somebody really wants
to read it and can't afford it,
just hit me up.
I'll send you a copy.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a revenue stream for me.
It's just about getting
information into people's hands.
But going through the whole
process of blog posts for the newspaper,
they didn't want more than
five hundred words because
you didn't have a lot of
column space if they were
putting it in the newspaper.
And they did put a bunch of
mine in the newspaper.
And so five hundred words is
not really a chapter.
So you have to take a blog
post and you have to figure out how to,
um, you know, enlarge it.
You want to turn it into a,
make it media or make it a
whole chapter as opposed to
bullet point ideas.
And then you take the whole
thing and you like,
look at a gap analysis.
Like, what am I missing in this book?
How do I order my chapters in this book?
How do I actually take it
from like a PDF or whatever,
and actually turn it into print?
And how do I sell it in a marketplace?
And so I did that whole process.
And I thought,
wouldn't that be a great
thing for other people who are like,
My blog rocks.
I want this to be a book to
understand and get some
tips on how to do that as
opposed to have to figure
it out themselves like I did.
And I thought other people
should want to hear the story.
And so I just posted it on socials like,
hey,
if anybody's interested in this topic
that didn't get picked, you know,
no tears.
But if anybody's interested in this topic,
let me know because I'll
put it out on YouTube or something.
And then forgive me for not
remembering the person's
name because it's been a week said to me,
why don't you do it live?
so that people could comment
and have that conversation
with you while you're doing
it as though it were on a
stage somewhere.
And I was like, that's brilliant.
And then I was talking to Jeff Betancourt,
who co-works with me here
in my office space once a week.
And we worked together at Stellar.
He said,
why don't you just do that for
other people too?
You've got a platform, right?
And so I was like, oh yeah,
we could totally turn this
into a virtual stage series
through post status.
And so that's exactly what happened.
I put it out there and
twelve people replied.
You were the first and so
you were the first one off as well.
So your talk was great and
people interacted and
people came to watch it.
And were there forty people
in the audience?
Not yet,
but that's okay because that's how
the web works.
People will actually say, well,
I'll catch it on the replay,
which is fine too, right?
And so we do that at WordCamps.
It's like,
I'm going to go talk to people
because I can watch your
talk later kind of thing, right?
Uh, and so, yeah,
so we have the post status and I had,
I had already talked to
Yostavalk about purchasing, um, uh,
WP speakers.
So I start,
we started to combine those
things together back then,
even before we had done it.
So it's the,
it's the post status WP speakers,
virtual stage series,
which is very large mouthful,
but you know, whatever, um,
it's in print.
It doesn't matter.
So, yeah, so we've had two so far.
We have about twelve more that are coming.
I just have to coordinate
which Tuesdays people are
available to do those
things because it is live.
It's important to me that it
be live because at a
WordCamp it's live and you
have that same kind of
excitement about giving a live talk,
even if you can't see the
audience and having an
emcee there with you.
So you're not just kind of
producing your own content,
putting it out there,
hoping people find it.
It gives us an opportunity
to work with people in the
community and show one more
way that post status is
really valuable to the community as well.
Yeah.
And as I understand that
talk about turning your blog into a book,
you still haven't given that talk.
I'm actually quite interested in that.
I don't have the problem
with writing blog posts
that are five hundred words or less.
I have a problem with
writing blog posts that are
two thousand words or more.
that's exactly that that's
and that's where that's I
think the meat of that
process right is is not
only looking at what
chapters do I need in a
book what blog posts like
of all the blog posts I had
written which do I include
which might exclude because
they maybe are more like I
wrote one they asked me to
do one on predictions for
what was it like what was
going to happen in the tech
world in the business world
that does not belong in a
book that's an evergreen
book right so like what did
you drop what did you add
what areas were there real
gaps where did I not have
something in there that I
really felt should and I
added a couple chapters
that way but also like okay
now I have like fourteen
chapters that are three
hundred and fifty to five
hundred words that's not a
book that's a pamphlet
right so like what do I do
with this now and the
process of really looking
hard at yourself and what
what you've written and thinking
in the way that a reader
would read it because you
know the information.
So you are filling in the
blanks already in your head.
But how could I turn this
into more of a read?
So it's not like point A, point B, point C,
but it still walks you
through a whole process.
And so that's kind of that process.
I think it takes a little more explaining,
a little more fleshing out,
really helping people look
at what they have.
It'd be a great workshop, quite honestly,
but good work at like a
weekend workshop for people to do.
where you actually come with
your blog posts and we look
together and see how we can
fulfill those kinds of things.
But I think it'll be a good talk.
And I said,
but I created the virtual stage.
Now it'd be weird for me to
put myself on it.
And I've had several people say, oh,
I'll be your emcee for you to do that.
And I will do it eventually.
I want to get the people
who've applied on the stage
first before I throw myself
on the same stage.
So it will happen.
It will be coming.
And if you, Chris,
if you want to work on your
book in the meantime, hit me up.
I'm happy to answer any of your questions.
I'll stick on this for a little bit.
I'm interested in the point
that you made about taking
something that's five
hundred words and then making it meatier.
That implies to me that
there's a lot of... You
have to go through and
really intentionally...
look at the the details of
the original post and then
like figure out like frame
it in such a way that like
it's not just a moment in
time like blog posts are
kind of like even even if
they are kind of evergreen
post they are just a
snapshot of that moment of
like whatever you were
thinking whatever was going
on in the world at the time
that the blog post it's
kind of set and and turning
that into something that's
a little bit deeper is a is a is a
interesting sort of thought
experiment that is probably valuable to,
I mean,
anyone who's like serious about writing,
you know?
But if you could look at one
blog post and think,
how could I turn that into
a three part blog post?
Now you've got it into, you know,
now you've got it into
fifteen hundred words and
that's more of a chapter, right?
So like, how do I expand on it?
Instead of just saying,
here's an idea and a concept,
which is a lot of what a blog post is,
right?
um you've got knowledge
based articles that are
more how to's if you really
think about it that way but
if you think about blog
posts and the interest in
the way that we Storytell
with them how could I turn
that into something that's
a little bit meatier that
it takes it from being like
here's a concept and an
idea and a little bit about
it here's a concept an idea
and let's really talk about
it and that's this I think
the difference yeah that's
really that's really it's a
really cool thing um
Yeah.
Let's switch gears a little bit.
Your executive director at Poststatus,
what does that mean?
How would you describe
Poststatus to somebody
who's maybe listening to
this and doesn't know much
about the ins and outs of
the WordPress community?
What do you do in your
executive director role?
Sure.
Well,
the WordPress community is a very
large community and it is just,
I always tell people like
community is defined in so
many different ways,
but it really has to do
with people that are
like-minded about something
or have something in common.
Like I live in Hilton, New York,
that is a community.
the common factor there is
we all live in the same
geographic location so we
are widely and vastly
different but we have that
pride in in local whatever
right our football team or
those kinds of things when
you look at a global
community it's very
different I think about
jeep owners I often compare
to jeep owners jeep owners
are a very special breed of
people there are jeep
owners who don't care that
there's a jeep community
And then there are your
diehard Jeep owners that
are putting rubber ducks on
each other's cars that are doing meets.
I have a friend who has so
much into her Jeep ownership that during,
during the lockdown,
they were given an
opportunity to drive on the
Watkins Glen speedway on
the race course itself.
And so I opted into that and
I got to drive,
ride with her in her Jeep on the,
on the speedway.
That's a Jeep club kind of thing.
And those people are like
decking out their Jeeps.
They're,
putting eyelashes or I know
all kinds of different things, right?
Taking their doors off,
taking their roofs off, putting different,
the whole thing.
It's absolutely a culture.
And WordPress is the same thing.
We have a global community
in that we are all using WordPress.
There are, and even if you don't know,
that there's a community
community you're part of it
because you are using
wordpress when you discover
that there are other people
and there are meetups and
there are word camps and
there are podcasts and
there are all of those
things that draw us
together you either still
don't care and you just do
your own thing which is
fine nobody cares you're
allowed to do that or
you're like this is
intriguing I want to be
part of this culture that
is this community of wordpress
Then there are sub
communities in WordPress.
So there are people who are,
and some of those are meet groups, right?
So our meet groups on WordPress.
So some of those are the developer groups.
Some of those are the marketing groups.
Some of those are the photography group.
And we have those even smaller interests,
right?
So subcultures are that.
Post status is a community for WordPress.
We have a website.
I was just writing a blog
post that's gonna go out today.
Our newsletter will go out tonight.
and there is also with that
a slack community and it is
for people who are really
into the whole culture and
community of wordpress but
it's a subculture it's a
sub community because
although anybody could join
they don't right and so you
have this it kind of has
microcosms down a little
bit into people who are
just really driven
not only to do their thing
with wordpress and be part
of the big community but
want to have some of those
deeper conversations want
to be involved in the
day-to-day and and know
what's going on in
wordpress and so that is to
that's how I describe what
post status is it's a a sub
community of the greater
community of wordpress and
as executive director I am
And charged with, and charged,
is that a word?
And trusted with the
day-to-day operations of that.
So I'm not, we don't spend a lot of money.
I mean, we have money that we spend,
trust me.
I have a pay, you know,
we all get payroll.
Like I'm,
this is not a volunteer job for me.
I do get money to do that.
We pay our writers.
We pay things, you know,
we pay people that are,
my behind the scenes people
that are doing all the tech
work on my podcasts and
blog and videos and things like that.
And then we also have to pay
for hosting and all those
things that other people do as well.
But it's more than that.
I am the one who's having
conversations with people who are maybe
being bad players in the community.
Those are not my favorite conversations.
What I have to say to somebody,
I deleted your post because,
or if this keeps up,
I'm going to have to remove
you from Slack and those kinds of things.
It's few and far between,
but it does happen.
More likely,
I'm answering questions of how
do I get somebody else in here?
And I'm like, here's the coupon code.
They can join for fifty dollars a year,
right?
Like it's people want to
invite people in all the time.
Great.
They have to pay their fifty dollars.
This is a membership community,
which is not a big deal, right?
It's really worth the fifty
dollars that you pay or get
your company to pay for it.
If you're not freelancing,
that's even better.
But there are things there
that I have to do on Fridays.
I do a fairly new feature.
I do freelancer Fridays
because freelancers feel
like they don't like nobody
knows who they are because
they're agencies of one or
small agencies.
And they want people to know like, Hey,
if you're looking for
somebody to run social
media or to do SEO on your
site or whatever,
I am available for that,
but they're not going to
post that they need a job.
They're not going to post in
gigs because they're just
constantly available for
those kinds of things.
And so we're doing
Freelancer Fridays now just
to kind of give people an
opportunity to say, this is who I am.
This is what I do.
You know,
we post the newsletter on Tuesdays.
So we glean through what
people post about what they're doing,
the self-promotion.
Part of that is absolutely a
feed into our newsletter,
things like that.
And we also post socially and things.
So I'm hopefully by this
fall going to have a reiteration.
We did this a few years back
of a career summit for WordPress.
We'll be coming back and
we'll have two tracks for that,
one for career seekers and
one for people who are in
HR and employing others to
give them best use cases
and give them tips and
tricks on how to do hiring
and how you should go about
searching for a job.
those are the kinds of
things that we provide and
when people have ideas like
somebody said hey we we
need a channel for music I
was like oh I made that
three weeks ago so here's
the music channel like
because it doesn't all have
to be just about wordpress
we are human beings who
have wordpress at the core
of how we're connected but
we also have a lot of other
things in common so there's
a lot of different slack
channels in there like what
are you reading it's the
book channel you know and and uh
your music tastes.
And I started a foodie
channel because I was tired
of reading about
everybody's sandwiches in
the main channel.
And then they were like, hey,
can we have a vegan channel too?
I'm like, sure.
So all of these different
things that allow even when
you get it down to the
granularity of things that
pull even smaller
microcosms of people together.
to allow people to have
those common communities.
So those are a lot of the
things that I do is keep an eye on,
feel like the mother hen of the group,
if you will, right?
So making sure everybody's
happy and fed and warm in our community,
welcoming new members, things like that.
But also if you're the mom,
you're also the one who has
to uphold the rules and
make sure that people are
staying on the up and up
and for the by and large they are, right?
It's really few and far between.
Um, where there's a little bit of, um,
animosity.
And so, but when that does happen,
you know, I keep an eye on it.
So.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think of post status,
I've been a member for a really,
really long time since back
when I was at WebDev,
which was in the twenty
fourteen ish time.
I think I left WebDev in twenty sixteen.
And so I've been in post as
I wasn't active in the
Slack channel for a really,
really long time.
But I always like
would look at Post Addis for the job stuff,
like the aggregating
WordPress jobs is one of
the best sources.
I still kind of feel like
that's an easier aggregator
if I'm looking for what's
available in the WordPress
space than other things.
It's more central.
rejoined post status a couple years ago,
or not rejoined, but rejoined the Slack,
re-logged in, I guess,
to the Slack a couple years ago.
And since then,
I've been more active in there.
And I see it, like,
I'm also in the WordPress core Slack,
but I feel like, like,
because it's a subset,
but it's also a broad subset,
and it's also a subset of
people that are largely
doing the business of using
WordPress and building
sites on WordPress and whatever,
that my experience has been
that it's an easier place
to connect with actual
people doing the work than
the WordPress core.
There's so much going on,
and it's very focused on
either core development or core
projects or, you know,
events like very specific
sort of like silos,
whereas the post status
community feels more like a community.
Bringing that back to the
title of the podcast, the interest,
I think, of both of us,
of this idea of like
bringing people together
and giving them space more
so than the core slack.
And I actually feel like as
I'm thinking about it now, like
I was in the WordPress IRC
channels way back in the day.
I'm sure you remember those two.
And even that, I feel like, was...
there was, it was more,
it felt more welcoming or, I mean,
in as much as IRC is
welcoming and easy to use,
which is not really, um, like I,
I feel like it's, it's the,
the core Slack channels are,
are kind of more sterile
than maybe they once were.
And maybe that just, uh, the,
the product of,
of WordPress getting bigger
and it's a bigger project
and there's lots of things going on.
And, uh, post status feels to me more like,
like sort of the vibe of, of
what those old IRC channels
were like back in the day.
Yeah, I've never been on IRC,
but I know about them and I
didn't join WordPress
really the community at all
or know anything about it
until like twenty fourteen.
So that was probably before
my time as far as WordPress goes.
I was an AOL instant
messenger back in the day, but.
Yeah,
I gave myself a give myself a thumbs
up on the computer.
Uh, yeah,
I was on all the things back in
the day there is ICQ and, and I didn't do,
I had an AOL instant messenger account,
but I'd never used, uh, AOL really.
My parents did.
Um, but yeah, back, back in the olden,
olden times, um, of, of,
of communicating with
people on the internet.
Yeah.
I'm probably old enough to be your mother.
So that, that, that, that, that tracks.
So tell me about some of the
new stuff you have coming up.
You mentioned the Speed Network Online.
How did that come to be?
Yeah.
So June Liu is a friend of mine.
She and I are the co-leads
for the marketing team for
WP Accessibility Day,
which is coming up October, October,
October, October, October, October,
October.
But she is a freelancer and
she really does a lot of it
with accessibility and she
loves doing social media
and that's really her niche.
And she wants to be able to
do that for companies who
don't want to manage their
social media and she does
accessible social media,
make sure there's always alt descriptions,
et cetera.
And she said to me one day,
I don't know how to network
in WordPress as easily
because if I go to an in-person meetup,
everybody's there to talk
about their websites.
Nobody's really there to do
networking for that.
Online meetups are sometimes
even harder if they're not
focusing on that.
I said, yeah, it is really hard.
I went to speed networking
once at the local –
Rochester Chamber of Commerce,
there was like a hundred
people in the room.
So you only got to meet,
you didn't get to meet them all,
everybody for sure.
There's the outer circle and
inner circle and just like speed dating,
like every five minutes
they'd bring the bell and use,
everybody'd swap to the
right or the left and you'd
be talking to somebody new.
I said, we could do that with Zoom rooms.
We have thirty people,
fifteen stay stationary in the room,
the other fifteen cycle
through those fifteen rooms.
I said, we could do this.
And as we're chatting on Zoom, I'm like,
okay,
I just registered speednetworkonline.com.
She's like, wait, we're really doing this?
I'm like, I'm doing it.
I want you in on it if you
want to come in on it.
And so she actually did the
majority of the work on the site.
I got it all registered and hosted and
She made the front page look beautiful.
I made the forms and you
could already RSVP.
We are charging twenty
dollars a person because
I've learned if you don't charge enough,
people will just skip.
Like, oh,
I don't really feel like doing it today,
which lets down everybody
else that shows up and paid
that money because they
were told there's going to
be X number of people.
And so we thought, let's give it a try.
We'll do it after WordCamp Europe.
So Michelle has some time to
recover before we go and
try to figure this whole thing out.
And so it's June twenty sixth.
It's at, I believe, one p.m.
Eastern in the United States here.
So you can always figure out
what that is in your local time zone.
We've already got people all
over the world registered for it.
I say all over the world
outside of the United States.
I will say we have people
outside of the United
States also registered for it.
Everybody is English
speaking because it is an
English speaking event.
And what we've asked people
on the intake form when
they register is
information that we are
then and they know this
when they sign up for it,
going to make available to
only that group of people.
So if we when we have another one in July,
they will not have access to
the people's information
from june but the people
that you meet the people
that have signed up for
your networking event you
will get their networking
information afterwards so
you don't have to be
writing fast and furious
you don't have to be like
taking screenshots of
people's business cards if
people still have business
cards I do um but I'm old and then
But those kinds of things.
And so we want to make it as
easy as possible.
It's only five minutes.
You only get two and a half
minutes to really say who
you are and what you do.
And the other person gets
that two and a half minutes
to say who they are and what they do.
But let's say that you and I
are in that room and I do
social media with attention
to accessibility.
And you're like,
I just launched this new
product and I need social media.
And you're like, all right,
let's talk afterwards, right?
And now we've got each
other's contact information
because we share it with you afterwards.
and then you are able to
make those connections on
the outside because you
made that connection
through speed networking.
That's the big one that's
coming up right now.
I'm also working on a
project with Corey Moss,
which is going to take a
little bit more time.
I have owned the URL
wpwiki.org for a very long
amount of time.
And we're actually going to
start building a WP Wiki
that anybody can add articles to,
anybody can edit articles.
And you can,
I'm hoping that it'll be more
than just like, hey,
this is me or this is my business.
I'm hoping it'll be articles on like,
what are APIs?
What are webhooks?
How do I, you know, what's CSS?
Things like that,
that will be a one-stop
place that people won't
have to search everywhere
to learn what we do in
WordPress and some of the things,
the terminologies that we use,
some of the how-tos that you might need.
Um, and also like people are like, well,
how are you gonna monetize that?
Well,
I know exactly how we're gonna
monetize that because there
will be companies who will
want their pages,
wanna have like a vanity page in there.
So let's say that GoDaddy, um,
wants to have a vanity page in there.
They should have one.
But the, the,
the basis of how Wiki works
is that I could then go in and edit it.
And let's say that I had a bad experience,
um, with any company, not just GoDaddy.
Right.
But, but I have a bad experience.
I'm going to go in there.
I'm going to edit it.
And I'm going to,
because I can do that
anonymously or whatever,
I can be nasty and be like,
go don't buy GoDaddy or whatever.
Right.
Well,
if I gave you the opportunity to pay
to lock that down,
you could now have a vanity
page on there.
That's good for your SEO
because it's one more place
on the Internet that's talking about you.
Use the keywords you want.
I'm not going to police all
that kind of stuff.
It's yours to figure out.
But then you'll pay an
annual fee to lock that
page down so that others
cannot edit your page about you.
You won't be able to do that
on an article like
What are APIs, right?
Because that is not specific
to a business or a person.
But there will be an article
about Matt Mullenweg.
How do you not have an
article about Matt Mullenweg?
He's been somewhat
controversial this year.
I will automatically lock that.
I'm not going to charge Matt to do that.
But I'm going to lock that
down because I don't want
my wiki page to be just
like people arguing about
Matt's role in the community.
I want that to be a
historical description of
what he's done for WordPress.
And so that will be a locked page.
So that's one of the projects.
This will be dropping soon, too.
So if you look at any of
these sites and you don't see anything,
it's because they are very,
very much still in the infancy.
And some of them are just an ideation.
I'm working with Marcus
Burnett on Sponsor Me WP,
which will be a place that
if you are like me,
who is doing all of this
free work in the community,
companies like Kinsta,
who is now sponsoring me
five hours a month,
can look and see who else
is in the community that's
looking to be sponsored.
It'll be a directory of
those kinds of those people.
You won't be charged to use it at all.
We are doing it as a gift to
the community.
It will tie to WP speakers.
It will tie to the WP world.
If you have links in both of those places,
you can include them.
But it's a place to kind of
talk about who you are.
It's really a lot about like
what Aruba Ahmed is doing in GitHub.
But people like me in
marketing don't necessarily
understand how GitHub works.
I'm just going to be honest, right?
Like if you're a graphic
artist who works in WordPress,
you don't want to have to have a GitHub,
right?
You want to just be able to
fill out a form on a website and be like,
boom, there it is.
There I am with my Gravatar, et cetera.
So Marcus has done some great,
the homepage looks phenomenal.
I will say that.
He's texted it to me over the weekend.
And so those are some
projects that I'm working on.
And then the last one, well,
there's two more,
but one of them is going to
be Michelle Reviews It.
Michelle reviews it.
And then I'm going to be
building a blog where I review plugins,
themes, services, things that you have.
And I will be monetizing that, of course.
And then as well,
I'm going to do some courses.
I've done a pretty good job
of branding myself in our community.
And people have come to my
sessions to learn about
personal branding.
And so I'm going to do a
course on branding.
I'm going to do a course on
how to do affiliate
marketing properly so that
you and the company can
make money and you can both
be happy because you're doing it right.
And so those will be courses
that will be offered at I
think I have
takecourses.online is the URL for that.
So that'll be developed shortly as well.
How do you do all the things?
There's so many things.
That is so many things.
It's not a small list of things.
Not all of them are available yet,
but also I'm not a developer,
so I use tools, right?
So when I build a website,
like when I built WP
Speakers in two days and
people were already signing up for it,
I use cadence.
I use WS forums.
I use things that were at my
disposal because I'm not a
developer and I'm not trying to
figure out how to do it my way.
I'm trying to figure out how
to do it in the easiest and
most efficient way that
still looks pretty, right?
Like I still make pretty websites,
because I'm using themes
that people know how to
develop and look good.
And so I'm doing a lot of that.
And then lately,
it's partnering with people
who can help me get it over
the over the finish line,
because I do have a lot of
things in the works right now.
Well, thanks for coming on, Michelle.
Do you have any,
what are your summer plans?
I imagine that you're going
to be going to some events.
Are there places where
people can meet you in person?
Yeah, I will be at WordCamp Europe,
which is next week.
So I'm not sure when this is coming out,
but I'll be at WordCamp Europe this year.
Coming out,
I think at or right before
WordCamp Europe.
All right.
Well,
if you're listening to this and
you're at WordCamp Europe, come find me.
I'm the girl on the scooter.
And then I will also be
going to WordCamp US in August.
And I will be going to
CloudFest in Miami in November as well.
You can find me every
Wednesday at ten a.m.
Eastern time.
I have open hours, open office hours.
You can just hit me up.
I'll give you a link to that.
I also post about it on my
Twitter account and as well
as my Mastodon and
Blue sky, cuz I wanna make sure that I,
I'm available for other
people and LinkedIn.
I think I put it there too.
And that's just an open hour
where people get to talk to one another.
And if you wanna, you know,
pop in and talk with us,
otherwise you can find me
on any other places online
and you can find all of my links,
anything that is currently available.
So you won't find the ones in development.
at meetmichelle.online.
I built my own link tree
because I didn't want to be
able to hold into somebody
else's account.
So I built my own link tree,
meetmichelle.online,
and you can find all the
links to all the things right there.
Awesome.
Well, again,
thank you for coming on and I
will see you at WordCamp US
if not before.
And yeah, thanks for being here.
It was my pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.