Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee
Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. On today’s show, we have two very lovely chaps. We have Dan, we have Nathan. Fellas, how are you both?
Nathan
I’m very good. Thank you. Lee, really good to be connected with you again.
Lee
It’s going to be fun, isn’t it? Everyone talking over each other. I always love interviewing two people at once. I’ll let you two argue over who answers what. But very quickly, if we start with Nathan, if you could give us a 30 second who you are and where you’re from, and then we’ll follow on with Dan.
Dan
Okay. So Nathan Wrigley. I run a couple of WordPress podcasts, WP builds and WP tavern, and I basically create content in the WordPress space. More recently, joined forces with Dan to create the plugin podcast Plus, which Dan has kindly built for me because I’m not clever enough. And that’s where we’re at now, with a plugin to help podcasters. So that’s probably what we’re going to discuss.
Lee
And Dan?
Nathan
Yes, so I’m Dan Maby. I’ve been in around the I’ve been in the WordPress space for, I think, coming up to nearly 18 years now. I’ve been delivering in-person events for 14 of those years. So I’ve been very focused on community aspects around the WordPress community. And as Nathan mentioned, we’ve partnered recently to bring something into the podcasting space within WordPress. It’s something that sits, I think, really aligns well with the open source aspects and the decentralisation of content for the community.
Lee
Fantastic. Well, let’s jump straight into it and tell us, I’ll let either of you answer, what is Podcaster Plus in plain terms and who have you built it for?
Dan
Okay, I’ll take this one. So Podcaster Plus Blocks, which has been built by Dan, is an endeavour to separate out a podcast player so that you can essentially have a very pretty and beautiful, completely bespoke designed podcast website. In a heartbeat, it leverages the WordPress default block editor. And in a normal situation, if you’ve got a podcast like you do, Lee, typically, if you want to put that on a website, you’d go and copy and paste some player, and you’d have very limited control over what that player would look like? Well, we’ve made it so that each component that builds up a player, so for example, the play button, the skip forward, the description, the image, these are all separate blocks, which enables you to pick them up and drag them and put them anywhere on your WordPress website so that you can have branding which is completely unique to you. It’s hard to describe in words. It’s one of those things where once you play with it for a little while, you get the gist of why it’s really useful, but it enables you to You completely automate things. You set it up and then you forget about it.
Dan
You put your RSS feed in, we’ll consume that content. Every time you create a new podcast, we will auto-publish a post for you, and it will look exactly pixel-perfect how you want it to look. So you don’t have to rely on any defaults that come out of your podcast hosting company or anything like that.
Lee
Well, that’s interesting. For example, I use podcast.co for this podcast, and they provide a player which is not the most attractive player on the I end up just linking to the MP3 and using the default HTML5 player, which also is not the most attractive in the world. I think what you’re saying is, I could plug in my RSS feed to Podcaster Plus, and you guys would then draw down my show notes and everything else, including the MP3 URL, and then put that behind an attractive player that I’ve designed with Podcaster Plus. Is that right?
Dan
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So you feed in… The one thing that you’ve got to do is have an RSS feed. So the basic setting is put in an RSS feed, and then We’ll monitor that periodically, every few minutes or whatever. And then when a new episode pops up, it will then get put onto your page or post or whatever it is that you want. You might use a custom post out, for example. And you would spend a little bit of time either using one of our default templates or you would build one yourself and you can make everything go literally everywhere. I don’t know, you might want the play button at the far left, you might want the the the audio scraper where you can jump through to 30 seconds and a minute or whatever. You might want that to be a certain set of colours and a certain height. You might want the featured image to be the background image to the whole player. You can basically customise it in any which way. Your imagination and your capacity to spend time building it is the only limitation, really.
Lee
Oh, so for most of us listening, that is absolutely ridiculously ours. Most of us go down rabbit holes that we rarely get out of.
Dan
No, we hope to.
Lee
And just to clarify, then, is this predominantly focused on the player? We’re not talking about the rest of the page layout.
Dan
Well, given the way that the block editor works, the answer to that is no. It can be the entire page layout. So as an example, for example, you could have a hero section which you just customise. It could say anything you like. You could then put the bits and pieces that make up our player. You could do a typical letter box rectangle, which you often see as a podcast player out there in the wild. Or you could put the play button so that you can make it mimic a YouTube video or something like that. Or you could make a full screen background image from the featured image that you upload to the podcast Podcast Host and what have you. No, but then you could have whole rows and sections and entire pages of content, whatever the heck you want. If it will fit into a WordPress block, it will go on that page. So you can do the whole thing. You can customise it in any which way, and you are not limited just by the podcast content. Any content that you can put on a WordPress post or page, you can add to the podcast.
Nathan
Our suite of blocks include things like the podcast description, podcast title. So all of that gets pulled in from the RSS feed. It enables you to actually build out a template for your page that has, as Nathan mentioned, whatever layout you’re looking to deliver, but also that dynamic content that’s coming directly from your RSS feed, which is super helpful.
Dan
A good example might be, for example, you might have a player towards the top, the description, the featured image, that stuff, and then you might have your archive directly below it so that when somebody has consumed that particular podcast post, they can see all of the other ones that you’ve done. And obviously, you could exclude that post. You could offset it by one and what have you. Or you could just put, I don’t know, you’ve got a Black Friday sale, you’ve got a course or something, you could put that in. Bottoms, links, menus, anything can go onto that. And we will just insert the player into all that content however you want to sell.
Lee
Then who’s the ideal candidate for this plugin? Is it just any podcaster or is there a certain type of podcaster? I mean, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience might be developers or we’re like, Yeah, but I’d want to get into the code and do a bit of jiggery-pokery. So who’s the ideal?
Dan
Yeah, I think there’s a really nice sweet spot actually there because of the audience that you’ve got. And that is to say that if you’ve got clients who have the need for audio on their website, particularly podcasts at the moment with the RSS feed, but I’m pretty sure that at some point we’ll just tackle regular MP3 files or WAV files or whatever as well. It could certainly be end users because once you’ve got it set up, it is set it and forget it. You’d obviously have to know your way a little bit around WordPress to make sure that that was all configured, but it’s fairly straightforward. But then if you’ve got an agency and you’ve got clients wanting this stuff, this really is perfect because it enables you to offer a really, really credible an entire website for your client’s podcast and really minimal work on your part.
Nathan
It’s actually the way this is developed is using the WP interactivity API. If you want to get into a very technical aspect of it. There’s actually the ability there for a developer to initiate any piece of content on the page could become the play button, for example. It’s actually you’re not restricted to just our blocks. There’s I’m really, if you’re looking to get very technical with this, there is that option. But equally, if you’re looking for a set and forget solution, it’s available as well all within the same suite of blocks.
Lee
Phenomenal. My next question is literally, blocks. You’ve leaned really heavily into blocks. Why was the block editor the right foundation for this given A, there’s a little bit of controversy still about blocks, and B, there are also an awful lot of page builders out there.
Nathan
So this solution will be available to work within page builders as well, but initially we’re focusing on the block editor. So we’re really looking at core WordPress here. How do we develop something that aligns with the current focus of WordPress, hence the focus around blocks. It also enables us to focus heavily on things like accessibility within the solution, because, for example, if you take some of the off-the-shelf If you have audio players, you’ll find they’ll have maybe an H1 tag or an H2 tag sitting in the top of the player. Obviously, you don’t have no control about really where that’s being rendered on the page. The ability to use blocks and change the layout of that page through the core workflows of WordPress really was our focus.
Lee
No, that’s really good and very encouraging as well with regards to accessibility as well. I interviewed Jen just yesterday around accessibility, and I was really surprised. Excuse me, we were really surprised. One of the things she shared, I asked the following question. I was like, Why is accessibility so important when probably only 2% of the people accessing the website have any form of disability. She absolutely learned me sharing the actual percentage of people that do have some form of disability and are not able to access the content that you have or understand it because it’s not structurally in the right way. She was essentially highlighting that these disabilities most are invisible, and it’s not 2% that I’ve made the assumption. It’s not people who walk around with a cane or in a wheelchair, etc. There are many people that struggle to access content. You’re right, a lot of these third-party services don’t really consider that at all. It makes it really difficult for a much higher percentage than 2% that I’ve assumed to access people’s content.
Nathan
I’m fortunate enough to have access to a mouse and to be able to use a mouse on a daily basis. However, I actively choose to use keyboard navigation on a regular basis. Even though I have the ability to. I tend to default to ways of working that maybe a keyboard user would usually would work, as opposed to somebody that has the access to the ability to use a mouse.
Lee
Workflow-wise, as a podcaster, would this be something that I would instal, configure, and then essentially forget because I’d be able to go to podcast. Co and upload my podcast to it, knowing that within whatever time I’d set, say within the next hour or two, my website would go ahead and check that podcast feed and pull it down and publish it on the website.
Nathan
Does it go that far? It certainly would. Yes. We We’ve built a content, what we call a content automation add-on, which actually allows you to do two things. Initially, it allows you to import your entire back catalogue from your RSS feed. So you can go through the process, instal the plugin, set up a template for your page or your post, depending on how you want to render it. We do have a custom post type add-on as well that allows you to set a specific custom post type for your podcast. Then once you’ve set your template, you can run through the import process, which will, as I say, crawl the back catalogue of your RSS feed and actually publish every single episode on your website with the template that you selected. Once you’ve done that, you can go through the automation steps, which will allow you to basically set what time frame you want the plugin to be checking against your server. That might be an hour, that might be every eight hours, depending on your preference. Then every time you publish a new post via your RSS feed, so every time you upload your new audio, the plugin will crawl that RSS feed and publish a new episode on your website.
Dan
Dan built something really cool and slightly unexpected. I woke up one morning and Dan had sent me an email and said, Check this out. He’s also built in some automation so that you can have different templates based upon different criteria. So just as an example, a whole variety of my podcasts start with the word the. I have a show called, with the word this. I have a show called This Week in WordPress. And so with this if this, then that approach, you can say, if the title begins with the word this, then use a different template to all the other ones. So that page will look completely different in whatever way the template suggests for particular episodes. And obviously, and other things like, I don’t know, it might contain the word Christmas. If the title of the podcast contains the word Christmas, use this template instead. And again, it’s set it and forget it. You set it up once, and then every time you produce a podcast, it will pull that and set a different template. So you could just modify. I can’t remember if it does more than inspect the title, Dan. Does it do more than the title?
Nathan
So at the moment it’s focused on the title. However, there is foundational settings in there for using the new podcast 2.0 categories, but that really hasn’t been adopted widely enough yet for us to go through and enable that. But it is there as those technologies become more adopted, then we can obviously turn that setting on.
Lee
That’s fantastic. Now, it’s an interesting dynamic, isn’t it? When you’ve got an absolute Coding nerd. Hi, Dan. With somebody who self-confessed is not a coding nerd.
Dan
An idiot. That’s what you’re trying to say.
Lee
I was being polite.
Dan
No, thank you.
Lee
What’s the working dynamic like? Who’s the ideas person? How do you work together? How does it work?
Dan
It goes like this. Dan does everything, and then I appear on a podcast and imply that I did things.
Lee
That’s how he did it. Am I in your honesty?
Nathan
No, no, no. It’s been really good. It’s been a really good partnership because Nathan obviously is a podcaster. So it’s been about solving real-world problems, looking at stuff that Nathan… How does Nathan work? What are the workflows? What are the challenges? And basically scratching that itch. How do we make sure that we build something that solves a problem that is being… That a real-life podcaster is running into?
Lee
And just to highlight for folks who don’t know, sorry to interrupt, but Nathan has published hundreds of episodes on multiple podcasts for many, many years. So just to highlight how much experience you’re getting access to there.
Dan
Yeah, that’s true. I never really think I don’t know about the numbers, but it’s a few. It’s a lot. The wider project, we’ve got ideas to go a little bit further than just the plugin. I don’t know, really, if we want to go into that, but there’s this whole… Lee, you will know, We obviously had a little session just before you hit record. This whole bit of getting a podcast organised is also in our sites as well in the future, not just the displaying on a website and making it look pretty, but-I remember your first version of that. Yeah, well, many years ago, you had a stab at trying to solve that problem.
Lee
So I presume you’re going to bring the lessons of that in.
Dan
That’s right. And we’re building on top of that, hopefully in the near future as well.
Nathan
We’re looking at automation, essentially. So podcast hosting, they’re ten a penny, unfortunately, at the moment. But we want to make sure that we’re looking at providing something that provides genuine value for the podcaster. So time saving is really a focus for us. How do we automate that process of guest booking, guest allocation, how do you make sure that people are where they need to be at the right time? I’m sure that both of you have, well, I certainly know Nathan’s had this. We’ve had this conversation many times, but trying to make sure that we’ve got a guest at the right URL at the right time can often be challenging. Making sure that we’ve got the tools in place to automate workflows is really where Podcaster Plus as a hosting platform is focused.
Lee
What What I also like, you said it there that there are podcast hosts are everywhere, but they all adhere to a certain standard because they have to if they’re going to be published in, say, iTunes, Spotify, et cetera, or Apple Music, I think it’s called nowadays, or Apple podcast. I have no idea what it’s called, but anyway.
Dan
I don’t know either, actually.
Lee
Out there, you have to have a specific RSS feed. The great thing is what you guys are doing is you’re working to the standards. You’re making sure that you’re supporting the the standard RSS feed, etc, which all services are going to have to use and continue to use. But also you’re doing the same with WordPress. You’re following the standard pattern, the way that WordPress is built so that you can provide something that’s future-proof and has longevity and is going to continue to be supported both by the third-party services, WordPress and these podcast hosts, as well as your own plans, which I think is super encouraging.
Nathan
Yes, it’s been an interesting journey actually, looking at RSS. It’s a bit of a Wild Wild West out there, to be honest, when you’re looking at the RSS space. It’s been some interesting challenges have been thrown up through this process. But yeah, We’ve built or building the hosting platform using web standards. We’re building the components. The components within Podcaster Plus blocks are focused on web components. Again, it’s looking at standards, really, across everything that we’re doing to make sure that we can tie all these pieces together in a way that is technically possible these days.
Dan
There’s quite a lot of stuff Dan alluded to it a moment ago, but there’s quite a lot of stuff coming down the pipe, and it’s called podcasting 2. 0, and it’s probably invisible to most. Even most podcasters, I would imagine, probably don’t know about it, but there’s a whole load of other things coming which is going to be available to podcasters in the near future. Other things that you can do apart from publishing an MP3 and then that being consumed by podcast players and then ultimately listened to by people. There’s going to be a whole load of other data bound to your each individual podcast episode. So for example, categories, monetisation options, all sorts of other things. And they’re slowly getting adopted, but it’s a bit of a trickle. And we’re being fairly mindful of that as well, because it does feel that if you’re serious about podcasting in the future, those are the things that you’re going to have to know about. No doubt, search engines and things like that will be using those to figure out whether or not your podcast, if it’s a particular search that somebody conducts or your podcasting app, if you search on that, whether or not your podcast is a good fit for that as well.
Lee
So have you guys shipped version one then, or are you launching where you’re at on the process?
Nathan
Podcaster Plus blocks is launched, is available at podcasterplus.com. That is live. We’ve got That is available for public consumption now. We do actually have a nice little launch discount available on the website, up to 55 %, in fact. What?
Lee
It’s crazy. Yes.
Nathan
Podcaster Plus itself, the hosting platform, That currently is not publicly available. We’re still working through and making sure that is… Essentially, we’re dogfooding this process, so making sure that we are utilising these tools as we go to test and to try and make sure that they’re fit for purpose.
Lee
What was that? Dogfooding? Yes.
Nathan
What does that mean? Actually using the products ourselves. Making sure that they are fit for purpose before they get released to any of our beta users.
Dan
I have a podcast called Dogfooding, and each week I go and taste a variety of different dog foods and rate them from zero to 10.
Lee
The problem is I’m very gullible, and I would probably have believed you had I I’ve not heard the slight gest in your voice. I’d have been running a search for it. Dogfooding podcast. I can’t find it, make it.
Dan
It’s not real.
Lee
Sounds fantastic. No, that’s good. And using the product that you’re building, it’s a fantastic way of finding all of those bugs because I build things for other people to use, and it’s them that often find the the issues that I’ve missed because I’ve just built something as quickly as possible to a deadline, et cetera. And there are obviously things that I’ve missed because it’s not something that I use on a day-to-day basis, even if it’s something as simple as just to save notification so that you know it’s saved. I know it’s saved because I coded it. But some people don’t know when you hit save, if you don’t tell them with a nice big notification. That’s actually something that came up the other day. I did that. I forgot to put a notification up. The client’s like, I don’t know if it’s saved. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. So you guys, dogfooding, I like that, are doing that.
Nathan
Yeah, it’s also enabling us to go through the workflows and determine what are the pain points, where do things fall down in some of the workflows, and can we then put in place automations that will support that? I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but guest booking is one of those that can often be a challenge. How do we make sure we’ve got the person in the right place at the right time?
Lee
If we just think about other For the page builders, just quickly, is there a way to be able to… So for example, in Beaver Builder, I believe I can create a page template and I could, in theory, use the ID of, say, a layout or a template. Is there a way to at least use a short code to be able to plop some blocks, some Podcaster Plus blocks onto a Beaver Builder page, for example, or a bricks page? Or is this just very much it’s It’s blocks and nothing at the moment.
Nathan
Sure. At the moment, it’s blocks or nothing. There are various solutions that enable you to run blocks within some of the page builders.
Lee
I think that’s what I was trying to say, but I just stumbled over myself.
Nathan
From our perspective, we haven’t built out short codes as a solution just because there are an awful lot of settings that are available within the blocks. So trying to equate that to short codes could create It would create horrific short codes that just become unwieldy and just unmanageable, to be honest.
Lee
We’d rather build-Be like the days of divvy again.
Nathan
Yes, we’d rather build dedicated integrations. This really comes down to the audience asking for, so do we hear requests for Elementor? Do we hear requests for bricks? If so, then obviously that’s where we then put the time into building out those integrations because if you instal the plugin, you’ll see we ship a container block, for example. That container block is a very, very powerful block that enables you to create responsive flex-based layouts within the page. To try and accomplish that with a short code or something similar just wouldn’t be very user friendly, and that’s really what we want to focus this on. How do we make this something that both a non-technical and a technical user can make use of?
Lee
That’s super helpful. The good thing here as well is even if you are using a page builder, if you want to set up at least a template for the automation, then the block editor is already built in anyway. Use it for that post type or whatever it is or page, and then continue to use your page builder for everything else because you can still use your header footer, sidebars, and all that. Does anyone still use sidebars? I don’t know. But anyway, yes, it sounds great. Folks, you can check everything out over on podcasterplus.com. There There are some deals like were mentioned, including, I believe you guys, I saw somewhere, something to do with a lifetime discount, I think, or something like that as well. Was it a lifetime deal or a lifetime discount?
Nathan
I can’t remember. Yeah, we’ve got access to lifetime licences on the site. We’ve currently got up to 55% off on our launch price.
Lee
As Nathan is very old now, lifetime, how many years is that roughly?
Dan
I’ve probably got about eight months left, Lee. I hope not, mate. I’d be better with the annual licence, but there we go.
Lee
This podcast is a dark turn, isn’t it? That’s fantastic. Podcasterplus.com. Guys, thank you so much for your time. It’s been fascinating to learn about Well, first of all, to understand the problem that you’re solving, but also to learn how a coder and a non-coda have gotten together using the combined experience to create something that sounds really quite unique. I’ve not actually seen anything like this before, so it’s very, very cool, and I appreciate your time sharing your journey with us so far. I’d love to chat with you again in maybe a year’s time to see how the product has developed and also how it’s been adopted by the podcasting community, if you guys don’t mind.
Dan
Well, just referring to what I said a minute ago, if we go for seven months, I’ve got a fighting chance.
Lee
Yeah, all right. Well, in seven months, let’s have you back on, mate.
Dan
Eight months, that’s me. I’m done.
Lee
Fellas, thanks so much for your time. What’s the best way for people to connect with you both individually, other than podcasterplus. Com? And then we’ll say goodbye.
Dan
Dan?
Nathan
Dan Maby. Anything, pretty much anything at Dan Maby. D-a-n-m-a-b-y is a good place to catch me. I’m not particularly active on social these days, but I still do connect, predominantly on LinkedIn, I would say.
Dan
And then for me, I’ve got a few. wpbuilds.com is the website for the podcast. Podcast, or you can find me on x@wpbuilds, or you can find me on [email protected].
Lee
You’re on all the cool platforms. Well, fellows, thank you very much. Have a fabulous day, and I’ll talk to you in seven months.
Nathan
Take it easy.
Dan
Lee, thank you very much.
Lee
Cheerio.
