Reflections on Gutenberg Times and Do the Woo from the Founders

BobWP:
Well, I’m here with one of my favorite people in the WordPress world. Well, actually outside WordPress. You may know her from Gutenberg Times. How are you doing today?

Birgit:
Well, hey, Bob. Oh, that’s so sweet. Yeah, well, I remember that we did some luncheon in Torino, and there was outside the workroom, we were talking about so many other things. Yeah, well, I’m really glad that we can do the show together.

BobWP:
Yeah. So I happen to see, and I don’t know if you had mentioned it somewhere or something, and I saw that you were coming up on seven years or something like that. And I thought, well, I wonder when that is. And it was in January, the same as what we’ve just celebrated. So I thought, wow. Then we can say 14 years combined. It sounds even more impressive.

Birgit:
Well, and if you do it times three, seven times three, it’s 21. That’s WordPress celebration. Yes, it’s the 21st.

BobWP:
So I just thought we’d get on here and talk a little bit about, I don’t want to go into the whole journey, but some of the things maybe we’ve learned or whatever along the way. And I always wonder when somebody comes up with something, is it more or less a name that comes across in your brain, you think, oh, you just think of this and you wonder what I could do with that? Or is it a concept you have? I want to start this. I want to know which way you did it, and if it was what you wanted to do first—the concept of the idea—and then how did you come up with the name? Was it easy to come up with?

Birgit:
Well, yeah. So I started at the end of June 2017 to curate news about this new thing that everybody hated—kind of the block editor. And I said, it can’t be that everybody hates it, but it’s really amazing and it’s going to be changing WordPress so much. And I saw it at WordCamp Europe in Paris, and it was kind of a really great—it wasn’t a live demonstration; it was just kind of a video showing how you do blocks and how you can add ’em to a post and all that. It was very early on. I think the first Gutenberg commit on GitHub was just in February, four months earlier. So it wasn’t really, but it was absolutely fascinating to me. And I wanted to learn what other people do with it, what the plugin developers—if they are interested in it—what they’re talking about, what the developers are talking about, and where this is going and what the new features are. And I was really trying it out and seeing what’s coming up, and I wanted other people to know about it.

So I put a Storyfy out. I dunno if some of you might remember Storyfy. That’s kind of a curation tool where you can embed things like posts and pictures and have just a running list of things. And that was very easy to do. And just when they published a blog post or showed off one of the little things that they found cool about the block editor or where a new feature was showcased, I just put it into the Storyfy. And there was up until probably October of 2017, and then I heard the news: Adobe had bought Storyfy and announced that they would end its life in May of 2018.

I said, well, I’m not going to wait that long. I need to put it on a website. Well, I’m a web developer. There was this fun thing, WordPress; I should use that. It’s kind of the first one of many lessons I learned: that you have to put it on your own grounds and not do it on rented land.

So I thought about it, and then I also had some requests from users in the space that they would like to have a newsletter—like an email newsletter that comes every week or something like that—because they cannot always go to a page. It’s just something new, typical publishing problems that people are not coming to your website to see what’s new. You need to pull ’em over there. And so that was kind of the thing that came together.

Because it was all about Gutenberg, I kind of just thought about, okay, what are names of things? And Gutenberg Times came up. Somebody else at the same time had a Gutenberg Hub—that was Munir Kamal—and then there were other people out there. But I really liked the Gutenberg Times kind of name, and it was available. So I registered it in January of 2018, and that’s how it came about. Then I migrated all the Storyfy updates into the site, and it took a while and I had some people to help me with that. And then I started the newsletter. It was actually pretty easy to kind of follow along because it was kind of that vision that I had.

BobWP:
Yeah, for sure. Mine was kind of erratic when I started focusing. I think I actually dabbled in WooCommerce when it first came out—2011 or something like that. I think it was 2011, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, so I was writing a lot of stuff about it. I actually found on my blog, when I was more into affiliates, people were more willing to buy and spend for their e-commerce site on the plugin. So I just started writing about it, and I did a podcast in 2014 for a little over a year called The WordPress Breakdown.

Birgit:
What?

BobWP:
The WordPress Breakdown. And I did it with kind of a twist on words. I was breaking down stuff, but then some of them had a WordPress breakdown.

Birgit:
Yeah, it’s troubleshooting.

BobWP:
And what I did basically was I was just doing 15-20 minute podcasts with just myself. I was talking about plugins or themes and stuff like that—some of the stuff I came across. I did it for, like I said, about 13 or 14 months. And it was just becoming… I just felt like this is boring. I’m on there by myself. I’m talking about this stuff, and it’s really stuff I’m already writing about, and I’m just kind of regurgitating it now through a microphone. And I thought, okay, I’m just going to quit it. I stopped it and I told myself that I wouldn’t start something until I had a really good idea.

So in 2016, I thought of Do the Woo. I thought, okay, what’s out there in the landscape? What would be good to talk about? And I thought, well, there’s really nothing that focused on WooCommerce. And I knew the team there. I knew a lot about it. And so I thought, well, why don’t I go ahead? I got the name. It was one of those things—I wanted something a little bit fun.

Birgit:
Yeah, definitely it is. But it’s also that creation in there—Do the Woo. I really love it.

BobWP:
And so the name just came to me. So I contacted WooCommerce and I said, “I want to do this. Is it cool to have Woo in the name?” And so we kind of verbally agreed on it. And so I started that. And about three or four episodes into it, I thought, well, is there enough to talk about with just WooCommerce right now? So I actually changed it to The WP eCommerce Show and ran that for two to three years, did quite a bit with that. So I was talking about a lot of stuff, and it was a lot of Woo in it.

Then in 2018, I decided to kick Do the Woo back up in January, and I was actually doing both podcasts at the same time. And it just was becoming too much. So I said, I’ve got to drop one of these. And the WP eCommerce seemed like the one to drop. And so I just took off with Do the Woo again. And by episode—I was just saying on the episode before we started doing this one—I think it was episode five, I had Brad Williams come in as co-host because I realized I needed a co-host. It was more fun, whether we have a guest or not. And then it just kind of went from there.

And the interesting thing is, when I actually came up with the site itself, what, two, three years ago? Whenever. Because it was all done under BobWP.

Birgit:
There…

BobWP:
At that point, I wanted to get the domain, and Do the Woo.io was available. So I went back to Woo and I said, I wanted to buy this domain, but I’m stepping into another space here as far as having that in a domain. And so they said, “What was the agreement before?” And I can’t remember who it was at Woo, but we made an agreement—basically a verbal agreement—and they were cool with it and everything. But then when, like I said, I got the domain, it became a little bit more of a legal thing. So I negotiated with their attorney. They came up with a contract and something that was an agreement of what I could or couldn’t do, or should or shouldn’t do, or something like that. And it was perfectly fine. It was great. So I signed that, and then I was able to use that for the domain.

Birgit:
It’s quite the journey.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know me too well. My journeys are never nice, straight, narrow journeys with nothing happening.

Birgit:
Nice, quiet, but that’s perfectly okay. You need to stay in the moment, and then all of a sudden creativity strikes.

It was, so in April of 2019, I started thinking… I had a podcast in the nonprofit space. So all my life before that was nonprofit space. I had just founded three years earlier a nonprofit technology company—a 501(c)(3)—to help nonprofits with technology because the social justice people are not equipped in doing technology. It’s all self-taught, and they needed a little bit more strategic approach to it. And I was really helping, trying to help with that. And I had a show called What’s New in NP Tech, with Ruth, a co-host, and Jim O’Reilly. And he had this wonderful radio voice as well, and he was very polished.

I’m more about talking off the cuff, starting sentences and never finishing them. And he was very polished. So it was a very good contrast. And I said, okay. And in 2018, he had to stop doing the podcast. And by 2019, I was missing that energy—that you have somebody to talk through things and what’s new and what you want to kind of try out and what’s the purpose of it, then why that and not that?

So I thought, okay, Gutenberg has a two-week release cycle, and every time there’s so much in it beyond what’s in the release post. In the release post, the release lead—whoever leads it—highlights six, four, or five things, but there’s so much other stuff in there that might be good for developers or theme builders. So I talked with a design director from Automattic at that point, and asked if he would spend every two weeks, two and a half hours or something like that, on our changelog. We’d go through the changelog, highlight things that we want to talk about that are very important, and talk about more than the six things that are highlighted in the release post.

Birgit:
And that was really fantastic to put it together. We had a certain rhythm to it; we had a certain outline. We also talked about what other people do in the space—if there was a great plugin coming along or a question from listeners. So that was really a great start. We started—I think the first, the zero episode—was in June 2019.

Since then, I’ve had a most regular biweekly kind of rhythm. Mark Re did about 40 episodes with me, and then he left Automattic—that was, I think, December 2020 or something like that, after a year of the pandemic kind of thing, or January. And then Greg Ziolkowski from Poland, who was also a Gutenberg developer, kind of came on for another 25 shows or 20 shows.

And then I started to rotate co-hosts, and that made it much more fun to think about what other people are doing in this space. Can I bring that into the show and still talk about the changelogs? Yeah. We had Tammie Lister and Fabian Kägy, Ryan Welcher, Nick Diego, or Peter Tasker. One show was actually also with Mathias Ventura when he had this new phase of the site editor to announce.

And with all the phases in Gutenberg, we always had something to talk about. And it was funny—this friend with whom I did the previous podcast, he’s still a very good friend of mine—and he kind of had the question for me: “So you call it the Gutenberg Times, so when Gutenberg is done, what do you do then?”

And I said, well, once Gutenberg is merged to Core, wouldn’t your site be completely obsolete? I said, no, I don’t think so. There are a lot of other things that are going to come along. But it was really interesting to see how that, in other people’s minds, kind of made it, okay, it’s done now. But we all know it’s not done.

In December 2018, it came into Core. And what are we now, 2025? And we are still working on phase three of the Gutenberg project. So it was kind of interesting to see.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think a lot of people, they think of not an end in sight, but they don’t think of how to now twist it to this way or twist it to that way. Some people are very, I’m going to go to this point, and then this is the point I feel like there’s nothing else to be said, at least from my perspective.

But you’re like me. I mean, when I had Brad come on—I don’t know how long it was just Brad and me—and then I had Jonathan Wold and Mendel Kurland from GoDaddy back then. They came on. So we started rotating because, again, like you said, it was fun. And then we were bringing in guests too.

And then just after a while, I started thinking, well, could I build on this? And the more I got into it, the less I wanted to be on the podcast. I just thought—because it started coming to the point where it was, yeah, we’re talking about this and that and all these different things—but also I was seeing people that come on a podcast for the first time as a guest and, after, I mean, they were freaking out at the beginning. But then at the end, or later on, they said, “Wow, that was so much fun and stuff.” And I thought, well, I’d like to get more other voices and have other people talk about stuff, and pick out hosts to have their own specialty and their own knowledge and stuff.

So it’s been kind of crazy. Some people look at me like…

Birgit:
Yeah. When did you start with the network of shows? Was that two years ago? Three years?

BobWP:
Brad came on. Then, on January 9th, 2020, I brought Jonathan in, and Mendel came in. And then, I think it was January 30th, 2021, I brought Zach in, and Ronald joined. Then after that, I just kept thinking, how far can I take this?

And then, I think it was when I actually launched it as its own site. I had somebody design it. And then after about two years of that, I started doing some other stuff, and I thought, I want to make this more of a—I want to call it, I don’t really know—a network, but a collection of shows with all these different people. So then I had to look at redesigning everything.

But yeah, it was just… for me, I mean, I’m at a point where I’ve got to kind of just deal with what I have here now. And all the hosts are volunteers, so they always know. We’ve had a few that have had to leave for one reason or another. They’re getting busy with their business, and they just said, I don’t have the bandwidth anymore. And I say…

BobWP:
Thank you for what you’ve done. And I have a hall of fame on my post page and stuff for those that were on before and moved on. So it’s been very flexible with them, scheduling everything. Everybody’s busy and stuff, so we just kind of deal with stuff. We get things all scheduled in for a year, but then we move things around and people have times they can’t show up. Sometimes it’s a little crazy, but they all seem to enjoy doing it, and I’m lucky for that.

Birgit:
Yeah, I have started rotating through. Well, I started to see, okay, the WordPress space is still a little bit more male-oriented, and I see it also in my audiences. Yeah, it’s all 65% male, between 35 and older, or it’s 80% on the podcast. I said, well, I guess I’m in a situation where I can actually also bring some more female voices, especially female engineer voices, to the space.

And it’s a real joy for me to work with the engineers at Automattic, or other agencies, or other hosting companies. And I kind of want the person who comes on to not only be a one-time guest—if they want to, that’s okay—but if they are on multiple times, they get their own routine for that. And it’s much easier for them to say yes now than for the first time when they don’t really know what to expect.

So I am really happy to have about 10 to 12 women engineers that kind of rotate through. Most of them are actually in the community. They’re all very knowledgeable about the subject anyway, but then they’ve also put in the grind in theme development or plugin development.

So it’s really interesting to see what they do, and they bring a different perspective to the whole thing. When I was having a conversation with Greg, who is on the development team, I said, well, I could bring the user questions. What were you thinking? And then he would explain it quite nicely, and I learned a lot when talking with the volunteers—what software development is actually about. It’s… you have the architecture, but there’s so much behind the scenes that you can’t bring to the forefront. And if somebody says to content creators, it’s just, “What? Just change?” If I hear somebody say, “Well, it’s just an easy fix…” Yeah, that was kind of…

BobWP:
What?

Birgit:
…what I had when I was running my agency. It was never just an easy fix.

BobWP:
Never.

Birgit:
It’s always more. Yeah. So it’s interesting to see and bring other voices in there.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I know for me, the hosting has always been… I try to keep some kind of balance in some way, but I’m also asking—the person has to be willing to commit. Somebody. I’ve approached a lot of different people, and a lot of people just don’t have the time to commit or they just don’t. And also, it does take a certain comfort level to be a host. I mean, you want to be able to do it.

And if you’re almost on the edge just going in as a guest—I mean, I give them the benefit of the doubt. Some of them have come in a little bit reluctant, and they ended up just loving doing it after a bit. So it’s kind of… And yeah, it’s good. All the different voices. I mean, I’ve had a lot of guests on. I swear that probably 65%, 70%, or maybe it’s higher—I don’t know—are first-time podcast guests. They’ve never been on. And sometimes I have to talk them into it a little bit, and often they’re surprised how much they can talk when they don’t think they can, and they get going.

Birgit:
Yeah, it really depends on the questions.

BobWP:
Yeah, for sure.

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Birgit:
I have found that everybody brings something to it, and even if they’re missing knowledge, you can fill that in a conversation. It fills knowledge gaps for other people who are listening. And so I always have appreciation for things that don’t go well because those are the most important moments when you learn things.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Birgit:
Exactly. And I never really had anything that didn’t go well. Sometimes it was just… yeah, we had one the other day where we had 20… that’s a horror story. If you have a rundown that’s 29 pages because you have a changelog from three plugin releases because you had a holiday break.

BobWP:
Oh, geez.

Birgit:
Yeah. That is kind of the horror story where you say, okay, you need a special guest for that, who deals with that. And even then, you sometimes get lost. Am I on page 15 or 25? Where am I? Because you scroll so fast. Yeah, we cut that out and regrouped and then came back to it. So it’s great.

BobWP:
I had somebody… a couple of times this happened. One of the guests didn’t get recorded in the track. It just wasn’t there. It looked like it was recording and everything. So when I went to play it back, they were out.

BobWP:
It looked like it was recording and everything. So when I went to play it back, they were out. And I believe one time, one of the hosts actually said, “Well, send me the episode, and I’ll fill in those spots. I’ll listen to it, and then I’ll reply, and then I’ll see what I asked next.” And they did it, and it worked fine, but it was a nightmare for them. Then I had to go in and put everything in.

But I did have a guest once, and I felt so sorry for them. We don’t do a lot of upfront questions on ours, and sometimes people will request it. And this plugin developer was really pretty nervous about being on. So I said, “Well, let me send you a few questions about what I’ll talk about.” Well, I could tell even when we started, it wasn’t for them.

Birgit:
So brilliant.

BobWP:
And I always tell my guests, if you need to start over on something, it’s recorded. So I’m not live. I can go in and edit. And this poor person actually had created the answers for all the questions and was reading them. But he was so nervous that when he was reading them, he kept stopping and saying, “Oh, I got to start over.” And I could just feel his tenseness. And I wanted to say, if this isn’t comfortable, but then I didn’t want to. So we did it. I went in and did some editing, and it turned out fine, but I felt for him.

I thought, oh, I know that feeling when you think something might be easier for you or something, and you get in there and you just don’t have it in you or something. And I don’t blame them. There are a lot of people that just refuse to come on the podcast. They’ll just say, “Ah, no, I can’t do it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, cool.”

Birgit:
Yeah, I take that no very seriously because you don’t want to… yeah. But the other part was the horror stories only start when I screw up.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s when I did.

Birgit:
So at the beginning, I think I missed the record button with my mouse, and we had to do the show again.

BobWP:
I had one of those.

Birgit:
I think everybody has. But I have a very good editor who goes through that. She’s been a radio producer all her life, and she helps me with that. So now I just kind of record and record on QuickTime as a backup. So even if I screw up the Zoom recording… but now with Zoom, you actually get two tracks. And that’s really helpful because sometimes we just talk over each other. It happens when you’re in the moment and you want to—it’s something you’re excited about—then you talk over each other, and it’s hard.

BobWP:
I have a few people that have been that stuck almost. And I’ll shift tracks, then I shift them and stuff. And I did have the one that I forgot to record—it was when I was doing my other e-commerce podcast. And she ran this company that sold cosmetics, and she was in Ghana. And it was just—she had a Woo online store. That’s why I brought her on. But she would give jobs to local women to go out because they would have to get the ingredients for it. So she provided jobs for a lot of the women there.

It was a fascinating story, and I finally was able to get her on. And the most embarrassing thing is when you find out in the middle—I looked down, I thought, wow, that record button isn’t going. And I thought, now I have to tell her this right in the middle. Which is… I don’t know what’s worse: going through the whole thing and then saying, “Oh, sorry, it didn’t record.” So I kind of paused. I said, “Well, I have an interesting situation here. Obviously, I didn’t push the record button.” And she actually laughed, and she said, “Well, go ahead. We can do it again. Just send me your calendar again.” And she was real cool about it, but my heart just sunk.

Birgit:
Yeah, imagine no recording, especially when it was a good show and there was a good groove, and then all of a sudden I destroyed it. Oh, man.

BobWP:
It’s interesting too because some people, when you were talking about somebody asking, “Well, what about when it goes into Core and the goal’s over?” It sounds like you’ve been through a lot. I have been over the seven years. You flex with whatever works. It’s like, okay, is this going to continue? Yeah, well, I can continue it.

And you’ve tried different hosts and you’ve found that sweet spot. So I think both of us—I was going to ask about, did they ever change for our sites during the seven years? And they probably did in the sense that, yeah, we shifted to this a bit and nothing real maybe. I know that when I moved it to its own domain and kind of focused more on the bigger group of hosts, that was probably a big shift. But it was in my brain for nine months. I was working on stuff.

Birgit:
Well, there wasn’t really a big shift. So I think I changed the theme once, and it’s definitely overdue for a new one because I’m still on a classic theme and I should go on a block theme because then you can do a lot more. But I just didn’t have the time yet to migrate over.

Birgit:
But I think I’m also… up until 2021, in summer 2021, it was all a hobby kind of thing. I did it alongside my agency work, and it was up and down in terms of how much time I could spend there. During the pandemic, I had about six—well, four—months of burnout because I had so much work to do, and I didn’t have a break. I had to take my break.

And the only thing that I did during that break was keeping up with Gutenberg, keeping the Weekend Edition going, and keeping the podcast going. But I wasn’t doing any agency work. The developers and freelancers that I worked with—they were so good at taking over. I said, “I can’t deal with it, and if I have to step in, I’ll step in. But you know how we work.” And they were all many years with me.

So it was between November 2020 and February 2021. I was only doing the Gutenberg Times, and I was really amazed to see how that always kept my excitement going. And there’s a lot of personal stuff that got in the way afterward. So we moved to Sarasota; we sold the house in Naples, renovated the house. There was a lot of non-work and non-publishing kind of stuff getting in the way.

Then we organized our house in Sarasota, and after two years of not seeing our parents, we traveled to Europe in 2022. We met in Porto, and you were also moving. So I think we did this pretty much at the same time—moving back to Europe.

And I was really happy that I got a job at Automattic. And part of that job is keeping Gutenberg Times and the Gutenberg Changelog going as a Developer Advocate. So having that was a real blessing for myself and for me because I couldn’t migrate my agency. I closed the agency when I knew I was going to Europe. And so keeping that going was really good. I’m very grateful for working with Automattic on that.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t know that part of it. I mean, how that just seamlessly all worked, and you were able to bring that right into it. Yeah, that’s cool. And I think the big change for me probably was when I went to the bigger network of shows and everything, and started bringing more people in.

And then at the same time, I was given the gift of a redesign of the site from the Special Projects team at Automattic. Matt gave that to me, which was phenomenal. For a few days, I was just thinking, is this really happening?

Birgit:
Is this real?

BobWP:
I mean, it took us quite a few months to put it together and stuff. And I have one funny story about the launch. We had kind of a soft launch because…

Birgit:
And?

BobWP:
I was at CloudFest, and I got a message that said, “Your site is live.” And I’m like, oh, really? I had not planned for that.

And the ironic part of it—we got such a kick out of it—was my site prior to that had Beaver Builder on it. And I was hanging out with Robbie from Beaver Builder when I got the message, and I told him. And we took this picture. We were having a beer, celebrating and everything. But it was so funny—he just got a kick out of that. I basically removed Beaver Builder, and here he was celebrating with me and stuff. But Robbie’s great.

Birgit:
The new websites…

BobWP:
But yeah, it still is amazing—the support and everything I get with that side of stuff. A couple of times I’ve really messed it up. I keep saying, maybe I should just let you do more things. I shouldn’t be touching stuff.

Birgit:
You don’t know where the boundaries are unless you kind of push past them. So yeah, what’s your own knowledge—you want to kind of kick it a little bit.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. I poke around a bit to kind of understand. Some of the stuff is custom work, so I don’t want to mess that up. But some of it’s adding stuff. I’ve probably learned more about the block editor and everything than I ever thought I would be—just getting in to try to figure out, okay, this has to be a small change. And it’s like, okay, an hour later… now what happened there?

Birgit:
Yeah, I was doing that actually on WordPress.org. I am part of the editor of the Developer Blog that launched in late 2022. And then I got the note from the Meta team that the Developer Blog now has a block theme, and I have access to it.

And then I said, “Oh, I can change the navigation.” And I went in there, changed the navigation, and it kind of dropped the whole navigation and added all the navigation to the top-level navigation too. One is the overall WordPress.org, and then on the subsites, you have the own navigation. All of a sudden, my UI was jammed. So it took about two days to fix it. But I said, okay, I’m not going to touch that anymore.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve kind of learned now that I did screw something up recently again, and having them look at it… I even tried revisions, and it seemed like the more revisions I went back to, the worse it got. So it was like, okay, this is hopeless. I don’t know where this stuff went, but it’s not here anymore.

Birgit:
And here goes a half a day of your life.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah.

Birgit:
But that’s web development. I think it has… yeah, it’s always happened. Since when are you doing web pages? How far back is that going?

BobWP:
Oh, so actually I started doing… let’s see, when did I first do? We still had our previous marketing and design business around in 2000—I dunno—2005, 2006, somewhere around there.

BobWP:
…somewhere around there. I started doing—well, actually, it might’ve been even earlier than that—doing little HTML sites. We were doing print design. We started in 1993, the business. And so I had to kind of kick and scream and be pushed into it. And I made these godawful HTML sites with… oh, was it Adobe—what was it called? It was one of the…

Birgit:
Was it Dreamweaver or was it FrontPage?

BobWP:
Dreamweaver, yeah.

Birgit:
Dreamweaver, yeah.

BobWP:
And I remember I made one of our first sites, and I had Flash on there. Oh, it was just horrifying—bouncing letters, dancing around, or some crazy thing. And then, 2008 or 2009—I think 2008 or 2009—I got into WordPress, started dabbling in playing around with the blogging stuff. And I went to iThemes and got one of their themes there, and we did our business site.

And it was like, wow, that took me one-hundredth of the time it took me to do any other site because it was… I mean, it actually looked good, and it would function well and stuff. So yeah, I did that till about 2014 or 2015, I think, when I finally quit designing. I was into content, and I knew what I wanted to focus on. I was tired of the design client side of things.

Birgit:
So what was your first?

BobWP:
Oh, yeah. Well, I don’t want to say… this was 1996. Yeah, I did a German site. It was all HTML tables—kind of horrible. Well, it’s still out there because it’s a reference site for books and all kinds of things in Germany. But yeah, so that was in 1996. I started—that was as a citizen in Munich—and I learned about it, and I learned about HTML.

I found it so fascinating that you can put it up on the web and everybody can see it almost immediately. And that’s such a different experience from printing, where you have to wait till it comes from the printer and then you need to distribute it. That was instant distribution, and I really loved it.

But then what I found was that all the neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers were all on the German part—they were all in America on servers—and there was nothing in Germany that holds against it, what really happened. And we were a group of two people, each one of us had our site and started a site about the Holocaust and all that information.

And mine was called Shoah Project Internet. And we collected information about the concentration camp in Dachau, before the concentration camp had their own website in 2000 or something like that. I connected with authors who had published poems and also some nonfiction about the wealth of Jews that was taken away by the government, and about the resistance in Germany.

It was all in German, but there was no equivalent otherwise from private citizens to actually put this out. That really made me… and then there was this big discussion—there was an exhibition, a traveling exhibition. There was this myth that the German army had nothing to do with the concentration camps, but that was a myth, and it wasn’t true. And there was an exhibition that actually showed all the facts, and there was a big brouhaha and uproar.

And it was traveling, so everywhere I was kind of picking up the snippets from the online sites, from websites. So it was kind of an interesting…

BobWP:
I think I started using computers in the early 80s—or probably mid-80s. And I actually went to community college in the States in, I think, maybe the mid to late 80s. I took a year of computer programming, and I did learn—what was it?—BASIC, COBOL, Assembly…

Birgit:
Wow, yeah.

BobWP:
There was one other thing. And after a year, I remember we had this great guy from…

Birgit:
Fortran?

BobWP:
Yeah. Oh no, that was another one. Yeah, we had to dabble in all those in 12 months. And at the end of the 12 months, the instructor—he was great—he was a Brit, and he just had the craziest sense of humor. He said, “Well, now you’ve learned all this. It’s all going to be obsolete by the time you step out this door.”

And we were like, “What?” And I discovered after a year of that, that was not what I was going to become—a computer programmer, I thought. But it gave me the comfort level to use computers. I was really comfortable with that. So that was good. But yeah, crazy times.

So what’s going to happen in the next year for you, do you think?

Birgit:
Well, the Weekend Edition is going to be quite interesting every time. And I see that in the community—that the block editor is more in the forefront more and more. And there’s some great stuff coming out with Playground and with Studio to do staging sites and to just play around with WordPress.

So I know that Gutenberg—the Core contributors of Gutenberg—are still going to do the biweekly releases. So we are going to do maybe a monthly release podcast. And we’ll invite a few more people from the space that work with Gutenberg. There is now also… quite a few people have adopted the block theme space quite a bit on multiple levels.

It’s for enterprise levels, which started very early. But on the agency level, WebDevStudios, for instance—Jesse Palm was on the show recently, who had the starter theme that’s a block theme for WebDevStudios—and they start every project with it.

So these kinds of things show me that there’s quite another level of adoption happening about the Gutenberg project. And of course, I’m still hoping for a Google Docs-like real-time collaboration or async communication with comments.

There are some great experiments in the Gutenberg plugin that I want to dive into quite a bit as well. So we’ll see what happens.

Birgit:
So we’ll see what happens. Yeah, WordCamp Asia is going to be more of a research trip for me—to talk with the plugin developers and talk with some of the engineers and kind of see what’s next for them. And I’m sure I’ll find a few interview partners that I can make a show with in the space, because I already have. Some of them have left the space; some of them are coming back. So it’s really interesting to see.

BobWP:
Very cool. Yeah, it’s interesting because I think of… there was a point where I started adding some shows that were more WordPress-based. What I’ve found with some of these shows is, everything always comes back to WordPress or WooCommerce. And a lot of it—the similarities kind of weave in and out of all this stuff. It’s good to be knowledgeable of other things, no matter what you’re doing.

So I’m hoping we’re going to be stepping more into videos. I’ve been talking about it—we’re going to be doing more video with some of the shows, and we might do a little bit of live stuff here and there. I’ve kind of kicked and screamed into that, so that’s another piece that’s going to hopefully grow. I’ll be trying to focus a little bit on that part of it—what I do with that and how I present it and all that stuff.

Birgit:
I have heard from quite a few people that there’s a generation out there that doesn’t read anymore. I know. They want to go on YouTube and be entertained or at least shown things. And of course, with software, if you want to teach somebody, you need to show it. That’s very hard to do on the podcast.

BobWP:
Yeah, it is. Yeah. So who knows what? Maybe we should make this a tradition now—every January. We come in and catch up and see what we did, what we blew, everything—what broke and what didn’t work.

Birgit:
I would love to do that. Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

BobWP:
We’ll make it a January tradition. So anyway, we have WordCamp Asia coming up. Like you said, you and I will both be there. In fact, you’re going to be joining—you’ll be coming and co-hosting the table, doing the little booth, I believe, for an hour.

Birgit:
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Friday, I think.

BobWP:
If you haven’t caught up with her, you haven’t caught up with me. I’ll post when she’s going to be at the table, and that way you can tie her down because sometimes chasing people around… you know how that goes.

Birgit:
Yeah, no, no, absolutely. Yeah, no, I’m looking forward to WordCamp Asia. Also, I’ll be at CloudFest this year for the first time, so I’m not going to be at the hackathon. But there are too many people from Automattic going already that actually have a project. And then WordCamp Constance—that’s a camp with German speakers. So it’s really going to be interesting.

BobWP:
So you’ll be at the regular CloudFest event and stuff? Yeah, I know there’s going to be a little bit more WordPress stuff going on, and that’ll be fun. So yeah, we’ll be seeing each other next month and the month after.

Birgit:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate it. I’m really loving it.

BobWP:
Okay, well, we’ve said it enough times, but Gutenberg Times—and probably the URL is very easy and stuff—but do check that out. Is it gutenbergtimes.com?

Birgit:
Dot com. And yeah, you can also find me on the Twitters and on the Bluesky and the… I still call it Twitter.

BobWP:
Sorry.

Birgit:
…on the Bluesky and also on Mastodon. And of course on the WordPress Slack and WooCommerce Slack. So I’m everywhere.

BobWP:
Yeah, everywhere.

Birgit:
Well, thank you so much. It was wonderful chatting with you.

BobWP:
Yeah, well, thank you. Yeah, this was definitely a must-do show for January, so I appreciate everybody listening and…

Birgit:
Happy anniversary.

BobWP:
Yeah, happy anniversary. And come back next January for our second Nova. I’m sure you’ll see Birgit more than—or sooner than—next January, for sure.

Birgit:
Well, thank you.

BobWP:
Well, take care. Bye-bye.