How To Survive AI

Flew back home to Florida yesterday after several days out in Tempe, Arizona for PressConf. Overall, great event. Tight-knit feel to it and it was nice to be able to meet in person a lot of the movers and shakers in the world of WordPress.

But, it is also so freakin’ nice to be back home. 😇 I dunno…. I used to be into the conference scene and enjoy flying around. But, not so much anymore. Living in a hotel room and eating junk and drinking cheap Kuerig coffee from the hotel coffee maker? Nah. 🥴

OK, so let’s jump right in here, though. Lots to do this week!

First off, I’d like to talk about how to best handle AI. It might not be what you expect.

Then, I’ve got a bunch of plugin updates and releases to share with you. And a new addition to the Concierge Toolkit.

So, let’s dive into the deep end here….

In The Age Of AI, Be More Human

Last week, I attended PressConf in Phoenix. This is a conference that combines business and WordPress. Lots of entrepreneurs there. And, one of the most common topics that came up was no surprise.

It is AI.

Lot of people curious and wondering how AI might affect what they do. Are they going to be put out of work? Or, just learn to adapt?

Let’s be real…. AI is going to put some people out of work. It is coming fast and furious… and things ARE going to change. In my view, you’re going to need to learn to use AI. Those who thrive are going to be the ones who know how to use it and use it to magnify their own creativity.

The final talk of the conference was a panel of podcasters. And they were asked about the benefits of podcasting and WHY they were doing it. And it ultimately came down to just…. being able to talk to people and being more human.

Is AI going to make WordPress irrelevant? Probably not, but even if it did, the answer is just to be more human.

Your innate creativity and imagination and ideas can all be amplified and acted upon faster by using AI tools. Now you’ve got people with weak programming skills who are “vibe coding” things into existence. They have an idea and they can think through it methodically…. and guide AI tools to create it. Plugins and even SaaS services are being coded by people who don’t know how to code. Crazy, huh?

AI is helping to tear down the walls between idea and execution.

But, there is yet another aspect here….

Those podcasters were connecting to their listeners. They were being…. human. It is the same with Youtube videos, which brings on the visual dimension as well as allows people to see and hear you. I can tell you straight up that my Youtube channel is my chief source of new leads to my business.

There’s that old saying that people like to do business with people they know, like and trust. The way to build that up is to communicate and…. be more human. This is why videos and podcasting work so well…. and frankly will continue to work very well as AI grows further.

I’m not worried about AI. I’m excited about AI. I’m curious about it and how I can embrace it to make myself better at what I do and maybe even execute on ideas faster and better.

But, that’s what human beings do. We come up with ideas. We get creative. And yes, we communicate. And there’s nothing more effective than allowing the people you serve in your business to see and hear you personally.

So, in this age of AI, be more human.

Considering making more videos. Maybe podcasting. Connect with customers on a personal basis. If you have a team, put their faces on your website. Get them to interact with people. Make your company more human.

And embrace your ideas. Get creative. It is what humans do. And then, learn how you can use AI to execute on those ideas in ways you may not have thought possible.

This Week In Concierge

Well, Concierge was basically “steady as she goes” last week because I was in Tempe, Arizona a good chunk of the week to attend PressConf. Good event overall, but I’m quite happy to be back in Florida and back to normal. I don’t enjoy conference travel nearly like I used to when I was younger. 😇

One small project I did last week from the hotel room for a client was to help her build out an online quiz. While she was looking at other solutions (paid, third-party tools)… I told her that it could pretty easily be done with Fluent Forms.

So, that’s what we did. 😇 In this case, she wrote all the questions and did the basic quiz setup, then I took it over and made the mechanics of it work.

Fluent Forms has a built-in quiz module. That quiz module supports multiple types of quizzes. Combined with conditional confirmations, you can easily add people to your list, tag them based on their quiz score, and basically build your quiz into a powerful lead generator.

Whether quizzes or online calculator forms, Fluent Forms is pretty capable in this regard. Now, of course, coming up with good ideas for such things for your own website can sometimes be challenging. So, a quick idea…

Ask ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool. Tell it your niche, the kinds of people you want to attract to your site and what you do. Then, ask it for ideas for online quizzes and calculators that might be suitable for your audience. It can get the juices flowing, for sure. 👍

And then, hit me up and I can help you build it.

I’ve got some ideas for my own site, too. In fact, I was outlining one on the plane while I was flying back yesterday. 🤪

WordPress Quick Bits

Mullenweg Begins Lifting Bans. If you may recall, Matt Mullenweg went on a ban spree when he was stomping his feet angry when people criticized him. Apparently, over the years, multiple THOUSANDS of people were literally banned from WordPress.org and blocked on social media from the official WordPress account. Just crazy. Well, for one reason or the other, Matt has begun to lift bans and unblock people. I heard Mary Hubbard (executive director of WordPress) talk about it on stage at PressConf. Anyway, Matt calls it a “jubilee”.

WordFence Discontinuing Support Old APIs. If you are running WordFence 7.1.10 or older, it is time to upgrade. WordFence is discontinuing support for their older APIs, meaning scans and other important features will stop working. Make sure you’re running WordFence 7.2 or newer.

Elementor Hello Biz Theme. For quite awhile now, people who wanted to build their sites with Elementor could use the free and stripped-down Hello Theme. Well, now Elementor has the Hello Biz theme which is, as you might guess by the name, aimed for businesses. Hello Biz comes with some pre-designed website kits, business-specific widgets, etc. Check it out.

Rocket Announced ShopShield. My hosting partner, Rocket.net, has announced a new feature called ShopShield. This is aimed at WooCommerce sites and is designed to keep stores running reliably even during sudden traffic spikes. By building a system in conjunction with Cloudflare Enterprise at the Edge, they’ve built a way to properly distribute incoming traffic to accommodate for large spikes. You can learn more about it here.

Bunny.net Launched Bunny Shield. Bunny.net is the service I like to use for storing files and streaming videos. Much easier than Amazon S3. But, Bunny does other things, too. And they just launched one called Bunny Shield. Everything is about the bunny, right? 🤪 Bunny Shield is a security layer over top your site to provide a web app firewall, DDos protection, rate limiting and soon protection from bots. Read more about it here. Similarities here to using the Cloudflare proxy. Might be worth looking into if you use cheap hosting that doesn’t provide such things.

Kadence Releases “Kind Cotton”. While Kadence is ultimately a theme platform that you can turn into anything you wish, they do have starter templates that import pre-designed and nice looking patterns and then you can customize from there. Kadence has just launched a new one called Kind Cotton, which they say is aimed at creators “who value simplicity, warmth and purpose.” Learn more here.

Theme Switcher Pro Launched.. In short, this tool allows you to run more than one theme on your site simultaneously, allowing you to gradually switch themes. Strong use case would be being able to gradually switch to a new theme using the block editor while ensuring your old content continues to work. Looks interesting. Learn more about it here. They also have a demo video of how it works.

CartFlows Launches Modern Cart.. The guys behind CartFlows have launched a new plugin called Modern Cart. It is designed to give a pop out cart to a WooCommerce store, giving an easier and more streamlined buying experience. You can learn more about it here.

MailerPress Incoming. The team behind SEOPress looks to be launching (soon) a new email marketing platform for WordPress called MailerPress. New FluentCRM competitor incoming? We shall keep an eye.

WordPress 6.8.1 Incoming. As always happens shortly after a major WordPress release, a maintenance release is coming out to fix some issues. The release candidate is due out today and the general release later this week.

FluentSnippets Upgrade. My go-to code snippets plugin is FluentSnippets. And, few weeks ago, somebody asked about updates to it. Generally speaking, it hasn’t needed any because what it does is simple enough and… it just works. But, they came out with one anyway. 😎 Version 10.5 adds import/export functionality, soft line wrapping, and a few other things.

Presto Player & Vertical Videos. A new version of Presto Player was pushed out and the big headline is that it now supports vertical videos. So, if you’re into that video format for all the social platforms, Presto will now support putting those on your site. More on that release here.

Introducing FlyingPress To The Concierge Toolkit

As you may know, the Concierge Toolkit is an ever-growing collection of premium plugins that I make available to clients with their site in the care of Concierge. And when it comes to site performance, I already have options such as PerfMatters.

But, I didn’t have a caching plugin in the mix.

Last week, I acquired a license to FlyingPress and it is now being added to the Toolkit.

FlyingPress recently came onto my radar during a dust-up over the price increases in WP Rocket. Now, I don’t care much about the price increases, but that whole discussion got me looking and comparing different options. WP Rocket has long been considered one of the best solutions on the market…. and it is. But, based on my research, FlyingPress seems to be even better.

And, in fact, it looks like PerfMatters + FlyingPress is one hell of a site performance powerhouse for WordPress.

Now, to be clear, there’s definitely feature overlap. PerfMatters and FlyingPress have a lot of similar functionality. But, one of the chief things PerfMatters doesn’t do is caching. FlyingPress handles that very effectively. And some of the things FlyingPress doesn’t do (like the Script Manager for disabling plugins in some places) PerfMatters does very well. With both plugins, you can use the best of both and have all your bases covered.

And word is that FlyingPress version 5 is due out pretty soon with even further enhancements (announcement on X).

Alright, so a few quick things about all of this…

First, if you don’t know what caching is, it basically means that static copies of your pages are stored so that they can be delivered lightning fast to your web visitors without the need to query the database and process all the code again. It speeds things up because all of the “gear spinning” that is done by WordPress has already been done and doesn’t have to be re-done.

There are tons of caching options out there for WordPress, but they’re not all created equal. FlyingPress is considered to be top-shelf when it comes to speed as well as ease of use. The interface is very well designed and user-friendly.

Now, for Concierge clients who are on Rocket… do you need caching? After all, Rocket already runs in conjunction with Cloudflare Enterprise as the CDN. Well, after discussions with Rocket, the answer is…. yes, sites still benefit from local caching. Because it keeps a bulk of your traffic from having to hit PHP and the database in the first place, it speeds up sites.

When they told me that, I was in. 😇

This means that, beginning this week, I am going to be making the rounds and proactively setting up FlyingPress across client sites. My goal is to provide fastest possible site performance for clients. And when I learn that local caching is helpful even on Rocket, I take action. 😎

If you’re already running a caching solution, I’ll be in touch with you first so as not to change anything you don’t want changed. And if, for some reason, you don’t want FlyingPress, just let me know.