Me? Starting A Vlog? 😜

So, this week, I’m going to let you know about something new I’m doing.

In fact, I’m literally recording a video of myself typing these words right now. 🤣 Below you’ll find out why.

Anyway, busy week ahead! Let’s all make it super-productive, shall we? 🙏

I’m Bringing Back The Founder’s Memo (Just Not How I Planned)

Funny thing about writing a newsletter this long (almost 600 issues in)… you start repeating yourself in public. 🤣 And sometimes, you even talk about a cool idea you have and then never follow through. Turns out that’s not always a bad thing. 😜

I’m writing this section of this very newsletter while literally recording footage for a video. Mid-project, camera still warm, cutting clips into yet another video while I type this out. And here’s why…

Back in issue 456, I announced something called The Founder’s Memo. I was frustrated with BeeHiiv at the time… no way to segment my list, no way to send different content to different people who wanted different things. I wanted a place for shorter, more personal, more frequent stuff. No sections. No “latest posts.” Just me, telling you what I was working on. FluentCRM made it possible. I got excited. And then… nothing happened. Life and priorities took over, like they do.

While the tech scene has changed (BeeHiiv has really come along since then, even though I don’t use it anymore), the intention there was always there. But, life’s inertia meant… I failed to follow through.

Then in issue 486, while I was mulling over renaming this newsletter, “The Founder’s Memo” came back up… this time as a candidate name for the newsletter itself. Flirted with it. Didn’t pull the trigger. Kinda glad I didn’t do that one, because…

More recently, in issue 589, I told you about a crazy idea… a 30-day experiment putting out a new YouTube video every weekday. Outflow equals inflow, I said. The more you put out into the world, the more comes back. Not in some law-of-attraction sense. Just mechanically.

I never ran that 30-day sprint. But the idea never really left me either. Basically, the demands of client work of Concierge often mean I just don’t have the time to create videos like that. But, is that really a good excuse? No it is not. In fact, I think the secret is just to simplify and remove the friction to the point where I CAN do it. 😎

So, I decided to bring it all together. I’m launching a vlog on the Blog Marketing Academy YouTube channel, and I’m calling it The Founder’s Memo. I’m only 2 videos in as of this morning. Recorded over the weekend while I was smoking a cigar on the back deck. 😎

I still own the domain. Bought it back in 2023 when I first had the idea. Figured… why let a good name sit in a drawer? I’ve already got a couple of videos out, another one coming shortly, and I think I’m starting to land on a workflow that actually makes this sustainable. That last part matters more than people think.

This isn’t the 30-day experiment from issue 589. I’m not sprinting and stopping. I’m targeting at least three times a week… maybe more once I find my rhythm, but I’m not promising daily. The goal is something I can actually keep doing, not something impressive for a month and then dead.

A few things this is meant to do at once:

• Give me an outlet for the stuff that comes up way more often than this newsletter’s weekly cadence allows.
• Stay informal enough that it’s actually easy for me to make. No Hollywood production, no overthinking it.
• Scratch the itch from issue 589… more frequent content, more outflow… without the artificial 30-day deadline.

But honestly, the bigger reason is this: relationships are getting harder to build right now, and more valuable because of it.

Everyone’s noise is louder. AI content is everywhere, and most of it is interchangeable… it can hit “frequency,” but it’s got zero personality, so it just blends into the wallpaper. Social media rewards whoever’s loudest or most polished, not whoever’s most real. In the middle of all that, an actual person talking to you on camera, imperfect and unscripted, stands out simply by existing.

That’s what I want The Founder’s Memo to be. Me, being real with you, more often than once a week. It will be a solopreneur’s video blog – where I share some of the ebbs and flows of daily life running my own business, working on WordPress sites for clients, testing tools, setting up business systems, learning AI, and more.

And unlike my typical Youtube video, I don’t have to be at my desk all the time. 🤣

Here’s the part I actually want you to take from this, though: you should think about doing your own version of this.

Not a whole rebrand. Not a content calendar. Just… start. Remove the friction. Don’t chase production value… decent audio matters more than you’d think, way more than lighting or a fancy camera, but that’s about where the “quality bar” should stop. Nobody’s unsubscribing from you because your background isn’t perfectly lit.

Get something out. Consistently. Let people see you, not just your content. That’s the whole system. It’s stupidly simple, and it works.

And perhaps you will enjoy the new videos. 🙏

WordPress News & Updates

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped at WordCamp US. Responsive styling, browser-based media processing, inline Notes with @mentions, a persistent admin bar, and a way to mark images as purely decorative. 800+ contributors, 170+ of them first-timers. Full rundown here.

WP Rocket had a rough 7.1 launch day. Sites running its Cloudflare module started going down almost immediately after 7.1 shipped… turns out the bug had been reported six weeks earlier and never got fixed. They shipped a patch about 24 hours later. The full story, six-week-old bug report and all.

Elementor Pro patched a critical unauthenticated file-upload vulnerability. Two researchers found the same flaw independently… one of them walked away with a $15,600 bounty. If you’re running Elementor Pro, update now. Details here.

A public spat broke out over WordPress AI tools, and it’s actually relevant to what I told you about above. Syed Balkhi publicly recommended WPVibe over NovaMira. Giovanni Cintolo pushed back hard, pointing out that WPVibe stores the WordPress Application Password for every connected site… on WPVibe’s own servers. Balkhi’s response was, essentially, “yes, and it’s encrypted, that’s how it works.” Which, fine, but that’s exactly the “middleman” problem I mentioned earlier that NovaMira is built to avoid… it connects your AI directly to your site, nothing routed through someone else’s servers holding your credentials. See the thread yourself.

Beaver Builder AI is out of alpha and fully released, bundled into every paid plan. In-editor chat, an MCP connector for outside AI tools, and importable Design Kits. More on what it does.

WP Engine opened up Smart Search AI to everyone, not just their own hosting customers. Works with ACF, WooCommerce, WPGraphQL, and REST for headless setups. Announcement here.

FluentCart 1.6.2 now migrates your entire WooCommerce store… products, orders, subscriptions, history and all. Order numbers stay the same, Stripe/PayPal transaction IDs carry over, and subscriptions land on FluentCart’s own billing without a gap in anyone’s renewal. If you’ve been thinking about jumping off WooCommerce, the door’s wide open now. Full release notes. This was something I was waiting for… importing WooCommerce Subscriptions. I tested it. It works well. But, for now, I’ve elected to wait a bit longer on fully converting to FluentCart. There are just a few quality-of-life features I need from it before I’d want to fully make the switch.

WPManageNinja is rolling out cryptographically signed updates across their whole Fluent lineup (Boards, Affiliate, Booking, Forms all shipped this week). Your site now verifies an update actually came from them before installing it. FluentBoards’ release also went through a Patchstack security review and tightened permissions across its REST API and Pro endpoints… worth updating for that alone. More on the initiative. Super important given the supply-chain attacks that have happened lately.

SEOPress Insights 3.1 got a full interface rebuild, plus period/competitor/segment comparisons and guided tours on every screen. Also notable for the geeks among us: it now exposes read-only rankings and backlink data through the WordPress Abilities API, so an MCP-connected AI can actually answer questions about your SEO data. What’s new.

The WP Open Community Collective’s big community survey landed, and it’s a bit of a downer. Three in four people who’ve been in WordPress a while say their feelings about it have gotten worse over the past two years, governance being the top complaint. But here’s the interesting part… 90% of even the most pessimistic respondents still use WordPress every day and still say it matters to them. Full results here.

Why I’m Telling You to Check Out NovaMira

Let’s talk AI and WordPress for a second, because there’s a distinction most people miss.

Claude, ChatGPT, Grok… all of them know WordPress. That’s not surprising. WordPress is open source, it’s been around forever, and there’s an ocean of public documentation about how it works. Ask any decent AI how WordPress functions, and it’ll give you a solid answer.

Knowing your WordPress site is a completely different problem.

For my clients, the way I’ve handled that gap is by SSHing directly into the server and working from there. And frankly, that works… but it also means you need a stack of safety rules in place and you need to actually know what you’re doing. One wrong move and you’ve hosed the site. Not exactly something I’d hand off casually.

That’s the gap a tool called NovaMira is built to close.

Here’s how it actually works: you install a free plugin on your site, and it connects your AI client directly to WordPress. No middleman, no hosted service sitting between you and your install… the AI talks straight to your site through the plugin, running real PHP against your real database, your real plugins, your real theme. It reads your entire setup before it writes a single line.

Obviously, you need to be careful what you do. The plugin warns you about working directly on your live website and encourages you to use a staging site to test things out first. I fully agree. Especially if you’re new to using AI to work with WordPress.

Now, the free plugin gets you the raw access. But the real difference-maker is what they call “expertise”… a paid layer (Pro starts around €49/year – and yes it is priced in Euros since the company is based out of Italy) that gives the AI actual skills tied to the specific plugins you’ve got installed. Not generic WordPress knowledge. Skills for your stack.

I tested this out last week. I had it build a page using Kadence blocks, cloning a page that had originally been built in Elementor. I just said, “make a clone of that page, convert it to Kadence blocks,” and let it go.

It did a genuinely good job. Sure, there were a few things I needed to clean up because AI isn’t exactly a great designer. 🤣 But, it genuinely saved a lot of time.

I’ve done this exact task before using the raw SSH method, and here’s the difference: normally, the AI is trying to reconstruct Kadence’s block syntax from scratch, behind the scenes. Sometimes it gets it wrong. You open the page editor and you’ve got syntax errors, broken blocks, stuff you now have to go repair by hand.

None of that happened here. Because it had a skill built specifically for Kadence blocks. It already knew how to write the syntax correctly, instead of guessing at it.

Kadence is just one example. It works with pretty much everything… Elementor, Bricks, Divi, WooCommerce, ACF, Gravity Forms, WPForms, GeneratePress, Astra, and a long list of others, since it runs at the PHP level. If it runs in WordPress, the AI can touch it.

Here’s the part I think is actually the bigger deal, though: it connects through MCP, or through a new terminal-based CLI they just shipped. Which means you’re not stuck using the geeky, developer-side tools like Claude Code or ChatGPT’s Codex to get any of this done. You can do it from a regular AI chat. Claude, Grok, Gemini, Codex, whatever you’re already using. You could even do it from your phone, sitting on your couch, having your AI go make changes to a staging copy of your site.

And yes, NovaMira is going to be a way better interface to WordPress for AI than the default connectors that came baked into WordPress 7. NovaMira brings the skill layer… which is the entire point.

You don’t have to cross over into “technical person” territory to get AI actually doing skilled work on your site anymore.

If you’re playing around with AI and WordPress at all, put NovaMira on your list to check out. Concierge clients… I will likely be adding this to the Concierge Toolkit so it will be available for clients on the Core.