Privacy Concerns With Stripe? + Vibe Coding? 😜

So, last week, an interesting topic arose yet again. It was in a Facebook thread about FluentCart… and a guy who made a comment that one of the reasons he likes a self-hosted shopping cart is the privacy.

Adam, the co-founder of SureCart, said there is no privacy from self-hosting your cart because connecting your software to Stripe exposes the transactions.

I remember this being a “thing” back when Awesome Motive acquired Easy Digital Downloads, with competitors to AM concerned that they now could see their inside data on sales.

I pushed back on Adam on this topic. Did he have an ulterior motive to say this because FluentCart was a competitor?

But, I researched it last week. And… he’s not wrong.

Below you’ll see the post (and video) on the results of what I found. I will say, it isn’t overly alarming. But, yeah… if you had an expectation of totally data privacy by self-hosting your own shopping cart, you might be disappointed. It specifically has to do with the way Stripe works.

In addition, let’s talk about doing a site audit of your own site. As well as using “vibe coding” to make improvements to your site without waiting on any developers to do it for you.

Lots to cover this week. So, let’s get right into it….

Do You Ever Do A Site Audit Of Your Own Site?

As you would expect, I spend a lot of time working on other people’s websites. Goes with the territory. 😇

But, sometimes, it is nice to turn the tables back on my own. And to look around for things I could improve. Frankly, there’s no shortage of things I could do.

Plus, very often I find that my perspective changes. As time goes on, my viewpoint on things change. That can mean things like:

• Something I had built/designed on my site no longer seems as brilliant as it did before. 😜 Maybe it’d look better differently.
• I find things in my offer pages that now seem unclear, so I can go in and fix the copy.
• As time goes by, I find things on my site are presenting friction either to myself or to others. So, I can go and fix that.

Point is…

It can be super useful to sit down with a fresh set of eyes and just audit your own site for opportunities for improvements.

Or hell… just things you wanna try differently. 😋

I know how easy it is to get “tunnel vision” on your own website. If you’re sitting there working on that thing every day, it can be hard to gain that fresh perspective. You might not even see your own blindspots.

Those of you who have been with me for many years now have seen the Blog Marketing Academy site go through it’s gyrations. 😇 I like to mix things up sometimes, try something different.

I had blog comments, then turned them off. Then back on again, then off again. Kinda funny, really. See: Ultimate Guide To Blog Comments: Best Practices For Handling Comments On Your Blog In The Modern Era.

I’ve had sidebars, then no sidebar. Then mini sidebar. Then back off again. Now, I have a table of contents, but not really a traditional sidebar.

For members/clients… I had a traditional dashboard for awhile. Then, decided to use WooCommerce and do it all there. And now, I’m using FluentCommunity and a Client Center.

The site moves and molds to my own little experiments as I go around auditing my own site. Things never stay static.

That’s the way it should be, in my mind. Your website should be constantly evolving. Not only as a reflection of you (and you probably change over time), but also as a way to test things and see what works best.

It never helps to stay static and not re-evaluate things you do.

So, when’s the last time you sat down with a fresh set of eyes and… did a site audit of your own site? To look for things you could improve, change the look of, or make it better?

If you could use a second set of eyes, you can book a strategy call with me and I’d be happy to do a full site review for you and we can discuss things.

One little caveat, though…

Working on your own site can easily become a crutch. It is not the same thing as actually growing your business. So, while it can be super useful to spend some time on your own website, it is definitely the kind of thing you don’t want to allow to take over your entire schedule. 😇

Concierge Client Update

Notes About The Client Center

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the new Client Center. Basically, bringing the usual account functionality that’s been there already and wrapping it in the FluentCommunity container…. so that there’s support for notifications and community posts.

A couple of quick notes about this…

I may jiggle around the new community groups. My goal here is to keep things simple. I have no intention of trying to create some large community platform with this, since it is geared more toward clients and members only.

The Concierge Mastermind group is new and… a bit of an experiment. It is meant only for clients in Concierge to be able to crowdsource questions/feedback with others in the program and not just me.

This week, I will be officially adding all Concierge clients to the two Spaces designed for Concierge clients. All this means is that you can post in there if you would like. If you don’t want to be in those Spaces, it is super easy to remove yourself.

Keep in mind, if you’re in this Client Center, it means you also have a profile. So, feel free to customize your profile with a bio, cover photo, etc. All completely optional, of course.

In terms of interacting with me in Basecamp or by email, nothing changes.

WordPress News & Updates

ACF 6.6 Release. Kinda forgot to mention this one, but about 2 weeks ago Advanced Custom Fields was updated to 6.6. This version has a big update to ACF Blocks, separate Display Titles for field groups, custom palettes for the color picker, and a few other tid-bits. Check out the announcement post here.

Ollie Pro Extensions. Mike McAlister has launched Ollie Pro Extensions, a plugin that extends the standard WordPress blocks with capabilities they don’t have by default. Mike is doing a great job of adding abilities to WordPress site building that feel like they’re native to WordPress.

FluentCart Moving Quickly. The official public launch of FluentCart was last week (LTD available here). And they’re moving quickly with new updates. Version 1.2.1 supports custom fields on products, terms & conditions on the checkout page, improved reporting, etc. Version 1.2.2 already out, with a variety of small fixes and additions (like additional currency support, shipping zones for rest of the world, etc.). They’ve also officially kicked off the developer documentation, which is going to open up to all kinds of new integrations and add-on capability. The Roadmap is public, so you can see what is coming up. The one I’m waiting for most is WooCommerce migration, which hopefully will also include support for active subscriptions. I know from conversations with Jewel (CEO) that this is high on their radar. And once it works well, I am very likely to switch away from WooCommerce.

TutorLMS Woocommerce Migration. Speaking of WooCommerce migration, it looks like TutorLMS just delivered. They’ve now got their LMS migration tool 2.4.0 which supports a full migration away from WooCommerce and directly into TutorLMS native. Looks like it supports orders, subscriptions and coupons. So, now if you are using TutorLMS for online courses, you can use it’s native system to sell them without any need for the bloat of WooCommerce.

Judge Getting Annoyed With WP Engine And Automattic. The discovery process in this ongoing lawsuit battle is apparently annoying the judge. According to The Repository, the judge “has moved to rein in the escalating discovery battle between WP Engine and Automattic, warning attorneys for both sides to stop “half-baked” filings, describing their conduct as “not normal,” and imposing new limits on how future disputes can reach the court.” The whole thing looks to be a s**t-show.

Nobel Prize winner Guessed Due To WordPress Leak? This one is a little funny. An insider on Polymarket was able to guess the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize in advance… apparently because the Nobel site is on WordPress. And, one of the hidden XML sitemaps exposed some of the innards of an unpublished page about Machado. Matt posted about it. To provide context, though, see the comments. This wasn’t a bug in WordPress, but instead likely the result of an SEO plugin that was indexing images from an unpublished post. Either way, I guess somebody’s knowledge of WordPress internals made them some money on Polymarket. 😜

WP Rocket Launched Rocket Insights. WP Rocket 3.2 introduces Rocket Insights, a tool for monitoring your site’s performance metrics right from within WordPress, in partnership with GTMetrix. There are limits, of course, and this isn’t a full replacement for standalone GTMetrix. But, you can track performance of 3 key pages for free…. 10 on the premium plan. Which means… yes, Rocket Insights is a paid add-on subscription if you want the bigger features. Details can be found here.

LLMs Generator. This was something I was researching a bit last week, but optimizing your site for the world of LLMs. With so people now using AI tools rather than traditional search engines, it helps to optimize for LLMs, too. On that note, Coding Bunny has released a free plugin to help you auto-generate the llms.txt file for your site and guide AI crawlers on how to handle your website. I’ll likely share more in a future issue of this newsletter on this topic, since it is something I’m researching.

Vibe Coding Improvements To Your Own Website

“Vibe Coding” is getting more mainstream. It basically means using AI tools such as ChatGPT to code. Instead of manually writing code, you instead guide the AI tool through instructions and it writes the code.

Now, I’ll be the FIRST to tell you that vibe coding is not a replacement for actual software development. There’s a real SKILL that goes along with coding. AI can make things that work, but the code can also be sloppy at times, not up to proper security standards, or lacking context. So, it isn’t perfect… by any means. Sometimes, AI produces outright trash. 😜

But still! 😎 If you keep in mind the (current) limitations of AI tools in this regard, this has still democratized basic development so that even people who are not programmers can create their own custom solutions for things.

It also just so happens that WordPress is open source and very well documented, which means there’s a LOT of data out there for AI tools to chomp on to learn how to code for WordPress.

So, just like I talked about up above about doing a “site audit” and looking at ways to improve your site, you can also do the same about FUNCTIONAL changes to your site. Because, you may be able to vibe code a solution.

Instead of hunting for a plugin that can do things the exact way that you want, you could potentially build one to your exact specs.

Or, you could build your own custom block to pop into Gutenberg… specific to your own site.

Or, code up a code snippet that changes something about the way your site works. Drop it into FluentSnippet.

It could even be larger functionalities. For instance, just this morning, there was a conversation in the FluentCRM Facebook group with somebody complaining that it didn’t have sales pipeline functionality. I’m thinking…. just build it. 😎 Instead of sitting there waiting for the development team to develop it, just build it. FluentCRM happens to have pretty good developer documentation, too, and AI tools can reference that and code things to work with FluentCRM.

I did this myself. The entire system on my site for managing client site profiles is completely custom, directly integrated into FluentCRM. It not only made MY life easier to have this all in one spot, but it is a useful reference for my clients, too. And yes, I vibe coded it.

So, for your own website…

• What unique functionality would be useful to add to your website?
• What tweaks and changes to your WordPress admin might make daily life a little easier for you?

You can see some of the things I’ve done on my own site in this article: How I Optimized My WordPress Admin To Turn It Into A Business Command Center.

Now, a few quick tips and warnings…

• Remember, AI tools aren’t gospel. They don’t know everything and they will produce stupid code sometimes. So, it still takes a skilled hand to use them. On that note…
• Always test code in private. Don’t just willy-nilly copy/paste vibe coded stuff and drop it into your live site. I’ve definitely seen people break their own websites because of stupid code they vibe coded. Best to use a staging site.

AI tools make basic development more accessible. You no longer have as your only option to put in a feature request to a plugin developer, cross your fingers and hope they do it. You no longer have as your only option to keep trial installing plugins to see if they do one little thing in the exact way you envision. Now…. you may be able to just build it to your own exact specs.