This last month I’ve been working on a series of interviews with some of my friends and acquaintances in the WordPress community. As I said last week, I need some optimism in my professional life to keep me feeling motivated.
After the first interview (with Mike McAlister of Ollie), I was asked to release an audio-only RSS feed (i.e. a podcast). As someone who personally prefers listening to interviews in PocketCasts over watching on YouTube, it made too much sense to ignore. Wheels started turning.
Since putting the viewSource podcast on hiatus, I’ve missed the regular rhythm of talking tech in public with someone smarter than me. The WP Minute has been kind enough to have me on a few times recently to talk about WordPress and the ecosystem, but I have always been jealous of any podcaster’s ability to coerce total strangers into structured conversations.
The downside is that I have a number of disparate content streams that I’ve been trying to coherently wrangle. Blog posts. Written tutorials. A newsletter. YouTube tutorials. Livestreams. Social media accounts. These new interviews. And of course the “someday soon I’ll launch this” course concept. I’ve been great at starting random threads of content creation, registering domains and subdomains, and then generally feeling overwhelmed. Combine that with the subconscious pressure that any extracurricular effort needs to be leading somewhere more financially impactful.
And still the idea of releasing these interviews as a podcast was too good to ignore, so I dove in. I was hoping that adding one more content stream could actually help me solve a few problems and make some major structural changes I’ve been pondering over.
The new podcast is called Webmasters with Brian Coords. Here’s why I’m doing it.
What’s in a name?
For platforms like blogging, YouTube, and even newsletters, you don’t really have to think about creating a “brand” if you don’t want to. You can just use your name, for better or worse. This is great for building a name in your industry: I want people to think, “Oh, you need a WordPress expert, try Brian Coords.” Traditional marketing advice is to niche down, become a known expert in one area.
I’ve been doing that for a while, but it feels like a good time to compartmentalize. I’m still using my real name, but I’m going to try to grow something that has its own identity and could eventually become more of a communal property. It’d be nice to be able to scale- maybe build a community or find ways to collaborate with other creators. I’m not really sure, but it felt time to make a separate “thing”.
Decoupled WordPress
My online niche the last few years has been explicitly WordPress. And not just any part of WordPress- this subset I annoyingly call “modern WordPress”, a.k.a “close to core” or just “anyone who is willing to place their bet on Gutenberg”. My tutorials have been about building blocks, learning React, grappling with full site editing. I’ve never cracked open a page builder like Bricks or Breakdance and I don’t give marketing advice.
One rule of content creation is that you aren’t supposed be too broad in what you talk about online- it offends the content gods. There needs to be an underlying theme that can help an audience decide if they belong. For me, that’s been WordPress, with a focus on where I think WordPress is going, not where its been for the last twenty years.
WordPress is a bit like a religion, though. Once you’re part of the community, you don’t really want to leave, regardless of forces internal or external. It starts to feel a bit confining and we can become too identified with it. This made more sense when we thought of WordPress as something “owned by the community”. But that’s not the way to think about it any longer.
Into the great wide open (web)
To be clear: I’m not changing topics or leaving WordPress, I just want to leave the door open in the name. That’s why this podcast will not be called “WP Webmasters”, “Wizards of WordPressy Place”, or anything like that. (Ok, and the current trademark drama didn’t help.)
What’s important to me is the open web, the place that my younger self knew could exist just beyond the AOL Keywords and AIM. WordPress has been an important player in the open web, but it tends to get a bit high on its own supply. The truth is there are amazing things happening across the entire internet that embody the same philosophies we value: sharing knowledge, building communities, breaking down silos.
So I’m hoping to gain a broader perspective, much like Aurooba and I did with the second season of our viewSource podcast. I don’t have it fully mapped out, so it’ll be a bit of a journey. I’m still focused on WordPress for right now, but I’ll be experimenting with format, with topics, with production, and so on. Just going where the conversations take me.
If there’s one central thread beyond “WordPress” it’s that the people I’m talking to are masters of the web. The entire internet is the “world’s public square.” You don’t need any permits or permission to build something amazing and share it online, you can just do it. And WordPress is still a huge part of that, even if it is facing the biggest “Innovator’s Dilemma” the web has ever seen.
I’m not leaving WordPress by any means, in fact I’m writing a separate blog post about how and why I’m self-hosting this podcast entirely through WordPress. But I do want the chance to start including guests from outside my WordPress bubble to see what else we can learn about the web, about creating content, about how new technologies like AI are going to change our entire industry.
So check out the new website (designed with a huge amount of help from the team at Ollie) and subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Or just follow me on my YouTube channel, where I’ll be posting as well. And reach out if you’d like to be a future guest.
A few links for the road…
Earlier this week Matt Medeiros and I covered the WordPress 6.7 release, the new default 2025 theme, and what it’s been like coding with AI + Cursor. Is WordPress 6.7 Good? With Matt Medeiros at The WP Minute
Are you on Bluesky? I’ve been enjoying it. It just feels like a less angry Twitter with an open source identity. It’s at a critical tipping point right now and could use your voice. Connect with me on Bluesky.
There’s a lot of fun new apps being built around the Bluesky APIs. If you’re looking for something to share your WordPress posts automatically, Introducing Autoblue by Daniel Post.
With open APIs, there are tons of other great Bluesky apps being built. An interesting one is Sill, which surfaces the most shared links from your network (similar to an old Twitter app called Nuzzel). Try out Sill Beta.
As a result of current unsteadiness in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, Andy Fragen has made some updates to his tool: Git Updater Lite.
Is Creativity Dead? Why does everything on the internet look the same? A brief but worthy video essay: Is Creativity Dead by Kirby Ferguson
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