The Craft of Writing, Community Building, and WordPress with Jeff Chandler

In this LMScast episode, Jeff Chandler discusses his experience fostering community, authenticity, and enthusiasm within the WordPress ecosystem.

On social media, Jeff stresses the need of being authentic. He calls himself a “WYSIWYG” personality who adheres to the idea that “your vibe attracts your tribe”. He talks about how his early writing on WordPress inspired the development of WP Tavern, a gathering place for interesting conversations and relationships among WordPress users.

Jeff’s experience demonstrates how genuineness and individual interests may establish enduring communities in addition to fostering meaningful relationships.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jeff Chandler. I’ve known Jeff from around the WordPress community, Twitter, being online. We’ve met at WordCamps before. And I wanted to have a conversation with Jeff about writing building community Using wordpress, but first welcome to the show jeff.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you very much It’s a pleasure to be here

Chris Badgett: and you can find jeff on twitter at jeff row. The o is a zero I love watching your tweets. i’m a foodie. I used to take more pictures of food, but I always like seeing the My friends that have food interests, like posting stuff. Where did that come from?

From you? It seems like there’s a community of people that are really like knit about that.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The last time I checked, I have about, I have over 11, 000 photos on my iPhone and if 80 percent of those are pictures of food, it would not surprise me. But I just, I don’t know. I just got into the habit.

There’s food is really. It’s like a connector and it could, there’s a sense of community around food but man it’s interesting when you have a meal and that meal just takes you to a different place. Like why I didn’t know food could be this good. Or I’ve never had this kind of experience before.

And so a lot of times when I’m taking a photo of food, it’s just a way for me to remember it. And. Actually, it’s come in handy a few times. My wife has laughed at me and joked around and said, why do you take so many pictures of a food? Then she’ll think of a recipe or something that we want to make.

And she won’t remember exactly what was in it or what it looked like. And I say, honey, hold on. So I go back into my phone, I bring up the picture and I show it to her. She goes, Oh, you know what? I don’t mind you taking photos of our food now, but yeah taking the picture of a meal. I love good meals, love good food.

And it just turns out that I’ve been doing this for a long time and now we’ve found some of my tribe on Twitter and we have this hashtag called WP foodies, and we usually send each other photos about what we’re having for dinner. Or if we come across a nice meal or whether it’s a food truck or something like that, just a way to to share and participate.

It’s our own little community, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but yeah, every, everybody, I think everybody likes food. Everybody needs food in order to survive, but I just like taking pictures of it and having a a photographic memory of it. And I will tell you, man, the one time we went to this fancy place.

And I figured the steak there would be amazing. So I had a steak and my wife had the scallops and the scallops that my wife had the first time I bit into the scallop, I closed my eyes and it like took me to this, I felt like I was going on a magic carpet ride. And I said, there is no way a scallop should.

 Kind of experience over a steak and by golly, from there on, after I did not order the steak, I ordered the scallops.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s use that as an entry point into community. And particularly with social media I’m of the Bent where if you meet me in person, i’m the same person you’re gonna see online You know, I have my professional business side, but I’m also a real human with my own interests.

We were chatting before the show about hiking, getting out in nature, gardening running, stuff like that. I like to bring just some of my just casual self to my social media. I’ve noticed you do too. How do you think about that? Is that, Intentional or what’s your philosophy behind that? What need does that meet for your soul or your spirit?

How do you think about social media and being you?

Jeff Chandler: For starters, it’s a bit of a bummer that I don’t hear a rooster going at you sometimes when I tuned into this podcast, I would hear a rooster and it would bring this whole certain farm life dynamic to the show. So I know you’re in this nice office now, but I missed the rooster.

I thought it was better. It’s

Chris Badgett: you can’t hear, yeah. And by the way, I don’t recommend moving roosters and a whole bunch of chickens across the state. It’s a pain to do that, but we did it successfully.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I could imagine. Oh now you have a joke. Why did the rooster cross the state?

Something like that. Yeah. So going back as far as how I present myself and who I am as a person. On social media, I have never shied away from the fact that I consider myself a whizzy wig. And for those of you who don’t know, that is what is what you get. And I have never strayed away from that.

I, the only person I know who to truly be as myself. And so there is no, I’m never. Really encountered any need to be somebody other than myself. So that’s who I am. That’s who I’m most comfortable of being. And it’s worked out. And in an age of social media where people are doing everything they can to please the algorithms and whatnot, and try to go viral.

I’m just being me and if I go viral, I’ll go viral, but I really don’t care. It’s just, I don’t have any interest in being anyone but me. But yeah, and I’ve come across a lot of people these days that appreciate the genuineness and the bluntness and the truthfulness of someone like me.

Although I will say I tell the truth a lot. And, but if your wife asks, does she look fat in this dress? Trust me, that is an opportunity that you want to not be as truthful as you’ve always has been, because if you say the wrong thing, it will hurt. Literally. I’m talking

Chris Badgett: from experience here. Yeah. There’s a saying your vibe attracts your tribe.

So if you be yourself and you attract a certain people that are interested in whatever you’re into, whether it’s WordPress or food or being a homebody or whatever it is. You want people to mag to become magnetized to the real you, right? That’s a lot less work to just be yourself.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And then on Twitter, it’s a whole thing of, back in the day. At least when I used to produce the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was still working for WPTAV and writing for them and publishing articles at least people could hear my voice, but I haven’t been on a podcast and I haven’t been really out there as far as my voice is concerned for quite some time, for a number of years.

And I do find it to be a bummer of people reading my tweets and sometimes not being able to hear the genuineness behind the words that I’m saying, or being able to hear that I’m speaking from the heart or that I really mean when I’m saying, and so that’s a bit of a bummer but by and large, for the most part, everyone that has followed me for a number of years.

Knows that, I’m me and what I say is what I say. I’m not going to yank them by the chain. And so I’ve been able to establish that, Hey, what is what you get. That’s what you’re going to get out of

Chris Badgett: me. You mentioned riding at the WP tavern, which did you start that?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I founded WP tavern back in the beginning of 2009. And it was prior to that, I had started writing for Mark gauche of web law tools, collection. com, which at the time was the largest and most popular website devoted to WordPress news. In fact, it was in the WordPress dashboard. That’s how popular it was.

And Mark, actually, I started the blog and I was writing about. Publishing articles about things I was learning about WordPress at the time. And Mark happened to come across some of my articles and said, Hey, how would you like to get paid to write about this stuff? And I said, wait, is that a thing? Can you get paid to write about WordPress and articles?

He said, yeah, I said, absolutely. Let’s give it a shot. And then on top of that. I’m writing and publishing articles on the site that’s in the WordPress dashboard. Meaning everything, anything I publish shows up in the dashboards of WordPress users all over the world. Woo. Let’s go, I’m not going to say no to that.

So I started doing that for a little while. And a lot of my articles generated a number of comments. So I started. Creating a sort of community around the things that I was writing. I did, I had a I did that for about a year or so and created a following. And there was a domain that came up called WP tavern.

It was actually a gentleman by the name of Kyle Easelick. He was running a website called WP hacks in a lot of OG WordPress. People might remember that domain name where he was publishing things code snippets and things of that nature. For WordPress. And he said, Hey, I have this domain available.

You like to use it. And I said I don’t know what I would use it for or whatnot. So I made a blog post and I reached out to my community and I said, Hey, there’s this domain available. Should I break off from one blog, tools, collection. com and do something on my own? And. What do you guys think?

And everybody who chimed in said yes, do it. Have a forum, do whatever you want. We’ll follow you. So I’m like, okay. So Kyle graciously donated the domain of WP tavern to me. And it turns out that it was the perfect domain and it was perfect for what I wanted to do, because when I thought of a tavern is generally a friendly place where everybody knows your name, you come in.

You talk about what’s going on. You have some conversations. It’s a friendly and mostly polite atmosphere, but every now and then you’re going to have a bar fight and you’re gonna have to clean up broken glass and broken tables, which we ended up doing because of GPL debates and some of the other stuff that was going on in the WordPress world, but by and large.

WP Tavern was a huge success. And at one point, the who’s who of the WordPress world was a member of the WP Tavern forums. And if you wanted to get in touch or interact with who’s who of WordPress, you went to WP Tavern.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Let’s rewind the story. Before you started getting paid to write, where did the skill of writing come from or the, and the passion as well,

Jeff Chandler: man, this, wow, this goes way back.

I gotta tell you, so I’m not, it’s not like I took a journalism class. It’s not like I took a writing class. I started a long time ago. Started with there was a website way back in the day. E2 effects. And it was a. It’s what we would today, it would be similar to wordpress. com where it was, you had your subdomain and there’s a lot of other people that were using that website.

But one of the coolest things about E2FX was that it had a lot of community and networking aspects built in. So you could follow each other’s blogs or sites. You could read each other’s comments. You could, there was this whole It was like social networking, but via blogs, it was really cool, this network effect.

And what I did was I just wrote about things that I was interested in wrote my opinions about tech news that I was following. And it’s just a thing that I enjoy doing. It’s not, I didn’t take any courses or take any college courses or whatnot. I just wrote based on. No, I just wrote and published.

That’s pretty much what I did. There’s no magic to it, but the more I did it, like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at it. And that’s what happened with me. And look I had no intentions of becoming a full fledged journalist or becoming a reporter on certain things.

When I looked at it as this is interesting to me, I have thoughts and views and opinions about it. I’m going to write those and publish them. And that’s it. And if people comment on them, great. If people don’t, that’s fine. But I was just doing it for myself. And it turns out that particular skill set was valuable and other people other people could benefit from it.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is a super skill. There’s blogs and things, there’s emails, there’s copywriting on webpages. The more there’s like creating an outline for a video or a script or a business plan, or it’s just the ultimate skill. How do you in your mind see the difference between, I’m thinking about somebody who’s like a subject matter expert in a topic, And they’re thinking about, really getting into writing and creating content.

Of course, they want some SEO benefit, but how do you think about the difference between journalism and reporting versus opinion pieces versus SEO content? I think people get a little overwhelmed of what do I write about and how do I write it?

Jeff Chandler: So back in 2014, on my personal blog, jeffc. me, I wrote an article.

I wrote an article titled I am a bad journalist. And in this article I highlighted the fact that A, I never wanted to be called a journalist. B, I never called myself. A journalist. See, I never considered myself a journalist. To me, the word journalist means somebody who really goes after the story.

They do in depth investigation. And they double, triple check their sources. They do a lot of things that you would expect a journalist to do. And I never really did any of those things. I just. Took my views and opinions, and maybe I would interview somebody or I’d get I would ask somebody a question and use it as a quote, but then I would just publish a post and I was just really, I’m just a Joe Schmo, Joe, the plumber or whoever it is now that we’re that we’re describing as the average person, I’m just taking something that I have an interest in and then publishing my thoughts.

And maybe I come back to those at some point later usually it was just for me, but then I ended up getting an audience and it was an accidental audience. I wasn’t out there searching for an audience. I wasn’t out there saying, trying to get all these people to gravitate towards me. It was just me just writing stuff and hitting the publish button.

And then the magic happened where people started gravitating towards it, like a little, like a nucleus. And then just more and more. More and more things started getting attracted to the core. And it just worked out that way. And in my, I don’t know if I should say career, but in all the times I’ve written and published stuff on the web.

I’ve not once been concerned about SEO. Everyone out there is concerned about SEO, about titles, headings. How do you write this? How do you write that passive voice, this voice, anything about SEO? I threw SEO out the window and guess what? It worked for me. And it may not work for you. It may not work for somebody who is in a position of copywriting and writing articles for a business who is really looking to get that tap into that SEO and that audience.

But everything I did was from a human perspective. So I wrote as a human.

And it turns out that that was a great strategy for me in the long run.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It sounds like the traffic came from the story and your voice more than keyword optimization or anything. Exactly.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I keyword optimization, title optimization how I wrote the stories and I didn’t care about anything about keywords or anything of that nature.

I just said, look, I’m going to write this, as a human would read it and that’s it. And if I get SEO traffic, great. If I don’t big deal and it worked for me, but I will say that and that’s just from a personal writing and publishing standpoint, but I have worked for other businesses that SEO because they need to stand out because they’re in a highly competitive atmosphere against all these Places online that are absolutely doing everything they can with SEO and keywords.

And I got to tell you, I, that’s where I struggle. I’ve always done things my own way. And when you have to write things in a way that benefits, the SEO bots and trying to get things to rank I’m terrible at it.

Chris Badgett: Let’s let’s talk a little bit about just tactically, writing is an art and a science.

So first question, that’s a little more tactical. When you’re in your flow like how many articles a week would you do or how would you set goals or does one story take a full week or is it like come out of you like super fast because it’s you’re inspired or how do you think about volume of writing when you’re in the flow?

Jeff Chandler: And I think it also has to deal with what is it you’re writing? Is it a, is it an in depth topic. And is it something that’s going to require a lot of research? Is it something that’s not super time sensitive that you can spend a few weeks on or a few months researching? In my line of work, everything I pretty much wrote and published was how can you say time based or relevant, recent based.

So I used to cover a lot of news, a lot of things that were happening. And so I would end up just writing about what I knew, and then I would get in touch with some people. To figure out answers to what I didn’t know. Then, within a day or two, a lot of times a lot shorter than that, because I was dealing with public information that people already knew.

And I would just compile that in a way, and then I would publish the article. And in my mind, I, one of the things that I eventually learned is that you don’t, when it comes to writing news posts, is that you don’t have to have All aspects and everything, correct. You don’t have to have the whole story in one post.

You can write about what you know and the things you don’t know you can mention, but you can always follow it up with another post when that information comes to light, if it ever does. So I had, I had that mindset of let’s compile what we know into a post, put it together. Have some things in the back of my mind that we don’t know and let’s see what happens.

And then eventually they would either come out with another statement or the information would present itself and I would write up a follow up post, but when I would get into the flow and the flow is awesome. If nobody has ever been in the zone, boy, they need to make something that you could just trigger yourself to be in the zone because you feel unstoppable.

And it’s just a great feeling. But when I was in the zone, words would just flow from my head into the post editor, like nothing, and I would put everything together. And before you know it, I had 700, 800 words written and it felt like nothing. And for me, an 800 to 1000 word post is a lot when I’m dealing with news or something dealing with WordPress.

So yeah, I could go through, I could publish two or three posts a day. Sometimes I could do definitely multiple items, multiple posts per week, but in the realm of WordPress, look, WordPress is a huge ecosystem. There are things happening all the time internally within the project and externally in terms of what people are building and using.

Or the issues that they’re experiencing, there’s always something to write. And my job and sort of a skill I developed was, what is it that’s going on out here that other people should know about? And that’s something that you don’t really, you can’t, I don’t know, you can’t really train yourself for it.

It was self trained. And it turns out that a lot of the things I picked and choose that other people should know about were correct.

Chris Badgett: From the sort of journalistic reporting standpoint, let’s say somebody is involved in the community, be at WordPress or the foodie scene or some health and fitness niche or some like parenting topic, whatever it is, there, there is a community around every topic.

How did you think about sourcing your like what to report on and where the story is? Where would you, what advice would you have for somebody who’s like, all right, I’m involved in X community. How do I find the story to write about?

Jeff Chandler: I started off with me. I’m using something like Google reader or freely and subscribing to a number of different websites that dealt with the topic that I was covering that I was writing about.

Subscribing to a lot of those websites figuring out where the watering holes were for these people. So various forums. Slack instances comment sections on particular websites, different social media, Twitter Facebook, what have you, and trying to insert myself into those areas via commenting or sharing my opinions or something loosely based on what I wrote about, but putting it in there and just trying to get my name out there so people can see me in these watering hole.

And then. Outside of that just, I think my personality and my ability to be friendly with people and to listen and not to be so one sided and to be great at engaging in a conversation, whether that be a debate or just hearing both sides. And I think that had a lot to do with people gravitating towards me and the things I wrote and just wanted to be part of my inner circle.

I think. I think attitude and how you approach people goes a long way towards building your vibe, your community.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned comments. I don’t like this question, but I’ll ask it this way. Are comments dead? And we all know that like social media has changed things, but there’s still blogs published today that have lots of comments on them.

But how do we think about comments in 2024, 2025? If we have a website or we want to get engaged in our community on comments.

Jeff Chandler: That’s a great question. And to be honest, we’ve been asking our comments dad since 2015 or before that it’s something that keeps up. I think, I definitely think there are situations where it makes sense to have comments disabled, depending on your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish with your content.

But. I think back to how important comments were for me and I remember publishing articles and waking up the next day or within hours, I’d get my first comment and boy, it felt great. It’s oh my God, somebody read this and took the time to comment on my article. That is pretty cool.

And most of the time these days, that doesn’t happen. It’s spam or somebody’s saying things that you don’t need to have published or, somebody is angry and upset comments used to be a great way to, to build community, to have to start your following and. It was the social networking before social networking, and then you had your trackbacks and your pingbacks, which, which was really cool.

And I, I don’t know if it sure seems like comments are dead, but with the Fediverse and the different things that are being. Created to provide that social networking aspect, but to your website and then to your comments, I think they could make, they definitely can make a comeback.

Chris Badgett: Can you describe the Fediverse if somebody isn’t familiar with that?

Jeff Chandler: That’s a good question as well. I’m not quite sure of the. Technicalities of what the Fediverse is, but from my understand, from my very basic understanding, it’s a way of, it’s a way to decentralizing, centralizing, decentralized materials. Maybe the people out there are cringing at the, at me just saying that thing but it’s to bring a lot of disjointed things together.

And so you don’t have to be inside of a closed wall or should say a walled garden, you can be, you could be open and treat your website as one place and freely have access to other things and other content, other comments. Other places. And you can create that sort of network effect. And if if somebody wants to throw a book at me right now, because that’s all wrong, please do.

But I do know that the Fediverse is a great thing. There’s a lot of work going on with the Fediverse. I think there’s a WordPress plugin out there. It’s Pub, pub, something, of it, okay. There’s some plugin that’s being worked on out there to utilize the Fediverse, but there’s great stuff ahead.

And one of the coolest things, one of the best things about my early days of blogging is that networking fat, the networking effect where I could follow people, chime in on their blogs and all that stuff. And I’m hoping we could somehow recreate that, but not have to be tied to one particular service.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of networking and spam Matt Medeiros is in the live stream comments and he would like to know who was your favorite podcast co host.

Jeff Chandler: Okay. Before I answer this, and because this came up the other day, Matt, you need to change your last name because. I and many other people always have to Google what your last name is in order to spell it correctly.

All right. You do us all a favor in a WordPress world and change your last name to something that is easy to spell. So we don’t have to Google it. As far as my favorite co host, huh?

Boy, that I had a lot of great times with John James Jacoby.

He was even killed. He was very smart. We had a lot of great in depth conversations about WordPress things on the show. And he was one of my favorite guests, but my other, I would say my favorite probably was Malcolm Peralti. And that’s because for the longest time, he was the devil’s advocate.

So when I would look at something very positive and this is great, he would be like Jeff, what about this? And think about this way and that way. And I’m like, and it wasn’t as if he was trying to be a downer, he was just coming at it from the opposite perspective. So while I was the optimist, a lot of times he was the pessimist and you know what, for a show talking about WordPress, that was a perfect combination.

And we had a lot of great conversations and interviews because of that dynamic that we had.

Chris Badgett: I like that insight. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to the all in podcast, but it’s there. The, some of the hosts like have very different views and it’s what makes it interesting. Yes, but there’s friends.

That’s not like they’re fighting or anything.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And quite honestly, if you’re going to listen to a show where everybody has the same opinion and everybody’s not challenging each other. It’s boring. Nobody, it’s just come on. Somebody should challenge something. Somebody should say. No, we’ll think about it this way and think about it that way.

That’s where you get into the nitty gritty. That’s where you get into the innovation and the different ideas and perspectives and where you end up in a place that you may not ever thought you would be in.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of community, WordPress is really interesting to me because for what I’ve obviously been here for a long time now, but in the beginning.

I was just like on the outside of any kind of community aspect, there’s this cool tool. I’ve learned some tutorials on YouTube on how to use it. And it was several years into my journey where I really started to discover like, Oh, there’s all these people on social media. Oh, there’s these events I can go to.

Oh, these, some of these people are becoming real friends, either online, in person, hybrid, both. And it just evolved. How do you think about community in today’s world? I’m also asking in the context of if we want to get involved in a community, like whatever, foodie niche, some health and fitness nature, whatever, how do we do community?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, it’s, it all starts with, publishing and getting out there and just being cognizant of the fact that there are other people out there. It’s a big world. There’s a lot of people and there are going to be, you’re almost guaranteed to have others out there with the same interests as you.

And use your personality, use your ability to get out there to post and create this core, this nucleus and, in such a way to where it’s inviting of others to join you on this journey and be like, Hey, oh, you’re into that too. And you’re into that too. Yeah. All right. And it starts, you gotta start small, but you gotta just do it.

You gotta start it because if you don’t, you have nothing to gravitate towards you. A lot less thinking and a lot more doing or else. What you’re not even accomplishing anything, but in the WordPress space, it’s still very easy to start up a meetup or find a local meetup and to find people who are just getting into the software, despite it being 21 years old.

There’s still a lot of people just coming across it. And meetups are great. Meetups are, I participated and ran a meetup here in Northeast Ohio, a number of years ago. And it was fantastic. You get to. You get to teach WordPress and figure out that WordPress is not as easy as you thought it was when you’re teaching something, which was a revelation to me and just getting to talk to these people and getting to know their experiences and their journeys of how they came to WordPress and whatnot.

It’s very cool. And how the, These people just how they ended up in WordPress sometimes is really cool. But yeah, community is very important. And I will say that the WordPress community for me has been, look, Chris, over the years, when you’ve, when a lot of people have asked, what’s your favorite thing about WordPress?

One of the, one of the top answers is a. Community and be all the plugins and the ecosystem and everything like that. But community, that’s the word meaning people who are welcoming each other in people who are who share their knowledge and their time with no cost associated, just on the basis of being friendly.

That’s the community part of WordPress that a lot of people love. And this community aspect of WordPress has helped me out tremendously. On a personal basis throughout, throughout the years of 20, 2019 through 2020 and 2021, I was unemployed and there were many times where, you know, my, my cell phone service was shut off or my car was about to be repossessed or certain bills, my mortgage wasn’t going to be paid.

And while I didn’t. Feel comfortable doing it. I did reach out to the WordPress community and I said, Hey is there any chance you folks can lend me a hand and get me through some of these tough times and they delivered time and time again, they delivered, and there are many other instances of people in the WordPress community who really needed some help and collectively we pulled through and got them through some of their toughest moments in their life up to that point.

Community is very special. Nobody should ever take it for granted. And when you build it, when you build it and they come, man, take very good care of it because there’s nothing like an awesome community that, that you’re a part of, it’s almost like a side family, to be honest, and work camps to me are like family reunions that I want to go to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. When it comes to community. WordPress as an example has an in person component with events and whatnot, but what would your advice be around? Let’s say somebody is just starting out. Maybe there’s an in person aspect, but they don’t know about it. Not necessarily with WordPress, but any community, sometimes people like behave a little differently on the internet or whatever.

So if somebody is like either starting a community or trying to get involved in an online community, what are some things to think about that might be counterintuitive compared to. More formal in person community, like your local town, for example, or things to be challenges or things to be cautious about, or opportunities.

Jeff Chandler: Oh, let’s see. I don’t know. Maybe expand them, maybe expand upon that. And we can have a conversation about that. Maybe you answer that question and then I’ll chime in.

Chris Badgett: So some challenges for me with, I’m actually like an extreme introvert, right? Sometimes I come off as an extrovert because I make a lot of videos and do webinars and, have content out there.

But if I go to a town event, You’re going to see me on the edge of the event. I may not even go but like in the online world let’s say being an introvert as an example, one, a lot of what I’m doing is like one on one interaction, this call included, which is my sweet spot as a, as an introvert.

But when in online community, sometimes they can be so massive. Like for example, there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. Which is the human being through our evolution and whatnot is only designed to be able to maintain 145 relationships or something like that. But like you mentioned WordPress I don’t know there’s a lot of people using WordPress and maybe I’m just guessing 20, 000 people that are really active in the community aspect of it online, I can’t keep up with 20, 000 relationships.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So that’s a challenge. Another challenge is sometimes people on the internet or through email or social media or whatever, like they tend to they’re more trolls and let’s say less of a filter or. Sometimes you can get involved in a community online anonymously, which you can’t really do in person.

So that’s a challenge. We talked about comments. Like it’s good that there’s comment moderation in WordPress so that you can just get the spam stuff out of there as an example. So that’s a challenge. Sometimes big communities, there’s language barriers, that’s a challenge. Yeah I’m just spitballing with you, but those are some of the challenges.

And and also I think one of the big opportunities with an online community is in my second half of life when I really became an online person, a lot of the relationships I have, like where I’ve actually shook somebody’s hand or given them a hug or something like that, it may have existed for years online and it was cool.

We were friends then, we’re friends now, but like a lot of, there’s more opportunity to start relationships. Online, which is really cool.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. There’s many times where it’s funny when I used to host the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was doing WP tavern, I used to go to a WordCamp and believed or not, I’ve never been this extroverted.

Which is seeing if you look at my, if you look at my tweets online and you look at the way I project myself online, you’d think, boy, that guy is really into being around people, but I’ve been to word camps where I’ve stayed away and I don’t introduce myself to anybody and I go into introvert mode. So it does occasionally happen to myself as well.

Yeah, I project myself as an extrovert online, but in person I could sometimes go into introvert mode. It was funny at the WordCamp, I was speaking with somebody and there is a woman that was two rows behind me and she goes, excuse me, are you the host of the WordPress weekly podcast? And I said, yeah, how did you know?

And she goes, oh, I could tell that voice, That, that voice.

I’m like, oh yeah. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. And then we ended up with a just being able to talk and get myself out there and have her. If I wouldn’t have been talking or if I wouldn’t have been out there, throw myself out there into the community, into the in person aspects, she probably never would have met me or had that opportunity to do but yeah.

These days, word camps in the WordPress community, specifically we have done a really good job of protecting each other. For these situations where no, we have the code of conduct, we’ve got an incident response team that WordPress has but by and large we’ve been doing, we’ve done a great job of looking out for each other.

At these events. That’s not to say that some incidents haven’t still occurred. But no, this community does a great job of looking out for each other.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress specifically. I first touched it in 2008, so I’ve been here for 16 years. And if I, in some way it is, not that I’m perplexed, but I’m like, how am I here?

I end up being like why have I become so obsessed with this tool and what we’ve done with it and like the community around it and everything. Why is publishing and e commerce and online education so important to me? And it’s like a process of discovery. And I’m just looking into like, where does all this passion come from?

But I’d ask you for your side on WordPress, you wouldn’t have done all this like writing or gotten into the flow on writing or invested so much time in the community. And so on in the project without some passion, where does the passion for the surrounds of software WordPress come from?

Jeff Chandler: So I want to go back. I want to throw this back a little bit to comment, because I want to share a funny story about comments. Comments are actually the reason I got started. I chose WordPress way back in the day. At that time I was a big fan of Joomla. And for those who don’t know Joomla yeah the default theme in Joomla, I think was solar flare.

I think if I recall really uniquely out with the top and the header part with the header image and the top left nav menu. See it’s burned into my brain. But Joomla at the time didn’t have comments natively built in. You had to purchase a module or a commercial plugin or something to bolt it on.

At that time, somehow, some way I heard of something called WordPress and it had commenting built in. So I tried it out and tried to implement the website I was building into WordPress. And I said, no way I can’t do this. WordPress is too difficult. Not even going to try it. Went back to Joomla, ended up with.

The same frustrations. I said, okay, you know what, I’m going to give WordPress one more try, I’m going to take a deep breath. Once I discovered once I read a tutorial and discovered it, I could change how things worked by changing a number in the code, which was a parameter or an argument and realizing that changing things.

And the behavior of either the plugin or WordPress itself was that easy. That’s when I got the WordPress bug. That’s when it got me. And plus I had comments built in natively. It was free. And so that’s when I built the website on WordPress and then I started writing about, and this was mostly to help me.

I started writing and publishing everything I was learning about WordPress. WordPress at the time. And it just so happens that a lot of other people in that time period were just discovering WordPress. And they too were also writing and publishing everything they were learning at the time as well.

So I was part of this, there’s a unique situation looking back on it of this. Large crowd of people learning WordPress all at the same time, which lend, which lent itself to everybody helping each other and everybody looking for resources to level up their WordPress game at that time. And going through all of that built up my passion for WordPress and being able to realize, wow, editing and being, being able to do these things and WordPress is very powerful and it’s so cool.

And then having, And interacting with all these different people at the same time, it just became a lifelong I wouldn’t say lifelong cause I’m still living and it’s still there, but I still have the passion for WordPress and mostly the community and the people who build it to this day and to this day, WordPress is 21 years old and man, it’s still there.

I still have a love for it. And it’s still there.

Chris Badgett: It sounds simple. But I still, I’m just as passionate as I was when I first, when it first clicked for me, similar to you, it was this idea that you could publish something and anybody, anywhere in the world. Could look at that thing on their computer.

Just blew my mind that like your voice can go everywhere that the internet is, and that’s still like amazing. And that’s just something we just overlook and like we’re in it all day. So we don’t think about as much anymore, but that’s amazing.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The main overarching goal of WordPress to democratize publishing is pretty great.

And it’s something worthy of getting behind. And trying to strive, be open and free to allow everybody to have their voice, to be able to have a tool that they can use to get their voice published online. It’s a very noble and worthy cause. And it’s, it has been, and still is.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

That’s Jeff Chandler. You can find him at Jeff row on Twitter. The O is a zero. Jeff, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your story writing tips, community conversation. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you for having me. And Matt, change your last name.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post The Craft of Writing, Community Building, and WordPress with Jeff Chandler appeared first on LMScast.