Welcome to an exclusive interview on the future of online publishing with Jack McDade, founder of CMS Statamic. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about CMSes and investigating different options, so I thought it would be interesting to chat with some CMS founders about their solutions and how they think about things.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
John Doherty: [00:00:00] Jack, welcome. Today I have with me Jack McDade, who is the founder of Statamic which I learned recently how to pronounce correctly. I was calling it Statamic. So Statamic. com. It’s a CMS that Jack and I believe a small team are building. Yes. So yeah, Jack quickly, if you would tell us who is Jack McDade, why Statamic and how would you describe Statamic to people who have been, publishing on the internet for a while or looking for, yeah what kind of sites is it best for at this point?
Jack McDade: Yeah, for sure. So Jack McDade, I’ve been in the industries for 20 plus years as we all It’s not that young anymore. Ran the marketing, like developers group at marketing companies built my own agency did a number of things and managed clients and couldn’t find a CMS that really fit.
I like having a smaller team as possible and like managing these sites.
Like content driven sites with the database was always really annoying to me because the client would be making changes. And then I’d be like, want to make changes in dev and be like, Oh, no, there’s a conflict. And we’ve got to figure out how to [00:01:00] merge the changes.
And what if we just put everything in flat files and version controlled it. And that way I could just merge changes. And so I decided I’d build my own. CMS for my clients to see like how well it was possible like what it could even work. It’s like back in 2012 and so so built that with a friend got like a
- 0 out and proof of concept version and it worked and so ended up taking it on solo for the next 12 plus years and has grown much from you know further from where we started it’s not flat file only anymore. You can use a database. We’ve got a lot of things too much to just enter in the Intro here.
We’re sure we can get into any specifics if you like Yeah but that’s my background and how Statamic got started and you there was a third part of your question I was trying to hold on to, I think I lost it. What was it?
John Doherty: The type of site that people tend to build on top of static, like who, and the reason why, and I was just telling you this before we started recording reason why I really wanted to talk to you is because of all the drama going [00:02:00] on in WordPress these days and like people like myself, they’ve been publishing for a long time.
They’ve been building on top of WordPress. I feel like it’s time people. fiduciary like to their business, like being responsible as a business owner or just like a builder of websites or building websites for clients should be considering. Is there a better option these days?
And so who uses Statamic these days and what kind of, so what kind of sites are best on there now and what kind of sites do you wish used it more?
Jack McDade: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Okay would say The ideal kind of site that runs, you can run any, you can literally run anything like opentable.Com runs on it and huge new sites, little blogger sites, like anything can run on it. The ideal scenario though, does differ from WordPress in that if you’re looking for a solution that has a one click installer, where you can swap between different themes and then add a calendar booking system with one click and add an e commerce with one click and just like.
Get the kitchen sink with a button click and maybe it doesn’t look exactly how you want But it works, like that’s not really what [00:03:00] Statamic is designed for, that’s not our sweet spot. You can, you can’t really get very far doing that. Statamic is really designed for making a content driven website that has a one or more developers involved, maybe not full time or maybe a team of developers full time, but that at some point in the project, The assumption is there’s a developer who’s going to be hooking some stuff up on the template level.
And so it makes it like agencies is a perfect Statamic user because they’re often building and managing their sites for clients or building sites and handing them off once they’re wired up correctly, and then the client can manage it. That’s an ideal customer, but anyone who knows HTML, who’s happy to like, tinker pop the hood a little bit think with some css Like the you don’t need to know how to write php.
You don’t have to be a programmer but if you can mess around with html, you can build something with static and so The sweet spot is it’s a spectrum that it goes super technical. We’re built on laravel So if you [00:04:00] want to build custom applications and tap into the entire laravel ecosystem, you can And on the other side of the vents if you just want like a simple blog, but you want to You Like do it yourself and not just use a theme that you’ve seen a thousand times.
Like you can write some CSS, right? Some HTML, like you can do it. That’s our wheelhouse. Yeah.
John Doherty: And for the people listening, the audience here is a lot of like marketers, SEOs, content, marketers, writers, publishers, that sort of stuff. Level it’s a. Version of PHP, right? Yeah, it’s a framework that sits on top of PHP.
Jack McDade: So like it enhances PHP. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like WordPress is similar has their own like version or like a framework sitting on top of PHP. So if you run PHP, you can learn that. You can also learn like Laravel if you have some PHP background as well.
John Doherty: So Statamic is self hosted, right? So you got to install it on a server. You don’t, you do not have a hosted version at this point. Is that right?
Jack McDade: That is correct.
John Doherty: Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, so different from so it’s like wordpress. org versus wordpress. com we’re the dot org version.
Are you [00:05:00] open source?
Jack McDade: So the core is open source and then there is a pro Version, that you can enable and there’s a license fee for that Yep. Gotcha. And that license fees, what, like 295 or something like that? Two 75, one time perpetual. And then you can note it for, infinity years.
And then we have a, an annual renewal. If you want to get the latest features and like support at 65 bucks a year, it’s optional, you don’t have to do it. So you own it, your static site forever.
John Doherty: Gotcha. Cool. Makes sense. And you have, you do have some plugins that, you were mentioning if you want like a, one click add in a calendar, thing, which is, which is great like I use that and WordPress current, all my stuff is currently built on top of WordPress, but I’m, investigating other stuff.
But you also, I was. Researching a few weeks ago. You also do have some like pro plugins, like paid, plugins, like a plugin and maybe a calendar and like that sort of stuff as well, which you can also buy and install and, I assume you’re like uploading it to the server or whatever, I don’t know if there’s
Jack McDade: yeah, there are hundreds of add ons in the marketplace and like third party developers can put what there’s on there as well.
John Doherty: Very cool. It [00:06:00] is a it’s a slightly more, more technical install, maybe more technical, like upkeep than a WordPress or something like that. But for agencies that are building sites for their customers, whether it’s a publisher or it’s like a simple, a simple I don’t know, small business website or something like that, or like a SaaS company, building a a marketing site, they don’t want to use WordPress. They don’t want to use Webflow. They don’t want to use like one of those others. They have Laravel devs, or the founders, a dev themselves that can, you know, hacks, hack stuff around. This is a good option potentially.
Jack McDade: Yes, absolutely. And the, it really allows you to own your content and have full control over a modern like PHP application. So Webflow. Might cost you 50 bucks a month and then your bandwidth goes up and now it’s 500 bucks a month and it’s just It’s crazy you know exactly what to expect with static and the price point is not very different than wordpress plus a couple of You know paid pro add ons like acf pro and a form thing, you know a couple and you’re right in the same [00:07:00] Right in the same neighborhood.
John Doherty: Yeah, exactly. I was researching that as I was looking at all the options. Recently I was realizing, I’m like, okay, so I pay, like I pay for premium hosting. Honestly, it’s two months of premium hosting , yes. It’s really like really reasonable. Could run it on a server for five bucks, maybe a little bit more, kinda depending on like the usage and all of that, but like still we’re talking like a 10th of the price and you end up really? Yeah, there’s some switching costs and such, but you end up. You end up saving a lot of money pretty quick, which is pretty cool.
Yes, absolutely. There are two things I want to talk about.
One is like when people, like if there are people looking to move over to, to, to static, let’s say, they’ve investigated all the options. There’s a lot of other good options out there, but they’ve said like static is what I want.
I know, I know Laravel or I have a Laravel dev or whatever. And this is what I want to move to.
Say they’re on WordPress right now and they want to move over. What’s the process? How would they like best move over?
Jack McDade: The best way I would recommend moving from WordPress, one, you’re going to want to migrate your data.
So we have an importer we actually just launched our brand new importer [00:08:00] yesterday. Awesome. And it handles October 28th. That’s right. October 28th, 2024. We’ll have a full importer with WordPress support. So you can take your XML export from WordPress or even better if you use like WP all export and get like a more robust export, whether you’re the CSV or XML, it’ll support advanced custom fields or pods Gutenberg and they’ll import all that into Statamic so you get all your content all your data is in there But you’re going to want to rebuild your front end like you’re not going to be able to reuse Your wordpress theme as it is right because all the wordpress code in there. It’s not really apply So we recommend you could if you want it to look exactly the same You just don’t you just want to be off the wordpress stack You could create the HTML version of your site, right?
The rendered output, and then just start stripping out the content and dropping in static tags and pulling content from the control panel.
That’s [00:09:00] one way you could do it just step through that.
Another you could just redesign it and build it from scratch or grab a starter kit from our marketplace and use those to get your site going so you definitely have some different options but yeah, there’s going to be some manual work involved but the It’s the stuff that you would need to do in any redesign.
Even if you’re moving to a new theme or something like that, you’re still going to build it out like in dev or staging or whatever, and then, and then migrate stuff over and, whack a mole with bugs and layout issues and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, not too different.
John Doherty: Very cool.
And obviously like in there, you got to get a Statamic license, right? So at least like download, download the package. Can you download it for free? And you can download it.
Jack McDade: So Statamic is all run by Composer, like Composer is like the PHP package manager. I don’t think WordPress uses it, but like every other modern PHP application uses Composer.
It’s distributed package management. So like we [00:10:00] It’s distributed so that there’s no one person with a bottleneck that can control whether you can and cannot get code, right? so it is It’s how the rest of the world works Also benevolent dictator is that what you’re saying without saying exactly like it is out of our hands the code is out there It’s public on github composer distributes it.
We can’t get ourselves in the middle of it even if we wanted to so it’s out there. So yeah it’s all with composer And the pro version is part of the same code base. It’s just a config file you turn on. So if you turn pro version on, it unlocks all the other features like multi site, multiple users, get integration, the control panel revisions, like some of that stuff.
And then it’ll just, you’ll have a little banner in the control panel that says, Hey, you got to buy a license before you go live. So if you’re running it on a test domain or a staging domain, you can just dismiss the banner, keep using it for as long as you want. And then when you launch the site, that’s when you need to buy the license.
John Doherty: Oh, wow, that’s awesome. So someone could build everything out using the pro version [00:11:00] Basically, and then once you’re ready to go live then buy the license.
Also from wordpress where you got to buy all the pro versions and you’re like in development and you’re a thousand dollars into plugins.
And you’re just not using two of them and you’re like can I get a refund like it’s been 14 days like I know we’ve been building it for six months.
Jack McDade: We haven’t been on the other side of the fence being the agency being the freelancer trying to make, trying to make money and being up having to pay out pocket up front for this stuff.
I didn’t want to create another environment where It put them at a disadvantage. We, at the time when we started, we didn’t feel like we have economies of scale where we can float everyone else until they get paid by their client. And then, then we get paid.
John Doherty: So I wanted to shift gears as well. And I mentioned that I wanted to talk about like the future of publishing with you, cause I’m sure you think about that a lot. And also I didn’t know, I didn’t uncover in my research that Statamic started in 2012. Like it’s been a minute, literally.
Jack McDade: Years.
John Doherty: Yeah, things have changed like a little bit since then, just a little bit since [00:12:00] then.
So if you could sum it up since then, and that was like 2012 was like the heyday of blogging. Like personal bloggers, I had a personal blog that was getting like tens of thousands of visits a month from marketers and SEOs and that sort of stuff.
That was when all the big bloggers were really like doing their thing. Think like Pat Flynn and Tim Ferriss and, and all of those. And then it feels like now it’s, that’s completely changed. And people have gone to like more visual stuff, but what’s your take on what would you say has been like the biggest change in the state of publishing in those since you started Statamic. And then we can look to the future.
Jack McDade: Obviously I think the biggest. The biggest shift was from everyone having their own little worlds on the internet to us sharing social media streams. And that being the place where content lives and it’s ephemeral.
So like this, the shift from I’m going to write a blog article and. It’s going to live forever and people are going to find it forever. And now we’re writing these, Twitter X threads or, blue [00:13:00] sky or NASA or wherever you are.
LinkedIn posts exactly and they’re just poof.
They’re just gone so quickly unless they get viral traction and keep getting retweeted and that shift from like where content lives is It’s really unfortunate because everyone is constantly chasing short term gains instead of long term plans. And I need traffic now, I need likes now, I need links now, I need clicks now, I need dollars now.
And Impressions. Like, you’re chasing all these metrics
I mean if we’re being honest most businesses if you had a thousand really good customers It’s better than a million impressions like any day, right? You just 100 you just don’t know what it takes to get The core audience that you require to make a living and we’re all trying to figure it out And so you look at comparison is the thief of joy You look at what everybody else is doing and you I feel like you have to keep [00:14:00] up with it.
So it’s tough. That’s getting philosophical. But it’s also, it’s part of the way culture shifted. It’s part of the way Google and the big machines on the internet push and shape traffic and content and reward behavior. And, I don’t know that we have an answer to that, but I’ve seen, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it feels blogging and long form content. I don’t say it’s made a full comeback, but it’s come partway back like I blogs and articles and sites that were getting bought up by Holding companies and converted into engagement farming that’s pushing out social media, like csstricks. com And gotch. io these things that got bought by digital ocean They’re taking back ownership of these sites and bringing them back alive again.
Remember Smashing Magazine they’re putting out great content. I think There’s a real benefit to owning your content, owning, like having your, and obviously we have to put stuff out on social media [00:15:00] cause that’s where people find it now, like more than SEO for certain types of things, but owning your content is still super important for the longterm.
And I don’t know about you or listeners, but I don’t want a major tech company to be the repository for my content. I don’t want Meta or Google or Webflow or Shopify or whatever. I don’t want those people to own my intellectual property rights that they can heart, mine their AI algorithms on it. I want that to be mine. And then at my choice, I can push it out the place And so I think like your personal website or a company website is like the most logical place for that to be on the internet and I think there is I know john john o’nolan from Ghost has been pushing really hard on Trying to get some new Adopted standards around publishing and bringing back the idea of like blog roles and Pub sub and all [00:16:00] that stuff under some new names and I forget the term that he’s used and what maybe i’ll dig it up.
I’ll send you a link if you’ve got show notes or something We can put it there. Yeah, but some new protocols to make people’s personal News sites and blogs and stuff get more discoverable.
John Doherty: It feels like we lost like I told you I think before we started like i’ve been blogging since 1999 and when I really started blogging it was like 2000 Professionally, it was like 2009 10 11 kind of through 14 15 is when I was like really writing a lot of like More like personal, like true blogging stuff.
And I’ve gotten back to that a little bit. And I agree. I think there are like, there are people doing it. I think some people never stopped it, but they were like the I think of Justin Jackson, right? Like I love Justin. And he’s always been blogging, but like he was one of the few that kind of kept doing it and now like people are getting back to it and it’s really cool to see, but like the back in 10 through 15, let’s say like RSS and Google reader and like that sort of stuff. Like getting the content pushed to me. So when it was written, then I got it. Like I created my own feed versus like an Instagram or something [00:17:00] like that. Like a feed of content that other people owned versus all being on like one platform.
And then now I feel like people are, especially marketers and business owners are starting to understand the, publish to your site. And it’s also very possible to like video is accessible is more accessible now than it was then. And so you can do video, you can add transcript, you can use the script and add transcripts, publish it on YouTube.
And then you get it on your site and then it can get pushed out. And then you could take those clips and you can put them other places and refer them back to your own site. Like we’re starting to see that, you own it, and then you distribute it via these platforms, and so then you’re not at the behest of an Instagram shift in their algorithm, or a LinkedIn shift, or a Google shift, or something like that, because you have traffic coming from all these places.
And sure, one of them probably outperforms the others, but two years from now it’s going to be a different one, and that’s just the way the internet has always gone. But if you don’t have that one place, it’s like my Instagram account can literally shut down your Instagram account tomorrow.
If you have 500, 000 followers there, all of a sudden you have no business. Versus if you have 500, 000, [00:18:00] like visits a month to your website, sure. You’re like your hosting costs are going to be, more than that on like Instagram or whatever, but they’re not going to shut you down. Unless you’re doing like, unsavory stuff, likely I guess they’re like terms of service, but like they have terms of service that you actually know and the kind of content you could put on there.
And as long as you don’t go against that, you’re good, and as you said, people can come back and even if something goes viral, it’s goes viral for a week, versus a day versus I have people emailing me about blog posts I literally wrote in 2010.
Jack McDade: I get an email, I don’t know, two or three a year from it.
That evergreen content is you underestimate the value of it Yeah, because it’s yeah because you don’t see the numbers tend to get smaller but the Value per reader if someone’s reading an article you wrote 10 years ago And they’re like sucked into it and they’re getting to the end and then they email you that’s so much better than someone who Click the link.
You’re like, Oh, they read it. No, they didn’t. They clicked it. They skimmed your h2s. Yeah. And said I’ll, maybe I’ll come back and read that later when I’m not busy, which never happens because we’re never not busy.
John Doherty: I don’t even call it blogging. Cause to me, [00:19:00] blogging is like opinions and experience. So but let’s talk like resource articles. I can also be very like hardline philosophical about this stuff that I recognize that. So like other people may have a different definition of it, but I’ll call them like articles, resource articles, like this for this verse that, how do I do this thing?
Step by step like sort of stuff. And then you have your like. Opinions and thought leadership pieces and that sort of stuff. That’s what I call blogging, but I’m a huge fan of using content to build to build a brand, right? Like I see people building audiences on Instagram wherever, and that’s great.
And you have people like Justin Welsh and those that have built awesome businesses off of those platforms, But I also see a lot of people that like, they’re jumping from thing to thing. Like they’re building an audience on Instagram and maybe it’s around like AI.
It was around Facebook ads. It was around something else. Now it’s around AI and like driving people to squeeze pages and they’re getting that short term money. But there’s no like long term brand. Like you’ve been doing this thing for 12 years, like I’ve been, I’ve been blogging professionally for almost 15.
Like I’ve been built [00:20:00] EditorNinja, fairly new couple of years old, but but we have a brand already in the space versus driving people to squeeze pages. And so I’d love to hear your take on on that, on like using content to build a business and not just build a business, meaning direct response, like they come, they find my site and they buy like a, a Statamic license, but like they, maybe they discover Statamic because of like a podcast episode. And then they follow your Twitter like feed. I refuse to call it X. They follow your Twitter feed and then they like come to your personal site and they read what you’ve written there.
And then six months later, they’re ready to replatform. They loop back around and they download the core package and then eventually they buy a pro license, right? That doesn’t happen without content. I’m curious what you think of that and how you see that.
Jack McDade: I agree.
That’s the, unless someone is like taking the time to send you an email Hey, let’s get on a call. I’d love to chat with you about something that does happen. It’s pretty rare, but it happens compared to people who. Pinball around and connect with your content. The versions of ourselves we put out there on the internet is our content, [00:21:00] right?
Like it’s our content and our avatar next to the content all the time, right? Unless you’re doing a lot of YouTube and video stuff, which case is a little bit different, but it’s that content is what allows. People to have a glimpse into who you are, what’s important to you, your perspective, you get a feel for, is this the kind of person I want to like, see what they work on?
Is this the kind of person who I’d be willing to risk my business by switching to his platform or hers or whatever. And that content is like Your you know disembodied voice that lives on the internet and I think it’s out there doing work for you when you can’t be right, it’s like investing you put money into the market And you hope you’ve put it into the right places, but if you do, it starts to build returns for you and content that’s, that is a hundred percent how content works, especially if you don’t focus on completely ephemeral types of [00:22:00] content.
John Doherty: I totally agree. So what’s your take on you’ve been writing online for a really long time as have I, what’s your take on like pruning old content. Cause if this is our voice that like lives out there, like I’m sure I have stuff out there from 2010, 2011 that I would go back and read and be like, I’m a different person from then.
What’s your take on going back and pruning,?
Jack McDade: I think there’s value to it for sure. Both from removing things that just aren’t you anymore, right or Talking about tech that’s just dead now here’s how I did this with like mood tools and jquery like It’s gone like just it doesn’t i’m not getting any value from that stuff So yeah, proving this stuff away, but then there’s also bringing life back to evergreen type content.
I think there’s I think that those kind of articles that people can connect with 10 years ago or connect with currently that you wrote 10 years ago, might need a little touch of refreshing. Maybe some of the references are quoting me. Brooklyn nine nine episode that most new readers haven’t ever [00:23:00] even seen before.
Okay, I might need to like tweak my pop culture references, but the meat is still valid.
And I think keeping the originally posted on date is important, but then updated on. And I think that, That benefits you on the SEO side very much.
It’s like your content is alive and lives. So I think that’s important. I think there’s definitely value to that. In fact, I’ve got a buddy who’s working on a SAS app that helps you find stale evergreen opportunities, like things to refresh. It’s just, it’s a really good idea.
John Doherty: One of the things we do at EditorNinja is actually refresh content. So like old content people have written that has outdated stuff, broken links, like that sort of thing. I actually built out a WordPress plugin using chat GPT to write like the base and then did all the adjusting myself to basically like weekly.
Go and find content that is hasn’t been updated. And, last updated was whatever X days ago, I think I said it to, two years, so like 730 days, whatever that is, and then email you a list that basically it’s like, these are more than two years old. You should probably go back and [00:24:00] update them.
To just at least make sure that maintain them, at least make sure that like links aren’t broken and that sort of stuff. You can couple that with a screaming frog crawl or something, but like a full SaaS would be super cool as well. And I think that’s a that’s something that especially like businesses don’t think about.
And something I’ve been really like considering recently is if I land on a piece of content from, I don’t really care how long ago it was, I just want to know that it’s, Still accurate. But if I go in and I see it’s like a broken, like short code or something like that, that’s no longer displaying something.
I’m like, I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you anymore. Yeah. So that’s like a brand risk. Like good design is like a brand thing. You go to someone that’s like a basic WordPress theme or basic super basic thing. And it’s a business I’m like. I don’t know that I really trust you. Am I really going to give you my credit card number?
If I don’t see a stripe logo on your checkout page, I don’t know that I’m going to give you my credit card. And if content is like the gate. Then, having something that loads fast, you can maintain, you can design well all of that. And then your content is also [00:25:00] like up to date, at least not broken.
Is the bare, like bare minimum.
Jack McDade: Yeah, exactly. No, all of that goes into actually building a real company that can last, it can last 12 years.
John Doherty: I’ve been thinking about what, how does EditorNinja last for a hundred years? What would that even look like? Like very different mindset to like, how do I get this thing to a million a year in revenue?
Jack McDade: Yes. Yeah. I think that is a much better for most. I think we, let me rephrase this. I think most products and companies would be better off. If you thought about how can I make it last a hundred years versus how can I make a hundred million dollars or a million dollars or 10, 000, whatever it is.
And if you think about everything you do as putting bricks in a house and properly Building a foundation. And if you’re taking shortcuts, every time you place a brick, it’s not going to last, and yeah, it means things take longer and you’re, it takes longer to build revenue because you have to sacrifice short term gains for long term [00:26:00] plans.
Yet, it meant that it grew slower. But I feel like what we have now will probably outlast me Probably has a chance to live on past My career, like I’m 41, dang it. So 10, 20, 30 years would be like, I can’t imagine still coding with more than 30 years.
So, yeah, what can I do to make sure? That this is going to last, that the community around it lasts, that the plans are clear enough that someone else can run with them if I drop out all that stuff is Cause if everything about your company is in your head and you’re just assigning, like barking orders to people, I don’t really know why you’re doing it.
You’re not building a living entity. You’re just delegating work.
John Doherty: The podcast that changed my, thinking about this was the acquired podcast. Do you listen to [00:27:00] that at all?
Like a couple episodes, like a while ago, not recently.
There was one that released fairly recently about Hermes, the like luxury leather company, handbags and saddles and all of that stuff.
Highly recommend you listen to it. If you think along these lines talking about craft, that company is on their sixth generation of the family running it. They’ve survived attempted takeovers by LVMH and all sorts of stuff. They like literally started off making. What was it? Like trunks and travel stuff for like people in stage coaches.
And then they went to saddles once people started riding like horses around like Paris. But they, and anyway, and now they’re like, so huge with their their bags and all that sort of stuff. Giant company, sixth generation literally been around for 160 years and they’re so focused like on their craft and and their craft is like, High quality leather.
Their proprietary saddle stitch and all this stuff that it’s done by human artisans spread all around France. A lot of it still happens in Paris itself. Like they haven’t gone to like huge scale route, but they really focus on like the craft and it’s taken them a long time to get to where they are now.
[00:28:00] And we think about three years in and I’m not at a million in revenue there are 160 years in and they’re still around. Like even that is a right there, and so thinking about that what is what is the future of Statamic and maybe broader, what do you think is or what do you hope is the future of publishing, like on the internet?
Jack McDade: I think the future of Statamic is that it does well, that people, that it provides value, that people enjoy using it, that it doesn’t burn anybody. For any anything that we could have prevented. That enables people to build and manage the kind of websites and content publishing that they need without getting in the way.
And that it just stands the test of time. My future, like my hope of publishing is that it comes back into the hands of the people doing the work and that, you know, that would you find sustainable ways for having the tech monopolies, not take it all from us. And as everything in AI, the rise of [00:29:00] AI and scraping and be able to write stuff and what is training data sets on, there’s a lot of questionably legal ethics going and into all these things.
And, like AI is a great tool, but I’d love to see it. Do the things we don’t want to do so that we can do the things we want to and it seems like ai is Constantly doing the stuff that we want to do the creative things like oh design this for me write this for me people want to be designers and writers like I don’t want to do my dishes.
I don’t want to run to home Depot for a washer. I’d like, there’s things that I would happily pay a huge amount of money for
Exactly. Can you do want clean my kitty litter? Can you like, there’s just stuff that it doesn’t like add value to my life that I have to do because it takes opposable thumbs or, I don’t know.
We’re now we’re off on a tangent, but I want to see more solutions that take the pain out of work rather than replace the human in the work.
So my hope is that we get to that point where you know Ai doesn’t [00:30:00] it helps you polish your content. It helps enhance your things.
It Takes your idea and brings it to scale rather than replacing you.
John Doherty: But don’t tell me what features to build. Like I want to do that discovery. That’s the meaningful stuff. Yeah, totally. I want to craft content. Like I obviously I run an editing company. We use Grammarly like a ton. And I’ve recently been getting back into a lot more blogging. And I was, I realized that if I have Grammarly turned on while I’m writing, I’m not crafting content. So I’ve started turning it off and then I come back and then I do a run through with Grammarly, adjust stuff.
Then I send it to one of my editors and they edit it. And then we, and then we publish it, but these tools can get in the way as well. And I think if we can bring that like human. Don’t neuter your voice.
Jack McDade: sometimes bad grammar on purpose is okay.
Because it look at authors like Kurt Vonnegut writing two word sentences, like, all over the place. And, Yeah. You can catch someone’s attention by doing what everyone’s not doing, which is making your content sound like AI wrote it [00:31:00] because the green squigglies said that was bad writing.
John Doherty: You got it. There’s a certain amount of taste there, and I was gonna say, got nothing against SEO content. I do have stuff against SEO content, even though I come from that world. But I think and it’s done well for companies for a long time and less now, but I actually hope that these, helpful content updates and such actually get us back to real blogging and real writing and building an audience and having strong opinions about stuff again, like I think that sort of stuff, even if they’re controversial, like this is the stuff that makes us human, opens up the conversations and helped hopefully helps us all be better if we can be civil, which can be tough on the internet, but I think it’s a good goal, man, I think it’s a good goal.
Jack McDade: Yeah, I agree.
John Doherty: Very cool. Jack. Thank you for the time. I want to be respectful of your time We’re coming up to the top of the hour. It’s great to connect with you man. Yeah you too Yeah, so Where can people find Statamic if they’re looking for support or have questions?
I’ve got a lot of agency owners and dev agencies and such like in my audience, if they’re looking to interested in maybe moving away from, some other [00:32:00] platform to Statamic, like where, who could they reach out to?
What’s the best process there?
Jack McDade: Yeah, statamic. com is the hub for everything, but you can email me Jack at statamic. com or find me at Jack McDade on Twitter or blue sky or mastodon because I run the static accounts and all those two. Twitter, mastodon, blue sky Instagram.
It’s my responsibility to be where people are and leave the opinions out of it. I’m really easy to find if you know my name or my company and we’ll do my best to have me or the team get you whatever answers you need and see if that might be a good fit.
It won’t be for some people, but it will be for others. And we have a in our discord channel or our discord server, we have a, from WordPress channel, because we’ve been talking about this specifically full of people like X automattic employees and other people in there who are just like discovering it.
And it’s fun to watch them fall in love with that. And I’d be like, Oh my God it’s much easier to do this kind of thing, this kind of thing. This is fun. It’s I spent all weekend hacking because I haven’t learned the last [00:33:00] time I did that because it was fun. I made me happy.
John Doherty: I love it, man. Congrats. Congrats on the first 12 years. And now that I’m like familiar with y’all and what you’re doing, I’m definitely following along and I’m definitely using a different platform for my next not different from Satomac, different from WordPress for my next project.
Jack McDade: Yeah, there’s a lot of great ones out there, so make sure you don’t do your research and, I’m probably friends with most of the owners of all of them. We like to chat a lot take your pick. Good luck.
John Doherty: I like that. It reminds me of the early days of like the digital marketing SEO industry where like all the big agency owners were all buddies and friends and they’d speak at each other’s conferences and that sort of stuff. It’s we’re great for this, they’re great for that. We’re all friends. Kinda can’t go wrong.
So I love that. Yeah, exactly. I love that ethos. So awesome, Jack. Appreciate the time, man, and have a good rest of your day.