INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 37. Today, Pippin and I will be talking about what we’ve been up to and lots of user interface stuff.

PIPPIN: Once again, Ninja Forms, the guys from WP Ninjas, have been kind enough to continue to sponsor us. They’ve had a couple of new extensions released recently. They released a Slack integration that lets you send notifications to your Slack chat room when a form is submitted. They also released a GetResponse and iContact integrations recently for email lists, so doing some really cool stuff over there. Go check them out at NinjaForms.com and WPNinjas.com.

You have been working on expanding your team recently, once again. It seems like this is a pretty consistent trend.

BRAD: Yeah. We’re kind of perpetually —

PIPPIN: Tell us about it.

BRAD: Perpetually hiring over here. No, we’ve had a fellow named Jeff Gould on trial for a while now, and he’s going to be going full time with us on Monday, so we’re super excited about that. It’s going to definitely help us accelerate our timelines and whatnot. And, he’s actually based in the U.S., which, believe it or not, is the first U.S.-based team member for us.

PIPPIN: Out of how many members now?

BRAD: Including myself and Jeff, we’re five total now.

PIPPIN: Very cool.

BRAD: Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. Then also he was actually working on a nice feature that’s going to be coming in Migrate DB Pro in the next release. I’ve mentioned this before on the show that we’ve been having trouble with some hosts blocking our requests because we’re making requests too close together. We’ll make one, and then, a second later we’ll make another request.

PIPPIN: Sure.

BRAD: It’s kind of how our migrations work. He added a little control on the settings tab where you can just slide it up and add one-, two-, or three-second delay between the requests.

PIPPIN: It slows the migration process, but it also keeps hosts from blocking it.

BRAD: Yes, yes. We actually considered; we had a debate about whether or not we should just do it by default. We should set it to, like, two seconds by default just so most people will never run into that issue.

PIPPIN: Sure.

BRAD: I did a little bit of testing, and it actually slowed the migration I tried down by 3X, adding a two-second delay.

PIPPIN: Wow. That reminds me of a really interesting statement I heard from some developers or researchers at Facebook once. Facebook obviously has really, really good servers and is consistently very fast. I was listening to, I think it was, an interview with one of their database designers or something, somebody like that. He was talking about request speed and how it doesn’t necessarily matter how fast the request speed it. Obviously, to a degree it matters.

What matters more is consistency. If it’s consistently 500 milliseconds to load a page on Facebook, that’s okay as long as it’s always 500 milliseconds. If one day something jumps up and is 2,000 milliseconds to load a page, it throws people off, which makes me think that always slowing it down may not be such a bad thing.

You noticed that it was slower for you, obviously, because you intentionally delayed it. But that makes me wonder if you did that, aside from people that experienced the older version and the new version, would anyone notice.

BRAD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess we could slow it down just for new customers, or actually you couldn’t. You’d have to do it per install, so any new installs.

PIPPIN: Sure, sure. It could always be a filter or something that you could put in.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: For people that knew that their host was okay with it and wanted it to be a little bit faster, it could.

BRAD: Yeah. Anyway, I think we’re —

PIPPIN: Hosts that have blocked it already, slowing down the request isn’t going to improve it then. Do you have to get in touch with them and say, “Please don’t block this?”

BRAD: No. It’s not that kind of a blocking. It’s not a permanent ban. It’s a temporary thing where the host has some kind of denial of service software installed, and so if you make the requests too close together, they just say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re going to start rejecting your requests.”

PIPPIN: Okay. That makes sense.

BRAD: Yeah. Yeah, I think we’ll start out just by not having it on by default. People can turn it on if they need it, and we’ll go from there. That’s the plan anyway. I’ve also been redesigning the UI of Migrate DB Pro a bit.

PIPPIN: Drastically or just a little bit?

BRAD: I don’t know if drastically – probably not drastically. Just a little bit. Just kind of tweaking it. Like the progress UI is a little bit neater, just tightening it up a bit. The settings tab has just kind of been a mess. It is a mess right now because we’ve just really been throwing things in there.

PIPPIN: Welcome to every settings screen that went from 2 settings to 20, 30, 40, or 500.

BRAD: Yeah. I can see how it happens now.

PIPPIN: This sounds very familiar.

BRAD: Yeah, because you’re just kind of adding them as you go, you know, one here, one there.

PIPPIN: Yeah. You add one. That’s no big deal, right?

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Until it’s happened 50 times.

BRAD: Exactly, exactly, and so at this point I kind of just took stock of what it looks like, and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” It needs to be looked at fully at its current state and kind of recognized to make it kind of more logical.

One example is there’s an option in there for SSL verification. That’s been there since the very beginning. And, since the very beginning, people have been confused thinking that it’s turning on SSL and turning on and off SSL.

PIPPIN: I’ve experienced the exact same thing because I had that exact same setting in a couple plugins. People are like, “Well, what happened to SSL? Why is it not enabled?” Do you have an SSL certificate? Did you turn it on for your site?

BRAD: Yeah, yeah, so SSL being on and off is a separate issue from SSL verification being on and off, right? SSL verification just prevents the man in the middle attack. It’s that —

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: You know the one I’m talking about.

PIPPIN: Yep.

BRAD: I’ve renamed that to Certificate Verification, and so they have to kind of dig into it to figure out that, “Oh, that’s what this is,” instead of making that snap judgment when they see SSL in there.

PIPPIN: Sure. That totally makes sense.

BRAD: Yeah, those are the kinds of things I’ve been working on.

PIPPIN: That’s cool. I love to see how those kinds of changes make an impact for good or bad. I think there are a lot of expectations or–I don’t know–responses that we have when we use a UI. This is something that I started kind of playing with today accidentally.

Earlier this morning, I was doing a plugin review for a plugin called Caldera Forms, which is a form builder plugin on WordPress.org. It’s built by — now I keep forgetting who it is — David Cramer and Josh Pollock from CalderaWP. It’s a really cool plugin. It has kind of your standard functionality that you would expect in a form builder, so it’s got the drag and drop interface, the text fields, the emails, all the different field types, email submissions, et cetera, what you would expect when you’re used to a form builder plugin in WordPress.

When I was first using it, I was really kind of thrown off by some of the UI decisions they made. I looked at it and was like, “Why would you do it that way? That’s weird. This is not what I expect.”

It almost put a bad taste in my mouth at first, but then, as I used it more, I was starting to realize, like, “Wait a minute. This is actually really cool. This is really intelligent.” Maybe it was my preconceived notions that kind of screwed me up. Just because this is different and it wasn’t what I expected didn’t necessarily mean it was bad, and so I started to try and think about it that way and was able to actually realize that I think this is actually a much better UI experience than maybe what I had expected to happen.

My expectations came from experience. I’ve used all these other plugins, all these different UIs within WordPress for plugins and such. And so, just kind of built up what I had expected to see, and then I didn’t see that.

One little example is, for a complex plugin, we expect there to be a settings page, right? You have different options you enable, things like that. There’s no settings page for this plugin, and yet it’s a very complex plugin. But they do have various settings throughout. There are form specific settings like, “Do you want email notifications for this form?” and things like that.

But in terms of, like, plugin-wide, there was only a couple of settings. The way that they actually did it is they put toggle buttons at the top of the screen. Any time you’re editing a form, any time you’re viewing submissions, any time you’re doing anything like that, there are three toggle buttons at the top of the screen related to CSS, which allowed you to disable the styles in terms of the actual styling of the forms, disable the grid CSS. The whole thing is responsive, and so you can disable the grid that the plugin loads. Then there is one more option.

Clicking them automatically saved that setting. There was no, okay, now save. There was no change the option, save settings, reload page. It was all ajax. It was just an immediate toggle.

At first I was like, “Why are these buttons sitting here? I don’t understand.” But then afterwards I was like, “Wait a minute. Why would I have an entire screen for these three little settings? That’s silly.”

It was just kind of cool. It was a cool exercise in looking at how what we’re used to affects new experiences. Yeah, it was fun.

BRAD: Is your review available somewhere?

PIPPIN: I actually just published it. It’s on PippinsPlugins.com. I did a quick little video review walking through kind of setting up a form, building it, how it works, et cetera. And actually ended up — I wasn’t planning on it, but I ended up talking about some of that same kind of experience how it wasn’t the UI I expected, but then once I played with it, I realized that I actually really, really liked it.

This is something that we also experienced maybe a year ago, year and a half, with EDD. We were building in some new features, and one of them was related to quantities. Originally, EDD didn’t have quantity support. We figured, hey, it’s digital products. You don’t have quantities.

Well, eventually we realized that there are cases where you have quantities, and so we built it. Well, very standard in e-commerce is when you go to a checkout screen or the cart screen and you set your quantities. There’s a button that says, “Update Cart” or “Save Cart” or “Refresh Totals” or something like that.

BRAD: Yes.

PIPPIN: I kind of looked at that and thought, “This is kind of silly. Why don’t we just update them on the fly? Why is there a need for the user to hit a button, initiate an action, and reload the page?”

We changed it so that there is no button. There is no “Update Cart.” If you update a quantity, it just fires an ajax request and immediately updates the totals, recalculates discounts, recalculates taxes, et cetera, all on the fly. I thought it was a really cool experience.

BRAD: But people were looking for the button.

PIPPIN: People were looking for the damn button. And a bunch of people — not a ton of people, but some came back and were like, “Well, maybe this isn’t good because people expect there to be a button.”

It kind of made me step back and think, well, people may want the button, but maybe we can work to change that expectation. Why is there that expectation? Well, there’s that expectation because everyone else has done that. That’s how everything works and has for the last ten years in e-commerce. Well, I kind of like the idea of trying to change that. Now, no one ever comes and says, “I don’t understand how this works,” and I think it’s because we’ve been able to slowly get people used to it.

BRAD: I wonder who was providing the feedback to you. Was it developers, or was it actually end users trying to use the site?

PIPPIN: I think mostly we had feedback from developers.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: The initial feedback that we had was based on, like, I put out kind of a preview of, “Hey, this is what we did.”

BRAD: Do you think that end users would have just figured it out and managed fine?

PIPPIN: I think it’s very possible.

BRAD: Developers are building the site, and they’re kind of looking for things that aren’t working or might be missing, so that’s the red flag, right?

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: Like, “Oh, where’s that button I expect to be there,” even though I don’t really probably need it.

PIPPIN: I guess sometimes we build interfaces on our expectations of how users are going to behave.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Yeah, it was a really cool experiment. I expected to go in and just review a plugin and kind of not necessarily cut and dry, but it’s – we’re going to use the plugin. We’re going to say what we like about it, and then it kind of made me start thinking about it in a whole different way.

BRAD: Cool.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: Awesome.

PIPPIN: Interesting. You have recently been doing some changing to your pricing.

BRAD: Yes. We did a little bit.

PIPPIN: Tell us about this.

BRAD: A little bit of a change. We had two tabs on our pricing page: one that said “Individuals,” and one that said for “Teams,” so licenses. Kind of two groups of licenses, and no one was getting to the “Team” tab or very few people. Then, on the “Individuals” tab, we had three packages. One was Elite, and that package had zero sales. No one was buying that.

Basically I decided, you know what? Let’s kind of kill two birds with one stone here. That’s such a horrible thing to say, isn’t it, though? Who is killing birds with stones anyway? But anyway, we removed the Elite package completely, and I kind of jammed the two of the team licenses on that one page, so now there are four licenses across.

PIPPIN: Yeah, so you know have Agency, Studio, Developer, and personal.

BRAD: That’s right. We’ve bumped up Agency and Studio a little bit. The installs have been bumped up. Agency is actually unlimited now, and there are no restrictions on the number of people that can have access to support or anything like that with Agency. Studio was bumped up to, I think, five. Five team members have access to support. Yeah, we’re just trying to make plans that are more attractive that people will actually buy, is basically the adjustments we’ve been making.

PIPPIN: Sure.

BRAD: Oh, and I’m running an A/B test on that page as well.

PIPPIN: That’s what I was going to ask. How are you measuring it to measure the change?

BRAD: You may not see. If you go to that page, you may not see the Agency license. I’m testing whether or not having three or four packages on that page makes a difference. If it happens to be that three is better than four, then we’re probably going to kill off one. Maybe merge Agency and Studio somehow or something.

PIPPIN: Sure. Yeah, I loaded up in two different sessions. One of them, I see Agency; one I don’t. Very cool.

BRAD: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, we’ll see how that A/B test shakes down.

PIPPIN: When did you make the change? Was it just in the last day or two?

BRAD: A couple weeks ago, but that’s not nearly enough time. Yeah.

PIPPIN: Sure.

BRAD: I think I need, like, three months, I think it’s going to be before I have a conclusive result.

PIPPIN: A/B tests are just tricky because you want to make assumptions really early on.

BRAD: I know.

PIPPIN: I found, so we’re running a couple of tests right now too, and every time I log in I’m like, “Oh, check it out. This one is clearly winning.” The next day, “Oh, that’s not right. Maybe I should just ignore this for a while.” But, it is kind of fascinating to look at results as they come in and how they change.

BRAD: Yeah, are you watching? There’s a conclusivity rating or whatever in Optimizely.

PIPPIN: Yeah. In Optimizely, yep.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: It tells you how many more visitors that you need before you get, like–

PIPPIN: We’ve got a couple running right now, and I just looked at it this morning. I’m going to open them back up. It gives number of visitors remaining to try and be significant.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: But then there’s also, in the main summary, a significance level, like how significant are these results so far. Right now we’re at 90%.

BRAD: Oh, well, then it’s probably–

PIPPIN: Yeah. They’re pretty significant so far.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: But they’re pretty fascinating. The tests we’re running right now, we actually have two of them, but the first one was related to pricing, which is awesome. On our pricing page, just like yours, we have decided to do a test with slashed pricing. The only change that we did is we simply put a slashed number above the price. You know how a lot of times people will see, like, okay, it used to be this number and now it’s this number.

BRAD: Right, so it’s like a strikethrough the number.

PIPPIN: It’s a strike, yeah.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Yep, so we’re playing with that, and we did it only on our personal plan. Instead of being $69, it’s now $49. We have it on both our homepage and our pricing page because both of those show the exact same grid, so we had to do it on both. Now what’s interesting is that they actually have very different results so far.

BRAD: Interesting.

PIPPIN: On our pricing page–

BRAD: I don’t know if that’s interesting or just confusing.

PIPPIN: To me, it’s a little bit of both. I don’t know what kind of insight it’s going to give us because we have to let this run for several more weeks for sure. A couple things: first of all, our pricing page gets about half the number of hits as the homepage, which would be expected. But so far, on the homepage, which both of these pricing grids are identical. They are the exact same thing, so we have to have them on both pages. Our homepage shows that by slashing the price, we have been able to increase revenue by 16.7%. But the slashed price on the pricing page shows a revenue decrease of 50%, which is really interesting.

There was one result earlier that we were looking at that was still very inconclusive, but it was basically more people purchased with the slashed price, but they were less valuable. Basically, we had more people purchasing the personal license, which is $49, and fewer people purchasing the professional, which is $199.

BRAD: Right, because you don’t have a slashed price on professional.

PIPPIN: Right, it’s only slashed on the personal, which kind of says, “Oh, look. This one is discounted, so I’m going to jump on that one right now.”

BRAD: It would be interesting if you moved it to the other one.

PIPPIN: Which is exactly what we’re going to do with the follow-up.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: We’re going to see how this changes over time. Then it might be that we’ll have a slash on both, we’ll only slash professional. We really want people to purchase professional is what we’re aiming for.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: I just thought it was fascinating that we could actually have an increase in purchases, but a decrease in revenue, which is awesome. I mean that’s not awesome, not necessarily. We want an increase in revenue more than increase in purchases, but seeing those kinds of results just by a little tiny change is just fascinating.

BRAD: Yeah. Yeah, it is. A/B testing can be pretty fun. I’m always surprised at how long they take. That’s the only thing.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: And you can only really run one at a time, right? It’s hard to run multiple because they can affect one another.

PIPPIN: You have to be very careful running multiple. That’s for sure.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: We do actually have a second one that we’re running, which I think they’re completely separate. There are always correlations between things, but we recently added a popup to subscribe to the newsletter on (indiscernible), which part of me really, really hates because I don’t like those. However, dang it, they work.

BRAD: Do they?

PIPPIN: They work. They really do. We’ve added several hundred new people to the list since we added it, and quite a few a day. But one thing that we decided to do was to not just say, “Hey, will you subscribe?” We’re saying, “Hey, if you subscribe, we’re going to give you an automatic 10% discount as well,” which then will get emailed to you, which definitely makes a huge difference. Instead of just getting people on the list, we’re also making it far more likely that they’re going to go ahead and purchase.

What we did is we’re doing a really basic test where one version of the popup will show that they can get a discount. That’s the first line on the popup: “Subscribe and get a 10% discount.” The other version of the popup is that text is at the bottom of the popup, so it has different reasons why you want to subscribe, et cetera. Then, at the bottom says, “Oh, and you can get a 10% discount by subscribing.” Interestingly is that the one where it displays it at the bottom only has converted twice as well as the one where we put it up front and personal.

BRAD: Whoa, that is crazy.

PIPPIN: Which kind of baffled me. I would have expected the other way around.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: But we’ll see. That one, it hasn’t run long enough to be super conclusive.

BRAD: How do I get to that? It’s AffiliateWP.com, right?

PIPPIN: Affiliate WP, yep. Navigate around the site, and then move your mouse out of the window.

BRAD: I’m not getting it. It’s just not — I’ve been trying that while you’ve been talking, and it’s just not going.

PIPPIN: Let’s find out. Maybe we broke it. That’d be interesting. No, it works for me. It’s possibly you’ve already seen it. It cookies people.

BRAD: Oh, so if I’ve already X’d it, then it won’t come back.

PIPPIN: Yeah. If you open a new incognito window or clear your cookies, then you should get it.

BRAD: Yeah, yeah. Oh, there it is. Boom.

PIPPIN: Yep.

BRAD: There it is. Okay. It’s at the bottom for me. It said 10%.

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: Okay, but it’s still in view.

PIPPIN: That’s the one that’s converting better.

BRAD: They don’t have to scroll to see the 10%.

PIPPIN: No, no. The only thing, it’s the first line or the bottom line.

BRAD: Right. I see.

PIPPIN: Yeah, yeah, so the one where it’s at the bottom is almost twice as good so far, which is weird.

BRAD: So weird.

PIPPIN: Yeah. I would not have expected that at all.

BRAD: How early on are you, though, in that? How conclusive are you?

PIPPIN: It’s still pretty early. Right now we’re at 2,600 impressions with a conversion rate of 1.82% overall. Honest, we need to see 10,000, 20,000 impressions before we really make an assumption. I think this has been running — we did this during San Diego, so just over — last weekend, I was at WordCamp San Diego, and we launched it, I think, while in the airport or something.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: It’s only been going for a few days. Once it goes for another two weeks or so, then I think we’ll have some more solid data to really be conclusive.

BRAD: Cool. While we’re talking about pricing, I wonder. I’ve been considering how to price the Amazon S3 and CloudFront Pro plugin that we’re going to be releasing soon. We’ve been discussing it internally, and the thing that we’ve kind of gotten to is that it kind of makes sense to price it based on the size of the media library. If you had a site that had 50,000 items in your media library, you would pay more than a site that has 100. It seems fair to me. It just kind of makes sense. But we’ve been getting some backlash on that idea.

PIPPIN: You might have to remind me how part of the plugin works. Does it interact with your own servers at all, or is it only their own?

BRAD: Oh, it’s theirs. Yeah, it doesn’t touch ours.

PIPPIN: I’d be curious on what are people saying, the people that are unhappy about that potential pricing. What are their reasons?

BRAD: We haven’t gotten feedback from a ton of people. It’s really just, I think, two or three people so far.

PIPPIN: Sure.

BRAD: Just in the comments of the blog post that I put out, the sneak peek blog post. The comments were generally around just not being in line with pricing, with other plugin pricing, because no one does it this way. No one prices based on the size of the media library. People were just saying, “Well, why don’t you just do it per site like everybody else?” I guess we’re back to expectations again, right?

PIPPIN: Right. One of the reasons why I was asking about whether or not your servers are used is because, at least in my expectations, when I see somebody that is pricing based upon usage, it’s because the more the system is used, it’s interacting with their own servers in some way. The more it’s used, or the more files that are processed, the more expensive it is for you to run the plugin.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: You as the provider.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: But in this case, I’m not sure that applies because everything is on their own servers.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: It’s almost more of an arbitrary fee.

BRAD: Right.

PIPPIN: I don’t necessarily disagree with you.

BRAD: Actually, you know what? You just nailed it. That was the word that was used is artificial, that it’s an artificial limit.

PIPPIN: There we go.

BRAD: I think that’s what you’re trying to say, right?

PIPPIN: Yeah.

BRAD: It seems like an artificial limit. I guess my feeling about that though is that sites is also an artificial limit, right? The number of sites that a plugin is allowed to be applied to, that a license is.

PIPPIN: Yeah. I think that can apply. I think that makes sense.

BRAD: It’s also artificial, right? Really, no matter what you do, it’s always going to be artificial.

PIPPIN: In a way, we use sites as an artificial limit because the idea is, okay, if we’re going to support you, we’re going to support you on this site, and we’re going to support you on this site. It’s more work for us normally.

BRAD: Yes.

PIPPIN: Well, I’m not 100% confident, but I think you could extend that argument to also say it’s more work for us to support you on larger sites because there’s more likelihood of something to go wrong.

BRAD: Yes, exactly. Exactly. The plugin needs to work harder on your giant, high traffic website. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s just something we’re kind of still discussing and thinking about. But, right now it seems to make the most sense to do it that way. But, we’ll see.

PIPPIN: I want to see how that turns out or what you end up deciding.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: Is the release getting a little bit closer or still a ways to go?

BRAD: Getting a little bit closer. Probably, I’d say a month and a half out. Yeah. I think I said two months out the last podcast, so I think we’re on this artificial schedule.

PIPPIN: Getting closer.

BRAD: Yeah. We’ve been working on the CSS JS add-on, which is the ability to offload your CSS, your front-end CSS in JS to S3 and a CDN if you want. The idea is that, as we detect files being loaded into and displayed on the front-end, so as a CSS or JS file is enqueued using the WordPress enqueuing system, we hook into that and then we queue it up to upload it to S3. Then, once it’s uploaded to S3, once that’s been completed, then we start serving it, so the hook will just overwrite your local URL with the S3 URL. That’s the idea there, but again we’re still working on it. We’re hoping that works and that it’s performant. We’re going to do the uploading in the background, obviously.

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: We don’t want people sitting, waiting for the page to load and the assets are going to S3 the whole time. It’d be like ten-second page load time. That’d be great. Yeah. Have you been listening to the Startup podcast?

PIPPIN: I haven’t. I’m a terrible podcast host. I don’t listen to that many other podcasts. Most of the time when I listen to a podcast, it’s about brewing.

BRAD: I should challenge you to listen to this, and then we can talk about it because here’s the thing.

PIPPIN: Challenge accepted.

BRAD: He’s starting a business, and he’s going out looking for money. He’s looking for venture capital or angel investors. He’s going about it that way, so it’s very contrary or very different than what we’ve done. We bootstrapped our businesses.

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: It’d be interesting to talk about it, I think.

PIPPIN: Definitely. I think it’s two completely different worlds.

BRAD: Yeah.

PIPPIN: For sure.

BRAD: For sure.

PIPPIN: At least in terms of running the business side of things.

BRAD: Yeah, and I recommend anyone listen to this thing too because the guy used to work for This American Life.

PIPPIN: Oh, that’s cool.

BRAD: On NPR.

PIPPIN: Right.

BRAD: I think it’s NPR that that was on.

PIPPIN: I’m pretty sure it was.

BRAD: Yeah. And so he’s just a really good storyteller, and it’s a phenomenally well-produced podcast.

PIPPIN: Was he behind the scenes or actually one of the hosts?

BRAD: He’s one of the producers, I think.

PIPPIN: That’s awesome.

BRAD: I think he was a producer.

PIPPIN: I got the chance to actually see This American Life live once.

BRAD: Oh, wow.

PIPPIN: During college, I worked as a stagehand at a theater, and they came and did a show at our theater, so I helped set it up and run the show.

BRAD: Nice.

PIPPIN: It was really cool.

BRAD: It sounds pretty cool. Should we read some of our iTunes reviews?

PIPPIN: Yeah, I think that’ll be a good way to wrap up. We’re actually very pleased to see quite a few reviews came in recently. For anyone that left a rating, thank you very much.

BRAD: Yeah. Here’s a funny story. Pippin was saying, “We’ve got 30-some reviews.” And I was like, “No, we don’t. I only see one review, Pippin. You’re crazy.” It turns out iTunes Canada is different than iTunes U.S. You have to switch between them to see the reviews in each respective country.

PIPPIN: Yeah. I don’t see the Canadian reviews, and you don’t see the–

BRAD: Isn’t that bizarre? That’s kind of a weird way to do it, I think.

PIPPIN: It’s a little strange, though I suppose it probably ties into the way that the app system works as well. If you’ve ever sold an app through iTunes, through the app store, you actually get sales reports for every single region.

They just changed pricing for apps in Japan, and so I get a new report for the Japanese sales. I get a new one for European. I get a new one for U.S. I wonder if it’s all kind of related to the same idea.

BRAD: That’s also kind of bizarre that they wouldn’t just have one report.

PIPPIN: Yeah, so there have been some great reviews, and we’re going to read a couple of them just as a way to say thanks. This comes from lex.me. They say, “Looking forward to the next episode. I just listen to the very first episode, and I know how much I am going to learn from here. Thank you! This podcast is exactly what I was missing.” That’s awesome. Great to hear that from the get-go there was something useful for listeners.

Then another one, this comes from Keichan7. “This is a must-listen for all WordPress developers – whether you do themes, plugins, or both. Keep up the good work, and I’m really excited to hear more!”

BRAD: Awesome.

PIPPIN: In total, we’ve had about 35 reviews. If you are one of those people, thank you very much for taking the time to do that. Again, my original offer still stands. Anybody who has written a plugin, if you want to drop us a review on iTunes, send me a note, either Twitter, email, through the contact form on the site, and I’ll be happy to take a look at your plugin for you too. I think that’s a wrap.

BRAD: Yeah. See you next time, I guess.

PIPPIN: All right, see you soon.

BRAD: Thanks, everybody.