Customer Experience as a Service. I'll teach you how to do (and train) tech support that doesn't suck. https://teapaw.org/t.co/Y31BEl3ymb
Greenwood, SC
Joined March 2008
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Cheat Sheet for Sustainable Support:
Book ($5): benlikes.us/ssbook
Tool ($25): benlikes.us/crrtool
CX Audit (starts at $975): benlikes.us/audit
Coaching ($535): benlikes.us/consultlander
These prices WILL go up.
Yes I know, this is a rage bait/joke/troll post that's just trying to do numbers.
But also: there are a LOT of people (who just voted for way-left-of-fiscal-center politicians) literally asking this question today. They are the same ones who want to take all the billionaire money and spread it around.
Stay in school, kids. Maybe actually pick up a book while you're there.
I'm a fiscally conservative dude.
Out of love for the poor and the immigrant and my family, I wouldn't vote for any party flirting with socialism, ever.
So watching the whole country give the Democrats a mandate to sprinkle a little cyanide on our pound cake is... interesting.
To be crystal clear: the Republicans deserve every bit of the trouncing they are getting. I just hope it doesn't come at the expense of our economy. There's only so much of everyone else's money that we can take.
If your web host said anything other than "we've patched everything" in the past 23 hours, it is time to find a different web host.
I'll allow for some amount of fear-inducing proclamation about how bad this one was, but make zero room for "we can't update PHP" in 2026.
In my plugin Tech Support days we'd regularly run into hosts who told mutual customers that they couldn't update PHP (for one reason or another).
I can't imagine a world where that's a kosher response any longer.
If it took your host more than a few hours after 10 AM eastern yesterday to get things patched, I'd be asking very pointed questions about their plan to never let that happen again.
The comms didn't necessarily have to go out at 10:15, but the patches definitely should have been in progress at that point.
Cursor is going painfully slow and I am not sure it has anything to do with the PHPocalypse, but man it sure is annoying right now. I got stuff to do.
Today is why all of my @theWPsteward clients pay me more than they would pay {insert popular host} to host their sites:
- Patched every server within 10 minutes of the patch being released.
- did a fairly thorough check to ensure that nothing was compromised
- had full backups from every day over the past month (plus one more for good measure) in the event we needed to burn down the boxes and rebuild.
Clients knew none of that, and wouldn't know what to do if they did.
Was going to go to a session at this work conference, but I think all my geeks and I are waiting until 10AM to patch PHP or something?
What are the odds this is a psyop?
I'm at a conference for work this week. The keynote "speaker" was @LucaStricagnoli and it was the best "talk" at a conference I've ever been to. He opened with AC/DC before doing this one live: youtu.be/o2mkYv3JrjU?is=9Fo5…
The thing that keeps me using established software over my own vibe-coded alternatives is the demonstrated experience, competence, and helpfulness of the team behind that software.
I don't want to learn all of the hard-earned lessons that Katie's team has over the years. Vibe-coding my own alternative is signing up for a crash-course in hard knocks (that gets harder the more business-critical the vibe-coded bit is).
So the marching orders for plugin shops are to continue to demonstrate that you are (a) paying attention and (b) more knowledgable about the needs (as they relate to your service) of your customer base than they are.
Specialization and expertise still sells.
#SaveThePlugin Day 3: Today's task was to analyze how easy your plugin is to create with AI, and how to protect against this.
Scarily, my plugin would be difficult to recreate in its entirety, but most people only use a few features - and it would be easy to create them with AI. This is fairly inevitable and the best actions I came up with were:
- Proving the value of the plugin to our users by displaying data about the sales and revenue they're generating from the plugin. However, this would help with retention more than new sales.
- Highlight the reliability you get from using an established plugin with thousands of users, dozens of releases, a team behind it, etc. vs. using AI where you’re on your own and have to do all the testing and bug fixing yourself, including after each release of WP/Woo.
- I want to explore how to use AI to help our users get the most out of the plugin, for example suggesting which features to use based on their use case.
- Highlighting the features which are hardest to build with AI (e.g. live preview).
Yesterday's project: paint my office wall black so that when I throw more light at my face, it's not too bright behind me.
(I wore an obnoxiously bright shirt for tests)
ALT new "headshot" of my office setup with the wall painted black, my shirt is a hi-viz neon yellow and I'm grining at the camera.
I'd really like a time machine and a stack of Kid Rock Gospel albums (featuring a track with Eminem).
I'd go leave a copy on my own lofted dorm room bed in 2001 with a note that says Derek Webb isn't a Christian anymore. Hard to tell which item would be less believable.
And another site has been de-Kadenced (without even touching wp-admin) by my getting-pretty-great AI workflow. Pretty amazing stuff.
Today, while I was doing my day job, I told Cursor to pull one of my sites to local, replace the Kadence theme with Ollie, and rebuild it to look and function exactly like it currently does.
It worked.
It removed Kadence theme, Kadence Blocks (plus pro), recreated the Kadence forms (with Turnstile and all!)
Granted, it is a very simple 3-page brochure site, but I am blown away that I literally never even logged into WP-Admin, instead just coaching the agent through things.
Blown. Away.
This morning in checking up on this migration I finally logged into WP-admin and noticed some block validation errors in the editor. Told Cursor.
Cursor created a local admin user with WP-CLI, logged into the website in it's own browser to be able to read the dev tools log, found out the issue, resolved it, and pushed updated copies of the fix to the live site.
I definitely could have done all of that myself. It just would've taken a few hours to debug all the things. This took ~10 minutes only because I kept forgetting to go and approve each individual step.
What a time to be alive.
If all you see around you is pessimistic doomerism, no matter the field, that's an environmental problem. Find better and more intellectually diverse friends.
There is good news to be found. Start looking for it.
Good luck tends to beget itself.
Pro tip: Stop calling it "easy" in documentation or support.
benlikes.us/easy
AI is going to kill us all.
Also: Cursor can't remember (using any model) the things that I wrote in a MD file labeled "remember_this.md" in the directory entitled "Things to always remember"
But sure, it'll easily take over the weapons systems of the US government.
Given enough context and a human who wanted to use these frontier models for harm, (coupled with a checked-off punch-list of already-illegal activity) there's a chance that a model could break out and do nasty things.
We should prosecute people and companies who do those already-illegal things.
We certainly do not need additional legislation or guardrails imposed by congressional 80-year olds who have to have an intern find "where my email went to" because they rebooted and don't know the difference between a browser and an app on their windows machine that only ever gets software updates because that intern stays on top of it.
Ben Meredith retweeted
I’m relieved the government is going to fix AI. If the government is known for anything, it’s fixing and making things better. We are in good hands.
In all of the changes at Liquid Web since I left, it looks like the Tone Guide (and the rest of the Support Manual) that @learnwithmattc and I (along with others) put so much energy into has been functionally removed from the internet.
Its content was intentionally GPL from the outset, so I moved the tone guide here where it can live on and I left it named "GiveWP" so that OGs searching for it can find it: benlikes.us/tone