[Mike]

And we're back with the Website 101 podcast. This is the podcast for people who want to learn more about building and managing websites. I'm one of your hosts, Mike Mella.

With me is Amanda Lutz. Hi, Amanda. Hey, Mike.

How are you? I'm well. It's just you and me again.

Sean's not here. But we've got some stuff to talk about. And right up front, I understand you have some news about something we discussed recently.

Tell us about that.

[Amanda]

Yes. So, dear listener, and also dear Mike, last podcast episode we were talking about what was up with WordPress and what's going on and the craziness of it. But if you have not listened to it, please go back and listen to Season 8, Episode 2, when we did sort of a brief covering of all of the craziness.

And it continues. So, again, a caveat, I haven't read all of the entire articles, but I just look at headlines, really. But as of Wednesday, December the 11th, a California district court judge said that the WordPress hosting firm Automatic and its CEO, Matthew Mullenweg, have been ordered to stop interfering with the business of rival WP Engine.

[Mike]

Uh-oh, hand slapped.

[Amanda]

Total hand slap. And then, apparently, what happened, according to Reddit, and we'll share these links in the show notes, the Reddit headline is that the WordPress CEO rage quits their community Slack after the court injunction.

[Mike]

Mullenweg himself.

[Amanda]

Mullenweg himself. So, here are a couple quotes. And, again, I don't know where these quotes came from.

If somebody shared them from the Slack channel, it's hard to imagine wanting to continue to work on WordPress after this. I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.

[Mike]

Holy cow.

[Amanda]

And then he changed his Slack name to gone, and with the emoticon of a skull.

[Mike]

Skull emoji. Wow. So, it gets even more childish.

[Amanda]

More childish, more ridiculous, a complete temper tantrum. Yeah. So, Automatic is going to have to remove that checkbox from downloading WordPress files at wordpress.org.

Yeah, we talked about that. We talked about that. And, yeah, there are, like, just reading over the Reddit thread is amusing.

It's entertaining. It's, again, super childish.

[Mike]

Soap opera.

[Amanda]

It is a total soap opera. You're absolutely right. So, anyway, that was stuff that happened in just the last couple days.

[Mike]

Wow. So, we got that episode out just in time. I guess we did.

Or maybe we should have waited.

[Amanda]

Maybe.

[Mike]

We would have had this as the news.

[Amanda]

I bet there's going to be more. This is not the end, clearly.

[Mike]

Right. That's right. Okay.

Well, thank you for that update.

[Amanda]

You're welcome. That was exciting.

[Mike]

So, at the time of this recording, we're getting into the holidays. How are you doing with your Christmas shopping? Yeah, I see you've got some Santa in the background there.

How's your Christmas shopping going? Are you ready? Are you not ready?

[Amanda]

I had started it a fair amount ahead of time, which was great because things got delivered. And then Canada Post went on strike. And then, apparently, all of the other package delivery companies were like, it's too much volume.

Starting from this date, you can't order anything or it just won't get to us. I think Amazon deliveries are still happening pretty okay, but from literally anywhere else. I think that FedEx has just thrown in the towel.

So, I had a good start. My semester's over, thankfully. So, the marking's done, the marks are in.

And so, I've got next week where I can go to physical stores and finish up. But I was at a physical store recently for light bulbs. And it was a hassle to find the right section.

It was impossible to find anyone to ask for help. And when I finally found the right section, there were two options. So, as much as I want to support real, actual physical stores, every time I go in one, it's like, this is why I don't like it.

This is why nobody likes it.

[Mike]

Yep. I had this similar experience. I had to buy – I'll get to the technical stuff in a second here.

But just to finish this story, I had to buy a floor vent cover. And it had to be a certain fit. I went to Home Depot, bought this thing for $22, came home.

It doesn't work. Now I've got to find time to go back in and return the thing. So, that's – I'll get the money back, but that's an hour and a half in total out of my life that I've spent going there and then going back.

And it's just like – it's easier when it's Amazon, but I don't like the idea that I'm buying from Amazon so much.

[Amanda]

I agree with everything you're saying.

[Mike]

All right. Well, wouldn't it be nice, Amanda? Yeah.

If you could type a keystroke on your keyboard and all of a sudden all of your Christmas shopping was done like a shortcut almost to get everything ready for Christmas. Would that be awesome?

[Amanda]

Dude, that is the jankiest segue I have ever heard.

[Mike]

Let me just finish it at least so people know what the hell I'm talking about. So hard to make that happen.

[Speaker 3]

I know, I know.

[Mike]

I'm not – I don't have that solution unfortunately for anybody, for you or our listeners. But today, and this is where the segue comes in, we are talking about shortcuts of all types. So, it's very broad.

Some of it will be about shortcuts in software, shortcuts in website content management systems, things like that. And hopefully there's enough stuff here that we'll mention that could apply to both web developers and people who work with web developers. So, whether you own the website or work on websites, maybe we can help you out and save you some time in your life because I love shortcuts.

Yes. How about you?

[Amanda]

I use them constantly all the time. I do have to say first, hey, listener sitting at home, it might be kind of hard to like hear about typing on a podcast, but we're going to do our best to just mention a few of them that are the most important. I think that the keyboard shortcuts are so helpful, they're so handy, and especially more so when I was teaching the first semester class, I was shocked at how many students just didn't know basic keyboard shortcuts.

Control-A to select all, Control-C to copy, Control-V to paste, Control-S to save. And of course, those are all on the Windows machine, and if you're on a Mac, they're all the same, but it's just instead of the Control key, it's Command.

[Mike]

Yes. Anytime we say anything today, if she says Control, I say Command, it's the same thing. I use a Mac, she uses Windows.

We're not going to go back and forth saying that stuff.

[Amanda]

But it was always very surprising. I honestly thought that what would they be now? Gen Z, I guess, is that who is in college right now?

I would have thought that people of Gen Z who just have been online and on computers and using technology for literally their entire lives, that they would maybe be better. A lot of them are good at typing, but they just don't know these really basic keyboard shortcuts, and it was surprising.

[Mike]

Yes, and you know something that just quickly that makes me hyper aware of what you just said? There is an idiom or something, like an expression that people have started to use that I've noticed a lot lately from other people. I actually don't like it at all.

It bothers me. What they say is when they're trying to say, let's focus on this thing. Like if you're having a conversation and you want to drill down into something, a lot of people now say, let's double click on that.

[Speaker 3]

Have you ever heard that?

[Mike]

I've heard it multiple times from different people, and the reason I'm bringing it up now is because it's a mouse use thing. A lot of these shortcuts are keyboard things. You type on your keyboard.

So I think the fact that sayings like that are becoming popular shows how often people use their mouse and not their keyboard.

[Amanda]

I guess.

[Mike]

I'm a huge keyboard guy. Love just doing everything on the keyboard.

[Amanda]

Well, I think that you and Sean also both probably use your keyboard even more than I do because you both have talked about using the keyboard to like, what is your Google search keyboard shortcut? Yeah.

[Mike]

Tab, enter, enter.

[Amanda]

Yeah. To get to the first result.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

To get to the first result and then follow that link. But it's like, I don't. I don't even do that.

[Mike]

Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into this and see and talk about some of the things that we do use, things we do in the shortcut realm.

Do you want to like start with, you alluded to this a little bit earlier, just general keyboard shortcuts that are available in, you know, website content management systems or what have you. So what are some of those?

[Amanda]

Well, it's even just like software, pretty much just all computer software as well. That's right. So for the keyboard shortcuts, one of the things that I do a lot is zooming in and out, you know, making things bigger, making them smaller.

And you can do that by doing a control and the plus sign to, to zoom in and then control and the minus sign to make it smaller. Of course you can.

[Mike]

You go ahead. Sorry.

[Amanda]

You can also do that with the keyboard and with the mouse. If your mouse has a, has a scroller on it, I hold the control and scroll up to make it bigger and scroll down to make it smaller. And then to get back to the default, you just do control zero on the number keypad, not the numbers across the top, but the number keypad control zero.

We'll take you back to the default.

[Mike]

So on my computer, the one, the numbers across the top, it also works for that zero. It's not just the number pad yet.

[Amanda]

Well, here, let me try it right now.

[Mike]

So yeah, go for it. So we're talking about accessibility stuff generally and the number of times it doesn't work for you.

[Amanda]

No, but I might've gone like just way too big.

[Mike]

All right. Well, while you fix that, um, yeah, I have a lot of website clients who want to, you know, allow people to, you know, make the text bigger. And they always ask for, can you have one of those little buttons with the three A's and the, and you click them and I'm always telling them, you know, you could, maybe we should just teach people how to do this on their computer and it will work on every single website they ever visit for the rest of their life.

And it's control plus control minus. And when you watch them learn that and you see their eyes light up, wow, that, and this works everywhere yet. You don't need these, these little buttons everywhere that do it for that particular website, you know?

[Amanda]

Yeah.

[Mike]

So, um, yeah, that's a, that's a great one.

[Amanda]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Make the text bigger and smaller control plus control minus.

[Amanda]

Yeah.

[Mike]

It's that simple.

[Amanda]

Another one that I've learned lately, um, is, uh, on a windows machine, at least, I don't know what it would be on a Mac machine. If you hold the windows button, if you have a windows button on your keyboard and then hit a period or as some people call it full stop, cause that's how I read it. Windows key plus full stop.

And I was like, what is the full stop? But yeah, so the windows key and the period and on your monitor, it'll pop up a little modal window that shows all of the emoticons. All of the emojis.

[Mike]

Oh, okay.

[Amanda]

And so then that's a very easy way that you can just like drop one into any text field anywhere. Like I have, it works with visual studio code. It works with notepad.

It works with fields on web pages.

[Mike]

Interesting. I did not know that. I don't think there's any similar thing on a Mac.

Maybe there is, but we obviously don't have a windows key, so I'm not sure what that would be, but that's, that's interesting. Yeah. That's a good tip.

[Speaker 3]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Cause I often forget on the rare occasions when I do use emojis, I often forget what the name of it is, like rolling eyes face or whatever it is, you know? So that's, that's useful to be able to scroll through them.

[Amanda]

Yeah. And, and, and it shows you like your most recent ones at the top, very much like a cell phone.

[Mike]

Right. Cool. Okay.

Regarding the plus plus and minus text size one, there's another one that I really like. I remember teaching this to a colleague of ours of just a couple of years ago. He was, he's a very, very advanced web developer and he didn't know that this existed and it blew his mind.

If so, when you're on a website and you scroll, you scroll vertically with your mouse wheel, right? If you encounter a, like a little whatever area of the page where there's a horizontal scroll bar on the bottom and you have to scroll left to right, you can still do that with your mouse wheel by holding down the shift key and still scrolling. It will scroll left to right all of a sudden instead of up and down.

That's a useful skill to have. Yeah. I love that one.

[Amanda]

So that reminds me of a scrolling shortcut that I found recently. And maybe you know about this using a web browser. I use Chrome, but I think it would probably work with all of the web browsers.

When you have the browser dev tools open and listener, if you are a developer, whenever you're doing any development, you should always have the browser dev tools open. You know how you can modify the CSS in that elements panel?

[Mike]

Yep.

[Amanda]

If the, if the value is a number, instead of like manually typing in the next number that you want to, to test, to see how it looks on the webpage, you can scroll up and down to increment that number or decrement that number by one. And then if you do shift, it, it increments it by 10. And if you do control, it does by a hundred.

[Mike]

Oh, cool.

[Amanda]

Or maybe control is 10 and shift is a hundred. It's like one or the other, but it's like that way. It's like, it's a very easy way to like, just sort of estimate.

Oh, like I want it to suddenly get a lot bigger.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

Nice. And then you can start fiddling with individual numbers if you want.

[Mike]

That's great. That's a good, that's a good tip. That reminded me of something just now, but now I've lost it.

So maybe it'll come back to me. I'll just move on. So come back.

Yeah. This is something that really helps me in web development with the CMS that we use often, which is craft, but it's in a bunch of different CMSs, but it's not in all of them. And that is controller command S to save the entry you're working on.

I do that just like instinctually now where I'm, I'm working on some entry. I want to save it. I hit command S and when I'm in a CMS that doesn't have that feature, it drives me bonkers because when you do that and it's not programmed into the CMS to save the entry, it will open up a modal window that will ask you to save that entire page as an HTML file on your computer.

And that's not what I want anyway. No, I know. So that's a good one.

[Amanda]

That is, that is helpful. I also like, um, so yeah, with craft control S will, uh, control S will save it and then go back to the listing. But like control shift S will like save and save and continue.

[Mike]

Right. Yeah.

[Amanda]

So that you can like save and continue editing on the current page that you're on right now, which I also like.

[Mike]

And then there's another one that will save and then create a new entry. Right. What was that?

Do you remember that one? It's a, it's like maybe command shift S or I don't know, some, some combination where it will save the one you're working on, close it, and then start a new entry, which is great. If you're like entering a whole bunch of news articles or something like that, you want to do it one after another.

You don't have to go over to the mouse every time.

[Amanda]

Yeah. So it, it occurs to me that it's kind of funny that we're talking about how great all of these keyboard shortcuts are and we don't necessarily remember what they are off the top of our heads. But the thing is you find a shortcut that exists and you keep using it in that one instance.

And then it does become kind of muscle memory. So you don't, it's hard to talk about things that you just intuitively know about.

[Mike]

Yes. That's right. And I will, on that note, I'll add that in a lot of cases, when you're using an app that has a lot of shortcuts built into it, you can often hit shift question mark, and that will open a modal window with a whole list of all their shortcuts.

For example, if you use Gmail, the web interface of Gmail for your emails client, if you hit shift question mark, it'll open this big thing and it'll tell you all the shortcuts that are in there. There's a bunch of software packages that, that have that, this, this little menu to get to the shortcuts. So that's a great way to sort of refresh your memory when you forget them.

[Amanda]

So, and so I think that those are just like generic keyboard shortcuts that probably work in like the majority of all of the software, I think.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

What I wanted to do next was get into any specifics. Like what are some of your specifically your operating system or specifically visual studio code or specifically something else? What are some other shortcuts that you like?

[Mike]

Yeah, let's see. I know that I, so I've mentioned before on the show, I use a to-do list sort of manager called GQs and it's, it works with Google's ecosystem, like Google calendar and all that stuff. The guy who made it, um, is a big keyboard guy, which I am as well.

And so every single thing in it you can do with the keyboard. Now I'm not going to go through all the different shortcuts that are available there. You know, obviously there's too many, but the picture, a to-do list where you can scroll through the to-do list items, you can choose one, you can add a new one.

You could make one nested under another. All of that is possible with the keyboard only. And you'd be surprised how quickly you can start operating one of these tools if you don't have to constantly go from your mouse to your keyboard, dragging the mouse pointer around, clicking this, clicking that.

Anyway, it's great. So that's a great example that I have. And that also has one of those menus with the question mark key to pull up all their shortcuts, uh, which I really like.

So that's one of my favorites. Uh, how about you?

[Amanda]

Um, I have in my laziness, I have suddenly fallen in love with aliases.

[Mike]

Okay.

[Amanda]

So, so on my windows machine, uh, I have installed, it's called, uh, WSL, which is like the, the windows subsystem for Linux or something like that. And it, so it basically opens a window, but it's, it's a, it's a Unix operating system. It's like Linux that's happening right there.

And you've got like, it's a whole different directory structure. And that's where I do all of my local development. So in there, of course you can type all of these, like, you can, this is where you do all of like the command prompt typing, um, any of the command line instructions.

And some of them get big and some of them get long and some of them get complicated. And who's got time to remember everything, you know?

So that you want to type out in full. So what I've learned is that there is a like a profile file a personal file that's part of the the WSL or part of Linux or whatever that you can go in and you can like type new shortcuts And you can just create whatever you want and so you can it's it's literally called alias if anybody out there is interested in googling on how to do this yourself and So the command that you save in this file is alias space the shortcut that you only want to type space the big long crazy thing that you could not be bothered to type all the time and now instead of having to remember how to Find and delete and search for and do whatever I just type a very like a short one-word command that I made up It's pretty nice.

[Mike]

Nice. That's a good one I just remembered the thing I was going to talk about earlier that you reminded me of and I forgot so I'm gonna bring that Right now you share. Yeah, so this is just for anyone who uses the web at all This is gonna be helpful for anyone if you don't know this When you're in a when you're filling out a form and you get a drop-down box Where you can select let's say your country and there's a list of hundreds of countries or whatever province or state or whatever you don't have to scroll through and find yours you can type the first letter of your country and If in the case of Canada, I think the first one you're going to hit is Cameroon or something But if you hit it again The same like the letter C it will select the next one and then one more will get to Canada so I've gotten in the habit of CCC and enter and that's gonna pick Canada but the point is just just type the letter when you're in a Select box there like a drop-down box and it'll skip down to that one You don't have to scroll through and and spend all this time looking.

So that's what I was gonna.

[Amanda]

Yeah, I Like it. I like it when When websites don't just use Regular select fields. There's a couple third-party JavaScript libraries that do really cool things with select fields And so I like the idea of being able to type and have it filter down all the results it could be in the middle or the beginning or in the end, but you know, it's Filters it down a lot.

[Mike]

Yeah, those are helpful What yeah, I'm talking the one I'm referring to obviously is the basic HTML field that you get. Yeah with browsers now in our notes here you have a note that says Exclamation point then tab in VSC starts with HTML template. Can you explain what that is?

I'm not even sure I know that shortcut. What is that?

[Amanda]

So in Visual Studio code when you just create a completely blank HTML file so just you know index dot HTML and it's empty and there's nothing in it at all and instead of trying to remember Or is it a docked exclamation point doc type right and then the HTML tag and then the head tag and then that like really weird Meta tag for the viewport. Yeah Instead of remembering all of that you literally on your keyboard just have to type exclamation point and then hit the tab key Okay, and that will fill in it fills in probably about eight or a dozen lines. It's got like I said exclamation point doc type HTML had a couple meta tags a title tag closing head tag opening body tag Closing body tag a closing HTML tag, but then like also the cursor is like sitting right there Empty line in the body and it's like it's so you're just ready to go.

[Speaker 3]

Okay.

[Amanda]

There are also a lot of other Visual Studio code shortcuts that I have not looked into or gotten to but there are things like there's a shortcut for like if you if you wanted to make like eight list items Okay, there's some shortcut that will kind of like loop through this format that you made and make eight You write items. Yeah that look like that.

[Mike]

Yeah, I so I use I think I still have this running There was a like a plug-in called Emmett for for Visual Studio. Oh, yeah And that has a lot of those where you can type, you know, I don't know P Followed by an asterisk followed by a number and it give you four paragraphs or whatever it is. Yeah So, yeah, I think I still have that running I've had it for years And it's yeah, that's a good tool for those shortcuts.

And I actually think I have a command that does that HTML Sort of boilerplate copy that you talked about. Yeah But I didn't know that VSC had their own set. Of course they do.

Of course, there are tons of VSC Shortcuts, so that's a good call.

[Amanda]

Well, yeah, and they've I mean with Visual Studio code There are so many extensions that will give you so many other Shortcuts a prettier to make like the indentation look better. Yeah there's a other shortcuts the no other extensions that if you Is it part of just Visual Studio code? Will you start you type the open tag and it will automatically type the closing tag?

And then put your cursor in the middle so that you can start doing that Yeah, so and I mean like sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's a pain because I Like typing the closing tag because it's like it's like this I'm anal retentive about it. It's like I opened it. I want to make sure it's closed where and how I want it to be.

[Mike]

Yeah For the longest time I was really picky about having I still am I guess when I would type in a tag that doesn't have Closing tag like it like an image tag. I would have space Slash at the end where you don't need that and a lot of people like why are you doing that? And I just I'm old school and I do that because we used to do that a self self closing tag Yeah, it looks better.

[Amanda]

It does look better It looks way better and so Visual Studio code does a lot of stuff but all text editors I used to work with a text editor called notepad plus plus. Yeah, and they have this really cool Macro function Okay that you could you would start a macro recording and then you would do something on The screen typically I found it was easiest to do it with like keyboard stuff. For example Go down to the next line and hit the end button the end key on your keyboard and then go back five spaces and type something and Then you would stop the recording and then you would just say run macro and it would run the exact Commands that you just did go down a line go to the end go back five spaces type the exact same thing And then you could also have it, you know, so that would run to the end of file So if you've got like a really long data file that you need to go in and like change like delete every third line Find all of this attribute and change the value to that like whatever it is it would be really cool to just like like go through and do all of this for you instead of manually having to Find the next one make the change find the next one make the change Yeah, it makes me a little bit sad that Visual Studio Code doesn't have my yeah

[Mike]

I was gonna say that's that sounds like a very useful Photoshop had something like that actually where you could make a It was called a droplet or something where I assume it's still I haven't used Photoshop in a long time But I assume the new one has that too where you can like record Say opening an image file resizing it, you know or cropping it or whatever and then saving it to a certain directory and Then you'd save that whole set of actions as a an icon that sits on your desktop and you could drag a folder of Images into the icon and it would just repeat that task for each image So that's a good way to process images really fast right out of your camera.

[Amanda]

Yeah Still still charge the client for your full time.

[Mike]

But yeah, you just you just saved yourself a couple hours I I had to take the time to learn that there was such a shortcut and yes I always always well, that's that's a big joke in development, right?

[Amanda]

It would take me 20 minutes to do this thing, but instead I'm gonna take an hour to learn how to automate it, right?

[Mike]

Yes, and I'll never have to spend those 20 minutes on it ever again Yeah, that is an important thing to keep in mind that if anytime you are yeah automating things make sure that It's you're not spending time efficient. Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah, there's an app that I use on the Mac called raycast that I just started using in the past few months It's really cool.

And it's basically this sort of there's like a repository of all these commands that people publish and It just basically lets you do a bunch of stuff on your computer Like I have one that I ran right before this that will kill all my Notifications during during this podcast so like don't send me any email stuff or slack messages or whatever And I just type a keystroke and it instantly mutes all my apps kind of thing and it has a whole bunch of different features like that resizing images or You know scaling things it's great and I've started to use that a lot it's Mac only unfortunately But I'm sure there's something similar for Windows for anyone who's interested in that

[Amanda]

Yeah, it doesn't Shawn have a thing. It's like a physical It's almost like a keyboard. What was that?

[Mike]

Yeah, I'm so the notifications that I am getting are coming in on my phone not on my computer.

[Amanda]

That's where it's not Yeah, I didn't work stupid. Anyway, no, but she doesn't Shawn have like an actual physical Yes board that's got like big buttons on it.

[Mike]

And so you like just hit one of the buttons in it Yeah, I think it's called program it to do things right is a physical Thing I think it's called a stream deck if I recall correctly. It's familiar a lot of like podcasts Streamer influencer types have that where they can program in You know dim the lights if you have like smart lights and stuff and open up this app and start recording or whatever Yeah, that's right. He has one of those and I think he likes a lot.

That's a that's a good one So you want to talk a little bit more about? Tools that are specifically for You know making shortcuts you you kind of alluded to one earlier with your Which one was it? I guess it was a WSL thing where you can create your own shortcuts Yes, if someone were to ask me what my favorite app is, this is probably what it is.

It's called Keyboard maestro. I think I brought this up on the show before too it's a Mac only thing, but I think there's a Windows version called auto hotkey because I used to use that when I was a Windows person So keyboard maestro is this app that lets you? With a really useful like interface a very simple interface It lets you create a series of commands on your computer and then run them with a keyboard shortcut And it's really useful because I do it for Let's say every time I start up a new start up a project that I'm working on like a website for a client.

[Speaker 3]

Mm-hmm.

[Mike]

I Type one keystroke and it will open my editors which for me is cursor it docks it to the left of my screen Starts up the project that I'm talking about Opens a Chrome browser logs into the control panel of craft or whatever opens another window with the front end open and Uses my one passwords to log into all this stuff starts my work timer and then a voice comes on and says Ready to work on and then the name of my project. So Actually says that to me at the end and it's so cool because so much stuff, you know when you start DDEV Which is our you know local development environment with a database and all that stuff It can take a minute or a minute half sometimes with all those Well, I think the mutagen thing, you know that thing that it does sometimes where it has to like Archive all your images or something. I don't know what it's doing.

But yeah, sometimes it takes a long time So this whole process might take I don't know a minute and a half or two minutes to start up So I've started like I can fire that up and I could go get a coffee Or I could meditate for a few minutes take some deep breaths and it's great.

[Amanda]

I love I haven't I would I'm wanted to look Into that a little bit more. I'll look to see if there's a Windows equivalent. You suggested it might be Auto hotkey Yeah, that sounds cool Can you specify the voice that talks to you at the end?

[Mike]

You can but it's within a menu of voices It's not like you can get Samuel L. Jackson to say something or whatever, which would be pretty cool But it's like are there are there some pretty good voices? No, not really.

I do wish the voices were better There's basically one cool voice of this, you know the typical Woman, like almost like a Siri voice But then every other voice is like really old-school lo-fi like Stephen Hawking almost kind of voice like really low low quality So, you know who you know what voice I think should be on absolutely everything is how? from Everywhere I do mess around with those voices with With chat GPT, they don't have a bunch of different voices you can choose from. Oh, do they Scarlett Johansson's is no longer one of them But they do have some some cool ones on there.

So with the accents and stuff. There's like a British guy and stuff Oh, cool. Yeah, pretty nice.

[Amanda]

I did not know that I might have to I bet that the same and that's the problem though You save all of this time with all these really productive shortcuts and then you go waste all of this time Playing with GPT and different places.

[Mike]

That's right. That's true Speaking of AI we should mention that that's of course another way you can achieve shortcuts all over the place. Yes Especially with with the code editor we were talking about early where you can You know type a certain thing and it will add like the closing tag or whatever Very often now if you're using AI and cursor or in VSC You know, it tries to predict what you're gonna write now, right?

So if you type an opening tag, it will automatically add the closing tag And if you just hit tab to accept the suggestion or whatever It works. So that's it. That's that's built in with AI that stuff It is.

[Amanda]

Yeah, but that's super jumped up a lot when I first started using the github copilot I was teaching a class from home. So like online and I was supposed to be, you know, writing some JavaScript But because it's students and I'm trying to teach them. I like to go through one line at a time and with the first demo and I started typing and then github copilot was just like Is this what you meant to do?

[Mike]

And it was like well Yes in the long run, but Trying to teach Yeah, it's funny some of that stuff is kind of creepy how it knows You know, like if you cut you copy something in one template and go in another template Yeah, you want to paste it over here, right? Like, you know, I mean, yeah I just want to say I have started using this other thing out So I was saying I don't like the mouse and I use the keyboard more Well, I've leveled up again and I'm trying to use my voice more because I've started using this tool called whisper flow So on a Mac when you hit The function key hold it down or hit it twice or something like that It starts listening on your microphone and you can talk to your you can say something to your computer And when you release it, it will paste that text into whatever field your cursor was in something like that So it just lets you dictate text. Do you write code? Do you write code that way?

No, so Whisper flow is a is an enhanced version of that with AI and stuff But no, I don't obviously I'm not gonna sit there and go, you know, open bracket section Like that would be stupid But agreed but funny, but it is useful for you know well say typing emails for example if you're responding or even texts like it's really great when you're messaging in slack or if you're responding to Someone just hit that and say the word like they're standing in front of you say the sentence and for me It's much faster than me trying to type it and then correct stuff and all that stuff So yeah, I'm testing that out now and it's not for everybody I guess but I'm a big fan

[Amanda]

We have a smart house. So we've got the light switches and we've got the plugs and we've got Google devices it's hiding but we've also have Alexa devices and so we've got like a bunch of routines set up and we can turn lights on and off and and send notifications throughout the through announcements throughout the house and Timing and we've got like we've got like a couple just spare Smart plugs, so we've got now one for the Christmas lights and we've got one for the for the fireplace mantel lights And we've got like a weatherproof one for outside for the outside lights. And so it's nice to just be like, you know Alexa to all a good night and just all of the Christmas lights turn off.

[Mike]

Oh my wow, that's cool Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty good. Yeah, we have a we're I like the Google Mini we had it. We have a mini and it's like you can I've got one upstairs Yeah, yeah get it to play Spotify stuff or whatever and it's it's fun I've also got my pixel watch set up.

[Amanda]

So it's all using visit Google's Gemini They're all starting to interact with each other as well. And I just saw an email apparently the pixel watch will now work with the Whatever Google's doorbell is Yeah, I Just bought one of those Nest.

[Mike]

Oh, yeah, is it nest nest?

[Amanda]

That's right the nest doorbell. Apparently I could interact through my watch Comes to the door. No, can we don't have we've got a different doorbell.

[Mike]

So you can't see Someone on your watch though.

[Amanda]

You don't see the doorbell screen like the email the camera The the marketing email that I received Saying hey go out and buy a nest doorbell showed on the on the pixel face The video. Oh, wow of what was happening outside. Oh, yeah So that is that is like the ultimate like life shortcut.

[Mike]

Yes.

[Amanda]

I'm just gonna sit here And look at what I don't even have to pick up my phone anymore I just have to move my arm to see who's at the front door You don't have to go to the door to tell them to go away. You can just tell me go away Right, that is correct.

[Mike]

Yeah, I'm a big fan of that stuff too. That's good.

[Amanda]

Okay All right, anything else? No, I don't think we need to talk about any more shortcuts But yes in that we've just barely hit the tip of the iceberg I would love to hear from any listener what shortcut they like to use if they have Tried and true shortcuts in a single piece of software or if they have like a shortcut tool Like what Mike was talking about I'd like I like learning about them and seeing what's available and what's out there and So yeah, you can always send us a message at website 101 podcast comm slash contact

[Mike]

Yeah, or hit us up on a social network that you might or might not find us on Just look look for the podcast title and you'll see us comments on YouTube We are still doing lunch bites on YouTube, which is our sort of Live show the first and third Wednesday of every month at 1130 a.m. Eastern Time We talk about random stuff for a half hour. So join us there, too Yeah, and let us know all your shortcuts.

That'd be great Okay. Well, this is fun. Thanks Amanda was thank you Mike and thanks listener.

[Amanda]

Bye The website 101 podcast is hosted by me Amanda Lutz.

[Mike]

You can also find me online at Amanda Lutz comm And by me Mike Mella find me online at be like water dot CA or on socials at Mike Mella I'm Sean Smith your co-host.

[Sean]

You can find me online at my website caffeine creations dot CA and LinkedIn at caffeine creations

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.)