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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the Publish Press Podcast. I'm Steve Burge from Publish Press, and I'm here with my cohost, Dan.
Dan Knauss:Hi. I'm Dan Knauss from Multidots. And today, we spoke with Simea Mirki from Morntag in Switzerland about their family company for people working together now in, what is it, established family business working with publishers often, traditional publishers coming from print to digital and maybe increasingly the other way around from WordPress or some other publishing system and who still want to be able to do beautiful print design and, menus and things like that. I also talked about their tools they're using and how AI is impacting their work and their clients' industries.
Steve Burge:Yes. Simea and her family. And when I say family, we really do mean that. She has her dad, her husband, and her sister helping her out too. Her agency helps people navigate between different worlds, between different linguistic worlds because they have clients who need to deal in English, multiple versions of German, French, Italian.
Steve Burge:They have businesses that need to navigate all those different languages. And also, she helps them navigate between the old fashioned world of PDFs and magazines and navigate from there to the online world and to the world of AI and YouTube as well now. So consulting is a big part of what she does too, and this was a really fascinating conversation. Let's turn it over to Samir. Hey, Samir.
Steve Burge:Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Simea Merki:Thanks for having me.
Steve Burge:So, Samir, you are part of a company called Montague?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Exactly. We're based in Switzerland. Many people don't know where that is. It's south from Germany.
Steve Burge:Oh, well, you're part of a whole kind of the the German speaking part of Europe. Right? You're kind of in the North part of Switzerland up near Germany?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Exactly. From where I live, it's like half an hour to Germany. And the area is called Dachshund. So that means Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Simea Merki:And that's also where we where we have our clients in the Dachshund region.
Steve Burge:Okay. So you you speak German, obviously, excellent English as well. Okay. I was doing some googling about you before we got on the podcast, and you are a you're a singer as well. Right?
Simea Merki:Yeah. That's like a side hustle of mania.
Steve Burge:Sorry. And when I came across that, you sing in English, Bernese German, high German, German. It gets very complicated for us as as English speakers. So you can you can sing in English plus, like, three or four different versions of German as well?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. Many people actually don't know that. Switzerland has a very strong dialect. Some who have been at WordCamp probably heard it.
Simea Merki:It's not the it doesn't sound like German. And most German people will not understand when we speak. It's called Swiss German. And then each Canton in Switzerland. So each area has their own dialect, which is very diverse.
Simea Merki:So, for example, my husband came from another region in Switzerland. And at one point I had to translate between him and my grandma because they didn't understand the dialects. Yeah. So that's really as special for Switzerland. Also that we have four languages as national languages.
Simea Merki:So that would be German, Italian, French, and then one fourth language that's called rumanc. And, yeah, we're very multilingual here.
Steve Burge:Yeah. I don't think I've ever met a Swiss person that can't talk in two, three, four different languages. It's being multilingual is a natural skill growing up. Right?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Think so. It's also teach in schools, obviously, so you can't really get around it.
Steve Burge:Oh, so if you go to a school in Switzerland, you're going to learn multiple languages at the same time.
Simea Merki:Yeah. So I had English since kindergarten and then French from third grade on and German, obviously, since I I was able to read books because there's no written language for Swiss German. There's only the spoken language. So whenever you read, it's always high German. So basically, when you start reading books as a kid, you learn a second language.
Simea Merki:And then from then it goes on and you gradually gradually learn new languages. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So is that an advantage as a a publishing company, as a web design company, which Montag is, is an advantage to be to be based in the heart of Europe and to have all those those language skills? I mean, you must must be pretty good at building multilingual WordPress sites, publishing from a multilingual perspective. Is it an advantage in business?
Simea Merki:Yeah, I think it is an advantage because we're able to cater to that, and we know how important that is. But on the other side, it's a disadvantage when you think that WordPress is really not built for multilinguality. To some extent, we know our way around now, but we've had to figure out because you always have to use a plugin, there's no way in the core. So sometimes it feels like a disadvantage or I think, oh, how easy projects would be if they only were in one language. But on the other hand, it's a very interesting thing also to see because I see the whole editors teams of the magazines we cater to, and they have an Italian speaking team.
Simea Merki:They have a French speaking team. And for me, it's very interesting. But sometimes it's also stressful, to be honest.
Dan Knauss:How good is AI getting at at handling dialects and and Bernese German?
Simea Merki:Not at all.
Steve Burge:Little little better.
Dan Knauss:Fuck that. Not too good.
Simea Merki:Yeah. I would say not at all.
Dan Knauss:I was wondering.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Also, the that there's no grammar doesn't make it easier. Right? So you can't really teach AI. They have just they just need to listen and and understand how
Dan Knauss:have those. So Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Can't handle a
Steve Burge:there was
Dan Knauss:not enough source text to read. But, yeah, Quebec Quebecois, like Canadian French is gonna be a little a little harder for it to to manage. I haven't it seems like they've picked up a few things, but there's not that much source material to to process, though. So Yeah.
Simea Merki:No. No, that that seems to be the same. Yeah. In Switzerland, it's the same. We actually when we install WordPress, we always pick the original German.
Simea Merki:I don't like to call it original, but the high German one, because most plugins are also not translated to German Switzerland. So in the WordPress space, we basically stay with that German
Steve Burge:version. Oh, the German version from Germany or the Swiss German?
Simea Merki:No, the German German. Because, for example, one very good example is Elementor. When you install it, and you have your site in Swiss German or Germany, I think it's called German Switzerland or something like this. If you set it to that, some and actually many menu items in the back end are not translated in their English. So it's very stressful to work with Elementor when your site is set to German Switzerland, which happens with every other plugin.
Simea Merki:So it's really not a great user experience when you set your page to that. So we tend to really set our pages to just the German German because the probability of everything being translated is much higher there with all the PO files and all the translations that we have going on from the WordPress core and the plugins and the themes.
Steve Burge:Do you have a a favored approach to building multilingual sites in WordPress given you you do it so often? Do you use WPML? Do you use a a multisite approach? What's your preferred approach?
Simea Merki:So we really decide for each project, because I think there's several use cases for several types of multiline quality. So one would be you have the same content just directly translated. That's where you could think of tools like Weglot where you can automatically translate. That doesn't work with our projects, because we need the translations in our database. So we tend to stick with WPML or PolyLang.
Simea Merki:But we've, we have seen and built several types. So that may be a multi site that may not be a multi site, really depends on how the client wants to work and how their how their content also works in in the different languages.
Steve Burge:Okay. So Weglot is a SaaS service. It will offload all the content into its own database. But quite often, need all the content on your site in your own database. And and from there, it depends on exactly what needs they have as to which approach.
Steve Burge:You take WPML as one that keeps coming up, but also there's a company out of Germany, I believe, that will have true translate translation press.
Simea Merki:Oh, yeah. You you mean the plug in by site?
Steve Burge:Yes. I think they take a multi site approach.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. For most of our projects, that's a bit too complicated because we have one editor that basically looks for all of the content in every language. So we have not yet found a project that fits. But I think that will come up also, it's not that we say one plugin is the best, we always use that, because you really can't say it for all the projects that we built.
Simea Merki:And yeah, it really depends on the project on the workflows also on how you work with the offices that then translate if they need. There are certain file formats that they need for people to export and send to them so they can translate it. One is called XLIF files. And so it really depends on on all the things that our clients need. And then we basically have a list of things, and we check for which plugin does that the best.
Steve Burge:So you are not exactly new to to web design, to building websites, but Montag is not a was a publishing company originally. Right?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. We were really in the publishing space. It actually started when my dad learned InDesign when I was one year old. And that's when he started being self employed and teaching people InDesign.
Simea Merki:And so that's how I also came to the publishing industry. I was just a kid. And then at our table for lunch, we had people that learned InDesign with my dad. And then for lunch, they came and took a lunch break with my family. And so that's how I first got in touch with the publishing industry.
Simea Merki:And only after, I would say ten-fifteen years, we realized that there's actually, I would say, blue ocean out there for many publishing industry. Like, how do you say associations, for example, if they want to automate their content that they have, for example, living in Word documents and InDesign, if they want to automate to web or from web to print, they need a good system for that. And there are systems for that, but they are very license based. So they tend to be pricier. They tend to be big projects.
Simea Merki:When you implement it, you can't really start small. So that's when we realized that WordPress could actually be the solution for that. And that's how we came to WordPress. It's basically not a web first approach. But we searched for solutions, how we can cater to our clients, a content first solution so they can really care for their content and work on their content.
Simea Merki:The Gutenberg editor is great for that. So they work in their content. And then one day they publish it and it may go via the MySQL database from WordPress directly to InDesign. It may go directly to a PDF, or it obviously often goes to a web platform in some way, or even third party platforms, apps, etc. So, yeah, we basically came from printing to WordPress, to the web.
Simea Merki:Web is our secondary skill we learned. Yeah.
Steve Burge:I see. You have a lot of customers who may have a PDF designed in Adobe, and they need something that is affordable but still high quality to get all their content online. And a lot of the platforms that do it are expensive and, proprietary platforms. WordPress is a good option for these smaller companies that need need to digitize all their content.
Simea Merki:Yes. Yes. It is. That's that's what we see. Yeah.
Steve Burge:They what kind of customers do you have coming to you? You have people with, like, trade magazines, people who put out monthly PDFs?
Simea Merki:Yeah. We've we have seen a variety. So we have had clients that were a restaurant and they had a menu that they wanted to change each week, and they didn't want to go to a graphic designer each week to design the menu. So they just take out the WordPress site from us and they put up the menu. It's on the web site automatically.
Simea Merki:But also they can just click one button and they have a styled PDF of their menu. So that's like one side of the scale. And the other side of the scale is, for example, the Swiss Scouting Association, they have a magazine that comes out four times every year. And they have it in three languages, and they want to go digital and they need a lot more. They need publishing processes, they need planning features, they need, obviously capability management and everything.
Simea Merki:So that's the other end of the scale. In between, there's lots and lots of use cases. When you also think of web shops, for example, we have one client, they sell, they sell products for gardeners. So they have very complex chemical products. And they need fact sheets for that, which is also a PDF.
Simea Merki:And we're working on that right now that they can automate those PDFs from WooCommerce directly because the database from WooCommerce is very similar to WordPress database, or it's very close to it, it's in the same database. And you can automate that also. So I would say our sweet spot is really using the content for any channel. It's not really tied to an industry or a brand or type of business.
Dan Knauss:Are you going mostly from from web to print now? Is are most of your projects coming from WordPress or web to print? And previously, was that the opposite where the print based companies trying to get on the web or is there a mix of of both?
Simea Merki:I would say there's definitely a mix. We have some clients that ask the day of a WordPress website and they need content to have in a PDF or or something like that. But I would say when it comes to publishing projects, when you really think about the magazine projects we're doing, it's really I would say it's crazy how print first they're still thinking. So they really have their magazine, they have nothing to very little in the web. And they also don't really have the workflows on how to work with simple articles.
Simea Merki:So they plan for a whole magazine for like every month, every three months or so. And their workflows are very different. So that's what we need to work on first. And then in the end, it will be a web first workflow where they cater to the web first, and then eventually they will produce a printed issue from that. But where they come from is mostly mostly print first thinking and print first producing.
Simea Merki:It's not not at all a digitized market there. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Well, some some of these organizations probably have magazines that go back thirty, forty, fifty years maybe. These are very deeply ingrained in their organizations. Right? I imagine something like the the Swiss Scouting Association may have been putting out a magazine for decades now.
Simea Merki:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they put out one every four times a year.
Simea Merki:And they're now at like issue number 40 or 45, even. So that has history. Yeah. And it's not one of the older magazines we're working on. So we have clients that have printed for fifteen years or so their magazines, they live on paper.
Simea Merki:And that's also a very strategic subject sometimes. How do you get not only the people working on the magazine, but also the people subscribing to that magazine to a digital world. What do they want? What do they need? Is it the same content that you want to print?
Simea Merki:Is it the same style that you want to have? That's all kinds of things you need to discuss in the first place.
Steve Burge:Do you find yourself often getting requests to basically just recreate the the PDF, recreate the magazine online? I I remember there used to be those attempts, like in Flash, to literally recreate the magazine. You try and, there'd be flip pages, extensions for for content management platforms. You probably have to do quite a bit of work maybe to talk them out of it, to help them navigate from a magazine fixed format to to the web format. There's quite a lot of consulting and maybe training involved.
Simea Merki:Yeah. I think the statistics speak for themselves. Were statistics from a German institute that actually looked into those flipbooks, or those flipbook PDFs that are in the web. And they basically found out that people don't really have a lot of appreciation for that. I put the article in our blog, I can maybe send you that link, because I think it's very interesting.
Simea Merki:It's about how people really appreciate a well printed version, quality printed version. And they really appreciate a good digital version by which I mean, I would mean HTML first works on mobile is responsive version. And in between, they tried to add a flipbook. And in my opinion, I sometimes have the feeling that it's mostly for the people that maybe have to go digital, they think they can put it off with a flipbook. And they say, that's enough.
Simea Merki:But I would say that most readers, the ones that are really consuming that content, they don't want that. They need something that works on their device that they have on the go on their smartphone, on their tablets. And by nature, PDFs are not responsive. So that discussion ends quite fast. So I really try to emphasize that, that it's really about the people that are consuming the content, and that when you focus there, the flipbook is not really the nice solution.
Simea Merki:In reality, we often still put a flipbook on the website also to bridge a bit between the printed version and the web version. But I would never consult on making a flipbook instead of HTML web version.
Dan Knauss:Do you find hesitation in in clients nowadays because of AI, you know, LLMs absorbing all of the content that they they can get hold of. Are you finding clients that, you know, are are rethinking whether they should bring their archives on online? And how is that shaping the kind of projects you do?
Simea Merki:Well, it is definitely a subject. Though I have to say for the the smaller publishing houses we are working for, sometimes it's a ride or die question. It's not really the question if you want to digitize it, how and how fast you can. So mostly that tends to be a side discussion very much so, but not the main subject. We discuss a lot about paywalls and all those things.
Simea Merki:But I also don't have the solution. I think we also need to see the coming years how that works, how that can work for people also still to be paid to produce content. However, I would say in our area where we work with the clients, it's mostly really, you need to go digital, how do you do it and how fast can you do it? Because otherwise, you just lose all your subscribers, and that's not the alternative. So if you try to balance which one is the worst, then it becomes clear that you don't want to lose your subscribers.
Simea Merki:You want to cater to them first. Yeah. But it is a discussion I have not solved for myself yet.
Steve Burge:It sounds like you do like a lot of strategic work as well. Montag started as a as an Adobe training company by the sounds of it and then transitioned into web design with the WordPress side of things. And when you have companies that are stuck between that Adobe, the print version, and the, and the online WordPress version, getting them from one world to the other or maybe bridging the two, it sounds as if you need to provide some strategies and business skills, some advice to your customers too?
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. That's a very essential part of our work, actually. We hardly ever build a project that big, like with a publishing project, we hardly ever build it without starting with a pre project that really involves all those workshops that you may need for digitising the workflows for getting people to understand how web works, what is important to them, how they can also produce content that is not printed, like videos or audio and all those things. So we bring that up very, very early because we want them to build something that that works for them with those changes.
Simea Merki:So, that's definitely always an essential part. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So are you still a family company? You said your dad started the company. And did I read that your husband works with you too?
Simea Merki:Exactly. He's sitting right over there coding. So we're four people. Yeah. We are four people.
Simea Merki:So we have two coders. One mostly focuses on front end, also React, JavaScript, Gutenberg programming. And the other one, who is my husband is more the back end guy for all the database stuff and everything like that. Then we have my sister who is also part of the family. And she is basically working for the design of the project.
Simea Merki:So she does really build the front end of the site. And then I am more project manager strategic, which is all four of us. My dad retired in the meantime since we started Montag in 2021, I think.
Steve Burge:What does what does Montag mean? Apologies for my my rudimentary German. Where does the name come from?
Simea Merki:It's actually something that works only in Swiss German and not in high German. It's a good example. So mourn means tomorrow in Swiss German, and montag means Monday, in German and Swiss German. And so we tried to combine those words of mourn tomorrow and montag Monday. And so we have like, I think you could call it tomorrow day.
Simea Merki:So like, it's like a fusion of Monday and tomorrow, which we try to emphasize. It's really important that you don't lose yourself in everyday work without thinking of tomorrow, which we are seeing actually with our publishing clients, that they have a lot of work to do. Their daily business is extremely stressful. They have all the deadlines, they need to print their magazines on a certain date. And still in that pace, it's really important to not forget tomorrow and how you should innovate to stay there.
Simea Merki:So that's how that came about. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So the clients you have come to you, not looking for WordPress in particular. Sounds as if maybe they could care less what the platform is. WordPress is your choice. They come to you because of the pain points they're feeling and the need to transition to the online world?
Simea Merki:Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes when I have to describe what our company does, I say we're a mix between a web design company and a publishing software building company. So there's a mix of both elements and both are very important. So we have the web knowledge to basically rebuild stuff in the Gutenberg editor, blocks for them, do everything they need on digital side of things. But we also have an understanding for them as a publishing instance.
Simea Merki:For example, I just recently had a call with a client and she said, yeah, you know, we did a website relaunch some years ago with just some web agency, but they just didn't understand our subject. And I thought, yeah, that's really I think that's really where our sweet spot is, we are able to understand because we've seen many go through that process. We've seen many print first workflows. And sometimes when I talk to someone who lives in WordPress only or web only, they don't even know that those publishing workflows still exist where you send web, not even web based, where you send Word files or anything like that between each other, and that's the workflow, they don't know that that exists. So it's hard to understand.
Simea Merki:And that's basically, I would say, our sweet spot is, we're able to understand that, while still we have the technical knowledge to really cater for all their needs to digitize in a good way and not only do the minimum or the flipbook version. Not to brag about flipbooks, but I think it's not the optimal solution when you think about the digital world and the web. Yeah.
Steve Burge:You have a software platform now called Prestify? Mhmm. That you guys have built to try and help this transition between WordPress and PDFs?
Simea Merki:Yeah. This actually started as a plugin that we found from a colleague from Germany. He's called Andreas Zettel. And it's a print CSS plugin. So print CSS is basically like CSS for the web.
Simea Merki:It's also the same semantics and everything. But the output is not a website, but a PDF. And he built a WordPress plugin that can take WordPress posts and create a PDF from it. And at one point, he had other projects, the developer and we thought, let's, let's work, keep working on that. And so Andreas basically gave it over to us, all the things he built, he built it on an open source license.
Simea Merki:And we are now working on that plugin. Also, it's essentially a WordPress plugin that allows you to create templates, to automate posts, custom post types with all your fields and everything you have to a PDF. So the menu I talked about earlier is built with Prestify. So that they can
Steve Burge:From the restaurant, right?
Simea Merki:The Yeah, exactly. The restaurant menu.
Steve Burge:Every week, they can update their menus, spit out a PDF using Prestify.
Simea Merki:Exactly. And what Prestify does is two things. It's basically the template that lives inside of WordPress that defines how your PDF looks and that gets all the content information. And then that whole package is sent to a print rendering service, PDF rendering service that we host, and which is basically the SaaS we sell, but the plugin itself is on an open source license. And the whole product is called Prestify.
Steve Burge:Awesome. How far could far could you go with it? Could you make like an ebook, for example? Could you make maybe a a magazine? What, how far could you push Prestify if you wanted to say if you wanted to flip your workflow from being instead of being Adobe first and Print first, how far could you take this and flip your workflow to being, web first and then exporting?
Simea Merki:I mean, you can take it very far. Print CSS is actually a really interesting subject to dig into if you're a nerd or a printing publishing nerd. There's lots of possibilities from footnotes to rules where you want a page break and where you don't want the page break from basically fixed layouts, where you want the images, where you want the text, all of that would work. However, we see in the practical work that for magazines, it's not enough flexible or when you then come to printing a magazine, you really want to also make it some kind of an art, I would say. So when somebody reads a magazine, they want to lay back, they want to enjoy their coffee and the magazine.
Simea Merki:So you really want to go a bit beyond with the design, and you don't want every page to look like rule book. So so that's, I would say there are the lines where we draw, where we say, you want your, your magazine to be a layback medium, where you drink your coffee beside, then maybe go to InDesign, get your content to InDesign automated, and then really focus on the design work there, make it creative. But for everything else, why not Prestify it or why not print CSS as as technology? There's lots of flexibility.
Dan Knauss:Does Prestify sorry, Steve.
Steve Burge:No. Go for that.
Dan Knauss:Does Prestify handle like a a Gutenberg kind of block based theme environments where where the content is is coming out of WordPress from from that kind of layout where where content is is structured through Gutenberg blocks.
Simea Merki:So you can work with Gutenberg and then export that to the PDF. Print CSS works with HTML. So basically, you would just implement that. For other instances where you really have the same structure each time you maybe don't want to rebuild that, we build that with custom fields. So going back to the restaurant menu, there's a fixed field for the daily meal that they serve on Monday, there's one for Tuesday and everything.
Simea Merki:So there's fields for that. You can do both, you can combine. There's not a second editor, it really gets the content from Gutenberg directly. And then if you need to change something on the go to go to the PDF, you can add that in the CSS. When it comes to hiding things that you don't want in the PDF or so.
Simea Merki:You can do that in the CSS. But the HTML is basically the WordPress content itself.
Steve Burge:Is Pressdify supporting the the WooCommerce store you mentioned as well that sells chemicals? You mentioned that they put they put the, I guess, the safety information, information about the chemicals into WooCommerce, and then need to spit out a PDF.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Exactly. That's why we love WooCommerce because it's so close to the core. It really looks very familiar when you're familiar with the WordPress data structures, then WooCommerce is easy. If there's one field that wouldn't work, or you can't get in, you can just use a PHP function in the functions file that you add a custom field there.
Simea Merki:So, technically, a lot is possible. I won't say everything because then our coders will hit me. But they can do a lot. We also do that as a service, we build a template. But there's there's lots of types of content you can get to to Prestify.
Simea Merki:Basically, anything that lives in your WordPress database.
Steve Burge:What's been really interesting, and I've only just realized this about half an hour into our conversation, is we haven't mentioned the letters A and I so far in this conversation. How do you think about that as someone who works very closely with print magazines? It's almost as if they still exist in a slightly old fashioned world where content is handcrafted, where the pages are put together using Adobe in a very, in a very creative way. Is AI impinging on on what you do and what these publishers do? Or are we still a very in a very manual process?
Simea Merki:I would say as is, most of them are in a very manual process. However, I would say it's hard it would be hard to find a publishing house where nobody's used JACCPT or anything like that. So I think in real life, people use it. And I happen as a side hustle at Morntag, I happen to also hold workshops for agencies how to use AI. So prompting is really something I would say is a good skill of mine.
Simea Merki:And I think that's where that comes in. The publishing houses will need to learn AI, they will need to learn how to work with a chatbot. So the quality will not. Yeah. How do you say?
Simea Merki:So that, quality will not decrease while you use AI. So I think that's the big part of the job. I assume it will not be a question of using AI or not using AI. But it will rather be a job on how to use AI so you can uphold your quality and make it maybe even better. Because there's a possibility of that.
Simea Merki:Also, when I see the manual work that people do sometimes in those publishing houses from tagging content, to shortening content for an excerpt, all those things that are not really the core of their work. There, I would say, why not use AI that's really freeing up their time to do different things. And also, another thing I see, when we talk about AI in the publishing industry is, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Notebook LM, for example, tool of Google where you can even create video overviews of subjects now. And why not use use AI to create more digital first content, maybe if you're not technically skilled, why not create a video with AI that really summarizes your main points that you wrote about or something like that. I can really see that bridging a gap there.
Simea Merki:Because most editors I know and authors I know from the publishing houses we have as clients, they are not as skilled as your typical Gen Zer who can just put up a video on their smartphone and do anything with that and put it on YouTube. They're not that skilled for that. And so I think AI could come in handy there to really create rich form content, video, audio, not only text. I think that's that's my take.
Steve Burge:That's almost a a brand new feature. I think I remember being on Notebook LM maybe two months ago, and it could do podcasts. It could take your documents and make a a nice podcast of a man and lady talking back and forth about your topics. But now they can do video as well?
Simea Merki:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's a new feature. It's like two weeks old.
Simea Merki:It's really impressive. You have to test it out. Yeah. I really think that's that's a way of how how that all could work for us. How we could use Just
Steve Burge:yesterday, for the first time talking about video moving quickly, I was watching a video of a Japanese person explain a new WordPress feature. In fact, I think he was this is now getting several level levels deep in terms of talking about AI. But this Japanese guy was talking about a new automatic feature that could generate Gutenberg blocks from just a text prompt. You say, I want a block to show the weather in Switzerland, and this automatic feature would spit out a Gutenberg block to do exactly that. But the guy had done the whole thing in Japanese, and I think YouTube had automatically dubbed it all into English.
Steve Burge:And I just sat there watching the video in English, and apart from a couple of glitches, this twenty minute video was just as good as watching a native English speaker, really.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a we that's a native feature in YouTube. We have that in the German speaking area too.
Simea Merki:So when you open up an English podcast or video in YouTube, it will translate not only translate, but how do you say it? You hear somebody talking in German that actually would be speaking English. Yeah. Yeah. Also multilingual.
Simea Merki:I mean, there's there's lots of possibilities when you think of AI. Yeah.
Steve Burge:I think I maybe I saw that on your blog, on publishing. Blog, which is a a site that you when you had an interview maybe with a someone at Woodcamp Europe and may maybe provided he was an English speaker, I think, Noel Tark, I want to say. And you provided a German dubbed version of the interview you you did with him?
Simea Merki:Oh, you don't provide it. YouTube does it on their own. Okay. That's that's the crazy thing about it. Yeah.
Simea Merki:There's no work for us to do. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Okay. So these are things which are moving really, really quickly. I mean, we're talking about things that have features, capabilities that have dropped in the last couple of weeks. Yeah. These are the kind of things that you're consulting, that you're you're training helps with when it comes to these customers who are not not just not as perhaps stuck in a slightly old fashioned way of working, but also just don't have the time to catch up if they their business requires them to hit deadlines each month.
Steve Burge:A lot of the work that you do at Moontag sounds as if it's helping them catch up with this new era.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's what you could describe as our mission statement. I would never tie WordPress to our core values or something like that, because I don't know, one day maybe another open source tool will come and we would evaluate that as being more useful for our clients. So we would use that.
Simea Merki:So I think really at the heart of our work also is usability. So it's not about the craziest new idea, the craziest AI feature or anything like that. It's really on how you can adapt and use that in your everyday work. And that's what we do with the WordPress systems. Also, it's not about them having the craziest publishing tool that they can they will never require them to never work again or something like that.
Simea Merki:It's mostly that we have a very limited budget and we do the best in our abilities to get the best out of that for them. So I would say that practicability is really an important part of our work. When you have associations, they often have a fixed budget or we hear things like, Oh, if it's above that price, we need to ask everyone in the association if they're ready to do it. So you really have to maybe even rectify everything you're doing and be sure that everyone needs that. And that's also healthy, I think.
Simea Merki:That's also why I love to work with smaller publishing houses. Because you really have to prove that what you're building is worth the price, is usable, is helpful. And I think that's what AI has to prove as well in the future years, how how usable it is for for everyday work and how practical it is and if it's worth the money. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:You mentioned grade earlier. Yeah. In that in that same line of thought, are there certain other other WordPress tools or even beyond WordPress plugins or tools you commonly use or companies you partner with frequently that are especially good compliments for maybe Prestify. You've mentioned some like WPML and PolyLang. Grade briefly came up.
Dan Knauss:I think of like 10 ups, eight day week when I look at Prestify. Yeah. What what are what are some of your helpful complementary tools that you find yourself using and and maybe some partners you have in the space.
Simea Merki:So you mean for for tools that we implement for our clients on that or that we use ourselves?
Dan Knauss:The well, either one. Yeah. What what pairs well with with your work beyond the tools you've developed like Prestify?
Simea Merki:Yeah. So it really depends on on the the client that we have. Obviously, we're on the PublishPress podcast for a reason. We've used PublishPress Suite for for years. We also used Multi Collab for years.
Simea Merki:I'm excited to see how that will be in some years when the Comic Yeah, Con features in yeah. The I mean, there's there's many plugins that we use frequently, but it's really hard to say, like, that one is is a fix for us, because we really try to implement as little as possible only when it's needed. And we try to deactivate everything that's not needed, because a great deal of usability for our systems is speed. So we now also learned React deeply, and we started integrating lots of features on our own. So we don't use a plugin that maybe has 10 features, and we need one of it.
Simea Merki:So that really came in handy. So when it comes to really catering our clients, what I have to say is, also custom code is a very important part. And with custom code, we may become to tools we use on ourselves. Our clients are big fans, our coders are big fans of Cloud Code, of the Gemini API, and all those tools, we use that daily. And for organizing our work, I have to mention ClickUp.
Simea Merki:That's a really helpful feature. I also know lots of publishers who use it. ClickUp is a task management suite. And it also has AI integrated now. So I have the ClickUp brain, it's called, and I can chat about my tasks.
Simea Merki:And that's really handy for me as a project manager. Yeah, and then really, maybe I need to mention NotebookLM, because we started putting up a notebook for each project. And so I put up everything we work out in the workshops in the pre project. So everything that is fixed, all the user roles, all the workflows, everything, I document that really good and detailed. And then I put up all those PDFs into one NotebookLM.
Simea Merki:And then all our coders, designers, everything, everyone who works on the project, they know everything from NotebookLM. So they basically ask the notebook and not me. And that's really one thing that helps. And I'm just now working on a project where we have the workshop for the editors by the end of the week, and I'm thinking of creating video content to explain to them their new system. So I'll see how that works with the new Notebook Alumn feature.
Simea Merki:But I think those are the kinds of work that make it fun working with AI, not only being faster and then handing off some Excel files, but also thinking of how can we create the content through AI that that is really how do you say that the people understand it well and want to listen to it, want to consume it, want to learn with it? So I would say notebook column is really a game changer for us as well.
Steve Burge:So, hypothetically, you're dealing with the Swiss scouting association. They have French, German, Italian. Those are the three the three key languages. You might be able to create a a how to video, say, in German and then have it dubbed into French and Italian for different parts of the organization.
Simea Merki:That's exactly what I'm working on right now. Yeah. And it's actually very good advantage because I'm not able to speak Italian. And my French is not that well that I would be able to teach them in French. So to teach them the the key principles in their native language, something I can't do, but I I can.
Steve Burge:Okay. So you may be far more multilingual than either me or Dan, but there's a limit to how many languages
Simea Merki:you speak. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Steve Burge:Okay. Your your French and Italian are not quite as good as your English and German.
Simea Merki:No. No. I I don't speak Italian at all. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So, Samir, there's one question that we ask everyone that comes on the podcast at the end, and that is our guests are all in publishing, have an interest in publishing. Is there a a publisher, a writer, someone whose work you really admire at the moment? Someone who maybe sends out a newsletter or writes a blog who you you always pay attention to when their newsletter drops in your inbox?
Simea Merki:Oh, that's a good question. I have the newsletter of James Clear. I'm not sure if you know him. He's the guy that wrote Atomic Habits. His newsletter, I think, is very relevant.
Simea Merki:Each week is something that I think, oh, it's really a good thought. Can I
Steve Burge:start with three or four thoughts?
Dan Knauss:Right? Sure.
Simea Merki:Yeah. A three I think think it's like a three two one structure. I I think it's really easy to read and you're you're through it fast, but still it makes you think. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Cool. And it sounds as if you have some others on your mind as well.
Simea Merki:Yeah. If if I may.
Steve Burge:Go for it.
Simea Merki:Yeah. I I just read a book called four thousand weeks. Just forgot the name
Steve Burge:of the author. Bergman.
Simea Merki:Oh, yeah. Oliver Bergman was it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good book.
Simea Merki:I have to see if you can follow him for a newsletter or something like that. But that book really I just became a mom two years ago, and that really changed how my business and home and everything, how that cooperates and sometimes disturbs each other. So that's really helpful, that book to maybe also be a bit lighter and to understand that it's not as important to get every deadline every time. So for me, it was a really enlightening book. Yeah.
Simea Merki:And on YouTube, it's Matt Diavalla. I don't know if you know him. He's a YouTube creator. He does loads of like self experiments where he tests out taking a cold shower every day for thirty days and stuff like that. He's also a minimalist.
Simea Merki:And I really admire his take on just trying out and then seeing if it works after thirty days. He maybe keep it. He maybe doesn't. So that's a really fun guy to watch.
Steve Burge:Well, that probably really nicely sums up our conversation today. I asked you to to name a publisher you admire, and you came back with a, a newsletter writer. But I guess James Clear writes books as well. But you talked about his newsletter. You talked about a book, and you talked about a YouTube creator that, we talk about publishing, but, all of those are different aspects of the same thing.
Steve Burge:Right? Creating content that people are interested in consuming.
Simea Merki:That's true. Yeah. That's also one of our go to sentences. We always tell our clients relevance not only comes through content, but also the content in the right place at the right time. That's relevance.
Simea Merki:And the right channel, obviously. So relevance also means where you put it, how you put it and not only what you say. So where you put it, how you put it, maybe our job. What to say is maybe our client's job. But if that works together smoothly, you you really get a new relevant relevance.
Simea Merki:Yeah.
Steve Burge:Awesome. And where can people keep up with your content, keep up with you, Samir?
Simea Merki:Yes. So our company website is morntalk.com, and our blog is publishing.blog. You mentioned it already. We are also on YouTube, just starting out. So
Steve Burge:I saw
Simea Merki:that. You can also search for.
Steve Burge:I was looking for your your presence on social media and your YouTube channel. Unusually, for an agency, seemed by far your most active channel.
Simea Merki:Yeah. Yeah. We really try because we we noticed that people like to watch the videos and tend to not read the newsletter as much as earlier, some years earlier. So yeah, that's a relevance project there. We try to find the right channel.
Simea Merki:And I'm Yeah. On LinkedIn. If somebody wants to connect, it's linkedin.com/in/simea. So only my name can find me there.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Simea.
Simea Merki:Thank you.