#231 – Damon Cook on How WP Trend Watcher Keeps Him Up to Date With WordPress

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a new way to keep up with WordPress news and updates.

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So on the podcast today, we have Damon Cook. Damon has been a developer in the WordPress ecosystem for over a decade, working with WordPress centric agencies, and more recently running his own freelance business, Noma Digital. He’s a longtime community member, contributor, and someone who remains keenly engaged with the latest WordPress developments from releases like 7.1, to shifts in plugins, themes, and the broader WordPress landscape.

Damon joins us today to discuss WP Trend Watcher, an open source tool he’s created to help WordPress professionals keep up with the ever increasing deluge of news, community updates and feature releases. As the WordPress space grows more dynamic, and let’s be honest, sometimes a bit overwhelming, WP Trend Watcher is designed to sift through a fire hose of RSS feeds, summarise the trends, and inject some much needed human curation into AI generated content.

Damon talks about the importance of staying ahead in the WordPress ecosystem, especially for freelancers, agency owners, and developers who want to anticipate changes and support their clients.

He gets into the technical nuts and bolts, breaking down how the tool gathers, and summarises, news. The models and local AI setup he’s experimented with, and the balance between automation and critical human review.

If you’re someone who struggles to keep up with the relentless pace of WordPress news, and wants a smarter way to separate the worthwhile updates from the dross, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Damon Cook.

I am joined on the podcast by Damon Cook. Hello, Damon.

[00:03:04] Damon Cook: Hi, Nathan. Good to see you again.

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Damon and I had a chat at WordCamp US. I think you said a little while ago that it was in 2024. So it’s been a few years since we’ve had a chat, and there’s been a few pivots in your life. At the time you were working for a hosting company, which I don’t think you are doing anymore. But we’re going to have a chat today about something which caught my attention probably on social media, I imagine, I saw it there. It’s called WP Trend Watcher.

I would just say at the beginning before we get stuck into the topic, if you go to the WP Tavern website, I will bury all of the links in the show notes. So anything that we discover today, go and click on the links over there. And actually given the nature of the topic, it might be wise, dear listener, to go and do that before you get into this podcast, because it’ll be fun to have a poke around and be forewarned as to what is it that we’re going to be looking at.

So anyway, Damon, thank you for joining us again. Just before we begin, I mentioned that you have changed roles in the last 24 months or so. Do you just want to tell us a little bit about you and your roles in WordPress over these many years?

[00:04:07] Damon Cook: Sure, yeah. Yeah, been a developer in WordPress ecosystem for over a decade. And always been with WordPress-centric agencies. And yeah, as of the past year about, I’ve just been running my own freelance, Noma Digital, then also doing some contract work. And yeah, and still keeping up on all the latest WordPress news and features coming out. 7.1, what is coming out in, well yeah, in like a week, I think.

[00:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah.

[00:04:38] Damon Cook: Lots of cool stuff there.

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there really is a lot happening. Genuinely, there is a lot happening in the WordPress space. And, it may be that you’re a developer, and so that side of things captures your attention. But from my perspective, I am not really a developer, but I am curious about all the things that are going on, because I’m fascinated by Core and plugins and themes and blocks and all of that.

But equally, the community side and all of that. There’s a whole load going on, and events and marketing and loads going on. But that deluge of information, that sort of fire hose is very hard to keep a track of. Some websites that were publishing for many years die out and other ones replace them, and things come at you from different angles.

And so you have built a tool, WP Trend Watcher, which you’re able to put on your local machine. I believe that’s right at the moment. It’s a sort of local install, and we can talk about the technicalities of that in a moment.

But this tool, the way that you’ve built it is primarily pre-built, if you like, to go out and inspect the WordPress space so that you can summarise the zeitgeist, of what’s going on in the WordPress world. You can keep up without having to do that manual slog of going out, reading everything, spending hours every day kind of wasting time, and I’m doing air quotes there, if you know what I mean.

Okay, so my first question is revolving around the why of this. What was the importance here that you felt that you wanted a tool that did this for you? And really what I’m trying to get there is why did you feel it was important to keep up with the WordPress space? Is it… if you’re a client, if you’ve got relationships with clients and you’re building client websites, is it not enough in your scenario just to know that WordPress drops, they do a version change every now and again, we get a release, I’ve got a suite of plugins, I probably need to keep up to date with those. Why? Why are you interested in the broader landscape?

[00:06:34] Damon Cook: Sure, yeah. I’ve been a, I was pretty active contributor for a while to the project, not so much lately. But, when I was a contributor there was, I mean, there’s always been a lot of news to keep up with, between Slack and Trac and WordPress.org stuff. But I started to see some of what were the reliable sources in that area. And as I work with WordPress daily, I still need to keep up with what is coming down the pipeline.

And so yeah, I just wanted to take that, it was very a selfish starting point. I needed to take all these RSS feeds, get them summarised, but then also verify that, what’s being summarised with AI isn’t just hallucinations or some kind of, you know, mistrust was there, because that’s a critical component to this project was the human layer. It’s just pulling in a bunch of RSS feeds, summarizing it, and then I go through and make sure the summaries and click through it, like a lot of the stuff, and read it, and it’s helpful for me to process and see what’s actually going on and then provide my own judgment on it, so.

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: The sort of curious bit there then I suppose is that you, it feels like you always want to be one step ahead of what’s happening in the WordPress space. And I suppose if you’re being a freelancer, having that knowledge of what’s coming up, particularly in WordPress and WordPress Core, because I’ve noticed that a lot of RSS feeds, for want of a better word, and we’ll get into that in a moment, are Core related.

So that then sort of tells me that you want to be ahead of what’s coming in the next feature set so that you can, I don’t know, forewarn your clients, or practice things that you know are going to suddenly drop on a particular day of the year, and so that when the inevitable call comes, “Why is this there now?” And, “How does this new feature work?” You’re ahead of it all. Does that kind of summarise your interest in it, or is it more eclectic than that? You’re just curious about it because it’s curious.

[00:08:39] Damon Cook: Yeah, I mean there’s certainly the curiosity is there, but yes, I do like to be at the bleeding edge of what is coming down in the new, like for example, the 7.1 release coming out. Just seeing what’s being worked on, what might have gotten dropped from proposals. Yeah and just I guess being in the ecosystem, I’ve seen how a lot of the community has come and gone, and what has been critically talked about is, what is a critical feature, and why might something not be worked on and all that stuff.

So yeah, it’s just a selfish way to keep up on the latest, developer news and, yeah, and share it out and summarise it and get some human judgment behind it.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: A curious thing which is not related to this podcast, but most Mondays I do like a live show in which we have three or four panelists, and we bat around the WordPress news from the previous seven days. And I’ve been doing that show for, oh, I don’t know, maybe seven or eight years or something like that. And in the sort of the week preceding, I go around the internet, I look at social networks, I read the blogs that I’m familiar with. I’ve got a giant list of RSS URLs in a feed reader, and I go through, and I read them, and I look at them all.

And it, genuinely is incredibly time inefficient. That is to say that I open things, get halfway through, realise there’s nothing really for me to talk about here with my guests, and there’s probably nothing for the the listeners to engage with. And so I lose a lot of time, doing that exercise, and it strikes me that in the era of AI, that would be, the intention here is to cut out that. Cut through the dross, sift out the bits and pieces that are of interest, and make the bits that finally reach your eyeballs worthy of attention.

How have you orchestrated that to happen? Because with the best will in the world, I think we all know that AI can go off the rails a little bit. It may be that it doesn’t quite match the intentions that you would wish it to have. How are you corralling it to be what it is that you want?

[00:10:47] Damon Cook: Sure. Like I alluded to, it just stemmed from a selfish kind of interest in keeping up on these news sources, and I knew a lot of them all had RSS feeds. I think that even I, you know, I have a fascination, an obsession almost, with AI these days and I’m always trying some cutting, more cutting edge stuff and tinkering.

But I think even myself, and I think I see a lot of people confuse AI with automation. And so it’s interesting to see, when I, this project, I didn’t want to automate the whole thing, like just go get RSS feeds, AI summarises, AI publishes, just do it, right? Which I can, we could potentially do with the project, but I limited it to that contract of, go get these RSS feeds, the latest news, come back, summarise them, and then show them to me so I can audit them.

A lot of them, I just open up like yourself. It seems counterproductive, but I actually like that’s how I really keep up. Because if I just read the paragraph from the AI summary, which I do, it’s it’s not really covering, and might miss something in that full article that actually really interested me.

So you know, I click through most of these and I’m reading. I peruse, I don’t read every single word for sure, but I peruse and just try to validate that the summary matches, and then I look for tidbits that might been missed that I’m curious about, and then drop that in the human summary element of the published final briefing. So that’s the workflow of it right now.

[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:12:27] Damon Cook: That’s how I’ve set it up and I enjoy just the whole, the sequential part of like gathering and then, there is an automation of it shows me everything I gathered, and then gives me an area to write my thoughts and then I click through everything. So it’s just turned into a weekly, kind of hobby project and it’s fun to do, so.

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the bit that is infuriating to me is just the dead time. And the dead time for me is not once I’ve found the link. That for me is when it actually becomes interesting. You click the link, you open it, and you do the reading and what have you. It’s finding the link and finding the interesting thing.

[00:13:07] Damon Cook: Yep.

[00:13:07] Nathan Wrigley: And so I think, it is totally credible to get AI to do that. And I have this, I’m not a great user of AI. That is to say I’m not somebody that uses AI an awful lot. But it’s becoming pretty clear to me that one of the areas which it genuinely is good at is curating like a silo of information. You give it a body of information, a corpus of information, and say, “summarise that,” or, “Draw out of that the bits that might be of interest.”

Now, it’s not perfect, but it seems to be exceedingly good at that. The creative side, maybe less so, and we don’t really need to get too much into that. But this bit of drop the corpus of information in, summarise that, publish your results. That seems like a really credible way of using AI in the year 2026, and that is indeed what you’ve done.

So now that you’ve got this built, and I will link to a report so you can see Damon’s previous, I think you’ve got seven or six or something like that, previous ones from previous weeks up, and you can see them all. It basically ends up in a bullet-pointed, numbered list of titles with links, and then maybe one sentence of about 20 words following on from that. And then that will obviously either lead to a click or not.

How have you found those summaries to be? The 20 or so that you’ve got in each of your little editions. How have you found them to be? Do they seemingly accurately represent what’s contained within, or does it tend to go off the rails a bit?

[00:14:39] Damon Cook: No, they’re accurate.

[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:14:42] Damon Cook: The key kind of component there is when the summaries happen, it’s using, I set it up because I wanted to use local models. It’s all prompt-based, so essentially, it’s going to these RSS feeds, getting the latest articles and links, then parsing that through AI and saying, and passing a prompt along saying, “summarise this for developers and agency owners with a critical eye on, X, Y, Z.”

And so that’s where things do actually come, they come back pretty accurate. And the inference of what the summary shows, it’s fascinating. But yeah, it’s pretty accurate, and the fun part is trying to prove it, to see like, “okay wow,” that sounds like it would interest me as a developer and agency owner. I’m going to click and read through and make sure that’s an actual thing, and not a hallucination. So it’s like a game of just fact-checking in a way.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: I’m curious to know what it doesn’t include. So for example the addition, I’m going to call it an addition. I don’t know. Oh, summary. There we go. Weekly summary is what you’ve called it. This particular one has 19 items listed, and I don’t know if it produced 19 different things and all of them got written to the page, or if, I don’t know if you can see in the background, 34 just didn’t cut the mustard. Can you inspect what didn’t get included and thereby start to have intuition to say “okay, I wonder why that one didn’t cut the mustard?”

[00:16:20] Damon Cook: Yeah, there is a built-in, for the AI to, when it does a review, it checks sources and it looks for duplicate, two kind of posts on two different sites about the same exact topic. It’s going to try to not do a summary on both of those.

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:16:40] Damon Cook: So it does check for duplicates, weak language, missing sections. So it does do some of that to cut out the duplicate work. But also, yeah, it’s not looking, like part of the prompt and part of the exercise for AI is to not look for superfluous, just like really fact-based deterministic stuff and not just you know. It’s funny because trend is in the title, right? WP Trend Watcher.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: Which is maybe the exact opposite of what you’re after.

[00:17:09] Damon Cook: It’s kind of like it’s not really looking for what’s popular, but what is factual coming out of a lot of these sources.

[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. When you are looking at this, this is a strange question, and I don’t know how you’re going to react to this. How does it make you feel? Do you have the intention that you’re cheating on the Damon from five years ago would’ve thought, “Oh, this is horrific, somebody did all this with a computer. This should be done by, a human being should be corralling this.” How does it make you feel on that level?

[00:17:41] Damon Cook: Yeah, it does make me feel cheap.

[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:17:45] Damon Cook: And I think that’s kind of why I publish these. It’s trying to be transparent. So if anybody’s going to go and read this, they know that I even put at the bottom how much time I spent trying to look through everything. So you can take all those facts and base whether you want to read this or not.

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:09] Damon Cook: Did he spend enough to? You can pass your own judgment. Did he spend enough time? Maybe he should have spent more time.

[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:16] Damon Cook: But yeah, that’s part of the exercise for me is making this open source, and just having this public, and so if folks do find it fascinating and helpful, they could even fork it and try to do something else. Or I even have, possibility to submit sources because I’m always thinking “Should I have another source in here?” or.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, yes.

[00:18:41] Damon Cook: There’s room for improvement too.

[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: The issue there is you end up with scope creep, don’t you? And before you know it, you’ve got 5,000 RSS feeds that you’re pummeling everywhere, and then you really are in a maze of trying to figure out what’s relevant and what’s useful.

The report that you get on the front end, obviously, you’ve got these AI generated the numbered list, in this case 19, the one that I’m looking at. Again, links will be in the show notes.

But then the interface that you built provides the option then to add sort of human notes, for want of a better word, at the end. So it’s not just a case of, okay, that’s where it ends. The idea is then that you would go in, contribute for yourself what it is that you feel is important here, free form writing like we always used to do, and so on.

[00:19:24] Damon Cook: Yep.

[00:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: Why did you include that bit? Why, what was the purpose in having that? Was it just a more human curated portion at the end, so you wanted to remember what you actually thought?

[00:19:33] Damon Cook: Yeah. It’s twofold. I wanted the human in the loop. It’s a pretty popular phrase these days with AI, but I wanted that aspect there. But also selfishly, a game to fact-check a lot of these things and make sure AI isn’t hallucinating. But also it’s the exercise of memory of like going through and reading these things, because then I actually, you know, it registers in my brain. Like this is really what’s coming down the pipe. Because if I just read through the summaries, even if they were 100% accurate and I just trusted them out of the box, I feel like it doesn’t necessarily always register for me. So the actually exercise of going and clicking and reading through and comparing to what AI summarised is helpful for to sink in that data.

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think if this were something that I was looking at, and I’m definitely not ruling out doing something like this because I genuinely think there’s a lot of merit in my specific case for this. I think I’d be looking at four of those a day and just trying to, I don’t know, at 9 in the morning just before the day begins, or at 5 at night just as the day’s about to end, the workday. Just go in and look at a few of those. Because I’m like you, if I read the AI 20-word summary, there’d be no substance to that and I wouldn’t remember it.

But the fact that the interface is there and those articles have been surfaced, and I presume you could probably run one of these each day and adapt what was there the previous day and what have you. So technically then, how does it work? I’m fairly sure that this is a thing which you have built, and is currently sitting on a machine in your house somewhere.

[00:21:08] Damon Cook: Yep.

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: Just describe the technicalities of what you need to get, on your machine to make this occur.

[00:21:13] Damon Cook: Yeah. It’s a TypeScript code base, and it’s on GitHub, so you can fork it, contribute to it. But yeah, I run it. You can pass in kind of a flag. I run it weekly. It was just an arbitrary decision, and it felt weekly would be good. But you can, yeah, it just checks basically the last date of when it ran, and then tries to grab the sources.

Then I use LM Studio application on my Mac, which allows me to kind of download models that are fit for my system. I have an 18 gigabyte memory that I can work with, so that is limiting. But, I think a lot of these models are coming down in size and the local AI movement, I don’t know if it’s a movement, but I think it’s taking off in a lot of ways.

[00:22:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yep

[00:22:09] Damon Cook: We’re starting to see a lot more, yeah, local implications. That was part of the exercise for me, was exploring that. What models I could use on my system, and then what were the results of using those models with this tool for the summaries.

So yeah, I think every week at the bottom, that’s part of the report is what model I used locally to run the summaries against. And I try to switch it up. I think I used probably six of them, I used the same model. I think it was a Qwen model. Then the most recent one I used, I switched it up, and it was a, I forget the name even. It was like an LS.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, these things come and go so fast. Yeah.

[00:22:51] Damon Cook: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the fascinating part is just to drop in a new model and see how it does, and the softwares look like, because they do change. And even the report, I think you’ll, if you just compare this week’s with last, just the output is a little different. And I’m trying to… That’s something I plan on working more towards is deterministic, the output. The summaries are one thing, but then when it outputs into the final report, getting that more deterministic. Especially, I really want to have footnotes, so that people can see where these summaries and stuff are, what they’re exactly they’re linking to. It’s kind in there but it does’t always output exactly the same in formatting, so.

[00:23:35] Nathan Wrigley: So you’re doing this work on the local machine, and then obviously I’m looking at it so it’s published, by the looks of it on GitHub. Is that all automated or are you curating that process? Or have you got, you know, your local machine is bound to GitHub, your GitHub repository and so this is all automated in that sense as well?

In other words, what I’m saying is if you took a break for a month and came back, would this all just be chugging along in the background and producing these weekly reports? Or is this something that you manually invoke on a weekly basis and copy and paste and what have you?

[00:24:07] Damon Cook: That’s the part that, yes. I just run the report and write my judgment in it, then publish it to GitHub, and then GitHub does a little, it takes basically the artifacts and just spits them out. But there’s not much there in the automation on GitHub. It’s just publishing it to GitHub Pages.

The fact that I have a section that’s required for human in the loop kind of takes away full automation. I could make it run, but then I would have to take that component out of me reading through, clicking through, and writing my own judgment at the end of the report. And I don’t plan on getting rid of that. I actually enjoy that aspect, so.

[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s become a bit of an interface. The AI plus Damon equals the finished product. You really don’t want it to be automated. And in a way, that feels to me a bit like, I don’t know, a race to the bottom. If we automate all the things, I just don’t know where the audience for that lives, because you’ll, never really know. Because there’ll never be a moment where you look back at it and say, “Is anybody reading this?”. “Has anybody talked to me about this?” and what have you. Whereas the fact that you’re interested in it, you’re on this podcast talking about it, you’ve got an interest in the subject matter, you’ve clearly engaged with it. I don’t really have a question there, but there’s definitely something there. The fact that you’re in the weeds of it and it’s not just AI for AI sake, I think is important.

[00:25:32] Damon Cook: Yeah. And it’s, yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that makes me, I don’t know, I guess go back to, where some of this started from. Yeah, I think people are creating their own knowledge bases. And you even touched on this. Just having that corpus of artifacts, a lot of that AI can do these days, and you can automate some of that.

But, how you take all that data and get the human in the loop and, is it even interesting if you, it’s interesting maybe to you to read, but if you want to share that, is it going to interest others? And yeah, the human aspect is critical for me there, because, especially if you’re going to share it publicly, you know.

[00:26:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:26:14] Damon Cook: At least be transparent.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you’ve called it WP Trend Watcher. And it feels to me, if I was to rewind the clock to, I don’t know 2023, where for the first time we were all beguiled when ChatGPT came along, and we all just thought this whole interface was remarkable. But it felt, oh, it’s novel, it’s interesting, it behaves in many ways it’s a bit, I don’t know, passed the Turing test and it convinced us that it was human.

But now that we’re in the year 2026, it feels like one of AI’s central roles is just, as I said earlier, these corpses of information, but not finite in the way that a human brain is. There’s only a capacity that I have to remember so much, and it’s alarmingly little. But over time, if you were to stick with this endeavor, the name that you’ve given it, this sort of Trend Watcher, it feels like the data that you’re gathering, as it grows and grows and the AI’s capacity to manipulate, understand, I’m doing air quotes, “understand” and, create meaning from the disparate bits of data, that will grow over time.

And so it’d be interesting in 2027 and 2028, what happened? Why did that bit never got built? And how did we get this thing shipped into Core? Where did it come from? What were all the little bits and pieces? Where were the jigsaw pieces that led that to happen? And how did this happen? And what’s the market trend? Why have we got a 4% decrease or an 8% increase in market share? How’s all that happened?

So it feels to me as if you keep pushing this out, that kind of information will be available, kind of MCP-able, by simply asking it questions, in a way that we’ve never had available to us in the past. Again, there’s no question, but do, you know what I’m saying there?

[00:28:03] Damon Cook: Yeah. I think, when I set out to build this there is, and there is still a component where I do want to have kind of the trend watching part of taking these past reports and having AI review them, and come up with inference of was there a trend? Why, yeah, why did we go from report 1 to report 18 about this? Maybe there’s this feature in WordPress 7, whatever. What changed there? And come up with a separate component for that. I haven’t built that in, but that’s kind of a potential, that’s always the end goal. And keeping these receipts for now and generating these reports is just the scaffolding in a way.

[00:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it feels to me as if it really isn’t bound to WordPress. You could run with what you’ve built and point it at just about any industry or thing. Your local tennis club or, whatever it may be. You could, over time, build up this sort of trend analysis, and see what’s going on.

And dare I say it, you could even implement it upon yourself so that you can see, what’s the cadence of my writing? How have I done my fitbit data or whatever it may be? You can see that, even as I’m saying the words, I’m thinking, “Oh, this is a dystopia that I don’t want to live in.” But at the same time, I’m really curious as to what that bigger capacity to maintain state and hold data over time. What that will furnish us with.

Because we all forget things, our brains are very ephemeral. Things that are important to us come and go. We misremember things constantly, and it will be really interesting to see what things like you’ve built, are going to enable us in the future. And it does seem like this is baby steps. The humans in 2029 looking back on the work like you’ve just been talking about for the last half an hour will think, “Oh, that was cute, but look where we got to now, we stood on the shoulders of those giants, and here we are now.” It’s fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Let’s say it that way.

[00:30:11] Damon Cook: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:30:14] Damon Cook: There’s so much data and it’s just growing, right?

[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:30:17] Damon Cook: It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Well, it’ll be very interesting to see how it all lands. But, what I would encourage everybody to do, I’m going to link to at least three things. I will link to the GitHub repository, which is obviously at Damon’s GitHub account. It’s colorful-tones, and then this is called WP Trend Watcher. I’ll also link to damonacook.com, where there is a blog post about how you can get up and running and what the necessary steps are for you to do that.

But I will also link to the sort of output, which is again, it’s a GitHub repository, but you can go and see the weekly summaries and what have you, and judge for yourself whether or not this is something that you want to install on your local machine.

I think the inevitable is going to be that there’s going to be more and more of this in our lives. It remains to be seen whether we have the time to actually interact with the data that it puts out, or we’ll need another layer of AI to cope with the level of AI we’ve got, if you know what I mean. It’ll be wheels within wheels.

So there you go. Anything you want to add? Did I miss anything there before we wrap it up?

[00:31:27] Damon Cook: No, the only thing just you know I’m colorful-tones. Actually, it might not be with, it might not have the hyphen, but on X. And then on LinkedIn I try to just share the report out weekly on there just for folks keep up, but that’s about it.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Lovely, in that case, I will endeavor to find your Twitter or X handle and various other bits and pieces. And, wptavern.com, if you search for the episode with Damon Cook. It’s spelt in the way that you might imagine, D-A-M-O-N Cook, C-O-O-K. Search for that. And yeah, thank you so much for chatting to me today, and bravo for a topic which I think I’m going to be leveraging very much for my WordPress news cycle.

[00:32:14] Damon Cook: We can get that, get some RSS feeds and we can get them, get you hooked up.

[00:32:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:32:18] Damon Cook: You can start generating some other reports.

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Yeah, let’s have a chat after we click stop in a moment. Damon Cook, thanks so much for chatting to me today.

[00:32:26] Damon Cook: Thanks.

On the podcast today we have Damon Cook.

Damon has been a developer in the WordPress ecosystem for over a decade, working with WordPress-centric agencies and, more recently, running his own freelance business, Noma Digital. He’s a long-time community member, contributor, and someone who remains keenly engaged with the latest WordPress developments, from releases like 7.1 to shifts in plugins, themes, and the broader WordPress landscape.

Damon joins us today to discuss WP Trend Watcher, an open source tool he created to help WordPress professionals keep up with the ever-increasing deluge of news, community updates, and feature releases. As the WordPress space grows more dynamic, and let’s be honest, sometimes a bit overwhelming, WP Trend Watcher is designed to sift through a fire hose of RSS feeds, summarise the trends, and inject some much-needed human curation into AI-generated content.

Damon talks about the importance of staying ahead in the WordPress ecosystem, especially for freelancers, agency owners, and developers who want to anticipate changes and support their clients. He gets into the technical nuts and bolts, breaking down how the tool gathers and summarises news, the models and local AI setup he’s experimented with, and the balance between automation and critical human review.

If you’re someone who struggles to keep up with the relentless pace of WordPress news and wants a smarter way to separate the worthwhile updates from the dross, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Noma Digital

Damon on X

Damon on LinkedIn

WP Trend Watcher on GitHub

You Don’t Need a Fancy AI Setup to Stay Current With WordPress – Damons post about why he built WP Trend Watcher and how to install it

Recent “editions” of WP Trend Watcher