#155 – Anthony Jackson on Trying to Figure Out His Way in the Tech World

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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, trying to figure out a way through the tech world.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wp tavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Anthony Jackson.

Anthony is a true technophile whose journey has been shaped by a constant pursuit of understanding new technologies.

From a young age, Anthony’s curiosity about technology laid the foundation for a lifetime of exploration. Starting from modest beginnings in computer repair, he steadily transitioned into the world of WordPress, and the complexities of server management.

This episode really is a story, the story of trying new things, being creative, and always following curiosity wherever it may lead.

Anthony talks about his early experiences describing the moment computers first sparked his interest, and the subsequent path he charted in the technology space. Despite hurdles and frustrations, particularly with initial web development and WordPress hosting, his story is a testament to determination and resilience.

As you’ll hear, Anthony learned the ropes of many technologies from grappling with CSS for website customization, to exploring cloud computing, and the command line in Linux.

His journey took a big turn when he discovered automated Bash scripts that facilitate the deployment of open source applications like WordPress. This is what Anthony is doing right now, but you’re going to hear many stories of different pathways that led to this situation.

Throughout the episode, Anthony sheds light on his philosophy of embracing technology. He speaks about the numerous technologies he’s explored, the trials he faced along the way, and the value of cultivating his technical skills. With his Bash scripts ready to streamline server setups and deployments, Anthony envisions a future where technology is not just a tool, but a powerful ally for businesses and personal projects alike.

If you’re keen to hear some inspirational stories about overcoming tech challenges, resilience and learning, 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 wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Anthony Jackson.

I am joined on the podcast today by Anthony Jackson. Hello.

[00:03:32] Anthony Jackson: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. I’m very, very pleased to chat with you today, not only because you’ve got some really nice audio equipment, which makes you sound amazing, but also it’s very nice to meet new faces, new people for the first time ever. That’s what’s happening here. I’ve never met Anthony before.

But in order that both you, dear listener and I, the interviewer, get to know a bit about Anthony, would you mind giving us your little potted bio. I guess it would be best to keep that in the sphere of technology, perhaps WordPress. But just tell us a little bit about yourself, but not too many spoilers about the episode to come.

[00:04:03] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, so my name is Anthony Jackson. I’m a technical person by nature. I’ve always loved technology, always had a thing for it. Went to school for computer technology. I have my own computer repair business. So I do that on the side, part-time, while I work a full-time job, as well as grow the business that you’re going to learn about here in a little bit.

So I stay pretty busy, obviously. I love technology, I feel that it can help a lot of people. I don’t think you should ever be afraid of it. I think you should always embrace it. It’s one of those things, if you don’t get on the bandwagon now, you kind of get punished for it later.

So I’m just really excited to share with your audience my journey because it hasn’t been easy, and I’m really glad I took the leap of faith because if I didn’t I certainly wouldn’t be where I am now. So I’m just really excited to get started and talk about it and share it with you guys.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. Can I just ask, I don’t know your age, but when I was at school, so I’m now in my very, very early fifties, but when I was at school, a child at school, computers were just starting to be something that was in the market, it wasn’t the domain of universities occupying an entire room. It was something which you could hold in both arms, but they weren’t ubiquitous.

You know, maybe the school had one. It was very rare for an individual to own a computer. And so it wasn’t really until I was much older and had left school that computers became a bit of a thing which people could tinker with.

What was the experience for you? Again, I’m not trying to wrangle your age out of you, but just give us an insight into how much computing had progressed by the time you were sort of at school?

[00:05:28] Anthony Jackson: Oh my gosh, Nathan, I’ll tell you a little backstory. So my mom left me when I was younger. My dad had passed away. It was kind of just me and I lived with my aunt. She had given me a computer to go live with my mom. She had found my mom is what happened.

I turned it on and it was just an old compact, it booted up so slowly. I had no idea what it was, how it worked, what the purpose of it was. All I knew was I wanted to be on the internet. At that time it was AOL, that was the place to be.

I remember turning it on and I pressed the button on the DVD player and the tray opened, and I was like, wait, what is the sorcery? Like, and I’m like, oh, that’s cool. Okay, we’ll go with that. And the neighbor knocked on the door and said, hey, you’ve got some mail, and she gave me this disk, remember the AOL 3.0 Running Man disk? And I was like, what is this? Like, 30 minutes of the free internet. I’m like, what is the internet, right?

And I put it in this tray and I ended up setting up my account and the first words I heard were, welcome, you’ve got mail. And I’m like, no I don’t, I just checked it. And I got totally hooked immediately on this whole email thing. And I just, it blossomed, man, and I’ve been doing computers for, God, 20 years now.

So I love the backstory on it because it really changed my life. Like, I discovered the internet, email. I spent five years homeless without the internet. I never would’ve known like who to ask for help, how to get help. It truly changed my life, Nathan. It really did.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s something quite addictive about it, but also I think, and this is from personal experience, I have no reference to psychology of the human race in general, but it would seem that some people really from a very, very early age are drawn to it on a level which is indescribable. You just have this desire to be in close proximity to a computer that’s switched on, and to be tinkering with it.

I have that, but I know people who are very dear to me that if you put them near a computer, the first thing they want to do is get out the chair and walk away. You know, there’s just no interest in it whatsoever. But I think it is something that you can be passionate about in a heartbeat.

So in your case, you know, you press the DVD button, something happened, you did it on a keyboard and something happened elsewhere over there. It’s like, ooh, these two things are connected. There’s something clever going on there.

And all of a sudden alarm bells are ringing. Like, wow, I’ve got to dig deeper into this. I know already though that you are younger than I am because you joined the computer world at a time when the internet existed. When I was playing with the first computers, basically, you switched it on and a cursor blinked, and that was it. That was the fun that you had, you had to type things in.

[00:07:45] Anthony Jackson: My first experience was Windows 3.1, back when the briefcase was around.

[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so as a child leaving school, you’ve got this interest in computers and what have you. So where did the journey go from there? What were the next steps from Windows 3.1? What are some of the things that began early on? What were the dominoes that fell?

[00:08:00] Anthony Jackson: Well, I discovered Windows XP, it was the hottest thing since sliced bread. I loved XP. Vista was a hot mess. Fast forward, seven was good, eight was terrible. And then Windows 10, and now Windows 11. I figured if I learned Windows 3.1, I kind of had to follow the journey. So I started Googling the different features of Windows, realised quickly that an operating system is an operating system, it’s just where you find stuff, right?

I love the fact that I could see it progress, that I could be a part of that and help people. And that’s what really turned me onto it. So the technology thing is what really kind of gets me. I love technology. I love the fact that we can use it to have a good time, to leverage it, to grow our businesses, to do a lot of things, like podcasting and other things.

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: Are you the kind of person that upon receiving a computer, desktop computer, do you like to take it apart and see what the bits are inside there, or assemble your own? Or are you purchase it from the store and let the dust gather on the inside and then dispose of it at some point, 5, 10 years later whatever it may be?

[00:08:55] Anthony Jackson: The thing that I love the most, Nathan, this is going to sound so crazy, I don’t enjoy building them. I actually don’t know how to build them. I tried once and failed miserably. But what I love nothing more in my computer repair business is when somebody comes to me and says, Tony, I need to buy a new one, I don’t know what to do, where do I start?

I love that conversation because it’s so overwhelming for a lot of people, and I have a unique way. I took a Tony Robbins class a long time ago for personal development, and they did this whole assessment on me and the results yielded that I had a way of breaking down technical information into a manner that someone can understand.

So when someone comes to me and says, I need a new computer, I’m like, okay, I got you, it’s okay. What do you need? What are you looking for? What are your concerns? And I can have a nice conversation and ease them into making a confident purchase instead of buyer’s remorse. It makes such a difference.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: I’m firmly on the Mac side of things, and when you purchase a Mac, you really only have three or four decisions to make, one of which is color. What color do you want the computer to be? But beyond that, it’s things like how much memory, how much ram, there’s very few components that you really get to choose about that.

But on the Windows side of things, for a family member, I have recently built a computer and I was actually fairly alarmed at how many choices there were for every single thing. And it really did make me realise that there’s a whole career in just being able to understand what range of graphics cards there are, what range of CPUs there are, what kind of panel could you have as a display, what the keyboards are, what the mouse are.

And that was really interesting to me. Is that something that you nerd out on then? Do you know all of the kind of serial numbers of the different graphics cards which are available?

[00:10:32] Anthony Jackson: I’m not that big of a nerd. My nerd comes out when I started Learn WordPress, that’s when the nerd came out.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, we’ve established your nerd credentials. That’s lovely. Let’s move on to WordPress then. When did you, firstly, when was the first time you came across WordPress, and in what context? What did you need it for?

[00:10:48] Anthony Jackson: So a long time ago I started my computer repair business, probably about eight or nine years ago. And the first thing that came to mind was a website. I was like, I have to have a website. I have a business, it’s a known fact you have to have a website, right?

Well, I didn’t know WordPress had never heard of WordPress, so I went where any other person would go, and that was to the internet to find web hosting, and I found godaddy.com. And I was like, GoDaddy it is.

I had a budget of around $3,000, and what happened was they ended up coding me a really nice HTML, CSS, web development website. But I realised quickly that I’m a picky person. I wanted things changed. I didn’t like how things aligned. OCD, like the CSS and stuff wasn’t aligning. And I wanted more control. I wanted to be able to control that.

And I remember Googling how to control your website and it said WordPress, the number one platform. I’m like, what the hell is WordPress? Okay. And I clicked, best decision of my life. I ended up going back to GoDaddy to get hosting, WordPress hosting. I didn’t know what it was, I had to kind of figure it out. And I realised quickly about shared hosting, and what it was, and how it acted, and I didn’t like the fact that I was being shared with people, it made me very angry.

I went through seven different hosting providers, 15 different WordPress for Dummies books, trying to figure things out. Was very, very hard. One day I ended up going to like, I think it was Namecheap or something, and getting a little bit better WordPress hosting with more resources because I thought that would help. And I was sitting there so frustrated because I saw a template but had no idea what to do.

And all of a sudden after tinkering with WordPress in the back end, I put the word home in what we call the primary menu. And at that point it clicked. I was like, oh my God, I can build a fully fledged website with content that’s branded to me without having to pay extra to add revisions and stuff like that.

And so for like two weeks straight, I learned how to install WordPress. I learned the art of the primary menu. I had so much fun just adding the same buttons every time, home, about, services, contact. And then I discovered page builders. That’s when things really turned. Divi was my first love, and always will be.

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: Did you have to really persevere then, because it sounds like you’ve got all of the equipment in your head for dealing with technical problems. You’ve got that sort of passion to see it through to the end. I think I get quite frustrated with certain tasks and give up fairly quickly, but it sounds like you’ve got all of the bits and pieces.

10 years ago when you installed WordPress, I’m guessing it was a much more difficult enterprise than it is now. You know, you’ve got these hosting companies that you basically click one button and not only will they set your WordPress website up, they’ll send you the login links, you can probably just click a button to log in on the backend and what have you. Was it fairly frustrating, and do you think that, if you’d had a different personality type, you would’ve just thrown the baby out the bathwater and gone, nope?

[00:13:29] Anthony Jackson: A hundred percent. If I did not have my technical background, I would’ve gave up years ago. I called GoDaddy so many times for support. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I called them. And I enjoyed calling them because when I did call them, I got to give them some great feedback because they understood completely what I was trying to do. So it was really cool. I got to see them improve and I got to see myself improve. But it was also nice to be able to call them and get it fixed because I didn’t have to explain what I was trying to do. I knew what I was trying to do.

And the design element stuff did not come until later. I spent so much time tinkering with WordPress, buying plugins. Nathan, I’ve got a repository on themeforest.net of plugins and themes that I haven’t even touched. I bought anything from caching plugins, to improve performance, to membership plugins, not knowing any idea what they’ve been. I just went on as spending spree and just bought everything. And now I’m like, what do I do with it all? Like, I don’t even know what I want to build.

[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a definite learning curve there. Just dealing with the nature of the internet. I don’t know quite how to put this. When I talk to people about how interesting I think the internet is, I can very often sense that people’s eyes are glazing over. You know, oh Nathan, dear Nathan, what’s the matter with you?

But I think on a very profound level that it is amazing that we live in a time where you can download free software, and with a few dollars invested in hosting, and it doesn’t have to be a lot, you can have something that the entire world, well, by that I mean people who have access to the internet, the entire world can see.

And conceptually, I just think that’s utterly remarkable. And I don’t know if it ever sort of hits you in the same way that it hits me. But you said, you know, you put the word home on your webpage, or you put something for your home screen and you have that moment of, I can do the internet. I can be on the internet.

I think that is something which gets lost so quick. But occasionally I stare at what I’m doing and think, I just click publish and there it is, and everybody can see it. And I think that’s phenomenal.

[00:15:35] Anthony Jackson: That hit me when I discovered the actual blog portion of WordPress. When I discovered that my content could go out to anybody and everybody with a click of a button. I was a little blown away. I was a little overwhelmed because I was like, this is really cool. I’ve created a piece of content for somebody that might need my help. They can just click a button and within a few seconds potentially see it. Like that is, you’re right, it’s remarkable. But it’s also really overwhelming for somebody who’s never experienced it.

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess, you’ve got to be a little bit careful about what you publish and what have you. But I still think we are in an age where I think it’s easy to forget how privileged we are that we have access. Well, you and I, for example, we’ve never met. We’ve only communicated on the internet via a social network. I messaged to say would anybody enjoy coming on this podcast? You contacted me. Here we are. We’re using a browser based application to communicate with each other. And this is just totally normal now. And yet my 14-year-old self staring at the computer in the school, what we’re doing now was the realm of Star Trek.

This was the kind of thing that people in spaceships did, and yet now it’s totally normal. And sometimes I try to sort of impress upon my children how remarkable it is, but for them it’s just, no, no, no, this is what all humans have had for all time. And it just gets lost.

[00:16:49] Anthony Jackson: It is remarkable.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Where from there then? So we’ve reached the point where you’ve discovered WordPress. What’s happened subsequently since then? It sounds like you’ve got your business all pivoted around WordPress as well. What’s the next step in the story?

[00:17:01] Anthony Jackson: Well, I went through multiple page builders, never really learned another one because I got so comfortable with Divi. I tried Elementor, didn’t really like it all that much. Tried every block builder. Discovered Gutenberg was the worst thing known to mankind. Tried buying Astra, some other, I forget the other company that has the block builder.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Kadence maybe.

[00:17:21] Anthony Jackson: Kadence, yes, I tried them. But the thing that I didn’t like about WordPress, I loved the page builders, they made things easy, but the one thing that I hated the most is I never really had control of where to put stuff. It always was just like, this is your block, this is where it goes. I didn’t know CSS. I didn’t know HTML. I did not know how to move things, and I hated that.

Because the whole point of me going to WordPress was to have control. And when I lost control, it turned me off. I was the person who built the entire website and canceled my hosting because I wanted more control. That’s how I learned. I canceled, and bought, and canceled, and bought and thought it would get better and it didn’t, and I just pushed, and pushed, and pushed and learned.

So I started to just Google how to move things with CSS. I taught myself the basics of CSS and HTML, and a little bit of JavaScript. Not a lot, just enough to be dangerous. But I wanted control, Nathan. I wanted to be able to do things, and when I discovered that I could do that, that put me in another whole new rabbit hole. Then I discovered plugins that control CSS, selectors and all of that, so it gave me an opportunity.

[00:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I always think that WordPress kind of has been pitched at me by other human beings as this kind of catchall, easy to use solution. I think maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll be satisfied in a way that you clearly are not, you know, if you want every pixel to be mapped perfectly from your head onto the screen, that’s not going to be the case. But maybe for many people it’s enough.

Okay, I’ve got this templated layout, it’s fine, I’m happy with that. I’ll click publish and whatever’s there is fine. But if you do want to move things around, and you do want to have a particular layout, and you want to show only these posts here and these posts here, but you want it to look entirely different from the theme that you’re using, I think it’s still very confusing.

And I think the underlying languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which really these days are the underpinnings of certainly the front end of web development, they’re fairly difficult to acquire if it’s not your job. If you’re just doing this evening, weekend, it’s a bit of a hobby, I still think those things are really difficult to acquire and they’re not slowing down. You know, in the year 2025 when we’re recording this, CSS is really on a clip, it’s really modifying itself quickly. All these different sort of layout systems, flex, grid to learn and what have you.

So I think the promise of the page builders in WordPress is probably why it’s as successful as it is. If you rewind the clock 10 years, when they just started to come about, you mentioned Divi and there was Beaver Builder and, oh, all sorts of other ones. I would imagine that if you could chart the growth of WordPress, it would’ve been the novice user wanting a sort of what you see as what you get, point, click, drag, save solution that meant that WordPress grew. And it sounds like you fitted into that niche quite nicely.

[00:19:56] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, I wanted to know why. Why it wasn’t working. Why the block couldn’t move. I was very irritated by that because I had certain expectations for my logo to be correct. And what really got me into WordPress was the fact that it was drag and drop. And I love the word drag and drop, because if you don’t know how to code, well, drag and drop is the alternative, and it’s your best friend. But it’s not a true, genuine, drag and drop experience.

Because to me, drag and drop genuine experience means to put things where I want to put them. I don’t want to be limited by the block builder, you know, the blocks that you’re provided. I want to be able to move it, control it, customise it. Because at the end of the day, people buy into you and not your products and services. But at the same time, your website never gets built because you spend way too much time customising, Googling the 20 best page builders of 2025, and buying a whole bunch of stuff you never needed in the first place, right?

[00:20:45] Nathan Wrigley: So have you doubled down on your page builder of choice and your website building experience is based upon the UI, and becoming an expert and having the perfect muscle memory for doing things in that? Is that how you build your pages, and themes, and structures for web pages now?

[00:21:00] Anthony Jackson: So, ironically enough, Nathan, I’ve actually got away from doing WordPress. I transitioned into something different, which we’re going to get to here in a minute. I learned everything about WordPress. I wanted to learn. The only thing I didn’t learn was WooCommerce. I understand what it is, I just didn’t want to learn it. I didn’t have a need for, my business didn’t sell digital products.

I got out of it because it just became frustrating because I just couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have the budget to pay someone to fix it. I knew if I did, I would probably just cancel anyways because I wanted it to look even better. So I just stopped because I didn’t want to do it. I discovered that I wanted to learn how to actually deploy WordPress for myself instead of using a hosting provider because that’s the easy way.

So one day I was Googling and I came across the word Linux. I was like, Linux, okay, that sounds like a fun rabbit hole. Let’s check it out. I discovered my first cloud computing company, which was Linode. I called them up and, you know, I got to be honest with you, I wasn’t super impressed with them, because the one thing that I realised quickly is that there’s no support at all. It is all community driven. If you think about WordPress, the open source, there’s no support. It’s all just learning community based forums, podcast episodes, wherever you can get content. Thank God WordPress, the audience is so big that you can get help. But to this day, there’s still things that I still want to know the answers to about WordPress, but I just can’t find anymore.

But I discovered Linux and I had a very, very difficult time of spinning up a server. I struggled so badly with the command line, so badly. And then I discovered that Linode had one click apps and one of them was WordPress. I was like, here we go again. I installed WordPress. I grew a little bit of a fascination with trying to find my credentials inside the terminal, realised quickly that shared hosting was not the only option to deploy WordPress.

My biggest problem with the server stuff was there was no support. I struggled very badly. Everything I Googled said, copy this, copy that. I’d copy and paste, I wouldn’t get the result. I was throwing things around, spinning up servers left and right, getting so frustrated. I’m like, what do I need to do?

So I ended up buying a course on Udemy, and went through this very, very great course for absolute beginners and discovered quickly what I was doing wrong. Completely stopped the course and started learning again, because I’m not that type of person who takes the course. I find my fix, and then I go back to like tinkering with things. I spun up, I don’t know, probably 300 little VPSs trying to figure things out. Needless to say, I’m a master of installing WordPress with Linode now.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Have you got into Linux server admin, sort of sys admin as a way, well, that was just the fun that you were having at the time, and then discovered that, okay, WordPress can bolt on top of that. And so now the two things have combined and you are back to WordPress, or have you entirely stopped with WordPress?

[00:23:40] Anthony Jackson: I never got into the sys admin stuff, but the next journey for me was, I Googled Linux and I had WordPress. I hated the command line, Nathan. The commands, the black and white was so overwhelming. As it turns out now it’s like my best friend. I can’t live without it because it’s so much easier if you know what you’re doing.

But I discovered something called cPanel, and when I got into cPanel I was like, okay, this is cool. I got a GUI, I can look at something, and lo and behold, guess what I found first? Install WordPress. I’m like, it’s back again, right? Everywhere I turn, WordPress kept coming back.

So I learned how to install cPanel on my own server, trials galore, WordPress. Ended up getting super frustrated with cPanel, because cPanel is extremely technical, if you are not in a shared hosting environment where it’s managed. It’s extremely technical. They started giving me questions, I started asking for commands. I started taking notes of those commands, so when I broke something, I would know what to do.

And I learned cPanel pretty proficiently, but got overwhelmed with it just because the technical. There’s a difference between documentation and technical documentation. Documentation is, click here, do this. Technical documentation is, before you get started, make sure that cPanel’s installed properly on your server. It’s like, okay, first of all, what is cPanel and how do you install it properly? Is there such a thing?

Like it feels so overwhelming and you couldn’t contact Linode, you had no support. The only thing you had was cPanel. So I went through hundreds of cPanel trials trying to figure things out. Grew a fascination with the command line and installing cPanel. And I discovered pretty quickly that, even though I didn’t want to learn WordPress anymore, I wanted to provide hosting for WordPress.

I wanted my own hosting provider. I wanted to be the guy who said, you know what you need, WordPress hosting, I got you. But as it turns out, hosting WordPress on your own server is difficult because you don’t have that system admin background to fix things. Makes it extremely challenging and it, your confidence goes way, way, way down, because you cannot provide that quality of hosting that you want to provide.

So upon Googling more, I discovered something called WHMCS, Web Host Master Complete Solution. Loved this concept. This was a dark rabbit hole. I went down this rabbit hole, and discovered quickly that I would have to install it on my own server, which I lacked knowledge of. Biggest problem was the file manager, figuring out the file structure, how to navigate to the path, trying to figure all that out.

And I finally got that installed and I learned about WHMCS. And through some Googling and YouTube, I hooked up my first server and I click install and it provisioned an instance of WordPress inside of WHMCS. I saw a button that said, log into WordPress. And I was like, oh my God. There’s a button.

And I clicked this button and I was like, oh my God, it just launched WordPress. I was blown away, so I was like, let’s get a business going. So I started writing documentation and yeah, it wasn’t that easy.

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: Boy, I mean, you get the prize for commitment though. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve got just bucket loads of time on your hand, or if you are just the kind of person that, once you’ve set yourself a task, it’s going to annoy you until you finally cross that Rubicon. But you’ve got a lot stickability.

[00:26:42] Anthony Jackson: I’m a determined individual. I went through multiple attempts at WordPress hosting, but I discovered that I was going to need help. I was going to have to find a way to provide this because I didn’t have the system admin background. So I discovered reseller hosting. And this is kind of where things blossomed.

Reseller hosting was great, because they not only provided the WHMCS license free, they provided a cPanel license and I didn’t have to manage it. It was the perfect setup. I was like, oh my God, this is perfect. So I really started to dig into my business then. But then I discovered really quickly that without customers, this is going to be really difficult.

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s the crucial bit that you have to have somebody to resell it to.

[00:27:17] Anthony Jackson: So after three, four months of messing with tech and mastering the art of cPanel, WHM and WHMCS, I stopped because I didn’t have any customers. Why pay 40 bucks a month if you’re not making any money, right? Didn’t make sense. So I was like, well, I need to figure out a different way to provide hosting. I came across something in Linode called Bash. Bash scripting.

I did a little Googling, looked at some images, and I’m like, okay, it’s coded. I’m not a coder. How am I going to do this? And I went back and looked at cPanel, because I had installed it one day and I noticed that the word Bash was in their installation command. And I was like, what the hell is Bash? And what is it doing in this command?

So Google, Google, Google. I discovered some commands, curl, Wget in Linux, all the stuff, and realised that I could pull a file down from the internet and run it as Bash. I was like, this is wicked cool. And I wanted to be able to deploy WordPress, but I wanted to be able to provide it to somebody else so that I didn’t have to deal with the server side. I wanted to be able to give them a script and say, you can download this script, click a button, add your domain, make sure your DNS is set up and you’re golden. And I was like, this is cool.

But then I realised like, I need a way to deploy WordPress because I can’t use Linode because then I’m doing it. I don’t want to help them get to where they need to be because I don’t know how. So how do I offer WordPress hosting in a manner that they can do it in a session that they can understand? So what I ended up doing was I discovered Docker.

[00:28:35] Nathan Wrigley: You have been everywhere.

[00:28:36] Anthony Jackson: I discovered Docker, and I was like, okay, this is overwhelming, right? Docker Hub, command line. I installed my first WordPress image and I saw the welcome screen. So what we know as WordPress, when we log in, we just log in with our credentials and we’re good. This brought me to the actual installation screen of WordPress. Pick your language. And I was like, oh, this is where it really begins, right?

So when I discovered Docker, I found the first image and I launched my first instance of WordPress using Docker, and it was local. And I went to go do everything and it said, error, database not found. I was like, this isn’t good, because I knew that the database was the core, right?

So I learned in Docker how to set up a database with my SQL. And after some serious frustration around coding YAML files, I got with a guy on Fiverr and I said, listen, I said, I need you to make me a script.

I need a Docker install that can install WordPress, have a database, and also be able to get an SSL on the domain, because adding SSLs in Linux is a pain in the butt. I don’t know if you’ve ever been down this road. One of the biggest things about cPanel and the shared hosting is the automatic SSL feature is flipping amazing. It’s one of the things you’ll fall in love with, because your site has to be secure for multiple reasons.

But regardless, he ended up using something called Caddy server. Reverse proxies, all that stuff. He ended up just creating the script. And he goes, just run it. I’m like, how do I run it? I have no idea. He’s like, just make a file, do this. And I put the code in and all of a sudden I hit enter and this thing started running. It started updating packages, and servers, installing Docker, Docker Engine, Docker Compose, running and running and running and running. And I’m just watching it running. My eyes are just lighting up the whole time. I’m like, oh my God, what is doing?

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like watching the Matrix or something, isn’t it?

[00:30:17] Anthony Jackson: It would pause, it would extract, it would unzip files. I thought it was broke. I restarted like seven times. And all of a sudden it stopped, Nathan, and said, your WordPress instance is ready, go here. And I was like, no way. No way. And I’ll be damned, man. I clicked the link and there it was on my own domain secure, and I was blown away.

I didn’t even log in because I knew it right then and there that I could deploy WordPress and everything would be fine, right? And so I saw this WordPress and I was like, oh my God, I just deployed WordPress in minutes, not hours, on my own server with nearly no technical knowledge.

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know, I think you’ve acquired quite a lot of technical knowledge on the way.

[00:30:55] Anthony Jackson: Well, thank God, right? Because running that script was extremely challenging, but I was just, you know that moment when you discover something and you’re clapping and you’re smiling and you’re putting your hands over the air? I was clapping away. That’s where my mind was at. And when I did that, that’s when the business really started, because I wanted to be able to offer WordPress hosting without having to worry about the sys admin stuff. So I figured if I just provided a script.

So now I have a script that’s made in Bash that you just copy and paste a command and the script runs and does what it needs to do. All you need to do is just add your A record for the DNS and your SSL and you’re good to go.

[00:31:28] Nathan Wrigley: So is that, dare I ask, is that where you’re at now? Or is there another sort of, I don’t know, you just sort of, quick, pivot left? Is there something else coming?

[00:31:36] Anthony Jackson: No, there’s more. So Bash is kind of where I stopped. I didn’t really learn Bash, but as you know there’s a lot of drama in the WordPress community, and it seems to shine on X. And I made a decision that it’s going to be really hard to market because of all the competition with WordPress. And I kind of stopped.

And so the business now, this is where I’m at, I’m creating Bash scripts for popular open source applications. Because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned through my journey with WordPress and learning servers and Linux, it’s that the open source community is so powerful. Your privacy, your focus, your respect, your content, your everything is so important. So I’m actually creating Bash scripts that automate the process of those popular open source applications like WordPress, Plausible Analytics, Nextcloud, all those popular ones.

I’m in the process of making scripts for all those, and it makes the process easy because when I first started deploying open source applications, my biggest challenge was the documentation. Trying to understand it, trying to read it, trying to make sense of it. And when I saw that WordPress script run, man, I was like, oh my God, I can make anything run, and now I’ve got five scripts.

[00:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: And so is that going to be the business in the future there? Where you come along and you, I don’t know, you want Moodle or something, or you want Joomla or WordPress or whatever it may be, and you’ve got a script which you basically just put it on your server, run it, find the path to it, run it, and you’re off to the races.

That’s an interesting business model and not one, well, I mean, obviously, that business model is encapsulated in many, many, many hosting companies and hosting solutions like cPanel and what have you, but yours is going to be just, buy the script, off me, run the script, and then you’re on your own.

[00:33:16] Anthony Jackson: Because the biggest issue that I’m finding with people, it’s not so much the command line, it’s tying the SSL into it. And a lot of people are hosting these open source applications locally, but there’s a problem with that. There’s a big problem. We talked about at the very beginning of this podcast episode, it’s not on the internet. It’s local to your computer, nobody can see it.

What Caddy does is creates that reverse proxy and puts it on your own domain so that the world can see it. It solves a big problem. Because Linux is so big, you not only have to learn the operating system. You not only have to learn the command line. You’ve got to learn the commands itself. You’ve got to have serious patience. You’ve got to be able to do a lot of things to get to where you need to be with Linux to be comfortable.

These scripts make it super easy. Literally, like you point your A record, you let it propagate, you press a button and it goes. And I went as so far to this, this is really cool, I had someone else create a script that secures your server as well. So when you run this WordPress script it disables root login, it does all the security best practices, uses public key authentication, the whole nine yards. Then it installs Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Engine, runs the file, runs Caddy, installs WordPress, and you have a secure server set up in 10 minutes with your own WordPress instance on the internet ready to go.

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember the famous five minute install for WordPress, but this is more like five minute install for all the stack. Click the button, go off, make yourself a coffee, and by the time you’ve come back everything is done. That’s so interesting.

[00:34:40] Anthony Jackson: There’s a couple of manual processes because of the way the script is built. But if you have a technical background, you’re good to go. And one of the reasons I did this, Nathan, was because I realised there was no support as we discussed, right? Well, I didn’t know everything about Linux. There’s no way I could be a system admin, no way in hell.

So I wanted to make a way to where I could give it to someone and say, hey, here it is. Heads up, we’re not responsible. This is your server. You break it, you fix it. I’m here to give you the script, I’m here to troubleshoot why it’s not working and that’s it.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re just the beginning. You are the first step on the journey, and then it’s hands off from your perspective, and then it’s over to you. I’ve got it.

[00:35:17] Anthony Jackson: The scripts are all one-time fees. So you own it, do whatever you want with it. Remodify it, I don’t care. Make it better, improve it.

[00:35:22] Nathan Wrigley: Where do you sell them then? How has that as a business idea gone down? Have you managed to find customers for that?

[00:35:28] Anthony Jackson: I have not found customers yet. That’s part of the reason I’m on here, to help get exposure. I’m still trying to kind of validate the business idea. Anybody that knows anything about Bash scripts knows that they’re not sold. They’re free. I’ve put a lot of money into having these things created for me, so I want to get a little bit of return on them.

And they’re not, I mean, the WordPress one is 27. It’s nothing crazy. You can deploy WordPress as many times as you want, SSLs, et cetera. It’s a slow process. I’m very much, my business in a phase where I’m building my audience. I’m trying to find out who that audience is, what their pain points are, what their problems are. And things will probably progress from there. So right now my biggest challenge is just trying not to learn anything else because I’ve learnt so much.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it would seem that your history is littered with, well, not dead ends, but kind of temporary dead ends where it leads you to the next thing, and it leads you to the next thing. But actually the thread running through your story that I’m picking up is that each time you drop a piece of technology and move on to another one, it’s kind of elevating you towards something a bit more difficult.

The technologies that we’re using at the beginning, the next one was a little bit more difficult to manage, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And it was that inexorable kind of rise to now where you are doing the full nine yards in this one script. That’s really interesting. What a fascinating story.

I tell you what, you have more patience than I have. And I don’t know how many times you’ve thrown things at walls, but I suspect if it was me, it would’ve been quite a few. When those moments of clarity that I don’t really know what’s going on here, but I’m going to persevere. Remarkable.

We kind of hit the sweet spot in terms of time. So we’ll sort of wrap it up. What a fascinating journey. I love that story. Tell me, Anthony, where would people find what it is that you are mentioning here, these Bash scripts? Where would we find those? And then another question, very much the same really is, where would we find you? Where do you hang out online, and where could people discover you?

[00:37:19] Anthony Jackson: So my primary home is x.com. I really like X. You can visit my bio, there is a link to the website. Please note the website is being updated from what it is to something else. I was going to do the whole WordPress thing, but things changed a little bit. So I’ll leave you a link, Nathan, with a link to the shop and you can take a look at the scripts and decide if you want to purchase one. If you do, just know that I truly appreciate your support. Running a small business is extremely challenging on a very tight budget.

I really feel that this is something that can help a lot of people get where they need to be because there’s a lot of digital scams in the world. And the one script that I love that I have is the Nextcloud script. And I love the fact that I can store my data securely and not have to worry about privacy and my data being sold. So if you’re looking for an alternative to keep your stuff safe, definitely a robust option.

So I’ll send you a link, Nathan, to the scripts. I’m still in the middle of updating links and things like that. I’m just excited to finally have it off the ground and finally have a business after learning nine different technologies in a matter of two years.

[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like a lot. So what I’ll say is, when Anthony sends me the link, I will embed it into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com/podcast, if you search for Anthony Jackson, then you’ll be able to find that episode and I will make sure that all of the links that he sends me finally end up on the show notes over there.

What a fantastic and interesting story. Anthony Jackson, I really hope that your endeavor, all of that hard work pays off. Good luck for the future. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:38:46] Anthony Jackson: It was great to meet you, Nathan. Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed this story. I hope that it inspires somebody. Technology is an amazing thing. Remember, never fear it, always, always embrace it. It can take you places you’ve never imagined.

On the podcast today we have Anthony Jackson.

Anthony is a true technophile whose journey has been shaped by a constant pursuit of understanding new technologies. From a young age, Anthony’s curiosity about technology laid the foundation for a lifetime of exploration. Starting from modest beginnings in computer repair, he steadily transitioned into the world of WordPress, and the complexities of server management.

This episode really is a story, the story of trying new things, being creative and always following curiosity, wherever it may lead.

Anthony talks about his early experiences, describing the moment computers first sparked his interest, and the subsequent path he charted in the technology space. Despite hurdles and frustrations, particularly with initial web development and WordPress hosting, his story is a testament to determination and resilience. As you’ll hear Anthony learned the ropes of many technologies, from grappling with CSS for website customisation, to exploring cloud computing and the command line in Linux.

His journey took a big turn when he discovered automated Bash scripts that facilitate the deployment of open-source applications like WordPress. This is what Anthony is doing right now, but you’re going to hear many stories of different pathways that led to this situation.

Throughout the episode, Anthony sheds light on his philosophy of embracing technology. He speaks about the numerous technologies he’s explored, the trials he faced along the way, and the value of cultivating his technical skills. With his Bash scripts ready to streamline server setups and deployments, Anthony envisions a future where technology is not just a tool, but a powerful ally for businesses and personal projects alike.

If you’re keen to hear some inspirational stories about overcoming tech challenges, resilience and learning, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Anthony’s website

Divi

Beaver Builder

Elementor

cPanel

Linode

WHMCS

Docker

Docker Hub

YAML

Caddy Server

Plausible Analytics

Nextcloud