Author: Jamie Marsland
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How This One Episode of Clarkson’s Farm Can Teach You More About Marketing Than a £10,000 MBA
About 20 years ago, I started an MBA. I was one of those ambitious, eager-to-learn types — until the company sponsoring me went spectacularly bust halfway through the first module. No more funding. No more textbooks. Just me, a partially digested SWOT analysis, and a sudden abundance of free evenings. Back then, I thought I’d…
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We Need to Talk About My Friend Jamie… No, Not Me
I have a friend called Jamie. No, not me. A different Jamie. I realize that’s confusing. This is like that time in school when there were two boys named Timothy and the teacher tried calling one of them “Timothy 2” to differentiate, and he immediately burst into tears. Anyway, Jamie (not me) is a walking,…
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The WordPress Speed Build at WordCamp EU in Basel 2025
What happens when two brilliant WordPress developers get just 30 minutes to recreate a completely ridiculous website design? At WordCamp EU’s Speed Build challenge, Fabian Kägy and Ellen Bauer were handed a design inspired by bubblegum, brutalism, and bonbons—and things got wonderfully weird. Here’s how it went down.
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I Went to WordCamp EU and Spent Three Days in My Hotel Room… Here’s What I Learned
There’s a quote by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that goes:“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Clearly, Blaise never tried doing this at a WordCamp. Or while slightly ill. Or while watching Interstellar in a hotel bed, drifting in and out of consciousness and wondering if…
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What Brands Still Don’t Get About YouTube
After making over 500 YouTube videos and growing a channel to 150,000 subscribers, I’ve noticed a pattern. Especially with brands. They’re trying too hard to be perfect. Polished lighting. Studio voiceovers. Scripted everything. Sleek, corporate-designed animations. It looks great. But it doesn’t work. Not on YouTube. Because on YouTube, polish doesn’t build trust. In fact,…
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How to Build a CSS-Only Carousel in WordPress Gutenberg with Zero JavaScript
Creating an accessible, functional, and beautiful carousel in WordPress has traditionally meant reaching for a plugin—or writing custom JavaScript. But not anymore. Thanks to a new CSS spec, CSS Overflow Module Level 5, we can now build fully accessible carousels using nothing but HTML and CSS. And in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to…
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When AI Avatars Look (and Sound) Like Us — What Happens Next?
One of the areas we’re exploring at Automattic is how generative AI might help us improve video content — for support, training, and product demos. And one of the most fascinating frontiers is AI avatars: realistic video presenters created entirely by machines, sometimes based on real people. I wrote about this recently in an article,…
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When My Heart Went Wonky, the Whole World Went Wonky Too
by Me (a totally normal person who now owns multiple pulse oximeters) One morning, completely out of the blue, my heart decided to start improvising. You know how hearts usually go thump-thump-thump, nice and regular, like a dependable old wall clock or a well-behaved metronome? Mine went thump…thump-thump…pause…JAZZ SOLO! It turns out this was a…
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How We Can Scale WordPress Education in Universities (and Why AI is the Catalyst)
Just finished teaching a WordPress course at OFFF Barcelona with an amazing group of young, energised creatives. They had no idea what was possible with WordPress — and they care deeply about creativity, freedom, and open source. The workshop sold out a week before the event, with all 25 places gone and over 30 people…
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The Future of Growth Isn’t Just in Code — It’s in Content
Greg Isenberg recently posted something that caught my attention: "The fastest path to your first $10M today is not in the IDE. It is in the FYP." It was aimed at founders — but it has real implications for established brands too. As someone working on a platform like WordPress.com, I see this shift every…
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The Proof is in the Personalization: Real Brands, Real Results
Still sending the same message to everyone? These brands didn't—and the results speak for themselves. 🎯 Kent Brushes (UK)Swapped out their standard Black Friday emails for hyper-personalized ones and saw an 839% increase in email-attributed revenue.Source: Klaviyo 🎯 Ferris State University (US)Tailored their website content to each visitor's stage in the funnel. Result? A 2798%…
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WordPress Is Sitting on a Goldmine — And the Feature API Just Dug the First Tunnel
WordPress is sitting on a goldmine. Over the past 20 years, its community has created more than 60,000 plugins — a massive, decentralized library of tools, ideas, and functionality. But until now, accessing that collective intelligence has been like trying to tap into an archive with no index. That’s where the new Feature API comes…
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The Whole World Changes When Video Gen AI Gets Usable
The other night, I was talking to my daughter Lily. She’s in her second year of film school — passionate, creative, obsessed with cinema. But she was having a bit of an existential crisis. “What’s the point of learning all this,” she asked, “if AI is going to be able to make films better and…
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5 Incredible Things Coming to WordPress Through the Features API
How a quiet shift in architecture could redefine how we build and interact with WordPress WordPress is changing — and not in the way people usually say it is. This shift isn’t aesthetic. It’s not about blocks or admin redesigns or even the embrace of full-site editing. What’s happening under the hood is far more…
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No-Code vs. Vibe Coding: A New Frontier or a Tired Debate?
The no-code vs. code debate isn’t new—but it’s evolving. Recently, a public exchange on Facebook between two professionals, Umar Mirza and Ahmad Awais (Founder & CEO at Langbase), reignited the conversation. It revealed not just differing opinions, but two fundamentally different visions for the future of software creation. Umar Mirza: No-Code Is About EmpowermentUmar Mirza…
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The Old Way of Marketing Is Dying — Welcome to Vibe Marketing
Over the past few months, I’ve been deep diving into vibe coding — a faster, more intuitive way of building software that prioritizes taste, speed, and experimentation over bloated frameworks and traditional workflows. What started as a creative detour quickly turned into a revelation. Vibe coding isn’t just a new technique — it’s a mindset…
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Can YouTube Show Ads on Your Channel If You Turn Off Monetization?
If you've chosen to turn off monetization on your YouTube channel or specific videos, you might expect that no ads will run. But the reality is more complicated. In fact, YouTube can still show ads on your regular videos, even if you’ve disabled monetization. Here's what you need to know. YouTube's Right to Monetize Your…
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How to Create High-Converting StoryBrand-Style Personalized Landing Pages Using Omnisend, Bolt.new, and WordPress (Beginner’s Guide)
How to Create High-Converting StoryBrand-Style Personalized Landing Pages Using Omnisend, Bolt.new, and WordPress (Beginner’s Guide) If you want to create landing pages that feel personal, professional, and high-converting — without hiring a developer — this guide is for you. In just a few minutes, I’ll show you how to build StoryBrand-style personalized landing pages that…
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How to Create a Seamless Scrolling Marquee in WordPress Using Core Gutenberg Blocks
Creating a horizontally scrolling marquee in WordPress is a fun and eye-catching way to show off client logos, testimonials, team members, or anything you want to continuously loop across the screen. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to do this using only core Gutenberg blocks and a bit of CSS magic. No plugins or…
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How Much Better Are LLMs Than a Human?
“Humans are just models too.” That’s what James Cameron recently said when talking about AI and copyright — and he’s kind of right. We, as humans, consume vast amounts of information throughout our lives and remix it to create ideas, stories, and solutions. That sounds a lot like what large language models (LLMs) do too.…