Author: Jamie Marsland
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Things That Are Easy, Except When They’re Not
One of the weirder truths of life is that difficulty is wildly uneven. At school, I had a friend who completely fell apart before an inter-class rugby match. Not a final. Not a big deal. Just a muddy field and a whistle. He was pale, shaking, and genuinely distressed. This baffled me. I played county…
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Why Remotion Is Such a Big Deal (Explained for Non-Techies)
Yesterday I dug into Remotion and built my first bit of motion graphics. My three-prompt effort is… rough 😅👇 But it instantly showed me the massive potential of combining Remotion’s approach with AI. I wrote a short, non-techy explainer on why this feels like a big deal 👇 Most video tools work like this: You…
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I’ve dreamed of building this for 15 years. AI let me do it in a weekend.
For fifteen years I’ve wanted to build a prediction market meets satirical newspaper. A place where readers could vote on what happens next in the news, wrapped in the irreverent tone of a Private Eye or The Onion. Last weekend, using AI, I built the whole thing. Not a prototype. A working app with AI-generated…
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My 2025 recap (by the Numbers)
My memory is bad. Not “where did I put my keys” bad, but “did I do anything at all last year” bad. So I wrote this down. When you turn a year into numbers, the vibes immediately flee the scene. In their place are facts, standing there silently, judging you. Here is last year, by…
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Write or Die
Write or Die for WordPress is a plugin that encourages forces you to write. It tackles procrastination in the most direct way possible. If you stop typing for five seconds, your words are deleted. This is not a metaphor. It actually deletes them. The idea is simple. Remove the safety net and force momentum. Surprisingly…
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How Tomorrow Times Was Built: A 15-Year Idea, One Weekend Side Project
Fifteen years ago, I had an idea. When you watch the news or read a story, the unspoken question is almost always the same: what happens next? What if there was a place where you could make quick predictions on the news and see how good you really are at forecasting the future? Back then,…
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Once A Year, I Get To Be Scrooge
I am currently building a tutorial on how to create a Linktree style page using WordPress. This is practical, useful, and will almost certainly help people. Halfway through recording it, a thought arrived uninvited and refused to leave. Why does this need to exist at all? Linktree is clever in the same way that putting…
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Yesterday, Something Unique Happened in WordPress
Yesterday I watched a WordPress plugin bounce between creators like it was competing in some kind of WordPress relay race. Idea, prototype, remix, accessibility audit, polished final version. All in a day. It felt like a preview of a future where collaboration is effortless and AI tools turbocharge the whole process. It began when I…
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Why I’m Now Convinced AI Won’t Kill WordPress
On the way back from Boston yesterday, unable to sleep because the small child behind me kept kicking my chair with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated mule, I watched the brilliant Benedict Evans give one of his presentations about where AI is heading. It was supposed to help me relax. Instead it felt like someone…
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My Annual Reminder That HTML Is Semantically Awful — By Design
Every year, usually after breaking something I didn’t mean to, I like to remind myself (and anyone within tweeting distance) that HTML is semantically awful — by design. HTML is like that old friend who can’t tell a story without five tangents, two unrelated photos, and a Wikipedia link from 2007. And yet somehow, you…
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My Shower Has Better Ideas Than I Do
Maybe creativity isn’t about talent, it’s about learning to see and listen. This week, someone said to me, “I’m just not a creative person.” I don’t think that’s true. I get it though. We’ve been taught to think creativity is a gift, something only a few lucky people are born with. But maybe it’s not…
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I Had an Argument with a Man in a Café. His Phone Was Loud. Civilization Is Over.
I was working in my local café yesterday, the kind of place where “coffee” has evolved into a giant bucket of syrupy milk with just enough caffeine to justify the name. Everything was lovely. There was soft chatter, the faint hum of the espresso machine, and the comforting illusion that humanity still had some manners…
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I Vibe Coded Six Apps in a Week — Here’s What That Would’ve Cost a Few Years Ago
TL;DR I built six fully working apps: PootleWriter, PootlePhotos, PootlePlayground, PootleSites, PootleBooks, and PootleNoodle – each in less than a day. A few years ago, they would have required a full dev team, months of work, and up to £120,000. Thanks to AI-assisted “vibe coding,” browser APIs, and WordPress Playground, what once felt like enterprise…
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10 Ways WooCommerce MCP Could Make Your Storefront Actually Exciting
The new WooCommerce MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration quietly opens up one of the most interesting frontiers for eCommerce in years. Until now, WooCommerce’s REST API has mostly been used for backend automations: syncing products, managing orders, and building integrations. But MCP adds a twist, it lets AI assistants talk directly to your store in…
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10 Amazing Ways to Use the Perplexity Comet AI Browser with WordPress
The Comet AI Browser from Perplexity opens up a completely new way to work with WordPress — blending browsing, creating, and publishing into one seamless flow. Here are ten powerful ways you can use Comet and WordPress together right now. ⚡️ 1. Talk to Your Site — Real-Time WordPress Editing via Chat Open your WordPress…
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Introducing Pootle Playground — My Experimental WordPress Blueprint Builder
If you’ve ever had to spin up a fresh WordPress site for a client demo, a plugin test, or a tutorial, you know the grind.Install WordPress. Add plugins. Create pages. Set the homepage. Tweak settings. Repeat. WordPress Playground made that faster with instant WordPress in your browser, but building custom environments still meant hand-writing JSON…
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The Rise of Ecommerce in India: What I’ve Seen and What the Data Shows
Over the last two decades, I’ve had the chance to visit India multiple times. I’ve seen the changes firsthand. I’ve worked with my own development team based in India. I’ve watched India-based WordPress companies like Brainstorm Force and InstaWP grow from small teams into global names. I’ve also been inspired by grassroots efforts like WordPress…
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If You Want to Understand How Someone Uses Your Product — Run a Training Course
Really. I mean it: run a training course. “If you want to master something, teach it.” — Richard Feynman There’s no better way to truly understand how people use your product, what they love, what they fear, and where they stumble, than by running a training course. Over the past 10 years, I’ve trained more…
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What Actually Runs a WordPress Website
Most of us treat WordPress like a black box. You log in, publish a post, maybe install a plugin, and a website appears. It feels seamless. But beneath that simplicity lies a small network of programs that work together every time someone visits your site. The Four Layers That Make WordPress Work A live WordPress…
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If Automattic’s Telex Builds This, You Might Not Need That Page Builder
One of the most exciting things about Automattic’s Telex is that it lets anyone build custom blocks for WordPress. That is a big deal. Over the past few weeks, we have seen some really creative examples pop up: everything from video scrub-on-scroll effects to timelines, even a playable version of Pong. It is fun, it…