Jamie Marsland
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Hot metal, mass media and my old street
I’ve been reading Hot Type by Jeff Jarvis. It’s great. It has also exposed a fairly substantial hole in my knowledge of the industry I work in. I knew about Gutenberg. Working in WordPress, you encounter his name quite regularly, usually shortly before someone expresses a strong opinion about an editor. But Ottmar Mergenthaler? I…
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8 Simple AI Prompts to Help You Sell More with WooCommerce
Eight things that make a WooCommerce store sell more — a free delivery bar, bundles, bulk discounts, low stock notices, gift wrap, trust signals, back-in-stock alerts and a weekly sales report. Every one built by chatting to Claude, with no plugins. Full prompts included.
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Why WebMCP is going to be big for WordPress… and how to try it today
The short video below shows me using WordPress Playground with WebMCP to add a hamburger menu to a website. It’s pretty cool: I can ask AI to work on the site, see the results in my browser, and keep shaping things through conversation. Want to try it yourself? Open the latest ChatGPT desktop app, switch…
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Reading the layout back
I’ve been experimenting with what a Canva-like editing experience might look like in WordPress. The hard part is not the dragging. It is turning what you dragged into a real WordPress page.
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I Found a Cheat Code for Creating Unique WooCommerce Product Pages in Minutes
Most of us have an idea of how we’d like our shop to look. Getting that idea onto the screen can take rather longer. I’ve just tested a new way to do it: give AI a mockup, ask it to recreate the design using HTML and CSS, and include real WooCommerce product blocks inside the…
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Why You Should (Almost Always) Build for Beginners
Nobody gets promoted to Head of Marketing and suddenly develops a love of complicated software. They’re still a person. They still have too much to do. They still get annoyed when changing something that looks simple requires a tutorial, a support ticket and someone called Dave who understands the system. Yet when we talk about…
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Developer Educational Content Probably Needs to Change
Developer educational content used to have a fairly obvious audience: developers. Documentation, tutorials, code examples, API references. Different formats, but broadly created for people who understood the fundamentals of software development and wanted to learn how to build with a particular platform. AI is changing that. Because developer education increasingly isn't just about teaching people…
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Have We Just Witnessed the Birth of the First Truly AI-Native Media Format?
Until now, most generative AI has been making new versions of things we already understand. AI images are still images. AI music is still music. AI video is still video. But what happens when AI makes a type of media that couldn’t really exist before AI? I think we might have just seen the first…
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I Spent Four Hours Queuing at Geneva Airport and Now Understand Why People Worry Europe Is Becoming a Digital Backwater
I love Europe. I should probably establish that before proceeding. But I have just spent roughly four hours of my life queuing at Geneva Airport, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate European technology policy, his own mortality, and whether it would be quicker simply to walk back to England. The cause was…
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Two modes
I’ve noticed there are basically two modes a company can operate in. Customer-centric mode. And engineering-centric mode. Most great businesses start in the first one. Someone sees a problem. A real person has something annoying, expensive, slow, painful or downright ridiculous happening in their life, and the company decides to fix it. The early conversations…
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I love teaching WordPress. And I especially love teaching complete beginners.
Over the years I’ve trained more than 5,000 people face-to-face, so getting back in a room with beginners at WordCamp US in Phoenix today was a real joy. And the results were pretty great. Across 18 learners, average confidence in the core WordPress skills we covered jumped from 2.67 → 4.16. 15/18 improved and nobody…
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How I Approach Educational Content in the Age of AI: A Study in What Worked
Over the past year, I’ve been developing a new approach to educational content for YouTube, X and LinkedIn in the age of AI. The approach is pretty simple: build something exciting, show it working, then teach people exactly how I did it. Less theory about what AI might make possible. More: here’s what I built, here’s…
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How to build a help bot for your plugin that doesn’t go stale
Adding an AI help bot to a WordPress product is easy now. Point it at your documentation, give it an API key, done. It'll work beautifully for about a month. Then you ship a release. A button gets renamed, a default gets retuned, a feature moves. Nothing breaks, no error appears. The bot just quietly…
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Working in AI Feels A Lot Like Climbing Kilimanjaro
Fifteen years ago I climbed Kilimanjaro. One of the strange things about altitude is that you can feel absolutely brilliant. You’re chatting, laughing, wondering why everyone made such a fuss. Then somewhere above about 4,500 metres, your brain quietly reminds you that it has veto powers. The very unsettling part is that you don’t really…
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Why the Heck Is Everyone Using the Word “Harness” to Describe Our Relationship with AI?
Can we please stop saying we're "harnessing AI"? It's such a weird word. You harness horses. Oxen. Maybe a particularly determined husky. You don't harness a chatbot that occasionally forgets what you asked it three sentences ago. I'm not standing in a field wrestling ChatGPT into a leather bridle before asking it to rewrite an…
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What ABBA Can Teach Every Content Creator
Before we go any further, skip to 0:50 in the video below. Pay attention to the pre-chorus. Your ears will probably want the chord sequence to move on long before ABBA let it. That’s exactly the point. I play in an indie rock band called Shenanigans. We’re the sort of band that plays Radiohead, Nirvana,…
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The Easiest Non-Technical Way to Move from Wix to WordPress Using ChatGPT
If you’ve been thinking about moving from Wix to WordPress, you’ve probably discovered that most migration guides assume you know what FTP is, are happy exporting databases, or don’t mind wrestling with plugins. I don’t think that’s how most people want to build websites. Here’s the good news. If your website is primarily made up…
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I Built a Canva-Like Page Builder for WordPress with Fable
Over the weekend, Fable and I built a working MVP of a new WordPress page builder called Gogh. The idea is simple: make building WordPress pages feel as easy as Canva. Instead of wrestling with rows, columns, and nested blocks, you edit directly on the live page. Elements can be dragged, resized, rotated, reordered, and…
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Why England Lost to Argentina
England lost to Argentina. This is not ideal. In fact, for approximately 57 minutes, England appeared to be doing something highly unusual, which was winning a football match against strong opposition while looking reasonably comfortable. Then England scored. And everything changed. Most teams, when they score, become more confident. England, however, reacts the way I…
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Giving content teams precise, safe editing in WordPress: what’s new in Front-End Editor
When I built Jamie's Front-End Editor for Content Teams, the idea was simple: let a client fix the words on their live site by clicking the text and typing, without ever opening the block editor or learning WordPress. No dashboard, no interface, just edit the page in front of you. The idea landed. But the…