Author: Jamie Marsland
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PootleWriter Just Got a Major Upgrade: Image Support Is Here 🚀
Say hello to drag-and-drop image uploads in PootleWriter – fully optimized and seamlessly integrated with WordPress. New Features Upload to WordPress Media LibraryDrop an image, and it’s instantly uploaded to your WordPress site. Filenames and alt text? Automatically cleaned and added. Drag-and-Drop SimplicityDrag images straight into the editor. You’ll see a blue dashed border and…
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PootleWriter Update: WordPress Categories, Markdown Support, and Optional Draft Posting
We’ve just shipped a new PootleWriter update with three powerful improvements to streamline your writing and publishing workflow. WordPress Categories — Automatically PulledPootleWriter now connects directly to your WordPress site and automatically pulls your existing categories using the WordPress REST API. Just pick the right category from a dropdown — no need to remember or…
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My Cat is a Criminal, the Internet is a Dumpster Fire, and I Rode a Train Through Hell
Let me tell you about my cat, Pom. Pom is technically a domestic animal, in the same way that lava is technically a building material. She is a small, fluffy tyrant with zero regard for international law, property rights, or upholstery. She looks like something you'd see on a greeting card, but do not be…
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Why you should learn Storytelling deeply in 2025
There’s that famous quote: “There’s the story you tell yourself, and the story the world tells about you.”Usually seen in moody typeface over a photo of someone hiking through fog, followed by a podcast ad. But behind the bumper sticker philosophy is something weird and true: we can’t stop telling stories. We explain life through…
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Why Over a Million People Paid to Walk Through a Muddy Tunnel
The other night I was watching a documentary on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, I know how that sounds. But look, it was either that or scroll aimlessly on my phone for an hour while trying to avoid buying another guitar. So, documentary it was. And then this amazing fact popped out. Brunel, the legendary Victorian…
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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…