Category: Writings
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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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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 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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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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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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Everything I Learned Bringing Up Three Daughters: A Father’s 10 Rules for Survival
I love my three daughters. They are my life, they are miracles. I thought it would prove useful, for anyone about to embark on this journey, to have a road map, a guide from someone who’s been there before, trodden the path, and tripped on all the Lego pieces along the way. Now, everyone’s journey…
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The Soundtrack to My Life Is Rubbish… and it’s all your fault!
I have a confession: I love silence. I like hearing nothing except, maybe, birds, the wind in the trees, or the sound of my own brain trying to remember why I just walked into the kitchen. But apparently, silence is now considered dangerous, like asbestos or unsupervised children with glitter. Take the French Open. Tennis…
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We’ve Poisoned the Well, and We Can Never Make It Pure Again
The day everything changed was November 30, 2022. That was when ChatGPT was unleashed upon humanity, and my daughters’ friends discovered they could get an AI to write their university essays while they sat around eating crisps and watching Love Island. Sure, we had “AI” before then: autocorrect, spellcheck, Siri telling us to turn left…
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The future of WordPress? A complete website from nothing but a link.
If you’ve ever worked with WordPress, you’ll know the pain of spinning up a site just to test an idea. That’s why WordPress Playground is such a breakthrough. It runs WordPress entirely in your browser. No servers. No setup. Just open a tab and you have a working site. It’s one of those technologies that…
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I’m Not Sure WordPress Can Be WordPress Anymore
(Or: What If It Could Be Something Even Bigger?) Loveable is now valued at $1.8 billion, with $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That’s not a typo. A tool that lets people build and deploy full web apps with AI just passed a milestone that many of us in the WordPress ecosystem would have laughed…
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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…