Category: Writings
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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…
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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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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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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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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 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…