Writings
My thoughts and musings
Why this terrible song is so inspiring
Oct 05, 2026I’m sitting at an old mahogany desk in Pushkar, India, beside a beautiful sacred lake. According to legend, Brahma’s wife was late for a ceremony here, so he married someone else. Most of us would have checked our watches. And…
Read more →Hot metal, mass media and my old street
Sep 23, 2026I’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,…
Read more →Why You Should (Almost Always) Build for Beginners
Sep 08, 2026Nobody 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…
Read more →Developer Educational Content Probably Needs to Change
Sep 05, 2026Developer 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…
Read more →How to build a help bot for your plugin that doesn’t go stale
Aug 07, 2026Adding 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…
Read more →Working in AI Feels A Lot Like Climbing Kilimanjaro
Aug 05, 2026Fifteen 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…
Read more →Why the Heck Is Everyone Using the Word “Harness” to Describe Our Relationship with AI?
Aug 04, 2026Can 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…
Read more →Why England Lost to Argentina
Jul 16, 2026England 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…
Read more →Giving content teams precise, safe editing in WordPress: what’s new in Front-End Editor
Jul 14, 2026When 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,…
Read more →AI Makes It Harder Sometimes to Get Traction
Jul 03, 2026When I was running WordPress courses, someone once copied my website almost word for word. They copied the headlines, the structure, the sales copy, the lot. They were so lazy they even copied my phone number. So I started getting…
Read more →Turn Any WordPress Playground Into a Guided Education Experience
Jun 30, 2026If you’ve ever shared a WordPress Playground link and watched someone wonder where to click next, this is for you. I’ve been experimenting with a new feature on pootleplayground.com called Guided Tours. Here’s a live example: https://pootleplayground.com/p/5ai0uv Open the link…
Read more →The Push-Pull of Government Running Things Really Badly
Jun 29, 2026Or: Why British Government Is Basically a Washing Machine Stuck on Spin Cycle Every few years, a politician stands at a lectern, looks serious, and announces that power is going to be devolved. This week it was Andy Burnham. The…
Read more →Meet the Distraction-Free Writer — a calm place to write, right inside WordPress
Jun 27, 2026WordPress is a brilliant publishing platform, but let’s be honest about the writing experience: the moment you click “Add New Post” you’re staring at admin bars, sidebars, settings panels, block inserters, and a dozen things competing for your attention. None…
Read more →AI Designs It. WordPress Runs It.
Jun 26, 2026Over the past few months I've been exploring a simple idea. AI has become remarkably good at generating HTML. Not just acceptable HTML, but genuinely beautiful, well-structured landing pages that would have taken me hours to build by hand. I've…
Read more →We Need Better Stories, Not Just More Videos
Jun 25, 2026I've spent the last five years making WordPress videos. For a long time, the formula was fairly simple. Build something useful, make a good tutorial, publish it, and people would watch. I don't think that's true anymore. The problem isn't…
Read more →Using ChatGPT as a WordPress Page Builder
Jun 18, 2026ChatGPT might be the best WordPress page builder I’ve ever used. Which sounds ridiculous. But I’m not sure it is. Last night, I rebuilt my wife’s yoga studio website using ChatGPT and WordPress. The reason it worked so well is…
Read more →Pressship: The Easiest Way to Publish a WordPress Plugin to WordPress.org
Jun 17, 2026Publishing a plugin to the WordPress.org directory has a reputation for being fiddly — and that reputation is earned. You have to zip your files in exactly the right shape, hand-check a readme.txt against rules you can’t see, install developer…
Read more →We Ran a Huge Social Experiment on a Whole Generation. It Turned Out to Be Terrible
Jun 15, 2026Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right. This is…
Read more →WordPress Is the Smartest Long-Term Bet in an AI World
Jun 15, 2026The problem with AI builders is not the first demo. It is the third rebuild. I have used Lovable, Bolt, Replit and Base44 a lot. They are brilliant at getting you from idea to working prototype quickly. You describe the…
Read more →The Non-Technical Person’s Vibe Coding Cheat Sheet for WordPress
Jun 10, 2026If you are a non-technical but want to build stuff in WordPress with AI, bookmark this. This is the cheat sheet I wish I had when I started vibe coding. The trick is simple: Know what to ask AI to…
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