A rabbit hole I went down yesterday was this article on The New Stack and it went deep into places I don’t ever want to frequent1. In the article, it talked about the sustainability in open source, particularly when large corporations that turn over huge profits view contributions as “here’s a bug, fix it”. I don’t want to believe it, but it does seem like open source is only a viable business solution when somebody gets screwed somewhere down the line.
The XKCD comic you legally must share when talking about open source development.
I remember when I started getting “security researchers” reporting bugs in my plugins, and it got exhausting when individuals came with their cap in hand to my free plugins, putting the bug behind a bitcoin paywall. Oddly since my plugins have joined the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Programme these updates have pretty much stopped.
It got frustrating and stressful for me to push security updates when I was getting a couple every month, and I don’t have Google’s finest security researchers and AI breathing down my neck because my code probably isn’t being used internally in Google, or in Amazon, or Meta. I can understand why people who maintain these libraries are quitting when these are corporate entities are overwhelming volunteers, often with no compensation.
What’s with all the folks online tearing down other people’s stack?
I’ve read many a post in the past few weeks where people have been complaining about WordPress. There are justifiable complaints, obviously. However I feel like some developers and designers have made their entire existence about hating WordPress. Celebrating people moving off the platform. There are folks who post 2,000 word articles about how they hate Wapuu’s, sharing it as critiques on the community at the whole. But if you read the article fully, they simply hate Wapuu.
Obviously, everybody is entitled to their opinion. But I find it a bit strange. Making your entire personality on hating anything is weird, but especially for hating something as benign as a tech stack. Mate, Node.js won’t sleep with you. I also think it’s strange that people openly post on company blogs this. At least I try and keep it a bit separate. It’s woefully unprofessional and I can’t imagine it gets many customers.
Of course WordPress has problems. The block editor is a bit clunky still, and I am cheering on Fair to succeed. But nothing else is perfect. Shopify has problems2, Next.js has problems3, Webflow has problems. Different tools have positives and negatives. Being wedded to one system is always limiting. Be curious of other things4, explore the bubble outside, recognise which tools are best for the job, and go with them.
Never one of the Cool Kids
For me, I find the tool the most comforting to be WordPress. It’s creaky and clunky at time, but the sites rank well enough and do okay, plus I can make changes easily. There’s a reason why it’s been popular for so long. Same way COBOL has been around for so long. WordPress doesn’t attract the cool kids, but do you want your bank account to be cool5? Or traffic light systems to be cool? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather they work. I think WordPress is in the same place.
I find it similar to a patriotism. Usually the ones who I deem to be the most patriotic I find the ones who don’t bang on about it and recognise there are problems along the way. Whereas the folks who make their whole personality around a flag or a leader just a bit weird. Like they have nothing else to offer bar a piece of fabric from a flagpole. Because their piece of fabric is in their mind is better than your piece of fabric. And they want you to know about it.
I think developers who make their whole personality of “Hating on WordPress” similar. It’s text in a file that you open on a computer. We don’t have to be so emotional about it.
Finally – I’d like to draw your attention to the heading of the post. Do you know how difficult to find a roundabout that hasn’t been defaced in the UK in the year of our Lord 2025? To use as a base for my top image? Surely that’s worth a share just for that.
I may have assumed the gender of Wapuu. In which case, I apologise. ↩︎
Shopify is a nightmare for redirects. Like really bad. I had to use my friend Shane’s approach to redirects with it. As redirects in Shopify is completely unusuable. ↩︎
Have you ever tried to use Next.js to put anything in the header – like JSON+LD? And for it to work? Impossible. ↩︎
Last night I was working on this site, and wanted to change the banner at the top of the page to be more inkeeping with the rest of the site, I wanted a pixellated sky towards the top (which I’m still not 100% happy with), so after creating a gradient in Aseprite1, I loaded up the CSS file of this site in Visual Studio Code, as part of the project.
I use VS Code to do all my coding. I love the tool, it just works, but lately I’ve noticed the AI Code completions picking up a lot more hallucinations. Here’s one that was suggested to me last night.
Notice on line 160 the AI Code Completion the line suggests the background image to be a file that doesn’t exist.
You can see the image within the “images” folder of the theme called top-bar-background.webp, but the AI Code completion suggested the file to be top-bar-bg.webp. It was late, I’m developing my cold, and it’s my site – so I accepted it, without proper checks and uploaded it.
It didn’t work.
Now there is the point where AI proponents should say “It’s AI! You should check this”, but here’s the thing – I really shouldn’t. Copilot already has access to my theme and file library. Surely a “check if that file exists” with the returned data should be done? You don’t need AI. There’s a function in most modern languages, here’s PHP’s for example. Surely AI can check if a bloody file exists?
Other AI proponents will say “Cursor (for example) won’t do this”, but that’s my point. Cursor is built on VS Code, but there’s probably some weird quirks that are different that I would have to learn.
That friction adds time, and slows me down.
And that’s me as an 20+ year developer who can spot things. I shudder to think what those who blindly vibe code miss.
Aseprite is one of those programs that really should be three times the cost, it does one thing and one thing very well. I’ve never glided through a graphics program like it before. ↩︎
I see that AOL has ended it’s dial-up service after 30 years with barely a whimper. I think the first times I explored the internet was on AOL sometimes in the early 2000s, usually playing Slingo or downloading Quake Maps off a friends internet connection.
It was also the first time I experienced some form of gatekeeping. With AOL being ubiquitous with early internet with it’s easy setup, and the fact it was incompatible with Netscape Navigator, meant that it was always for those who weren’t the most technically literate. Something I – sadly – participated in.
This gatekeeping was reinforced when, during University in 2002, the “Social and Technical Internet” module I studied in my degree included a fascinating few lessons on early internet culture, and things like Eternal September. Further studies meant I really wanted to go back to that time.
Anyway, it’s kind of ironic that the cause of Eternal September died on 1st October.
I miss folks commenting on blog posts really. At my peak I’d post a blog post at home, walk the half a mile from my student digs to university, and then be greeted with 4 or 5 comments. Now? I think I’ve had one comment in the past year. I still don’t stubbornly take the comments off here nor Dwi’n Rhys though, in a vain hope they come back. They won’t. But they may.
But seemingly like half the attendees at LoopConf last week in London (read Tim Nash’s post about his ridiculous schedule from Yorkshire > London > Poland to be at events), I too was inspired by Ana Rodrigues’ talk “Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence”, who had a number of inspiring slides, including the one I’ve used as the header image (albeit with a terrible photo :-
Personal websites are the perfect playground for experimentation. They afford a space to explore new technologies that might not yet be suitable for professional projects and a safe space to fail.
So consider me inspired, and me testing more things that may fail. I’ve switched on Webmentions using this plugin, and also using Autoblue as well to try and foster some more comments from BlueSky (this post should automatically post there and also automatically pull in replies as comments). It may work. It may be utter rubbish. But we try.
It’s the first strand of things to do. I want to promote this blog to all the things. I want to take this blog back to the 00’s. I want to put 88×31 buttons on. I was bored on Sunday made a few because James Huff on the Post Status Slack wanted a retro button and the ones on the Web Archive were terrible. I want under-construction GIFs. I want to use my new found Aseprite skills to make this blog look a little less like the blog of a 41 year old business owner who renewed his home insurance today, and more of the bloke in his early 20’s who spend his evenings drawing little graphics, installing ridiculously unsafe PHP scripts, and generally having a good life online. Granted less of the PHP scripts, but more moving purposefully and breaking things.
