Also, through it I discovered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin, which pushes your blog posts to the Internet Archive (something I’ve installed on the site now – so it’d be interesting to see how it works). Very cool. And there’s probably dead links all over this blog. Will report back.
As always, it was good to speak with Nathan and Michelle, and good to meet MarcBenzakein too!
I was in the third edition of the Dealgorithmed email, an email dedicated to the fun side of the web.
It’s not available online, so in my interview I shared a website I love (Cloudhiker), content I’m loving at the moment (Evercade) and waxed lyrical about some of the early Jackbox games from the early 00’s I wish came back – Acrophobia (which was a backronym generator for multiplayers) and Cosmic Consensus which only exists in this screenshot…
…but it was excellent. Imagine a Family Fortune style board game, where you could advance one, two or three squares depending if you picked the most/second/third most popular answer.
Anyway, hello if you came from that newsletter! I hope you enjoy your stay here, sign the Guestbook. 🙂
So last year I made a bunch of goals for 2025 – things I wanted to do in the year to try and grow me, my business and my health. I also introduced the bingo card feature, where I’d chalk of lines, corners or a full house should I achieve them.
That really helped as I achieved quite a lot in 2025. Here’s where I am:-
Get back into public speaking – Success 🎉: I spoke twice in 2025 – once as WPLDN, once at an evening MWUG meetup. It was good to finally get out there and share my knowledge on running a business, and I really enjoyed it.
The talk I gave was a realisation after Loopconf where I shared breakfast with a few folks, and I talked somebody’s ear off on how I run a business. I’m pretty much an open book (even talking about money, folks – you should talk about money1), and this was my talk.
Overall, it was pretty well received. I really enjoyed it and it was good to get good insights from folks on how they run their businesses. I’ve taken at least one point on board for my business.
Finally rebuild Winwar Media to my liking – Success🎉: The bingo card helped here as I was pushed to achieve this towards the end of 2025. In the end, the new site went live on 29th December 2025. Is it finished? No. Is it better than it was? Yes. Can I build and iterate things on top of it? Indeed I can.
Similarly, I did the same with this here site, being inspired by Loopconf to start blogging again. Now I can work on things and have a clear roadmap for this site, using a a Trello board to map things out, add features and making the site a bit of joy to navigate. That’s the hope, anyway.
Sing about my Work More – Success 🎉: Yes! I now think I can tick this off as a success as I’ve built up a case studies section on Dwi’n Rhys. I also turn the testimonials into Instagram content, which helps engagement and churning out social posts. Yay! Not quite AI slop!
Run a sub 30 minute 5k – Failure: I didn’t achieve this. I’m about 2 and a half minutes off this at the moment. I’ve had a couple of 1km’s under the 6 minute mark. I’m not going to focus on times, though, instead focusing on quantity this year (more in the personal goals for 2026).
It’s odd, I think my mind gets bored with some runs, and ones I can focus on, which are a bit hilly for example, I do better than ones that are quite boring. I thought I’d get a few fast times over the Christmas break, but turns out straight in and out runs are harder than more undulating park runs. As a beach child, I hate to say it but the sea gets boring.
Hit a weight loss goal – Failure: I haven’t weighed myself for an age, but I know I’m off this. A lot of bad habits have creeped back, as although I feel healthier than this time last year, I am still a little heavier than I like. I’ll look to improve this this year.
Update: I weighed myself this morning, and it confirmed my suspicion. I put on a bit of weight! I’m still way down, but yeah, up a bit.
Attend a Game Dev Meetup – Success 🎉: This was an achievement as I attended the Manchester Indie Game Dev Meetup in July. I’ve since not been back (not that there is anything wrong! Just the dates haven’t aligned). I look forward to attending next year.
Oddly, I also achieved a goal from 2024 – with me scoring 23 in a game of cricket. Funnily enough it was the first game in 2025 I achieved this, with a score of 24. My highest is now 31 (retired).
I hit two lines! As such, I treated myself to two of my “line” prizes, which was a pair of brand new pair of cricket trainers and a Strava subscription.
Onto this year, here are my goals for 2026.
Professional Goals
Weirdly, my goals for 2026, I struggled with thinking of professional goals for me this year. I even turned to everybody’s favourite ocean burning hallucinogenic tool – ChatGPT – to try and come up with ideas and it came up a bit short. Nevertheless, here’s what I’ve settled on.
Release another Paid Plugin or SAAS
It’s been a fair few years since I’ve released a paid WordPress plugin or SAAS, and now that I write this with a relatively long term runway, I can maybe focus on some more non web development projects. I was fortunate enough late last year to work on a paid plugin which gave me great insight into how I can build and market one.
So the hope is for 2026 I’ll release a paid plugin or a SAAS. I’ve got two ideas I can maybe look to explore, one paid plugin is pretty much half way there for a first draft, so I can’t imagine it being too much work to push it out. I’ve got a cheeky idea for a blog post to prepare for it, too.
Grow my WordPress newsletter to 50 subscribers
I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do this, but one thing I’ve seen on a number of my sites has been traffic has dropped from search engines over all my sites. I’m not seeing a drop in rankings, so I suspect it’s due to AI. Joy.
Nevertheless, I’m looking to grow communities around my sites. One such thing is my monthly WordPress newsletter. It gets a decent number of subscribers and open rates, but it is still stubbornly quite small, with only 22 (at the time of writing) I pushed it out a little bit and I’m now up to 28.
I will say, the quality of subscribers is quite something. Names I trust and enjoy listening to in the WordPress space. I must be doing something right. It’d be good to get it up to 50 subscribers by the end of the year. I’m not entirely sure how, so if you want a monthly dose of WordPress, the web and some other fun things, please, do subscribe. Thanks!
Finally get WP Email Capture updated to my liking
I’m fucking sick of Peadig and it breaking, so now that Winwar Media’s site is done, I want to get WP Email Capture off Peadig and onto my standard Kadence setup. I’m imaging as I don’t particularly want to change the design too much or it’s functionality it’ll be a lot quicker. We will see.
Be weird to actually thinking of three different professional tasks to do for the first time!
Personal Goals
First off, I want to go ahead and do something I swore this time last year I’d never do, and run a 10k. I ran a couple of properly timed 5k runs with medals and stuff, and I think most runners are secretly magpies and like collecting shiny things. I’ve ran a 7k once (around the lake near where my partner lived in Romania), so I’d be keen to try and get to double figures.
Similarly for double figures, I’d be keen to get to 50 parkruns this year. I’m currently on 282. I’m 50/50 on whether I achieve this, but it’s one parkrun every 2 weeks. As long as I maintain that, I think I’ll achieve it.
Finally I really want to release a video game on non-Pico 8 hardware. What that will be I’m not sure, but I really want to either focus on retro technology, or something like Godot for maybe pushing onto Steam? We’ll see. I have looked at potentially game jams like DOSEmber as there are DOS based languages on Lua. I have one game on the go that could tick this off, but it may be technically cheating myself. But it’ll tick off the square.
So, on to this year, here’s my bingo card for this year, adding on 3 potential “50 before I’m 50” items.
Overall, I’ve gotten very lucky. The middle square is quite a nice one as I’ve already got a 50 before I’m 50 booked in, and a second one I’m relatively sure of hitting, however I hope that doesn’t make me lazy, especially as two of them require me to be fit.
Nevertheless, those are my goals for 2026. What about yours? Leave them in the comments, and are you doing a bingo card this year? Let me know if so!
My rationale to this is that it’s like politics – the people who shut down talk about it have the most to lose. By being an open book I feel I can help people grow, but that’s by the by… ↩︎
It’s kind of funny that both the amount of subscribers and parkruns are both on 28 ↩︎
I am the 378th quickest runner ever at the Y Promenad, Llandrillo-yn-Rhos Parkrun (at the time of writing).
On Saturday I got up 6:30am from a tip off from my brother the week before. There was rumours that Rhos-on-Sea, a suburb of my hometown, was starting a parkrun that day. Previously being an achievement on the 5k App, attending the first parkrun in a location is not quite as prestigious as before – it’s not promoted to stop the newbie run directors being overwhelmed with people coming to attend. So much so, that it felt a little bit underground, a bit hush hush attending the event. Like a drinker in a prohibition era United States, as murky as my half 6 start in Newton-le-Willows.
Although the weather was terrible when I set off, the drive to North Wales was constantly getting better, so it was a cold crisp morning as I parked up. Word had got out a bit, as about 500 parkrunners and walkers showed up at the event. They were ushered into the garden next to the tourist information to get the first timers briefing. With everybody was a first timer nobody was skipping it. After folks were briefed I said a quick hello and goodbye to my brother who showed up with his dog and set off on the route.
The route is perfect for personal bests, running along the Colwyn Bay promenade, from Rhos-on-Sea, past Toad Hall pub, under the pier and just by Porth Eirias before doubling back again. I was surprised that the coast I walked many a time was only 2km or so. It feels a lot longer, certainly looked it. There is a loop but it’s largely flat and concrete – with only sand deposited from the North Sea causing issues. There’s even 2k marked out in the promenade’s mosaic to somewhat time yourself.
Anyway, it wasn’t a day for a personal best due to the numbers attending. I did get rather close though. Probably about a minute back on my personal best. I did push it too hard too early on (I managed my first 1k and 1 mile to be under the goal of a 30 minute 5k), meaning I was struggling towards the end, but I got home in a respectable 33:30 – really only hampering. My goal was to get a photo of the token to proudly declare that I was in X best runner in this blog post, as they had only 450 tokens in total.
Which I did.
It’s nice to have an email with 1 and a name as on the inaugeral parkrun page although the 5k App still lists the run as “Unknown” for now, meaning although I didn’t get the elusive “Y” for my Parkrun alphabet, I did pick up the U!
Overall, the time wasn’t the goal today, it was just to attend, and support, and just be a part of something good for my home town. It gets a bit of stick and having a parkrun there is another thing it’s got going for it. It’s a gorgeous location and looking forward to attend again.
Away from things I discussed I also discussed the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release, building WordPress blocks with AI (and the security implications that provides) and changes to the Plugin ecosystem.
