Bubbles appeared in my analytics today and it could be a fun little project.
It seems to be a version of Hacker News for personal and those sites that are non commercial. In short, it curates a bunch of feeds from a bunch of sources (see them here) and then people can upvote on the posts they like, and over time the ones that aren’t liked are eventually hidden. It feels like a natural way to read a bunch of blogs dead quick. William Parker hit the nail on the head – “Anyone who’s ever tried to “do RSS right” knows the trap: You either miss everything or you drown in it. Bubbles sidesteps that completely.”.
The theory is that “the good stuff bubbles to the top”. At least that’s the plan. And I like it. So consider this blog post a way to support this project. Ben (the developer) want folks to keep using it, and I hope to keep doing so.
The last couple of nights I’ve fallen asleep to the Syrric YouTube Channel. It is a group of dudes who read out fun facts about video games. The thing that differentiates it from a bunch of other channels? It’s not designed to be watched – but rather listened too as you fall asleep.
Last night I had a hectic day and wasn’t in until about 9pm. I try to fall asleep between 10 and 11pm, so when I went to bed I was still rather awake.
10 minutes of hearing a calming voice talk about the history of Super Mario Brothers? Zonked out.
Also, quite nicely, as their output has been so regular the inevitable questions about it being AI generated came out – which they were quick to answer in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk7Nx0xpmj8
In short, I’ve really enjoyed this channel, and recommend checking it out. Hope it continues for ages as they’ve been burning through franchises like nobody’s business!
Is My Blue Your Blue is a website I found through Cloudhiker and one thing I’ve learned about me recently (along with the fact I’m cross dominant), has been I perceive greens a lot more than blues.
Not sure what to make of it, but it was nice to learn.
I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.
As Ben stated on his post:-
To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.
13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.
Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.
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. ↩︎
