WordPress Administrator accounts should never publish

Every WordPress post publicly names the account that published it. When that account is an Administrator, every byline points at the keys to the site. When its username is an email address, WordPress may publish that address as the byline, in feeds, and on comments. Here’s how to delegate accounts so the public record never names a user with administrative power.

badsector.blog

When ‘disabled’ doesn’t mean disabled

A settings screen should tell you what your site does, not just what you saved. I tested Keel and six of the most-installed WordPress security and comment plugins against their own settings. Several, my own included, didn’t do everything their screens promised. Five of the six vendors replied within days, and some are already working on fixes.

badsector.blog

A simple theme project can lead to contributions all across WordPress

Building a brutally simple block theme turns out to be a good bug detector: with so little of your own code on the page, WordPress's own bugs are easier to spot. Dirtbag is that kind of theme, and it led me into a 15-year-old curly-quote ticket, Gutenberg CSS, and core accessibility issues.

badsector.blog

XML-RPC in 2026

XML-RPC isn’t a single switch. Pingbacks, remote publishing, and Jetpack management have different risks and dependencies. Here’s what to disable, what to preserve, and how to test the result.

badsector.blog

Who Writes the Rules for CMT Drug Trials? Charities, Clinicians and Industry

The first CMT drug-trial framework was written by charities, clinicians and drug companies, two of them CMTA investments, with no public conflict-of-interest statement.

cmt.blog

What citation markup gives machines — and humans

I tested what my bibliography block’s markup gives search engines, reference managers, language models, and screen readers that a plain list doesn’t, and what it costs.

badsector.blog

A URN is a URI, not a URL

URI is not a synonym for URL. A URL is a type of URI, and so is a URN. Here's where DOIs, PubMed IDs, ISBNs and barcodes actually sit among more than 450 URI schemes.

badsector.blog

Six poems using the Lineate and Redact plugins for complex layouts

WordPress core has had a Verse (poetry) block since December 2018, when Gutenberg and the block editor first launched with WordPress 5.0. Lineate is a much more recent (free) contribution to the block plugin market from Johnathon Williams at OddJar. Lineate has a lot more going on and gives you the ability to do more complicated indents and gaps for shaped verse and unusual line / stanza formats.

m.arginalia.com

Who Benefits from the NRC’s CMT Research?

The NRC, the CMTA and a CMTA director’s biotech company back the same CMT1A study. Who owns the results, and what does Canada get? The agreement could say.

cmt.blog

The mysterious case of five corrupt databases

Five of my six local WordPress databases turned out to be corrupt, three of them untouched for a week. The disk was innocent, my tools were only accomplices, and the most likely culprit was a command-line tool I'd forgotten I installed.

badsector.blog

Two thermostats, one furnace

When another plugin overrides a WordPress setting, nothing says so. WordPress lets any number of plugins weigh in on the same setting, and the last one to run wins without a word. Keel now says what your update policy is, what’s blocking it, and which other plugins are working the same hooks.

badsector.blog

Who Decides What Counts as CMT?

HMSN-P, SORD, HNPP, motor-only forms: where CMT's edges are, who decides what counts, and why 'CMT' is on its way out in clinics and labs.

cmt.blog

With Abilities, the last filter decides who gets in

Abilities don't give a plugin one new attack surface. They give it several, and some belong to other plugins. Which doors are left open depends on whichever filter runs last.

badsector.blog

The Page Is an Interface

Tables of contents, indexes, glosses, footnotes, and even the size of a book emerged and evolved as the codex’s interface: tools for finding, checking, and arguing over ideas and their sources. This is a history of the book’s apparatus, its paratexts, and the page as an interface that the web’s standards and practices have never matched and still don't comprehend.

m.arginalia.com

Fediverse Software | FediDB

Every software project on the fediverse, ranked by servers, accounts and monthly activity. Compare Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, PeerTube, Lemmy and more on FediDB.

fedidb.com

Faster, Less Predictable: What the FDA’s Turbulent Years Mean for CMT

The FDA has promised faster, more flexible rare disease approvals, but rejections, reversals, leadership churn and pressure on research funding have made it less predictable. What that means for CMT patients and researchers.

cmt.blog

A decade of disability awareness: Invisible Disability Association marks anniversary | Globalnews.ca

The Invisible Disability Association marked the third week in October as Invisible Disability Awareness week.

globalnews.ca

It’s Invisible Disabilities Week and yes, you do matter!

Photo by Farman Kareem on Pexels.com (I chose this image because sunflowers are often the symbol of invisible or hidden disabilities.) I’ve been reminded on the socials that it’s Invisible Disabili…

wp.me

In WordPress 7.1, a “public” ability is not a permitted one

WordPress 7.1 adds a public flag to the Abilities API. It decides whether an ability can be seen and reached from outside, not whether a caller is allowed to run it. I checked the dev notes against the 7.1.3 code, WP-CLI, and the MCP Adapter: each channel has its own exposure rule, and one filter can let an anonymous request run an exposed ability.

badsector.blog

Plain-Language Research Summary: A Blood Test for Nerve-Fibre Loss in CMT

A 2025 study found the nerve-damage protein NfL more than twice as high in the blood of people with CMT, and loosely linked to severity. What it shows, what it can't, and how it fits with earlier studies.

cmt.blog

Shifting baselines and the second watershed

In 1995, Daniel Pauly named the way we quietly lose track of our place in an objective decline and become blind to impending ruin. Shifting baselines apply to systems and tools as well as fish populations. Counterfoil’s tool catalogue and the Techno-Optimism Archive both attempt to ground us in historical baselines.

counterfoil.org

CMT Blog

Independent patient advocacy on Charcot-Marie-Tooth and other neuromuscular diseases: the science, accountability reporting on charities and drug developers, and Canadian resources.

cmt.blog

Counterfoil

Counterfoil studies the point where a tool stops serving the people who use it. A catalogue of convivial tools, research notes, and a few tools of our own.

counterfoil.org

I didn’t build a 2FA plugin. I filed bugs, then built around the best one.

WordPress's Two Factor plugin already checks the codes. Instead of writing yet another 2FA plugin, I filed bugs against it, fixed some, and built two small add-ons beside it: one for policy, one for onboarding. Here's why separating mechanism from policy works.

badsector.blog

Name Games: Why CMT Type Names Are a Mess, and How to Find Reliable Information

CMT's type names grew out of nerve tests and a run of lettered genes. They no longer line up. Here is how the naming got this messy, where it is heading, and which sources to trust.

cmt.blog