My favorite argument against AI centers is they drive up the cost of water and electricity for all residents in US communities. Which, they do but that's a byproduct of most utilities being socialized, sharing the costs across consumers. This is a great example of the complications of socialism.

Two camps on AI and learning. One says stop making people think, the machine will do it. The other says ban it and hope it goes away. Both are wrong. The real skill is learning with it while keeping your own judgment, and almost nobody is teaching that. Which camp are you arguing from?

Trained a non-technical team on AI recently. The tools took maybe a tenth of the time. The rest was watching capable adults refuse to touch something that would help them. It was never really a training problem. It was a trust problem, and no vendor sells you the fix for that one.

We call it cheating when a student learns with AI. We call it enrichment when a family with money hires a private tutor to explain, prompt and correct until it lands. Same help. One's just always been reserved for people who could pay. So where's the line really, honesty or money?

Unpopular take from inside the training world: completion rates mostly measure attendance and call it learning. If someone passes your final without taking the course, that isn't them being smug. It's your course admitting it added nothing to their path. What would you measure instead?

My mum has a WordPress site someone built her in 2018. She's never touched a plugin update. I checked it last month. A small mountain of updates, including a security patch that had been sitting there for two years. She had no idea and nobody had told her that was her job now.

I have seen LMS libraries so tidy you could eat off them. Modules in rows, everything labelled. Staff still couldn't find what they needed when they needed it, because the org chart and the learning moment weren't the same shape. Does yours work from the learner's side?

I got asked last week if Moodle courses can move to WordPress. Honestly, yes. Content migrates fine. But the gradebook, quiz logic, completion tracking, WordPress doesn't carry those. If any of that matters, sort out the replacement before you budget the project.

Migrated a Moodle course library to WordPress once. Content moved fine. The gradebook and enrolment logic were a second project entirely, nobody warned the client. Quoted a flat fee for that migration? Ask what happens to your completion data. Just ask, I'll help.

Here's a great, quick use for AI. Ask it to become your favourite customer (literally, give it that profile), then have it read your latest posts ... you'd be shocked how often the content is written for the writer, not the audience. Don't know how to prime AI? Just ask, I'll help.

A long time ago, in an auditorium far, far away, I gave a talk called Make a Living Giving It Away. All these years later, that's still the best business advice I have: the more you give to your community, the more it comes back without you ever chasing leads. This week: plugin fixes.

I found out the photo of my face was broken on my own website. For visitors, anyway. On my computer it looked perfect, because my computer was the only place it still existed. No error, no warning. Just me, looking great, all alone. The fastest test? Just open your site on your phone.

I have an AI Ops tool that babysits my WordPress site overnight. It's hilarious to watch, because sometimes the bots get snitty with each other, and some mornings I wake up to a Thunderdome-style kickoff over who gets to win an edit.

I bid on local estate auctions and resell the finds. V1 of my pricing helper asked an AI what things were worth: instant, confident, invented. Rebuilt on real sold prices, it now tells me what things are potentially worth without me doing the hallucinating. Less magic, more boat money.

One of my scheduled posts got within 90 minutes of publishing with my note-to-self still in it, in capital letters. Same horror as the mail merge that opens Dear [FIRST NAME]. Every automated check waved it through. A plain read caught it in seconds. Nothing I schedule skips the read now.

I deleted a small mountain of topic tags from my website. Every tag is another page Google has to make sense of, and mine said the same thing a hundred different ways. Things got easier to find. A tag with two posts is a labelled jar holding one screw. The label costs more than the screw.

Fun fact: flying in the dark, your body swears you're climbing when you're level. Trust your gut and you pitch down, into the ground. Your website works the same way: leads feel like you're gaining altitude, but trust Search Console even when you don't like what it's saying.

I lost a morning to a publish button in irons. That's sailing talk: pointed dead into the wind, going nowhere, refusing to explain itself. No error. Just quiet refusal. One line of my own code, doing exactly what I told it. Talk about knocking the wind out of your own sails :)

For three weeks my contact form had a flawless spam record. It was also deleting my customers. The trap: a hidden field only a robot would fill in. Turns out browser autofill is, technically, a robot. Real messages vanished. If your spam record looks perfect, send yourself a test message.

Easy Popular Posts is still listed on WordPress.org. I last touched it in January 2015. Sites are installing it on new WordPress installs right now. I have no idea how many. thisismyurl.com/posts/what-y...

Dug up a 2011 WordPress post to fix the page chrome. Also pulled outbound links to third-party sites I can no longer vouch for. The install advice held. The specific sites I was recommending back then? Not all of them made it. thisismyurl.com/posts/wordpr...

Cleaned up a 2013 post on 2 May. Old menus, sidebars, ad blocks from a previous CMS had migrated over. Pulled them out, removed links to third-party sites I no longer want to vouch for. The writing is untouched. thisismyurl.com/posts/seven-...

The relief of finishing a first draft feels exactly like the satisfaction of having made something good. Same sensation, genuinely different situations. I spent years collapsing them into one before I noticed the gap. thisismyurl.com/posts/the-ca...

I ran the same WordPress theme through three AI review prompts and got three different verdicts. One said it was ready. One found real issues. Turned out the prompt was doing most of the work. thisismyurl.com/posts/three-...

Three mornings, same diff. My bot flipped the meta description, then flipped it back. Correct in both directions. Fix: don't correct what's already right. The pattern was the hard part. thisismyurl.com/posts/behind...

Nineteen years in WordPress and I have finally, at long last, gotten a theme approved in the official directory. Meet Quillwork: free, typography-first, self-hosted fonts, accessibility built in, no upsell. Only took me almost two decades. wordpress.org/themes/quill...

Doing a Master's in Learning & Technology right now, purely for the fun of it. No promotion waiting at the end, no box to tick. Learning something purely because it's interesting hits completely different.

Accessibility belongs in a theme from the first commit. A sharp WP Tavern piece makes the case, and the business version is almost rude in its simplicity: low accessibility just means fewer people can finish what they came to do. wptavern.com/why-accessib...

Spent two hours on why a client's images had vanished. A "helpful" optimization plugin was rewriting every URL to a CDN whose account had quietly lapsed. The plugin was still cheerfully reporting success.

Devs who've run a real content migration: what's the one pre-launch check you now do religiously because it bit you once? Collecting these. Mine is an exact published-URL count from the sitemap, no "approximately."