Useful reminder from dxw about the potential for things to go wrong on WordPress sites – in this case, a change of ownership for a suite of plugins. In August 2025 the new owner planted a backdoor in the purchased…

I sent out a newsletter for the first time in ages today. It’s a simple dump of the last week’s blog posts from here. Since I put in place the Jetopack-driven email subscription feature, precisely one person signed up, so…

Cloudflare have released a new open source CMS, that they are billing as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress. Unsurprisingly, Matt Mullenweg has views: The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend…

I don’t entirely understand this, but it sure is interesting: With my.WordPress.net, WordPress runs entirely and persistently in your browser. There’s no sign-up, no hosting plan, and no domain decision standing between you and getting started. Built on WordPress Playground,…

I’ve added auto-posting from this blog onto LinkedIn and Bluesky, using IFTTT to automate taking the RSS feed and turning it into posts on those networks. I ran into an issue with the full posts being too long for Bluesky,…

More blog tweaking. I’ve added an email subscription option so readers can get news posts from here in their inboxes automagically. Just use the sign up box in the header of the site on desktop, or on mobile the same…

A small piece of blog housekeeping: I just went to search for something I wrote years ago on here and realised in my last redesign I didn’t add an easy to find search function. So, I bunged the default theme…

Am finding the WP Reset plugin useful, particularly at the start of a project where I might be trying lots of different stuff out. Quickly takes a site back to the bare bones, clearing out the database and so on,…

📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 16 January 2026

Let’s see how long I can keep this up for! This week’s worky highlights: We are recruting for two big roles at Luton Head of Innovation Delivery and Data Deputy Data Protection Officer & Compliance Improvement Manager Also at Luton,…

Now I’m wondering whether I should just put everything pre-2026 into an ‘Archive’ category and just start afresh from this year… A though just occurred – part of the reason why the categories are in a mess is probably because…

Recategorising over 3,000 blog posts

I have been frustrated with the state of the categories on this blog for some years now. That’s right – years. This site has been going in one form or another for over 20 years – the first post being…

Some major reworking of this blog over the last few days. Dramatically simplified things – sadly the micropost format that Steph helped me build didn’t make the cut. Instead I am making use of the default WordPress ‘asides’ post format…

📅 Daily Note: November 7, 2025

Ash Mann – The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work: Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus – choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting…

📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025

I newslettered earlier. # – micropost 23087 i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging. I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily…

📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more: Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s…

📅 Daily Note: September 23, 2025

Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team: We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or…

Content Restrictor WordPress plugin

For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis. There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability…

📅 Daily Note: December 12, 2024

It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly. # – micropost 22785…

📅 Daily note for 1 July 2024

Pinch, punch, first of the month.# Am trying a thing to easily(ish) create anchor links at the end of paragraphs in these daily notes. That way I can point people directly to a specific nugget within a post. There is…

📅 Daily note for 28 June 2024

I’m back! First daily note in a while. Hope you are as pleased with me as I am 😁 The blog has been rehosted, meaning I can save a bit of money shutting down an old hosting account. Have also…