A website is the hardest-working member of your team, or it should be. It never sleeps, it greets every customer the same way, and it can sell while you are asleep or on the tools. Yet too many business owners treat web design as a cosmetic exercise, judged on whether it looks nice, when the real question is whether it …

Search has changed more in the past two years than in the decade before it. AI-generated answers now sit at the top of many results pages, large language models are quoting websites directly, and Google’s core updates have reshaped who ranks and who quietly disappears. For business owners, the practical question is no …

“Best” is a word that gets thrown around carelessly in marketing, which is a little ironic. Almost every agency claims it, few define it, and fewer still can prove it. So it is worth pausing on what the word should mean when you are spending real money and staking your growth on the outcome. The best is not the loudest …

Ask ten people what a digital agency does and you will get ten different answers. Some picture a team running Facebook ads, others imagine web developers, and a few still think it is all about logos and brochures. The truth is broader and more connected than any single slice. A good agency exists to grow your business …

Every business owner in Perth has been pitched the dream at some point. Page one rankings by next month, leads pouring in, a website that prints money. The reality is more grounded, and the agencies worth working with will tell you that up front. Choosing the right partner is less about who promises the most and more …

The web is being consumed in ways its creators never anticipated. Large language models are trained on crawled web pages. AI search engines synthesise answers from your content without sending a click. Voice assistants read your structured data aloud to someone who will never see your design.

I recently picked up an iPad Pro (9.7″), along with the Apple Pencil and a Logitech keyboard/case. I’m trying the package out as an alternate work configuration, and so far am quite enjoying it. It’s also good to force me to test more of our software from a mobile perspective.

I’ve been thinking about home automation a bit recently, and I realized that what I want as a big part of a system is some sort of generic presence-system. I’m imagining something along the lines of:

As a developer, I’m a huge fan of “red changesets”; when you get to delete more code than you add. Less code means less maintenance, less potential for bugs, security problems, etc. Today I got to “red changeset” the plugins powering this website because I realized I could just go ahead and delete the plugin I was …

I’ve long wanted to be able to do some simple, operated-powered searches within WordPress (especially relevant in a project I’m working on at Automattic ). After a conversation with Allen, where he wanted to do the same thing, I figured I’d just whip up a quick plugin to see how hard it’d be. Turns out the answer is …

Through some lucky scheduling, I was able to attend both LevelUp Con and WordCamp Saratoga in a single trip. I spoke at WordCamp about how to build a quick Backbone.js application which used WordPress as the backend (interfacing via the REST API ). I thought my talk went OK, although I didn’t love it to be honest, and …

Last week, I attended the first ever LevelUp Con (which WordPress.com sponsored) in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was really impressed with the event, which was organized by the crew at Mad Glory to help draw attention to upstate New York’s tech scene, and to expand people’s horizons and help them cross-train a bit.

I’ve been asked a few times recently what programming language I’d learn if I was just starting out. Right now, the answer is definitely JavaScript, and here’s why:

I keep hearing things like “programming is easy” and “everyone should code”! These are both interesting, kind of misleading statements. The actual core part of programming — actually writing code, is perhaps not that hard. Writing simple code is, relatively, simple. Many more people can, and should, probably learn to …

I’ve been pretty fascinated with the idea of recording my own location for a while now. I started using Foursquare at SXSW in 2009 and have mostly continued to do so since then (I have over 3,700 check-ins). You can see my check-ins being syndicated back to this website (using Keyring Social Importers ), and if you …

Back in April, this blog celebrated 10 years of existence, and it’s been almost five years since the theme on this site changed. Yesterday I decided to just go ahead and flip the switch on something I’ve been working on here and there since late last year. It’s a complete new, very experimental theme that I call …

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In amongst some work that I’ve been doing recently, and looking at my own work habits and trends, I realized that something super-useful to have would be a very accessible “microcontent storage system” where you would be able to store small snippets of information, tag them, have them fully-indexed and searchable using …

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

Just kidding, but I got some details back from Lisa C, and she appears to have some very specialised requirements for her system. I have suggested that it might be better if we work together to develop a “base system” which would include the complete logging functionality, and then she can customise and/or extend the …

Lisa Chan from Stanford emailed me, wanting to know if we could work together on building a search log analyzing system. I emailed her back with a stack of the details of stuff that I was planning and haven’t heard back… I wonder why not? Maybe she’s taken my ideas and is off building it without me?