Old tabs: Part 1

My habit of keeping interesting things open in tabs on my mobile is WAY out of hand. So I’m going to set myself the challenge of blogging them as I close them down. 10 a day.

I am terrible at keeping up streaks like this but let’s get started and see what happens. I’m going oldest to newest. Let’s see what I was looking at a LONG time ago…

1. Rethinking WordPress Product Pricing Models by Jon Christopher

https://jonchristopher.us/blog/rethinking-wordpress-product-pricing-models/

I don’t even know this person’s name but this sounds interesting. It’s from 2022. Has it been open THAT LONG‽

I skim-read this. It’s a look at how you could use paying for major software updates as a source of recurring revenue. It looks like Jon is still using this model 2 years later for OrganizeWP. So maybe it worked? Or maybe he’s just not worked on the product much. Hard to tell.

Aside: I use this model for Turbo Admin!

2. What is a WordPress developer? – Post Status

https://poststatus.com/what-is-a-wordpress-developer

This is a link to a podcast episode that I think I listened too. I probably had opinions. Not bookmarked.

3. Finding a new home for the WordPress community – Mike McAlister

https://olliewp.com/finding-a-new-home-for-the-wordpress-community/

Back at the end of 2022, while Elon’s Twitter acquisition was new, Mike was asking how we might use WordPress to power the WordPress community, rather than a proprietary social network.

At the time there was lots of interest and he spun up openpress.social. This is now dead.

Interesting because this week I have seen people asking why WordPress companies don’t use WordPress for other things.

4. StellarWP Releases Open-Source Libraries for Advanced WordPress Development

https://stellarwp.com/stellarwp-releases-open-source-libraries-for-advanced-wordpress-development/

StellarWP is a brand with some big WP plugin properties. This introduces us to their open source libraries and explains why they see it as a positive thing to share their work. Nice!

5. Web Scraping With PHP by darshankhandelwal12

https://serpdog.io/blog/web-scraping-with-php/

This is a from-scratch tutorial (like, it starts with how to set up PHP!) on web scraping. I probably bookmarked it because it references Goutte – a now archived screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP. Seems to have been replaced by Symfony’s HttpBrowser component. So I’ll bookmark that!

6. No Sponsors ??

https://git.joinfirefish.org/

This seems defunct. It says “No Sponsors – git.joinfirefish.org currently does not have any sponsors for you.

7. Open feedback as a gift

https://werd.io/2023/a-tool-for-open-feedback-as-a-gift

Oooh, I like this. We need feedback to thrive. We can’t get better if we don’t know what we are doing wrong. But giving and receiving feedback is hard. So frameworks can be helpful for ensuring we all get better together! Yay!

8. “I want to communicate and be understood, but it’s a struggle” – apolitical

https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/i-want-to-communicate-and-be-understood-but-its-a-struggle

I remember reading this. It’s about what it’s like for an autistic person to communicate with a neurotypical person: It’s exhausting! And enlightening to read about.

9. Using Custom Templates with Rewrite Rules in WordPress Plugins – Tom Mcfarlin

My thoughts on this, in order, were:

https://tommcfarlin.com/custom-templates-with-rewrite-rules/

  1. How does Tom capitalise his surname? It’s all caps on the site so I can’t tell.
  2. Wow, he’s still using the Hemingway theme! That’s 10 years old. I used that for a while. It’s stood the test of time. I like it!
  3. What on earth is this about? One of those sadly-necessary, word-soup WordPress things.
  4. Wait, I was fighting rewrite rules today. This might be useful. Bookmarked!

10. At last, marshmallows from a spray can – Axios

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/26/marshmallows-whipped-cream-aerosol-spray-can

Might just leave this one open, tbh. 🤣