I don’t use Wordpress so this war between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine is little more than #internet-drama to fuel my amusement. But Matt’s recent actions in this battle have started dragging users into the crossfire, and this is something I absolutely do not like. First by the blocking access to the plugin directory for those using WP Engine, and now by adding childish, your-with-me-or-agents-me UI elements on the wordpress.org login page:

Granted, this looks to be a login form for plugins and forums, not actual blogs. But even so, Matt, is this necessary? You may have had a reason for going after WP Engine for some reason. I have no idea what those reasons are, and quite frankly, I no longer care. You start making changes to things in service of your war, I loose all respect for you.

I may not use Wordpress, but I do use software that’s now owned by Automattic, like Pocketcasts, and seeing this makes me uneasy. What’s to say that these won’t be used in a similar way in the future?

Edit: Part of me wonders now whether this checkbox was added in jest. No evidence to support that apart from seeing various posts on Mastodon (I don’t have evidence to support that it wasn’t added in jest). If so, then I am a fool for taking the bait and getting worked up about this. It is an indication of how vicious this fight looks to me though, where adding such a checkbox would seem like a genuine escalation.

I’ve spent the last week working on a small puzzle game called Coasters, where you presented with two images and a clue, and you need to guess the word or phrase. One puzzle a day, sort of like Wordle. I’ve got 10 puzzles ready to go and I may add more but no promises. Check it out if you like.

I enjoyed reading Kev Quirk’s post about building a simple journal. I’m still using Day One, but I am still thinking of moving off it. So I was inspired to build a prototype similar to Kev’s, just to see if something similar works for me. Built using Go instead of PHP, but it also uses Simple CSS.

Reddit’s decision to allow only Google to index their site will probably mean I’ll be seeing them far less often than I do — which is almost never anyway, and generally from the results of a search. So I’m recording this screenshot, which I call “Reddit in the results”, for posterity.

Edit: Turns out Ecosia sources some of their index from Google, so these Reddit links will likely remain in my searches. I guess that makes this post unnecessary. I’m going to keep it up though, for posterity of my unnecessary effort to post for posterity. 😄

Mark the date. First successful CI/CD run of a Go project running on my own Forgejo instance, running in Hetzner. 🙌

Speaking of bad UIs, volià: my first attempt at building something with Gio:

It doesn’t do anything now, but I’m hoping this will be something I can use to test NATS. I will say Gio shows promise. Not a huge range of controls to use, but having everything run in a single memory address is nice.

Coding standards at work calls for US English in our codebase. So I’m typing words like “color,” “initialize,” and “data center.” And it pains me. I know that’s irrational but, you know, I never claimed to be rational when it comes to things like this.

At least the spell-checker’s on my side.

For the last few years, I’ve been using 4/24 as the expiry date of test credit cards within Stripe. Well those days are literally in the past now.

Interesting to see Google starting to solicit reviews for apps that came with the phone, such as the… Phone.

Love the new categories feature in Scribbles. Went back and added them to the posts on Coding Bits and Workpad. They look and feel great.