Mark's Blog

Seven and a half years inside a marketing agency taught me one thing: clients hold far more power than they realise. Here’s how to use it.

Not long ago I wrote about all the things that go into maintenance and the things that sit underneath your…

The question every 13-year-old asks I was thirteen, sat in a maths classroom that smelled of radiator dust and felt-tip…

Released back into the wild after decades of code, a developer turns the microscope on himself. Findings include logic chains, the mysterious appearance of Z, three drinks in client meetings, and why “it’s broken” is not a ticket.

LinkedIn says WordPress is dead, again. Roughly forty times since last Thursday, actually. A developer, who’s been using it since the start, checks the market share, those AI site builders, security issues, and alternative sales pitches. He finds a pulse, though. It’s mostly just a sales pitch.

After forty years of swearing at compilers, I now say please and thank you to an AI. Somewhere between the silent treatment, a secret affair with the terminal version and a forgotten anniversary, I realised I might be in a relationship with Claude.

Edit: I’ve added a new section for PHP memory issues and Cleared every cache? It might be their end “WordPress…

Every developer knows how this starts. Someone appears beside your desk with the immortal words, “Got five minutes?” Before you know it you’re trapped in a meeting room with no agenda, no clear objective, and a conversation that somehow drifts wildly.

This adds an “Auto-unpublish” control right under the Publish/Schedule box in the post editor, using the same collapsible date picker pattern WordPress itself uses, and schedules a single wp-cron event – the exact mechanism core uses internally for future-dated publishing, just run in reverse. When it fires, the post gets moved to Draft, Private, or Trash, whichever the editor chose. There’s also a sortable “Auto-Unpublish” column on the post list screens and a bulk action to clear the schedule on multiple posts at once.

A developer’s cynical, funny takedown of AI doom fears — from WOPR and Skynet to a real AI agent breach, arguing it’s bad fences, not bad AI.

Every client of an agency is unique. Unique hosts, unique hosting control panels, unique acceptance of “just use a plugin…

Not too long ago, I used a crazy amount of time to do math homework on WarGames – a movie…