Olly

Today is Bandcamp Friday, a day where Bandcamp waives their revenue share so artists & labels get the full amount. It's pretty cool. I pay for Spotify but even in this streaming age I like to buy the albums that I think are really good. I like owning the music, even though I do mainly listen via Spotify. I also like that artists are getting a decent cut, which they really don't from Spotify streams. One day I hope we can buy digital media in a record shop but, until then, Bandcamp (and Qobuz…

I saw rather a lot of shows at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe 😅 Fringemaxxed it. Picking shows on whim means you're going to see things you think were decidedly average, terrible even, but I found some unexpected winners too! I've listed everything below, with an off-the-cuff rating. Any review is highly subjective, of course. For example, some people absolutely raved about the Ahir Shah show but it barely raised a chuckle for me. That's just how it is, especially with comedy. Sorry…

I've ditched the OpenAI spam blog check in Pagecord. It wasn't working very well really, so I've decided to manually review all new blogs from now on until the numbers get so large as to be unwieldy (i.e. never). The /ai page has been simplified.

Some things I found whilst wandering the web last month. I love that this web site is hosted in a plastic box in a garden in South East London. The story of how Google helped destroy RSS adoption. Don’t be a meat proxy. There’s still hope for user-first software. I like using AI for coding, for sure, but I don’t want a personal super intelligence that’s owned by Meta thanks. How to photograph a solar eclipse. There’s a big one in Egypt next year. Why is the UK's 5G so bad? Let Buffering Britain…

I spent yesterday evening in the church of Sigur Rós, accompanied by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. It was as close to a spiritual experience as you’re likely to get with a band. Icelandic ambient post-rock and a 40+ piece orchestra. Mesmerising.

I've published a page on How Pagecord uses AI. I believe this covers everything to do with AI use at Pagecord, so new and existing customers can now be as informed as me.I've blogged many times about using LLMs, and the Pagecord source code has been available for review since 2024. Still, things can always be improved, so now everything you need to know is available in one place. Much better.The page is available at /ai, following the convention laid out by Damola Morenikeji in The /ai…

A couple of recent posts have claimed that I fed years of a customer's personal writing into an LLM without their consent.I want to clarify what actually happened. I used Claude Code to help write a parser for a WordPress export file, which I then used to import the blog into a Pagecord account. Note that I use Claude to assist most of Pagecord's development, and I've been open about that for years.I didn't submit a customer's writing to a model. Claude Code did have access to the export file…

I rarely touch Feedgrab these days. It does what I want and it just works™️. It's been running on a tiny VPS for a couple of years now, quietly grabbing over 6000 feeds every hour. I did push a new feature today though. I tried to subscribe to the Omarchy blog earlier this week but, alas, it has no RSS feed. It's clearly structured like a blog though, so now Feedgrab will create it's own feed if one doesn't exist and if the site is structured kinda like a blog.

A privilege to hear Mieko Kawakami1 talk at the Edinburgh book festival this evening. Her work is incredible and the audience treated her like the literary rock star that she is.Wild that the official Wikipedia page photo was taken at the event a couple of hours ago too!

By RCA Records - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54429601 Decide who you are, and do it on purpose— Dolly Parton

Procrastination

I came across the Green Web Foundation and ran Pagecord through it. Interesting that Cloudflare qualifies. Pagecord uses Cloudflare as a proxy to speed things up (along with a few other services), but the app and database are hosted on Hetzner behind the scenes. It turns out Hetzner also qualifies as green hosting too.

Source: Jimmy Wales – The Seven Rules of Trust

I was 15 years old when a school friend lent me her cassette of Disintegration. I took it home, slotted it into my boombox and my mind was blown. Your teens can be tough, but a band or an album can help you navigate those tricky years. Disintegration was mine. It stuck with me through a difficult move to the other end of the country when I was 16, and throughout my uni years. It remains my favourite album of all time, and it still sounds incredible 37 years later. There are other great albums…

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. -- Eleanor Roosevelt A few people on Mastodon recently showed hostility towards me because of my use of X and coding LLMs. I briefly tried to engage, but it quickly became clear this was a futile thing to try and do – it was just digging the proverbial hole as people piled on. I should have known better, but we live and learn. I deleted the account, which was described as “a privileged white guy thing to do”. You got me. Ten people…

I've updated this site to be more minimal. A home page, a blog, an About page, no social links, no Now, no baggage. I've also deleted a couple of recent posts and a bunch on social media, to try and heed my own advice. Webmentions are gone. Comments remain enabled, for now.The internet is wonderful in many ways, but it can also bring out the worst in people, especially on the socials. I want to avoid that drama, and I'm feeling cleansed already ⊹╰(⌣ʟ⌣)╯⊹

I watched an event with Jimmy Wales at the Edinburgh Book Festival today. He was talking about his recent book, The Seven Rules of Trust. As well as being a living internet legend, he's a proper raconteur. It was great hearing the story of the early days of Wikipedia, as well as his thoughts on the effect of AI on the platform. I look forward to getting stuck into the book!Wikipedia is a modern wonder of the world. If you're able, please donate a few quid to help keep it alive. Jimmy Wales…

I received an email from a competitor recently which had many facets, but the core point was a suggestion that I am copying what they do with Pagecord and I should stop doing that.The irony is that I don't read any competitor blogs or socials because it doesn’t make me feel good (well I actually read Herman’s blog but that's not a product blog, it’s just a good personal blog). I don’t want to care about what others are doing. I'm making Pagecord for my own needs, for the fun, and for the love…

I’ve been building a lot of features for Pagecord which is fun, but also exhausting (yes even with coding agents). This is in addition to trying to find a way to get more people to hear about Pagecord and try it, which is what my main focus has been and frankly it’s even more exhausting. I’m not yet convinced any of these efforts are paying off, but I remain hopeful that a needle somewhere will move in the right direction at some point soon. One thing I’ve been doing in this regard is more…

Had my first lobster roll in North Berwick today. Verdict? Scoffable but expensive and a little underwhelming.

Obsession was pretty good, but perhaps not as good as some of the reviews suggest. It’s a great achievement for such a small budget film, and the two lead actors were excellent, but I found it a little slow and predictable. It might be my age, but the gore level was also too much. Not at The Substance level, but still too high. Do we really need to be that graphic? Urgh.Writer/Director Curry Barker is a real talent, and with Obsesion’s worldwide gross of nearly $500m, he’s clearly going…

View from the cheap seats The King’s Theatre in Edinburgh has been closed for over four years but it re-opens this weekend after a monster refurb. I got to wander around it this afternoon and it looks fabulous. New bars, cafes, upholstery and paintwork, a new lighting room at the top, as well as accessibility changes - a difficult challenge in these Victorian buildings!Edinburgh has an abundance of theatres, but this is probably the most beautiful. Festival season kicks off next week, so I’m…

I asked the internet about which products are built without any AI, and a few have already been mentioned in the comments (go check out it – new Pagecord beta feature!). It's a pretty interesting topic! I think if you have the passion, the time, the skill, and the patience, it would be a very nice way to work. Certainly on an established product. It's how I worked for over 25 years as a software developer in some form or other, but I was never a hardcore geek or programming genius. I worked…

Is there an actively developed and maintained commercial software product that has a dev process (build, deploy, the lot) that is 100% AI free? Basically an "artisan software" product, in the same way you get GM-free food. My interest comes from a question I had over email about Pagecord's AI use.I'm not aware of such a product, but I'm sure they exist. Let me know in the comments!

Intertapes is a collection of found cassette tapes from around the world. macOS icons are now constrained by the same boring ‘squircle‘ as iOS. Rogue Amoeba argue that this shape prohibition should come to an end. Charity Majors writes a rational and compelling case about how AI is here to stay and we should embrace this by making AI boring again. Is 18 Words the new Wordle? I’m not good at this. Need to chill? youarelistening.to blends ambient music with city sounds. Do we need more…

I've improved the Pagecord blog spam detection algo. I ran it across all blogs and ~5% of blogs were classed as spam with few false positives. Defeating AI with AI + a sprinkling of human oversight 💪🤖

There are now three Pagecord plans: Classic. Free, unlimited posts, no image storage. Premium. All you can eat. Supporter. Premium, but you pay more as a gesture of support for the project (and get featured on the website, and maybe other perks to come). It’s a nice triptych, but now I’m wondering whether there should be a Petite plan which is essentially Classic with image hosting. $10/yr or maybe even a single, one off charge of $25.

I'm supposed to be on a LinkedIn hiatus but I shamefully visited it yesterday to pimp a blog post (a largely pointless exercise, as it turns out). While I was on there, I couldn't help but notice the post from a founder I know well. I'm definitely curious about his new venture, so I decided to read the post despite it being much too long, but after several sentences it seemed obvious that this was AI slop. It didn't feel in any way personal, literally every sentence was load bearing, there were…

Gumroad is a $100m/yr business. The founder, Sahil, has put his life and soul into it. Today it runs with 3 part-time maintainers and Sahil working 1 hour a week. The rest is handled by AI. Sahil uses Hermes to automate everything. Token spend is fairly high ($43K/mo!) and it now surpasses the human payroll, but for the size of their business, it’s small change given the previous outlay on us weedy meatbots. Here’s a chart showing the gradual replacement of humans at Gumroad. Source: @shl on X…

Every so often I get a question about Pagecord that I reply to on the socials, or over email. Email is private and I delete old social content, so I thought it might be fun to answer some of these questions in public on my blog now and again. Consider this a pilot episode. Here we go! Does Pagecord generate the page each time someone visits, or are the pages static? The honest answer is "a bit of both"! For blogs on a pagecord.com address (e.g blog.pagecord.com), the page is cached by…