Olly

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…

I first published the costs of running Pagecord back in March. Things have changed recently, with a few new costs (CleanTalk, ICO data protection), a move to more resilient infrastructure, and a big price hike from Hetzner in June. Pagecord is a UK Limited Company which comes with a number of overheads, and I take no salary or dividends whatsoever. Any profits stay in the business so I can call on them when needed. I think people will find this interesting, and also appreciate the transparency.…

Pagecord originated in AWS London simply because I had a grand’s worth of free credits. Once they'd been gobbled up, I moved it over to Hetzner where I got better value and I didn't have to rely on the big tech leviathan. I’ve been really happy with how things have worked out, but I've just moved Pagecord to its third home in three years. I thought I'd write about why, and how, I did the move. Pagecord is still hosted by Hetzner, but it's now running in the Falkenstein data centre (DC). Why…

Cloudflare released Drop today. It’s a simple way of creating a static website by “dropping” your HTML and CSS files into a folder and seeing it go live instantly. Interesting and fun idea, but it’s the modern equivalent of build a blog in 15 minutes. Impressive, but ultimately not much use to anyone in its current form. It’s purely a marketing exercise (working!), and probably generated by the summer interns and Claude. As a founder of a blogging platform, I shouldn’t be quaking in my Vejas…

I am so done with the Scottish "summer". The rest of the UK has been baking in perfect weather for weeks, Scotland has had a couple of days of warm-ish sunshine, and I'm in the south east of the country – the good bit, weather wise. It's like this every year, and this is my 16th year. It's astonishing what a difference 250 miles makes. Apparently climate change will only exacerbate this, dammit.We're already 2 weeks past the summer solstice, so the march towards shorter days and longer nights…

Inspired by Martin, here are "five albums that shaped me", not to be confused with "my five favourite albums ever", IYSWIM. That said, without question, Disintegration is my favourite album of all time. The Cure - Disintegration Madonna - First Album Prince - Purple Rain The Whitlams - Love This City The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses

A few sites and articles of interest I came across this month. Maybe blogging is falling out of favour because Gen Z think it’s too “cringe”? The Bank of England is asking people to vote on which animals should be ont the next series of bank notes. Poor frog Bot traffic has officially passed human traffic on the Internet. Great. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is now running Neko Health, full body health checks for £299. To reclaim our personal tastes (and cultural standards) we must abandon…

I'm been chewing on the idea of getting a new laptop. My current MacBook Pro is not exactly sluggish – it has 32GB RAM and the M1 Max processor – but it does chug a little with Lightroom, has 2TB storage which isn't quite enough, plus it would be a great upgrade for one of my kids. So after 5 years I think an upgrade might be in order.Trouble is, laptop prices have skyrocketed because the AI companies are hoovering up all the RAM, so there's a shortage which is being called a RAMpocalypse. You…

The plague of offering a free website/blog platform is the spammers. They’re relentless. I’ve largely automated spam detection now, but it’s eye-rolling to see them keep trying, day-in, day-out. Here’s a prime example. Try harder, bots.

I've been updating the Pagecord home page today with a new headline, refreshed hero text, and a new section called The Pagecord Principles.The idea is to encapsulate why Pagecord exists and what it stands for. I'm hoping this resonates with bloggers visiting for the first time, encouraging them to sign up to Pagecord rather than (or as well as) one of the many, many alternatives.It's not a political standpoint or a side-swipe at the competition, just a set of founding principles that guide the…

I love that Pagecord is open source but it's a double-edged sword because I see features being copied all the time. I don't read competitor blogs, but sometimes I come across things. I guess it's not a big deal given the arrival of coding LLMs – anyone can build anything at any time, right? – plus I've certainly been inspired by other products. Yet, people can literally see my work in progress and copy the product, and there's FA I can do about it. I have no IP moat. It doesn't bother me too…

Scotland comes to Boston for the World Cup ❤️

Biggest IPO of all time and Musk’s speech is a 5 sentence sci-fi B movie word salad that literally makes no sense. That’s all you got?I always think about this. There are always problems on earth. There’s always things that we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future - that make you glad to wake up in the morning, because you can’t wait to see what happens next. And that’s the future…

AI-sphyxiation /ˌeɪ aɪ sfɪksiˈeɪʃən/ (AY-eye sfik-see-AY-shən)nounThe gradual suffocation of otherwise useful products by unwanted and unwarranted AI features.“Google Photos has been completely AI-sphyxiated.”Etymology: A portmanteau of AI and asphyxiation; literally, “suffocation by AI.”See also: enshittification, slopification

I’ve published a small Pagecord command line app (CLI) for people who want to write on their local machine in Markdown (or HTML) and publish those files to Pagecord. If you use Obsidian, you should use the dedicated plugin, but if you use something else then the CLI app might be able to help. The app is written in Ruby (❤️), and you install it from RubyGems: gem install pagecord-cli Once installed, you can log in using the login command and passing your blog subdomain: pagecord login…

I’ve managed to stay away from macOS 26 (Tahoe) and it looks like macOS 27 (Golden Gate) might be safe to upgrade to. Apple appears to have listened to the Liquid Glass horror stories and fixed many (most?) of them. Liquid Glass remains, of course (Apple UIs tend to last several generations), but it seems far more refined and less transparent which is as close to an admission of failure you’ll get from Apple I think. Either way, it seems almost pleasant to my eyes now. There’s no chance of me…

Testimonials don't get any better than this imo.

I first thought about the next chunky Pagecord feature 148 days ago, according to the Fizzy card I created (I use Fizzy to track all my Pagecord work). I put up the first PR 32 days after that, and I got it production ready today, 4 months later. The feature didn't take 5 months of me grinding at the keyboard every day. Far from it. In the agentic coding era it has probably taken only a few hours of prompting and LLM munching over that time. At most, a couple of day's work in total.What's…

A post on Sebastian’s blog introduced me to Junited, a fun celebration of blogging started by Robert Birming in 2024. In Robert’s words:Junited is a little blog-loving adventure where the blogging community gets together to share posts they enjoy and discover new bloggers along the wayWhat a wonderful idea! I’ll be using this post to partake in it throughout June. I mean, I run an indie blogging platform myself so how could I not! 😊The posts and blogs I come across will appear here soon!

I didn't come across a whole lot of interesting links this month. Or maybe I did and just forgot to make a note of them? That's probably more likely. Either way, here are a few things I discovered and liked. As time passes, the larger our collection of digital stuff grows. Maybe whoami.wiki can help? "Your personal encyclopedia, written by agents". It's inevitable, but I'm not quite ready to hand it all over just yet. I visited New Orleans with work in 2023. I loved it and I want to go back and…

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.— John…

People love 88x31 buttons in their blog footer, right? Having fun experimenting on a Friday afternoon...

I’ve been using Voi bikes around Edinburgh quite a lot over the past few weeks. Here are some initial observations. The rent-an-e-bike concept is fantastic and reasonably priced. I can cycle into town for less than it costs on the bus, and the experience is much nicer. So many people seem to be using them, it feels like a revolution! The package deals for Voi passes don’t get better with more time. Why is the 1-month one the same cost/min as the 1 day one? Sunny weather helps. A lot. e-bikes…

I just spent an hour or so tightening the Pagecord home page copy and the ordering of content sections. I'm not sure if this will make any difference, but I certainly prefer it. Do you? I need to redo the walkthrough video at some point as the current one is cringe and it pre-dates a bunch of features. I know Pagecord has product market fit because of customer feedback (I've been soliciting this) and conversion rates, and it's very feature-rich today, so my focus now has to be about getting…

I started blogging in 2005 when I set up my first company, a consultancy that was just me contracting myself (and my soul) into financial institutions to hand-write code in exchange for cash in the City of London. I had to wear smart trousers, shirts and shoes but I got away without a tie. People carried briefcases. It sounds almost Victorian, doesn't it? I was never a prolific blogger and many of the posts I wrote back in the day got binned because they were terrible (although some survived).…

Spotify rolled out a new (temporary) logo to celebrate their 20th anniversary. The internet is ablaze with rage because it looks terrible on a phone home screen, but I actually love it myself. It’s playful and fun, and we need more fun in our lives in this age of average. More of this! Spotify Logo Special disco edition for 20th anniversary

I’ve seen a lot of musicals over the years. I saw Waitress this evening and it’s a good one. I absolutely love Carrie Hope Fletcher, and her performance of She Used To Be Mine brought the house down.https://open.spotify.com/track/7CBrUf50mf2IqcRZla38by?si=ODGT1eKqQZyMYODgtmQ8TgIt’s on tour across the UK for the rest of the year. Check it out if you can, even if you don’t think you like musicals because maybe you actually do.

I’m not sure how Róisín Machine passed me by in 2020. I suppose a global pandemic didn’t help, did it? Either way, I’m utterly delighted to have come across it recently while digging in the virtual crates. It’s a modern electropop dream.