Practical writing on learning, AI, and platforms

Themes, plugins, resources, and tools got their own domains. Columns went to a writing site. Apex left WordPress for flat HTML on Cloudflare Pages. The front door finally has one job.

Four years in, higher education's technology leaders have made "where does AI actually add value" their top priority. It's the right question. Then you read who EDUCAUSE lists as having been asked it, and not one of the categories it publishes is a teaching role.

Cloudflare refused my www redirect with error 20083, and a news feed parser dropped two of five feeds without an error. What broke and the one-line fixes.

Video hosting is three decisions, not one. SEO/discovery, on-site conversion, and private delivery each want a different host. Here is how to pick for each.

Two districts bought AI with almost nothing to go on, a state wrote rules, and a company wrote contracts. Underneath all of it sits one question nobody had answered: what does "working" actually mean here?

The 30 minutes a manager spends preparing their team is the single biggest variable in whether Excel training sticks. Here is the prep model, the follow-up rhythm, and the measurement framework.

The rulebook I wrote before I built the sites said no 141 times in about two hours. Mining Dispatch and Hauler Daily went live anyway, on 19 September, with a fact-checker that could not find its own shell and a privacy page that was ahead of the site.

A learner can produce fluent, correct work with AI and come away no smarter, while feeling like mastery. Chapter three of Learning to Learn With AI is about why that feeling lies, why AI makes it cheap, and the one instrument an educator can trust instead.

The second post in the AI-review series. Once an audit hands you a list of findings, the way you prompt the fix decides whether the problems get solved or quietly get worse. It works through the real critique of the Colophon FSE collection.

Masthead joins Quillwork on WordPress.org, my second free WordPress block theme there, plus a showcase site, two redesigns, and newsletter number nine.

Years back, a client of mine got hit with a frivolous lawsuit over their account-confirmation emails. The suit failed, and it failed because the written law puts transactional email outside CAN-SPAM. Here is what the law actually requires, and why knowing it precisely is what protects you.

A two-year AI tutoring trial found students rarely messaged for help, and mostly sent bare answers when they did. Decades-old research on a related skill says asking can be taught. Two small 2025-2026 studies test an AI-specific version of that idea, and a third tests a lever that doesn't depend on the student at all.

My new accessibility checker flagged every control on this site as broken. It was wrong three times before it was right, and each false alarm taught me something about how automated checks fool you.

WordPress VIP is the enterprise platform Automattic runs for organizations like The New York Times, BBC, and CNN. I have built and maintained sites on it at Postmedia. Here is what it is, what it costs, and the honest answer to whether your business actually needs it.

News migrations miss hard dates for three reasons that are all visible during scoping. Here are the checkpoints that catch them while there is still time to fix them.

A two-year trial in Tennessee found only small gains from an AI tutor, and a clear reason why: students rarely asked it for help. That's a problem teachers are unusually good at solving.

Five Cloudflare features most districts already have access to and rarely switch on: Snippets, Argo Smart Routing, Cache Reserve, Waiting Room, and the client-side security tooling that used to be called Page Shield. One is free and I would turn it on this week. Two are Business tier or above. None of them suit every school.

I helped move Canada's Parliament newspaper off Drupal in 2011. Here is what survives that move, what gets rebuilt, and the two things worth planning first.

A week spent tending the side domains I had half-forgotten I owned, meeting Claude's new model Fable on real work, and letting the system do the tireless digging while the judgment stayed with me.

The six questions I ask on a twenty-minute discovery call, why I ask each one, and what a useful answer sounds like, so you can use the twenty minutes well.

What actually leaves Wix, what Wix's own help pages say you cannot export, and how to tell whether you have outgrown it, with every limit sourced.

Detection is being switched off across higher education, and the reason matters more than the news does. The tools were quietly teaching everyone in the building to hide, which turns out to be the harder problem.

"Enterprise" is a hosting upsell label. The four layers that actually matter (edge, application, data, observability) fit on one page. Here it is.

It can be, but the question splits in two. Whether a vendor trains on your content is a contract term, and all four realistic platforms answer it the same way. Whether your district may hand records to that vendor at all is a FERPA question, and no product answers it for you.

I once watched a restaurant owner delete his entire content archive in ninety seconds. He was tidying. Here’s the permission map that prevents that when you have twelve people publishing to the same WordPress site.

A hooded cockpit, a lying inner ear, and the instrument habit your website needs. Why Search Console matters more than the leads that came in this week.

AODA-compliance audits for federal-vendor contracts are different from generic accessibility scans. Here is what a procurement-grade audit covers, who signs off, and where most WordPress sites fall short.

Survivorship bias, selection bias, leading questions, vanity metrics, proxy drift. Five ways a business quietly flatters itself with its own research.

An owner lost three weeks of enquiries to a form that looked fine. What breaks on an unwatched WordPress site, what real care covers, and when to skip it.

A meta-analysis of 53 studies says people learn more when you give them the problem before the method. The same evidence says which three implementation choices decide whether it works.

An LMS solves tracking and compliance well; delivery and content management poorly. Here are the four flavours that dominate, the decision matrix, and the audit before you sign.

No. Accessibility overlay widgets edit the page in the browser instead of fixing the code underneath, and they routinely conflict with the screen reader a student has already tuned to their own needs. What gets you to WCAG 2.2 AA is the markup and the uploaded documents.

Skills that look mastered in the classroom fade by Monday without practice. How backwards design fixes training, and the one question to ask any training vendor.

Records retention is the WordPress conversation nobody on your team has had yet. Here is what Library and Archives Canada compliance, FOI requests, and editorial retention obligations actually require, and where WordPress falls short by default.

A blown-out sky cannot be recovered in editing, and neither can feedback collected in a bad moment. Five ways to design the moment before you collect.

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My best spam filter also blocked real customers, and the inbox just looked like a slow month. The ten-second monthly test every business website deserves.

Two large studies show AI helps beginners most. One careful study shows the help does not become skill. I had read the second one and still kept saying the line, which is the part worth explaining.

Whether to leave Teachable comes down to one calculation you can do in ten minutes. Here is the arithmetic, and what the move involves once the number says go.

Cloudflare gives an LMS or SIS real DDoS mitigation at every tier, plus a firewall for login and enrollment forms and cheap delivery of static course files. It won't cache authenticated pages by default, and on its own it won't back anything up or make a district FERPA compliant.

An operational blueprint for engineering bilingual (English/French) content workflows inside WordPress to meet OLA Section 41 procurement and compliance standards.

At Yorkville Group, three schools on three separate WordPress installs meant a security patch went to two of them and missed the third. Here’s when WordPress Multisite fixes that, and when it buries you instead.

My rates are public, the way a lumber yard posts prices by the door. What a private college taught me about hidden pricing, and a fair test for any vendor quote.

I have spent a series defending AI. Here are the four places I will not follow it, and what you would have to believe to put those lines anywhere else.

Every publisher now asks you to declare AI use. The research says declaring it will cost you trust. Both things are true, so here is how I write the line anyway.

A modern sales stack for a service business is six tools, not twenty. Here is what each one does, what most teams over-buy, and the three things that actually move conversion.

A discount for a five-star review is not a request, it is a purchase. What real consent looks like, and why feedback collected without it quietly stops being evidence.

For anyone who has been sent the "AI makes you dumber" study this month and had a feeling something was missing from the summary.

I reordered my WordPress training page, built a Stances post type, and ran an EEAT schema audit that found my own structured data contradicting itself.

Moodle the software is free; running it is not. The one price Moodle publishes, the lines that make up the rest, and an honest range with the assumptions shown.

A client's WordPress admin was taking twelve seconds to load. Seven years of reasonable plugin decisions, each added for a good reason, all of them adding up at once. Here's the question that sorts a chosen stack from an accumulated one.

People answer surveys the way they think they are supposed to. Why the warmest feedback is often the least useful, and when to ask instead.

A practitioner's read on WordPress 7.0: the AI infrastructure it shipped, the real-time collaboration it pulled, and what the release means for plugin developers and platform buyers.

For anyone being asked to have a position on AI in scholarship or the classroom, and tired of the two camps.

Your iPhone photo looks fine on your phone but won't upload to WordPress, or shows a blank thumbnail. Here is what the HEIC format is, why it breaks the Media Library, and three honest ways to fix it.

Selling a course and running training inside a company are different jobs. One fights for attendance; the other already has it, and gets judged on a report.

Every couple of years someone announces WordPress is dead. The cause is always different; the platform keeps surviving. Here’s what fourteen years of “killers” taught me.

A WordPress site audit done well takes a day and surfaces three to five issues. Done badly, it produces a 40-page PDF nobody reads. Here are the 12 checks that earn the day.

There's probably a proposal on your desk that uses the word headless as if it were new. I've been building this architecture since before it had a name. Here's when it earns its place on a government site, and when it's a career risk.

A week of quiet gaps between what my site claimed and what it did: a podcast feed advertising missing audio, 230 archive pages leading nowhere, a blog that called everything WordPress, and an invoice tool I built instead of bought.

When moving off Moodle is the upgrade, when connecting it to WordPress is smarter, and when to stay put, with the SCORM, quiz and upgrade facts checked against the documentation.

Everyone was quoting a 54 percent gain from AI tutoring. The 54 percent I could actually source pointed the other way, which is the whole reason this newsletter exists.

Severance and Employment Insurance buy four to eight months. The first consulting payment usually lands in month six or seven. Here is the pattern I have watched senior professionals hit, and why the positioning work starts in week one.

A hosting quote with high availability on it can be insurance or upsell. Two numbers you can work out yourself decide which, and most teams find the answer is smaller than the proposal.

The Cape Breton mines died for decades while everyone pretended otherwise. What coal towns, a letter from St Kilda, and “learn to code” teach about the AI layoffs.

Fifteen years after WordCamp Toronto 2011, Make a Living Giving It Away goes to WordCamp US in Phoenix on August 18. What the session covers, who it is for, and a ticket discount you can share.

In a Hamilton meeting room, a federal research team kept circling back to the same question: where does the data actually live? "We host in Canada" answers one of four questions you need answered. Here are the other three.

WordPress 7.0 shipped, and a major version is a confidence event before a feature event. How I kept courses, a new plugin, and clients current in one week.

I kicked a beige PC under my desk and took down logins for a hundred people, coast to coast. Two weeks to find out. Find your box before it goes quiet.

Service sites leak at the same four joints: an offer nobody can repeat, buried proof, a heavy or silently broken form, and a slow reply.

Selling a course is four decisions in the right order: the promise, the stack, the price, and a funnel that teaches before it asks.

The data centre worry in Fort Erie is running ahead of the facts. I live here and work in tech, so here's what is actually on the table and what is only being marketed.

I forked Edit Flow into Editloft, kept the original authors' copyright line, and rebuilt it for modern WordPress. This is what a healthy fork looks like.

A talk got accepted, an audit graded my writing against a rulebook nobody had read, and four of my own tools reported a failure that never happened.

You are smart, you are answerable to a board, and you are surrounded by people who sound very sure of themselves. Here is how to tell the ones who know their work from the ones who are quietly selling you.

A Hamilton restaurant with a ramp and a freight elevator taught me accessibility is a business decision. A two-minute test shows how your site really welcomes people.

I grew up in a forgotten industry town, and I keep meeting that town everywhere. It's why every engagement I take includes teaching and every beginner's question gets answered.

My contact form honeypot mistook autofilled humans for bots and binned their messages. A week of that, nine pull requests, and eleven posts I re-edited.

Two of your pages compete for the same search, and both lose. Here is how to spot page dilution on your WordPress site and fix it by consolidating.

Quillwork is a free, full-site-editing WordPress theme built for writers and editors, designed around the reading experience first. Install it from your dashboard.

My nightly autonomous WordPress agent spent a week un-fixing its own fix. What that bug, a made-up auction price, and nine deleted scripts taught me.

The press releases say AI moved too fast to plan for. The WordPress roadmap that took the page builders' best feature tells a slower, more readable story, and it was public the whole time.

The week I almost shipped a WooCommerce fix that would have quietly undone itself, landed two open-source merges, and audited my whole library.

I was partway through migrating a LearnDash course site when I lost access to the dev environment. An Application Password I had set up earlier is what let me finish the job remotely. Here is why their real value shows up when you are locked out, not when everything is working.

Municipal procurement teams routinely miss the records-management line item when scoping a CivicPlus exit. Here is what it covers and what it actually costs.

Two days, the right two days, and a curriculum the next hire inherits. This is for editorial ops leads at media organizations where reporters cycle through every 12 to 24 months.

Eighteen pull requests, one merge, and a three-word thanks. What a week of contributing to WordPress plugins taught me about my own forked code.

The week I converted eight Colophon themes to full-site editing, cut the first Declamatio podcast after six takes, and tagged 28 posts to find the on-pillar gap.

Three prompts. Same theme. Three completely different reviews. The output you get from an AI theme audit is determined before you type your question. Ask for validation and that is what you get. Ask for truth and you get a findings list that would stop a WP.org rejection cold. This is what the prompt engineering actually looks like, step by step, against a real theme with real problems.

Senior procurement buyers come to WordPress discovery calls with a checklist. Here are the eight questions worth asking, and what a senior consultant's answers should sound like.

WordPress 7 shipped in May 2026. If you run a WordPress site, here is what changed, what matters, what to actually do about it, and the one feature that got pulled at the eleventh hour.

Over-optimised pages tank rankings AND conversions. Here are the seven signals, the back-off pattern, and the 30-minute audit that surfaces the worst offenders.

Eleven years after I last touched two WordPress.org plugins, I rewrote them. What you owe the strangers still installing your old code, and why.

Lighthouse scores measure what a 30-second synthetic test sees. Real WordPress performance is the user, page, and template view. Here is how to audit it.