What I’d give for a rain-free weekend! I guess it’ll be less-painful when the kids are out of school, but geez.
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Alex Standiford
I’m experimenting with integrating PHPNomad with NativePHP today. The thought of being able to run the same models and PHPNomad libraries in my desktop apps, and the server for that same app is just too dang useful to ignore! So many possibilities!
I’m already using this right now for an MCP server I’m running internally at Novatorius, and if this shapes up nicely, maybe I can cut back considerably on the amount of TypeScript I have dedicated to type coercion in the desktop app.
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Alex Standiford
Trying out Claude Design to help me build the sales page for my upcoming AI development for non-coder’s course. So-far, I’m impressed by how much easier it is to use than working directly with Claude code for the same task.
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Alex Standiford
Been doing lots of marketing and distribution work this week. Joining podcasts, taking client sales calls, content publishing flows for Siren. and working on getting the AI development for product founders course out the door. All of it is flowing back toward Siren in their own very different ways.
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Alex Standiford
If AI creates slop, AND AI doesn’t create anything new, the only conclusion one can draw is that AI was trained on slop. 🤔.
That’s totally how it works, right?
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Alex Standiford
Today has not been a good day. I’m pretty sure we got mild food poisoning or something. Both became my son have been mostly bed bound. I get bouts of energy that I am using when I can, but it’s definitely not much.
It’s days like this that I’m so glad I time budget, and I track my daily tasks. I don’t have the energy to do much today, so if I can find quick wins to snipe in the moments of lucidity, I’m taking it.
I managed to rally late today after sleeping off a lot of it, just enough to keep myself caught up on this week’s commitments. Definitely not 100% back yet though.
Hoping tomorrow is better.
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Alex Standiford
Envato’s move to a 50% commission is…perplexing. Feels like they’re biting the hand that feeds them at best, extortion at worst.
What’s funny is they decided to do this as AI is literally making it easier than ever to get off of these platforms. It’s like they WANT You to leave.
Seriously though, own your platform, y’all. WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads have been around for a coon’s age, and solve your problem without paying an arbitrary tax to whatever Envato’s investors decide you need to pay.
That distribution ain’t worth that tax. You could literally run an affiliate program with Siren Affiliates with a 25% commission rate (which I think is already really high for reliably converting software!) and capture a lot of that distribution, while actually taking ownership of those relationships and spreading out your dependency to your entire network. -
Alex Standiford
To the people who used to work on those StellarWP brands, I feel for you viscerally right now.
For people like us, these jobs were special. They were at a special time in WordPress in a liminal space where remote work was new and cool, everyone is happy to be there, and everyone genuinely cares and loves each-other’s company.
I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time the last several years trying to find work like that again, and I genuinely don’t know if those places even exist anymore.
So much so, that one of my core reasons for making my own business now is to try to recreate that again. I miss it. I see people around me grieve about the loss of it, and I would give anything to create that again. Someday, maybe.
I know for you this is laden with grief, and I am thinking of all of you constantly, but particularly this week. Take care of yourself.
It’s okay to grieve that, and don’t for one second think that it “was just a job”, because we all know these places were so much more than that.
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The 3 C’s
I’m often told that when I’m at WordCamps I’m “a blur”. I’m told that I am “everywhere”. It’s not completely wrong, but it suggests that what I’m doing is more-random then the actual strategy that’s behind the approach. I’m not just frantically talking to everyone with a WordCamp tag, I’m coming into WordCamp with a plan to talk to the three types of people that I can expect to run into there. I’ve found that there’s 3 types of people that you can talk to at a conference. Customers, collaborators, and competitors, and yet many people treat everyone like “customers”…