Internet flâneur • Pagecord foundling
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…
I've started using Mastodon a bit more recently since lots of Pagecord customers hang out there. I've just changed my handle to @olly@indieweb.social since my last one was far too obscure, so give me a follow if you'd like 👋
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…