TechCrunch on how Me.sh (née Clay) is now available on Android. Also, kudos to those other Clay folks for winning the Clay memetic namespace dominance.
Aside Archives
Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.
I have so many tools for organization and management across Asana, Google Workspace, P2, and Linear, but they’re not really connected. I’m trying to get everything in one place so there’s no data duplication, a single source of truth, and everything is always linked and accessible. It feels good, like spring cleaning, to go through everything. Woo has an initiative they call Mise en place with a similar idea. Which is why you’ve also seen those bug fixes and clean-up happening. With AI, this should be easier than ever.
I’m trying out this thing, it’s trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.
Update: This is powered by Delphi.ai and it appears very broken right now, people are sending messages and on my side it looks like it’s responding but they’re not seeing it.
I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent.
I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known.
Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.
Mike Little and I met hanging out on the b2/cafelog Sourceforge and Freenode IRC channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called Corsica.
Bonus: After publishing, Jetpack’s Related Post feature led me to this Best Blogging Software? post where Michel commented, months before the famous Blogging Software Dilemma. See, even back then people were arguing about static vs dynamic sites.
New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.
If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really looks like human effort.
In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had.
Ain’t no hill for a stepper.
If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this part of the A Way with Words podcast, and apparently, it might have come from the musician John Gaar.
It looks like Ubiquiti is coming for Sonos with its PoE Audio Port, a $199 device that closely resembles the $499 Sonos Port, and $599 PowerAmp. Sonos is going up-market with the Amp Multi.
Sonos has had a rough patch, but I’m pretty ride or die for them, and some of my favorite people are there: Tom Conrad, the CEO, Hugo Barra on the board, and Mike Tatum in CorpDev (he’s the guy who got me to drop out of college and join CNET back in 2004!).
The only time I don’t do Sonos in a home is for the amazing audio experience of Syng Alpha. The triphonic thing can be really magical. (Analog/vinyl is still Shindo Laboratories, but that’s just for special occasions.)
For headphones right now, it’s either some custom Airpods Pro 3 or the Sennheiser HDB 630 (Hat tip: Pud, who is also making some crazy headphones).
On the go, I love pairing two Logitech Megaboom 4s.
If you’re looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn’t recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around 400,000 words were removed from The Power Broker, which was ultimately published as 1,162 pages.
If you host your WordPress on WordPress.com your AI agent can now manage your entire site, including updating posts or pages, making drafts, pretty much all the things you normally do with WordPress. Hook this up to your OpenClaw, Hermes, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever and have fun!
Long-time WordPresser Miriam Schwab just rebuilt her WordPress site with Claude Code and it looks amazing. Go check it out, this is what is possible now with proper prompting. I’d love to see a WordCamp keynote from Miriam on her process in this. (And she’s doing this while missiles are flying overhead. Wow.)
Update: She blogged a bit about the process.
Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud.
For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!
People are doing pretty interesting things with Emacs (now on version 30.2!) these days, if you haven’t checked in recently. The bleeding edge has always been people into Org Mode. Sacha Chua has hooked up Whisper to Emacs to talk to it.
Emacs is probably one of the first and best examples of self-modifying software that contours to your brain. With vibe coding, we may get back to that space where everyone’s personal setup is like a crazy specific Emacs config file.
Five items:
- Automattic’s new transparency report is up, and TorrentFreak covers how AI-generated notices have been flooding the system. We don’t talk about it much, but for two decades now Automattic has been a fierce fighter for free speech on behalf of our customers and journalists. Our legal team has gotten a big upgrade in the past 15 months so look for more in this area.
- WordPress 7.0 is shaping up to be a great release, and we’re moving fast! As someone noted, after the product review, we got the new Connectors setting screen in beta 2 at AI speed.
- Yesterday, TinkerTendo hosted a fun BioArena Hackathon. From the pics, it looked like a great event.
- Kudos to WP community member Matt Medeiros, who used AI to spin up a quick webapp to help his community track which streets had been plowed after that crazy snowstorm. Making local communities better is definitely part of the WordPresser ethos.
- Claude’s hack to import your memory is an amazing application of what I hoped for with the Data Liberation push on WordPress.org. However, it’s just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic; what you really want is for that memory to be personal to you and work with every model, which is what OpenClaw and its many claw descendents, like ZeroClaw, do for you. It reminds me of Tantek’s 2005 Attention.xml presentation.
This year at Automattic has been intense. We kicked it off with two weeks of in-person AI enablement training, and there’s a great post about it now. I’ve been so impressed and inspired by my colleagues leaning in to learn and grow together in the most consequential time in software development in the past 40 years.
Two interesting posts today, first is Nick Hamze, who ponders the case on his delightfully avant-garde site for how WordPress fits in when everything is coded up on a whim, Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing.
Separately, I was delighted to see that legendary investor Brad Feld has hooked up Claude Code to post to his WordPress site, which hammers in Nick’s point that when you can use these tools on top of existing infrastructure, you get a much stronger foundation than imagining everything from scratch.
Pankil Shah writes I replaced WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger with this one app. (It’s Beeper.) And Wirecutter picks the 3 best journaling apps of 2026. (It’s Day One.)
I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.