My thoughts on WordPress these days

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series WordPress alternatives

I’ve been successfully hacking WordPress more or less regularly since 2008. It’s good software, and it’s aged reasonably gracefully, feature- and bloatware- wise, compared to many enduring software brands. Its developers have been insistent on backward compatibility while they painstakingly built a community of loyal developers and users doing all sorts of amazing things with … Read more

Dumpster fire?

Enough already with using “dumpster fire” to describe a huge chaotic mess!

Dumpsters are designed to control fire. If a dumpster’s on fire, shut the lid and shut the side doors. The fire will burn itself out.

Maybe the same idea applies to people on fire. Deny them the attention they crave, their psychological oxygen, and maybe their fires will cool off too.

A birthday song

Here’s a song my brother Barney Jones composed for my recent birthday. I am lucky to have such a talented family. Thanks, Barney! Most of the material on this site is Creative Commons licensed. This isn’t. It is Copyright (c) 2023 Barney Jones. All Rights Reserved.

The west’s radical transparency: a stake through the heart of Putin’s secrecy.

The unity of NATO, and the effectiveness of the world-wide new attitude towards BS on the intertoobz, owe a lot to something really radical pulled off by the foreign policy dream team Biden put together: Ambassador William Burns, now director of the CIA. Anthony Blinken Secretary of State Avril Haines Director of National Intelligence. They … Read more

Antivirus jumps shark. Cryptomining!

Well, holy cow. Now two different antivirus packages include code to use their hosts’ idle cycles to mine cryptocurrency. Users must opt in to both. But still, if computers were horses we’d say they had parasites and treat them with horse paste (aka Invermectin) to get rid of them. These antivirus packages give our computers … Read more

Scaled-up web software is hard!

The New York Times ran an article last Friday about the struggles people have had using all those vaccination-appointment web sites. The biggest complaint? The sites “crash” because they have too much traffic. I’ve worked at a company that runs scaled-up web technology. We have a customer with a vast seasonal rush, with millions of … Read more

Donald J. T***** will you please go now!

With credit to Dr. Seuss and newspaper columnist Art Buchwald: The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Donald J. T****, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can … Read more

From around the ‘toobz: articles marking the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s article

Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about … Read more

Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible

Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. … Read more