WordPress Doesn’t Want Honest Reviews

WordPress (Automattic) has blocked and banned me before for writing reviews that weren’t positive about a plugin or theme. (Kinda sounds like fascistbook, right?) And now they’ve done it again when my review was very simple and clear – that a plugin doesn’t mention that it’s VERY limited unless you upgrade to their paid version. Of course I support developers making money on the code they write – but bait and switch should have gone out with greasy car salesman and wide ties. So why does WordPress think …

Google has Eaten Microsoft’s Lunch

I worked at Microsoft for many years in the mid-1990s and late 2000s. I was a Microsoft fanboy. I got especially good with the Microsoft Office suite, and could do just about anything faster than most anyone I knew. I had all the keyboard shortcuts down, was great with Microsoft Excel formulas, could format anything in Microsoft Word, and was a master with Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint, and even did a lot with Access. Then, Microsoft completely messed up Office with their “ribbon” toolbars. They drastically changed – or …

AI Time-Lapse of Your Life

I was scrolling through someone’s social media timeline and noticed they had a lot of selfies. The idea popped into my head that this is where actual AI (not NLP / Natural Language Processing, that people are CALLING AI) could be used – even if just for fun. Remember the videos of people who have taken a photo of themselves every day for the past “X” years? Actual AI could look at one (or all) of your social platform timelines, do face recognition to find you, then compare …

Dr. Ben Franklin or: How I Learned to Ignore Lazy Entrepreneurs and Love the Email Address

I’ve been searching for a local or regional marketing consultant to hire, to put together a marketing plan. To me, the most obvious place to me to find that person is LinkedIn – the social network for business. To my great disappointment, of the more than 60 profiles I opened for people listed as “Marketing Consultant” or “Independent Marketing Consulting” only THREE of them had contact information on their LinkedIn profile. It should be a giant red flag if a MARKETING CONSULTANT doesn’t know how to market themselves… …

Simple Twitter Feature – Show Number of Blocks

Here’s a very simple Twitter feature that could make a huge difference in the quality of Twitter. It’s unlikely Elon Musk will ever see this but here’s hoping that someone will pass it along. Over the years I found that way too many fake, spam, and fishing Twitter profiles follow my account. I assume they’re doing this with the hope of getting a ‘follow back’ so they can spam more profiles and get into more news feeds. Unlike many people, I don’t care how many followers I have …

‘Free’ digital bulletin board

Last year I was trying to figure out how to build and display a ‘digital bulletin board’ on Main Street USA. The idea being that it would be remotely updated with text, video, graphics, AND would pull from RSS feeds, or just show scheduled content, and be easily updatable. The idea was to mount a flat-panel monitor or TV against a large window where there’s lots of foot traffic to catch the eye of visitors and residents when they were in town. It took a while, but I …

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