David Risley

The weekly newsletter for creators, membership site owners, coaches and marketers using WordPress. Discover new tools and strategies while keeping up with the world of WordPress. Sent on Monday mornings.

X is a trip. The conspiracy theories are out in full force about the plane crash in South Florida. Happens so fast. A societal symptom of people being lied to so often. Looks to me like the horizontal stabilizer came off. Nose drives. No control. Happened so fast. Flight path moved because they were dodging storms.

IKEA is a cool store, but incredibly inconvenient for a lot of things. Taking me forever to pick up one small thing. Shake on me for thinking I could walk into a store, buy said thing, and leave in a few minutes.

Setting up WordPress on most any host: click a button. Setting up @EmDashCMS on the same box: npm create, Git repo, SSR mode, Node 22, encryption key, SITE_URL, workerd if you want the sandbox, then remember to back up the SQLite file yourself. *IF* your hosting even permits you to do that kind of thing. Just sayin'.

From an email just now: "The beauty of using AI instead of WordPress means I can have a rock solid website with state of the Art tools and give up nothing. " This sentiment is being seen more and more. Look, WordPress is clearly not the only way to do things. Never has been. But, this idea that AI is making WordPress irrelevant is stupid. I look at it as AI+WordPress... not AI "or" WordPress. For some times, sure... you don't need WordPress. You never did. But, for a lot of sites, WordPress is still the best option. You just use it WITH AI. AI is damn good at WordPress. But, you don't have to sit there and try to "vibe code" every little thing.

The entire damn world is going to keep calling it AI. All he can do is force government docs to use a new phrase. Which only introduces confusion.

The fear porn people are putting out over this PHP security thing is off the charts. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's important and people need to pay attention. But, it sure is bringing out the engagement bait.

Word on the street is... ensure your PHP sites are running at least PHP 8.2 or above. Anything below that... huge security issue being exposed tomorrow. And 8.2 is the minimum version still receiving security updates. Sites below that better get with the program.

Doesn't he realize how easy this is to do with tools and AI?

Building my own custom AIOS Dashboard. AI does a lot of the work. Lots of automations going on. All reporting into one central UI where I can monitor/manage everything. So fun to build it, as I'm the only person it has to work for.

Jeez, converting some WordPress stuff over to Astro and it is CRAZY how much faster it is. Perfect this setup... and all performance plugins for WordPress literally have nothing to do.

Opus 5.5 is really good. That is all.

The Hermes desktop app is so damn wonky. It keeps having display issues and losing conversation, or repeating things already said to me. So frustrating.

I might be behind the curve in some circles, but I've never built an Astro site before. Working on my first now. Just to figure out how this works.

Grokbot is nice. But, Hermes.... I own it. Makes a real difference. I don't see it as a good idea to RENT business infrastructure.

Always fun when a client uses AI to work on their WordPress site. Especially when... they don't know how. Nasty-ass custom HTML blocks everywhere. Code nobody understands.... just stuffed into WP pages as HTML blocks. FML.

Sometimes surprises me how ineffective the support people with some WordPress plugin companies are. Sure, they reply. Not always quickly, but eventually. But, then... templated responses. Sending back dumb replies that get us nowhere.... about things they should KNOW if they know WordPress well at all. Seems like they just want to kick a reply out the door to get you off their screen, but actually wanting to FIX something isn't really the priority. Some are awesome. Others... not so much.

This is very well done.

So, Hermes Desktop can't display inline images? Bruh. Generating an image with AI is very common. Being able to see it in the chat you're working on makes total sense. Having to go dig into the Artifacts screen to see it doesn't. And in Bot Mode, there's no simple way to get to Artifacts. It is like a dead end. cc: @Teknium @NousResearch

Just downgraded SuperGrok. I'm moving away from @bot and going "all in" on Hermes. Too many reliability issues with Grokbot for now.

GrokBot is unreliable. Hard to ignore.