Ross's Micro Blog

And yes, keys, passwords all reset. And not sure where the compromise happened.. yet. Very odd.

Curious. Seems a Mailgun API key of mine got compromised. And despite a send limit of 1000 they’ve accepted over 3 million requests and send over 250,000 mails.

What?!!!!

I ain’t paying for those!!!

There is a policeman with a police car stood not far from our primary school gate this morning.

People are just driving up and parking on double-yellow lines right in front of him.

This is a tiny diorama view of the state of the world right now.

I think this is genuinely the best news story I read this week.

Ultralight backpackers going all in on Haribo-branded battery packs.

Amazing.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/781387/backpacking-ultralight-haribo-power-bank

I don't talk about work much, but today I was testing our plugin’s PHP version compatibility to 8.4 and back-compat back to 7.4.

I run my local sites using LocalWP – another WP Engine-owned product.

And I really thought I was going to break it. Switching PHP versions back and forth. Restarting services galore. Simultaneous downloads of new PHP versions.

It was flawless and made my job SO easy. Amazing.

So a plug for one of the awesome tools we make:

https://localwp.com/

For some reason there is a September School Disco this year.

“Golden” from K-Pop Demon hunters was playing on drop-off.

200 tweens trying to hit that high A5 notes.

I hope the teachers have good ear defenders. 😂

This JavaScript Markdown editor is right up my street. Small, simple, zero dependencies (as far as I can tell).

Great work!

https://overtype.dev/

Not gonna lie. All creative activity is kinda on hold until @loopconf is done.

Will my talk be perfect? Nope.

Has it taken on a life of its own? Hell yeah it has! I think it is writing me at this point!!

Will there be way more than a half hour talk’s worth of stuff? Oh yes!!

Should you attend? If you’re a UK WordPress dev then there’s not been a WordCamp for a while. The speaker line up is great and I know a bunch of awesome folks attending.

Discount code ROSS50 gets you £50 off a ticket.

I won’t link it but I read a post on X today (*) that was basically “WordPress has discovered package management and static content sources”

But, of course, it’s done it in its very own, proprietary way rather than using existing, mature tech, and arrived there through a very circuitous route.

Again!!

(*) – Yes, I still have an X account. No I don’t actively use it except for reading specific posts occasionally. And yes this post was only on X (as far as I know).

And it all feels so rational. Things WERE better.

Is this how my parents feel/felt?

Or did I grow up in some golden age?

Oh gosh. So many things about me are grumpy-old-man-longs-for-things-to-be-like-the-olden-days right now!

I keep discovering people who are going to @loopconf and it’s getting VERY exciting! So many people I finally get to meet in person. 😃

I increasingly find myself pondering just how incredibly lucky I was to have been born in the place I was born at the time I was born into the family I was born.

None of that is my frickining. And as I look around at the world I realise how so many people suffer through no fault of their own, just because of what they were born into.

And it makes me frickin mad that it's such a lottery.

I'm getting my music collection out of the cloud. Here's a write-up, including the apps I'm using on MacOS and iOS to do it.

Digital music is great. Discovery platforms are great. But I want to OWN my tunes.

https://rosswintle.uk/2025/09/de-clouding-music/

This is an excellent podcast episode on the benefits of sit/standing desks. Confirms what I thought, that alternating position is the best thing!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gg75

I’m working in React a lot again. Building a component system from scratch. Separating concerns. Using best practices.

Was actually starting to like it.

But it’s still SO verbose and you have to do so much thinking about the implementation.

It’s really painful to work with still.

Am I still, somehow, doing it wrong?

I just came across a product called “WazChat”.

Is it just Brits that will think this is a poor choice of name?

(With apologies if this is your product!)

I'm curious…

Are there any large companies or web agencies out there that are doing anything with building static websites using web platform tech?

I only ever hear about individuals doing this kind of thing, but surely there are benefits for microsites, or landing pages of some sort?