I recently learned that my preferred email provider — Proton — has the ability to send emails via SMTP now. This is something that other mail providers offer, if I’m going to implement it, I’d prefer not to route my emails (and potentially emails from others via contact forms) outside of the Proton ecosystem. As a quick improvement, I decided to configure Proton SMTP for my site.

I don’t watch a lot of YouTube on my television, but whenever I do, I’m always amazed by the number of ads that interrupt even short video clips. In the past, I have solved this by using SmartTube (an app for Android that removes ads and sponsor segments) on an Amazon Kindle Fire Stick. However, I recently needed to implement an ad blocking solution on a second television, and I’d rather not purchase another Fire Stick.

I recently published a new version of my Block AI Crawlers WordPress plugin. It’s built to be an easy way to give site owners the option to block AI bots and crawlers from accessing their site. It does this by adding robots.txt entries asking known AI bots not to crawl your site.  If someone doesn’t want their content used to train an LLM, I think it’s fair to give them that option.

I recently migrated my personal site from Astro (a JavaScript-based static site generator) to WordPress. I’d been happily running my site on Astro for a while, but over time I found myself missing the convenience and integrated tooling that I use every day in my WordPress work. I really like WordPress, I think it’s a great — probably even the greatest — option for many websites.