Thomas Frank

Every developer: “They want $10/mo for this app?! I’ll build it myself in 3 hours” 3,000 hours later: “People should pay me $10/mo for this”

@JeandreGerber @shpak_dev @austinginder Let me know how you like it. I looked into it, but the content editor didn't look nearly as nice as Gutenberg, so it's on the back burner for me right now.

@TomFrankly @shpak_dev @austinginder I'm going to try to use sanity headless CMS for that part. Front end all html and then pushing content with sanity headless CMS. That's my solve but still need to run experiments this coming week. Will let you know what I find

Rethinking my own WordPress site. Generating HTML is so easy now. Friction comes translating that HTML to block editor, but is it? If you start with empty WordPress and have AI build a custom theme and a custom block plugin... then the pipeline starts to get really good.

@jantegze @BridgetMWillard @Cloudflare Been looking into Sveltia over the last week! Out of all the options, it does seem like the most promising. From the video I watched, the editor experience doesn't look quite on the level of Gutenberg though.

@TomFrankly @BridgetMWillard @Cloudflare sveltiacms.app plus GitHub

Is anyone in WordPress doing WordPressy things lately? All I see is Claude This Perplexity That.

I think we're getting close to having open-source CMS tools that are on the level of Gutenberg or Notion. For me that'd be the last hurdle. There's Dhub and Basehub now, but both would just add another subscription. I've already got pipeline set up that deploys changes to my theme when I merge PRs on Github, and now I'm replacing plugins with in-theme functionality so all of that benefits from the same pipeline. There's definitely a part of me that wants to leave WP and start with a clean slate, but I think I can get most of the benefit just by doing this stuff. I realize the other day that I'm not yet tapping all of Cloudflare's potential, and I can likely move my actual WP install to a much smaller and cheaper server.

I totally get what you're mean. We're currently at the beginning of this major transition period (WP -> AI), where it's already clear that things are about to change drastically. But it's not entirely clear yet how to apply this. In some cases, moving away from WP is already working well right now, but otherwise, Wordpress is here to stay for the long haul. I just optimized a WP site with an HTML body size of ~700 KB (uncompressed), and I’d like that experience to stay in the past :)

@BridgetMWillard Working on a project now to reduce how much my WP site costs. Building a couple plugin features directly into my theme, replacing Elementor pages with fully-designed HTML templates in the theme itself, and also getting rid of all cookie sources so I can ditch the popup.

@jantegze @BridgetMWillard @Cloudflare How are folks writing content for Astro sites? I know I could just write in Markdown, but the media management in Gutenberg is really nice. How do folks in SSG land handle that?

@BridgetMWillard I started moving the majority of my websites from WP to Astro framework and to @Cloudflare, and I couldn’t be happier.

Been exploring this, and as of yet I still haven't been able to find a solution that lets me write content in an editor of the same caliber as Gutenberg for free. I know I could use Astro or a zillion other SSG frameworks for the site, but I don't want to write content in Markdown, mainly because I like being able to just paste images from my clipboard. Markdown would mean typing or pasting actual file paths, as far as I can tell.

@austinginder Do we even need WordPress for new (content-based) websites in 2026?

@thesamparr A big portion of manosphere thought (and arguably philosophy in general) is men in positions of power convincing themselves that it's somehow noble or right to do whatever the hell they want, while other people need to follow different standards.

I hope the young men out there watching this realize: this behavior is very low integrity...and high integrity is one of the main attributes of masculinity. "In a scene that set off this discussion, Mr. Theroux asks Justin Waller, a manosphere influencer, to explain his relationship, which he describes as “one-sided monogamy.” “Women don’t want to sleep with other men when they love a man,” Mr. Waller says."

@svpino Guy can build anything with AI but can't be bothered to ask the same AI to define some words

@TomFrankly He wouldn’t understand what half of those words means… 😂

Tell them to go build an offline-first collaborative note-taking app with strong consistency. Should keep 'em busy for a while.

@hobdaydesign On another note, and as much as it pains me to admit, WordPress' Gutenberg actually does this best. It's the only editor I can think of that gives you the *option* of showing that formatting toolbar all the time, anchored to the top, or have it float on a selection Notion-style.

I most agree, but would modify that to say it's designed for people who already know Markdown. When Notion first released, people who knew Markdown felt right at home. The editor also kinda sucked back then, but it was long enough ago that having Markdown auto-format was pretty rare.

One benefit of an always visible toolbar is that you can toggle a format (e.g. bold) before you type. Notion has the forward-slash menu, but you cannot use it to set bold. It's also not a familiar pattern.

@cassiecounsel I am near DSM! I got a new Macbook from that store in December, but not for Openclaw. Still concerned around the security on that, and been a bit too busy building an app

@TomFrankly Also just saw you are in DSM..are you by chance one of the other 2 people who went to the Jordan Creek Apple Store to buy a Mac for your Openclaw agents?! Dying to know who the others are…

Currently 892 hours into automating a 30-second task I do 4 times a year It's gonna be so worth it once I get everything working

@brian_lovin I wonder if I just tried Composer 2 on a bad problem. Even on fast mode, it was significantly slower than CC in my testing.

Using Cursor again today for the first time in a while. Still using Claude Code, Codex, Conductor, of course. First: someone needs to rename because the C-named companies are out of control. Second: fast is good. Composer 2 is good because it's fast. That's all you need to know to at least give it a try. Third: I am grateful that I can switch between all of these tools in an instant. Little-to-no lock in. I pick the thing that gives me the most intelligence-per-second-per-dollar and am happy.

@KevinEspiritu Unless I grow a 10lb sweet potato

You can achieve all of the success you want in this material world, but you will never match the happiness of me harvesting a 9lb sweet potato

@HanselNotions @NotionHQ A bit of a joke 😛 It's an entirely different operating system made by one guy. Very quirky, but also genuinely impressive in many ways given a single person made it. youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQ…

@TomFrankly Never heard of templeOS @NotionHQ

This is cool, but honestly I'm still waiting for TempleOS support

@Coscorrodrift @tnorthcutt @heynibras For now, I just keep them in a giant Logic session. I hardly ever export them. I just open the same session when I want to record and put the cursor at the end. With singing I practice near-daily, but I'm not all that structured about it.

@TomFrankly @tnorthcutt @heynibras What do you do with the recordings? Aside from that sending to the teacher during covid thing

does everyone know that the more you sing the better you get at singing?

New block: Tabs 🗂️ Sometimes a page has a lot going on. Tabs let you organize it in a new way… no subpages, no mile-long scroll. Type /tabs to try it out (rolling out now).

Expressing emotions is part of being human, and sometimes we want to connect with another person while doing it. We're not always ready to start fixing the problem. Part of being a good partner is finding the balance there, and not demanding that your partner either experience their emotions in silence or be working on the solution.

@AELeighton2 @Chizitere_xyz Wanting to vent is good for you, not him. Wanting to fix what's bothering you is good for you AND him. One is mutually beneficial. The other is not.

The internet constantly tells women that men are terrible listeners because the second a woman starts venting about her day, the man immediately interrupts to offer a logical solution. We are taught to view this as him being dismissive, emotionally unintelligent, or invalidating our feelings. ​The strict, unpopular truth is that to a man, fixing the problem is his absolute highest, most desperate form of empathy. ​Women vent to connect; we want our partner to just sit in the dark with us and validate the emotion. But men are hardwired to view the woman they love being in distress as an active threat. When he immediately offers a spreadsheet, a strategy, or a solution to your problem, he isn't trying to silence you. His brain has recognized that something in the world is hurting his partner, and his immediate, visceral instinct is to assassinate the thing causing you pain. We constantly shame men for "not just listening," completely ignoring the fact that his attempt to fix your life is his most profound declaration of love.