Lars Jansen
@oldstackjournal
🛠️ AI tools & simple web workflows for builders!
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Weekend builder check in for all my mates here.
What are you trying to unstick this weekend? A WordPress mess, an AI assisted build, some weird server problem or something completely different?
Feel free to drop it here. I'm always interested in what everyone's building.
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WordPress is proposing built-in MCP and OAuth to let AI agents connect to sites. Some pieces already exist, but the simpler connection is only proposed for 7.3.
The question isn't how an agent logs in. It's how you find out what it changed when something breaks.
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Marketing a small SaaS is harder to debug than the software.
When nobody signs up, was the price wrong? Was the landing page rubbish? Did the right people never see it? Or does nobody actually need the thing?
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MySQL's TIMESTAMP column runs out at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
That's only a bit over 11 years away. Store a warranty expiry or lease end date further ahead than that and it won't fit.
DATETIME goes to 9999. One old 32-bit limit still lurking in modern schemas.
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Holy SHIT GrokBot is faaaast compared to ChatGPT!
Brooks's law says adding people to a late software project makes it later.
That was 1975. Now we've got people running 50 AI coding agents overnight.
The agents don't need meetings, but somebody still has to review all that code. I wonder how much of the old rule still applies.
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Moving a WordPress site? Don't run MySQL REPLACE() on the old URL.
Some settings are stored as serialised PHP, with string lengths baked in. Change the URL without updating those lengths and things break.
Use wp search-replace instead. Back up first and try --dry-run.
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Stripe is making more of its services available through CLIs and AI agents, and I keep seeing predictions that SaaS dashboards are on their way out.
I'm not convinced. Plenty of paying customers still want to log in, see what's happening and click a few buttons.
I reckon we'll need both for quite some time.
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robots.txt has been around since the 90's, but it took until 2022 for it to become an official internet standard.
Nearly 30 years of websites politely asking robots not to wander into certain places.
And now some of us are using the same system to try to keep AI crawlers out. 😂
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Your 404 log is full of /favicon.ico because of a decision made in 1999.
Internet Explorer 5 looked for that file in the site root. No <link> tag required.
27 years later, browsers still try it if you haven't declared an icon. A bit of 1999 hanging around in server logs😆
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I've got a soft spot for old computers that are supposedly past their useful life.
Give them a lightweight operating system and one specific job, and they're often perfectly adequate.
This little Acer doesn't need to be fast at everything. It just needs to be fast enough at one thing.
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Quiet Wordpress site? Don't rely on WP Cron for scheduled posts or backups. It only fires when someone loads a page.
In wp-config.php:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);
Then a real cron:
*/5 * * * * wp cron event run --due-now --path=/var/www/site
No visitors required.
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I remember when setting up a computer meant deciding which software to install.
Now you can install an operating system, open a browser, log into a few websites and you're pretty much done.
I do wonder how much desktop software I'd actually miss these days.
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The clearfix hack can retire now.
display: flow-root contains floats natively, and it's been in every major browser since Safari 13 in 2019.
Plenty of stylesheets are still carrying it around like a lucky charm.
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I've ripped Omarchy off an old Acer and I'm replacing it with a lightweight Debian 13 setup. The plan is to use it almost exclusively for X Pro.
I've somehow ended up installing an entire operating system so I can watch people argue about software 😂
(I know I could have just bought another screen...😆)
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Google's updated user generated spam guidance is worth a look if your app creates shareable pages or generated outputs.
If they're meant for sharing by link, not discovery in Search, keep them out of the index by default.
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I'm trying to find more people here who actually enjoy the fiddly bits of building things. Little web apps, sexy SaaS apps, Linux experiments, odd automations, whatever you're tinkering with.
If that's you, say gidday!
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I've got an automated research system that can gather sources, review existing articles and prepare suggested updates to a website.
There's one thing it absolutely cannot do.
Publish anything.
That's a deliberate decision. I'm quite happy for AI to do the tedious research work, but somebody still needs to be responsible for what ends up on the site.
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I'd love to know how many small SaaS products could make perfectly good money charging $5 or $10 a month.
Instead, half the internet seems to be selling $49/month subscriptions to people who need the tool twice a week.
I wonder how many customers never even get as far as the free trial?
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AI can generate an almost unlimited amount of frontend code now.
I’m convinced the best approach isn’t giving it MORE freedom.
It’s giving it fewer decisions to screw up.
Here are the components. Here are the breakpoints. Here are the spacing rules. Everything works in the browsers we support.
Now build inside the fence.
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