I will not stand for this slander. Seriously though, I've never really understood the "what if we based our site on blogging software but with a bunch of plugins to make it pretend it's something...
I will not stand for this slander.
Seriously though, I've never really understood the "what if we based our site on blogging software but with a bunch of plugins to make it pretend it's something else" approach to websites (or worse, web applications). Why did Wordpress, of all things, become the standard for Making A Website, instead of a static site generator (if your company has an appropriate nerd available) or some modernized FrontPage thing (if not)?
I'm suddenly kind of curious which way the cause and effect relationship goes between this and companies structuring their SEO keyword spam pages specifically as blogs, which has also always seemed weird to me.
I think it's a fairly natural progression. The core feature of a blog is to publish content. Over time, however, you might find that you wish your content were a little more dynamic. Maybe so...
I think it's a fairly natural progression. The core feature of a blog is to publish content. Over time, however, you might find that you wish your content were a little more dynamic. Maybe so readers can interact with it: like a post, write a comment, share with their friends. And wouldn't it be great if you could pull in photos from Instagram feed, or maybe embed a map of your itinerary for your upcoming vacation?
Now your friend wants to write a post too, so you need to support multiple users. And since you want lots of people to read your posts, you grab this "Yoast" thing for SEO. Pretty soon you've got a lot of code running and things are slowing down, so you find a performance plugin too.
Things are going well. Now you're an influencer with a readerbase of almost 1,300 people! Some of them want to buy t-shirts, so you decide to install this eCommerce plugin and add a few items. Eek, payment processing is complicated! But that's okay, because the Stripe plugin takes care of the hard stuff.
At a certain point, your humble blog has transformed into a "web application". You still blog there on occasion, but somehow, you've lost the joy in it.
I’d agree if I hadn’t had so many people in the past tell me to “start a new woocommerce store”. Starting a new arm of a business on a famously insecure platform is never a good idea, no matter...
I’d agree if I hadn’t had so many people in the past tell me to “start a new woocommerce store”.
Starting a new arm of a business on a famously insecure platform is never a good idea, no matter how good woocommerce may or may not have been.
On the other hand I appreciate how some of the new service operators frame their product as “build a website with us, and if you want to make it a store later we can do that too” even though it’s all the same unified platform. In the last few years of my last job, we went from over a decade of self-hosted solutions to using Shopify, and as much as I generally hate SaaS and proprietary software in general, it really helped operations quite a lot.
Day One Wordpress Hater here. You echo my sentiments perfectly. And having worked on many of these plugin-hell-sites, I can promise you that it's not easy to maintain, nor is it pleasant for...
Day One Wordpress Hater here. You echo my sentiments perfectly. And having worked on many of these plugin-hell-sites, I can promise you that it's not easy to maintain, nor is it pleasant for anyone who's not got the computer toucher brain damage to use. It's most often slow and unpleasant, and the Block editor is the stuff of nightmares. I've switched to Kirby CMS
I think that happened because it made hosting a website approachable to non-technical users. That's what a lot of the web has been about, after all. I think for a good while, maybe even now,...
I think that happened because it made hosting a website approachable to non-technical users. That's what a lot of the web has been about, after all. I think for a good while, maybe even now, wordpress permitted free hosting, which of course broke down the barrier towards aquiring new users to being non-existent.
I'll join delphi in my WordPress hate. The early part of my career was pure WordPress (back around 2007 I think), and I remember always being shocked that such popular software was just monolithic...
I'll join delphi in my WordPress hate. The early part of my career was pure WordPress (back around 2007 I think), and I remember always being shocked that such popular software was just monolithic plates of spaghetti. It was not good.
I always felt that WordPress didn't become popular for being well-built or well-architected. A lot of platforms did the same thing as WordPress, with some features better and some worse. I mostly think that WordPress just got lucky. Its plug-in/theme packaging was a big draw for users and builders, but it wasn't anything novel.
The worst thing I ever saw someone pull off with WordPress was an entire social media platform including realtime chats and marketplaces, etc. Every page took almost a minute to load for literally...
The worst thing I ever saw someone pull off with WordPress was an entire social media platform including realtime chats and marketplaces, etc.
Every page took almost a minute to load for literally every visitor.
Most people can cobble together some no-code Wordpress abomination with a combination of free and/or paid plugins. And if they pay for a decent theme the abomination can look professional. Not...
Most people can cobble together some no-code Wordpress abomination with a combination of free and/or paid plugins. And if they pay for a decent theme the abomination can look professional. Not everyone can conjure a website from scratch let alone figure out static generation.
I've been wondering what CloudFlare wanted to do with the Astro acquisition since they announced it. I guess this is what it was: trying to eat at Vercel's market share by having their own...
I've been wondering what CloudFlare wanted to do with the Astro acquisition since they announced it. I guess this is what it was: trying to eat at Vercel's market share by having their own meta-framework that pushes you towards their own hosting platform.
An aside about Astro
Of all of the sevrer-side JS meta-frameworks right now, Astro is my current favourite. It took me a moment to properly understand its way of thinking, coming from Next.js and Remix mostly, but there are some things that just work nicely. It wasn't that bad coming from a React way of thinking.
I appreciate its focus on delivering plain old HTML and clearly sectioning off the heavier dynamic stuff. Certain patterns are a bit clunkier, but overall I have actually enjoyed using Astro and keep finding myself reaching for it.
I am glad that they have funding to keep the project going, and while I currently host most of my projects on CloudFlare, I really hope that it doesn't get too locked in. While Astro itself can be deployed anywhere, EmDash seems to be locked to CloudFlare Workers (and specifically a paid plan too).
I say Vercel, even though everything is comparing it to WordPress, because while "CloudFlare vibe coded a WordPress competitor in two months" makes for a good headline, I don't think the people reaching for WordPress are necessarily going to see this as a viable alternative. Instead, I see the kinds of people reaching for Next.js for a blog or bespoke e-commerce site being the people who would actually give it a try.
WordPress is as big as it is because of its plugin ecosystem, and CloudFlare is very much going after that here. The explicit calling out of the GPL licensing debates reads to me as CloudFlare saying "yeah, develop plugins for us as we'll allow them to be closed source so you can charge for them and keep competitors at bay." Combine that with... x402? What's that? *clicks, scrolls down* Oh it's crypto lol. Yeah, maybe not but good try. The focus on the security model is interesting too, and I think is actually a good selling point. Jumping back to a Next.js comparison, there's nothing equivalent to a permission system there either, so there's another differentiation.
I'd be cautious adopting it, but I'll be watching from the sidelines to see how this goes.
Per the post, “You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta”.
I am glad that they have funding to keep the project going, and while I currently host most of my projects on CloudFlare, I really hope that it doesn't get too locked in. While Astro itself can be deployed anywhere, EmDash seems to be locked to CloudFlare Workers (and specifically a paid plan too).
Per the post, “You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta”.
Oh that's sneaky! Not unexpected, but wow! I was actually shocked to learn that you can, like, host stuff on Cloudflare. I didn't realize they were in that space, I thought their hosting was...
Oh that's sneaky! Not unexpected, but wow! I was actually shocked to learn that you can, like, host stuff on Cloudflare. I didn't realize they were in that space, I thought their hosting was limited to edge CDN stuff.
They use to have a service called Pages, that allowed to host static site generator's (SSG) sites for free. I host mine there. Last year, they discontinued Pages, but it's still possible using...
They use to have a service called Pages, that allowed to host static site generator's (SSG) sites for free. I host mine there. Last year, they discontinued Pages, but it's still possible using Workers, although a little bit more complex than Pages was.
Are Pages discontinued? I just deployed two this week as well as a separate worker, you just need to click the tiny tiny CTA saying looking for Pages instead.
Are Pages discontinued? I just deployed two this week as well as a separate worker, you just need to click the tiny tiny CTA saying looking for Pages instead.
Hopefully the other way around. I don't want to see reimplementation of an arbitrary proprietary approach to the problem as a distinguishing factor between providers - I'd rather see the feature...
Hopefully the other way around. I don't want to see reimplementation of an arbitrary proprietary approach to the problem as a distinguishing factor between providers - I'd rather see the feature implemented in a standard way not requiring any special form of support from the server.
Yeah, it's kind of a joke because of the crypto connection, but I do wish we could have something like this connected to a useful payment network. It's possible (maybe even probable?) that it...
...x402? What's that? clicks, scrolls down Oh it's crypto lol.
Yeah, it's kind of a joke because of the crypto connection, but I do wish we could have something like this connected to a useful payment network. It's possible (maybe even probable?) that it would spawn a micro transaction cesspool, but at least it would be an alternative to ads. I've always wondered if the 402 status code was a missed opportunity.
X402 isn't about blockchain, it's about payment. All it does is provide a HTTP-first way to communicate to a user (and a browser/agent/whatever) that the page is paywalled. Yes, their current...
X402 isn't about blockchain, it's about payment. All it does is provide a HTTP-first way to communicate to a user (and a browser/agent/whatever) that the page is paywalled.
Yes, their current implementation uses crypto payments, but that's because they're unregulated and trivial to implement. It's also extensible with classic payment methods, in fact explicitly supports this, but for a proof of concept not dealing with MasterCard and Visa is probably easier.
That seems like the best strategy for rolling out any new standard that requires bank interaction. It ensure that banks can be consumers of the standard, like the rest of us.
That seems like the best strategy for rolling out any new standard that requires bank interaction. It ensure that banks can be consumers of the standard, like the rest of us.
Where are you seeing this? Because everywhere I've seen the docs site talk about fiat or credit cards seems to be avoiding the topic, rather than saying "here's how it could work if someone were...
It's also extensible with classic payment methods, in fact explicitly supports this
Where are you seeing this? Because everywhere I've seen the docs site talk about fiat or credit cards seems to be avoiding the topic, rather than saying "here's how it could work if someone were to support it". Instead all of the extensions that exist are very much crypto focused and seem to be entrenching crypto as the way to use x402.
I don't expect a project co-founded by Coinbase will want to support payments with actual money. I know Coinbase themselves don't take a slice from anything x402 related, but they have an interest in giving crypto a use case that doesn't include a way to bypass the crypto. Much like Web Monetization before it, I don't see x402 decoupling itself from crypto, and that leads me to believe it will never be taken seriously by the web world at large.
Oh, right. I read that statement as a "it could support normal money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯", and your statement of explicit support as x402 either supporting normal money right now or at the very least having...
Oh, right. I read that statement as a "it could support normal money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯", and your statement of explicit support as x402 either supporting normal money right now or at the very least having an explicit definition of how it would be implemented.
As far as I can tell, no established payment provider/facilitator (even Stripe, which has integrated using crypto and even then is only available to US-based merchants) has actually made a statement or indication that they will support it. There are 8 main crypto networks defined, but 0 real world currency identifiers either mentioned or reserved. Payment amounts are sent in the API calls as $, which you would think is the US dollar (ignoring the 29 other types of dollar) but is actually the USDC stable coin. Yes, it's pegged to the US dollar, but it is once again referring to a crypto concept and not a real-world one.
As irrationally annoyed as I am about it, I want an open payments standard to succeed, and I want it to succeed in a way that doesn't fuck over the internet. I think there's too much VC money dumped into crypto for me to trust it. If a reputable provider does support real money in my country, then I'll consider using it. Until then, I'm going to be filing it under "crypto".
Not sure why Cloudflare hinted at WordPress, and I'm skeptical, but I really like that they don't give a damn to blocks editor (except for an agent that “translates” them).
Not sure why Cloudflare hinted at WordPress, and I'm skeptical, but I really like that they don't give a damn to blocks editor (except for an agent that “translates” them).
I will not stand for this slander.
Seriously though, I've never really understood the "what if we based our site on blogging software but with a bunch of plugins to make it pretend it's something else" approach to websites (or worse, web applications). Why did Wordpress, of all things, become the standard for Making A Website, instead of a static site generator (if your company has an appropriate nerd available) or some modernized FrontPage thing (if not)?
I'm suddenly kind of curious which way the cause and effect relationship goes between this and companies structuring their SEO keyword spam pages specifically as blogs, which has also always seemed weird to me.
I think it's a fairly natural progression. The core feature of a blog is to publish content. Over time, however, you might find that you wish your content were a little more dynamic. Maybe so readers can interact with it: like a post, write a comment, share with their friends. And wouldn't it be great if you could pull in photos from Instagram feed, or maybe embed a map of your itinerary for your upcoming vacation?
Now your friend wants to write a post too, so you need to support multiple users. And since you want lots of people to read your posts, you grab this "Yoast" thing for SEO. Pretty soon you've got a lot of code running and things are slowing down, so you find a performance plugin too.
Things are going well. Now you're an influencer with a readerbase of almost 1,300 people! Some of them want to buy t-shirts, so you decide to install this eCommerce plugin and add a few items. Eek, payment processing is complicated! But that's okay, because the Stripe plugin takes care of the hard stuff.
At a certain point, your humble blog has transformed into a "web application". You still blog there on occasion, but somehow, you've lost the joy in it.
I’d agree if I hadn’t had so many people in the past tell me to “start a new woocommerce store”.
Starting a new arm of a business on a famously insecure platform is never a good idea, no matter how good woocommerce may or may not have been.
On the other hand I appreciate how some of the new service operators frame their product as “build a website with us, and if you want to make it a store later we can do that too” even though it’s all the same unified platform. In the last few years of my last job, we went from over a decade of self-hosted solutions to using Shopify, and as much as I generally hate SaaS and proprietary software in general, it really helped operations quite a lot.
Day One Wordpress Hater here. You echo my sentiments perfectly. And having worked on many of these plugin-hell-sites, I can promise you that it's not easy to maintain, nor is it pleasant for anyone who's not got the computer toucher brain damage to use. It's most often slow and unpleasant, and the Block editor is the stuff of nightmares. I've switched to Kirby CMS
I think that happened because it made hosting a website approachable to non-technical users. That's what a lot of the web has been about, after all. I think for a good while, maybe even now, wordpress permitted free hosting, which of course broke down the barrier towards aquiring new users to being non-existent.
I'll join delphi in my WordPress hate. The early part of my career was pure WordPress (back around 2007 I think), and I remember always being shocked that such popular software was just monolithic plates of spaghetti. It was not good.
I always felt that WordPress didn't become popular for being well-built or well-architected. A lot of platforms did the same thing as WordPress, with some features better and some worse. I mostly think that WordPress just got lucky. Its plug-in/theme packaging was a big draw for users and builders, but it wasn't anything novel.
Introducing em-dash, the blogging platform for all your em-dash riddled ai generated blog spam
I picked this name back when em dashes were still cool and I am NOT GOING TO GIVE IT UP NOW
Em dashes are still cool—but it's up to us to take them back from the machines!
You mean when em dashes were pretentious, right? 😜
The worst thing I ever saw someone pull off with WordPress was an entire social media platform including realtime chats and marketplaces, etc.
Every page took almost a minute to load for literally every visitor.
Most people can cobble together some no-code Wordpress abomination with a combination of free and/or paid plugins. And if they pay for a decent theme the abomination can look professional. Not everyone can conjure a website from scratch let alone figure out static generation.
I've been wondering what CloudFlare wanted to do with the Astro acquisition since they announced it. I guess this is what it was: trying to eat at Vercel's market share by having their own meta-framework that pushes you towards their own hosting platform.
An aside about Astro
Of all of the sevrer-side JS meta-frameworks right now, Astro is my current favourite. It took me a moment to properly understand its way of thinking, coming from Next.js and Remix mostly, but there are some things that just work nicely. It wasn't that bad coming from a React way of thinking.
I appreciate its focus on delivering plain old HTML and clearly sectioning off the heavier dynamic stuff. Certain patterns are a bit clunkier, but overall I have actually enjoyed using Astro and keep finding myself reaching for it.
I am glad that they have funding to keep the project going, and while I currently host most of my projects on CloudFlare, I really hope that it doesn't get too locked in. While Astro itself can be deployed anywhere, EmDash seems to be locked to CloudFlare Workers (and specifically a paid plan too).
I say Vercel, even though everything is comparing it to WordPress, because while "CloudFlare vibe coded a WordPress competitor in two months" makes for a good headline, I don't think the people reaching for WordPress are necessarily going to see this as a viable alternative. Instead, I see the kinds of people reaching for Next.js for a blog or bespoke e-commerce site being the people who would actually give it a try.
WordPress is as big as it is because of its plugin ecosystem, and CloudFlare is very much going after that here. The explicit calling out of the GPL licensing debates reads to me as CloudFlare saying "yeah, develop plugins for us as we'll allow them to be closed source so you can charge for them and keep competitors at bay." Combine that with... x402? What's that? *clicks, scrolls down* Oh it's crypto lol. Yeah, maybe not but good try. The focus on the security model is interesting too, and I think is actually a good selling point. Jumping back to a Next.js comparison, there's nothing equivalent to a permission system there either, so there's another differentiation.
I'd be cautious adopting it, but I'll be watching from the sidelines to see how this goes.
Per the post, “You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta”.
Actually no, what that statement omits is "...but without the single selling feature mentioned in the headlines." (plugin sandboxing).
Oh that's sneaky! Not unexpected, but wow! I was actually shocked to learn that you can, like, host stuff on Cloudflare. I didn't realize they were in that space, I thought their hosting was limited to edge CDN stuff.
They use to have a service called Pages, that allowed to host static site generator's (SSG) sites for free. I host mine there. Last year, they discontinued Pages, but it's still possible using Workers, although a little bit more complex than Pages was.
Are Pages discontinued? I just deployed two this week as well as a separate worker, you just need to click the tiny tiny CTA saying looking for Pages instead.
Oh, really? I tried to deploy a new site a couple weeks ago, and couldn't find this CTA ☹️
Yep I also missed it but if you go to create a new worker you should see it, if you can't I'll send a screenshot of where it is for me.
Sandboxing is pretty hot these days so perhaps other hosting providers will implement something that works with EmDash’s plugin system?
Hopefully the other way around. I don't want to see reimplementation of an arbitrary proprietary approach to the problem as a distinguishing factor between providers - I'd rather see the feature implemented in a standard way not requiring any special form of support from the server.
I'm suggesting that what used to be proprietary could become an open standard, widely available.
Unix didn't start out open source.
Yeah, it's kind of a joke because of the crypto connection, but I do wish we could have something like this connected to a useful payment network. It's possible (maybe even probable?) that it would spawn a micro transaction cesspool, but at least it would be an alternative to ads. I've always wondered if the 402 status code was a missed opportunity.
They just had to stick blockchain payments in there huh🙄
X402 isn't about blockchain, it's about payment. All it does is provide a HTTP-first way to communicate to a user (and a browser/agent/whatever) that the page is paywalled.
Yes, their current implementation uses crypto payments, but that's because they're unregulated and trivial to implement. It's also extensible with classic payment methods, in fact explicitly supports this, but for a proof of concept not dealing with MasterCard and Visa is probably easier.
That seems like the best strategy for rolling out any new standard that requires bank interaction. It ensure that banks can be consumers of the standard, like the rest of us.
Where are you seeing this? Because everywhere I've seen the docs site talk about fiat or credit cards seems to be avoiding the topic, rather than saying "here's how it could work if someone were to support it". Instead all of the extensions that exist are very much crypto focused and seem to be entrenching crypto as the way to use x402.
I don't expect a project co-founded by Coinbase will want to support payments with actual money. I know Coinbase themselves don't take a slice from anything x402 related, but they have an interest in giving crypto a use case that doesn't include a way to bypass the crypto. Much like Web Monetization before it, I don't see x402 decoupling itself from crypto, and that leads me to believe it will never be taken seriously by the web world at large.
https://imgbox.com/vBOMkHgO - bottom of the x402.org page.
Oh, right. I read that statement as a "it could support normal money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯", and your statement of explicit support as x402 either supporting normal money right now or at the very least having an explicit definition of how it would be implemented.
As far as I can tell, no established payment provider/facilitator (even Stripe, which has integrated using crypto and even then is only available to US-based merchants) has actually made a statement or indication that they will support it. There are 8 main crypto networks defined, but 0 real world currency identifiers either mentioned or reserved. Payment amounts are sent in the API calls as
$, which you would think is the US dollar (ignoring the 29 other types of dollar) but is actually the USDC stable coin. Yes, it's pegged to the US dollar, but it is once again referring to a crypto concept and not a real-world one.As irrationally annoyed as I am about it, I want an open payments standard to succeed, and I want it to succeed in a way that doesn't fuck over the internet. I think there's too much VC money dumped into crypto for me to trust it. If a reputable provider does support real money in my country, then I'll consider using it. Until then, I'm going to be filing it under "crypto".
Not sure why Cloudflare hinted at WordPress, and I'm skeptical, but I really like that they don't give a damn to blocks editor (except for an agent that “translates” them).