#WordPress development company i

[webdevelopments-post]

Why do You Need a WordPress Development Agency?

If you are a business owner wanting to create a website, keep reading to learn about the advantages of WebOwl, the best WordPress development service. https://webowl.dev/blog/why-do-you-need-a-wordpress-development-agency/

[jscalzi]

“Starter Villain” in Development at Paramount and Maximum Effort

As noted in this Deadline article, which just dropped. Maximum Effort, for those who do not keep up with such things, is the production company owned by Ryan Reynolds. They’re lovely folks and I am of course delighted to be in business with them and with Paramount on this. I think it’s a good fit all around. Jesse Andrews is working on the script, and I’m a fan of his other work, which includes…

[proto-actual]

Hey tronblr. It's sysop. Let's talk about the Midjourney thing.

(There's also a web-based version of this over on reindeer flotilla dot net).

Hey tronblr. It's sysop. Let's talk about the AI thing for a minute.

Automattic, who owns Tumblr and WordPress dot com, is selling user data to Midjourney. This is, obviously, Bad. I've seen a decent amount of misinformation and fearmongering going around the last two days around this, and a lot of people I know are concerned about where to go from here. I don't have solutions, or even advice -- just thoughts about what's happening and the possibilities.

In particular... let's talk about this post, Go read it if you haven't. To summarize, it takes aim at Glaze (the anti-AI tool that a lot of artists have started using). The post makes three assertions, which I'm going to paraphrase:

It's built on stolen code.

It doesn't matter whether you use it anyway.

So just accept that it's gonna happen.

I'd like to offer every single bit of this a heartfelt "fuck off, all the way to the sun".

Let's start with the "stolen code" assertion. I won't get into the weeds on this, but in essence, the Glaze/Nightshade team pulled some open-source code from DiffusionBee in their release last March, didn't attribute it correctly, and didn't release the full source code (which that particular license requires). The team definitely should have done their due diligence -- but (according to the team, anyway) they fixed the issue within a few days. We'll have to take their word on that for now, of course -- the code isn't open source. That's not great, but that doesn't mean they're grifters. It means they're trying to keep people who work on LLMs from picking apart their tactics out in the open. It sucks ass, actually, but... yeah. Sometimes that's how software development works, from experience.

Actually, given the other two assertions... y'know what? No. Fuck off into the sun, twice. Because I have no patience for this shit, and you shouldn't either.

Yes, you should watermark your art. Yes, it's true that you never know whether your art is being scraped. And yes, a whole lot of social media sites are jumping on the "generative AI" hype train.

That doesn't mean that you should just accept that your art is gonna be scraped, and that there's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't mean that Glaze and Nightshade don't work, or aren't worth the effort (although right now, their CPU requirements are a bit prohibitive). Every little bit counts.

Fuck nihilism! We do hope and pushing forward here, remember?

As far as what we do now, though? I don't know. Between the Midjourney shit, KOSA, and people just generally starting to leave... I get that it feels like the end of something. But it's not -- or it doesn't have to be. Instead of jumping over to other platforms (which are just as likely to have similar issues in several years), we should be building other spaces that aren't on centralized platforms, where big companies don't get to make decisions about our community for us. It's hard. It's really hard. But it is possible.

All I know is that if we want a space that's ours, where we retain control over our work and protect our people, we've gotta make it ourselves. Nobody's gonna do it for us, y'know?

[empath-demon]

Hey did y’all see that tumblr is migrating us all to Wordpress on the back end

They promise user experience isn’t going to change? But idk if I trust it

From the Ars Technica article:

The plan is to move to the WordPress back end so that Automattic can develop features that will deploy to Tumblr and WordPress blogs simultaneously. This will let Tumblr tap into the robust existing WordPress.com infrastructure and allow the open-source work happening on WordPress to more easily be tapped to improve Tumblr.

[netherworldpost]

AI art predictions with a laundry list

This is a very long post, so as an advertisement to entice you to read it, let’s start off with my proof points. It ends with advice on what to do if you make things and/or want to make things and are concerned.

I remember when royalty-free microstock ($1/photo) began. It fundamentally changed stock photography, ending a significant number of careers, creating a significantly larger number of photographers -- as well as graphic designers AND illustrators who now had floods of reference photos they could not access before.

I remember when boilerplate WordPress starter themes began. They largely are a “paint by numbers” kit of parts. A lot of web developers rallied against it, claiming they would go out of business. Some did, most did not, a great number went into business using them as tools.

Hell, I remember when WordPress started. Similar story to above.

I remember when Adobe created built-in color palette tools. These are, essentially, color wheels. There were a lot of designers and illustrators who claimed this would give the public and/or low skill designers too much power.

I remember when free logo generators started. See above notes.

I remember when ultra cheap graphic design freelance services began. Fiverr and Upwork, etc. See above notes.

Hell I remember when digital printers started gaining a neck grip on small scale commercial printing. Bad time to be a 1 and 2 color press shop.

Tech bros and their priests will continue to throw money and other resources at it from about mid 2022 until early 2024

A combination of boredom, other opportunities (good, bad, and neutral), lawsuits, and the inescapable physics of what is required to create new AI art will taper off interest around early to mid 2024

The arc of interest will diminish far sooner but will occasionally be spiked back up by a combination of:

^- click-bait news articles and new breakthroughs in tech

^- click-bait news articles that claim there is a new breakthrough because the reporter/outlet is just catching on to existing things

^- tech bros claiming a new breakthrough (that isn’t new) because they have reinvented existing tech and/or are outright stealing from existing tech

Some levels of AI will continue forever with varying degrees of aesthetic attraction

On some level, the continuation will be because some tech bros and their priests are interested in pursuing the tech and are uninterested in the benefits/costs

On another level, it will continue as a weapon against artists (at large) because all tech invented is utilized as a weapon by bad actors against specific groups people

On yet another level, it will continue as a weapon against specific artists because all tech invented is utilized as a weapon by bad actors against specific people

Some (a moderate sample size) artists will lose everything for a little while but ultimately adapt, a smaller sample size everything permanently and leave the art profession

The public at large will begin in earnest interest as a “we can create stuff too!” but then lose interest over time because quality (as measured by uniqueness) and accessibility (as measured as “free vs. paid”) will steadily decrease

The decrease of interest will spike tech bros desperate to reclaim their throne into accelerating outright theft and abuse because at the nature these specific tech bros are parasites and have nothing positive to offer either the tech or art ecosystems

Corporate interests will both utilize AI art for their own interests while suing to stop their own direct properties from being used. These lawsuits will generate attention-grabbing headlines but almost exclusively be settled out of court and/or the AI companies will simply be bought to bring the tech/people into the fold/shut down

Artists (at large) will engage in the various platforms. There will be generalized outrage for 1 - 5 years as a combination of acceptance, resignation, and useful labor-saving tools are built

^- schisms will enter the art community. Some points will be made as legitimate discourse, most will be stated as individual artists use this as the point-of-the-day to prove themselves better than everyone else.

Ultimately:

Tech will continue building what they can, scraping every resources available at the lowest cost possible and often through piracy, until it becomes untenable via cost and boredom

Artists will continue to create, adapt, and evolve. Some unfortunately will legitimately lose everything and drop out of the career for a period of years, some forever.

There will be a convergence point then the two will separate out slowly. The path will be painful for artists. The public will vastly be ignorant, those who know mostly won’t care, some will passionately rally for artists.

Advice for people who make things:

Keep making things. Despair is an automated weapon that targets you, the more you feed it, the stronger it grows.

Do not personalized despair. It is easy to give into the thought of a conspiracy theory against you, or your industry. I view the accuracy more as “people/institutions who do not know, or care, about your existence are building their own empire. Sometimes you’re a tree line of border protection against wind, sometimes you’re lumber. Either way you’re not considered in any instance except when you’re useful, and never as an individual.”

Protect yourself as possible (file copyright takedown notices, keep an eye on prices to keep yourself in business, do not actively participate in contests that scrape AI, block people onsite who advocate for AI art if you yourself do not)

Protect your business funds as possible (multiple streams of income where possible, keep an eye on costs -- is fancy packaging actually necessary, from a business perspective, or are you making it fancy because you’re an artist)

Build a community as you can, everywhere you can. There is an absolute effort-to-cost ratio that must be watched -- you can, as of writing, literally sign up for a MySpace if you want. I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a network there.

And to repeat: keep making things. There are tools you used to get started, there are tools you USE RIGHT NOW, I promise you, that were once heralded as “the thing that will kill art.” It didn’t, except where it did, and in both instances everything evolved to whatever our current state is.

[theindieinformer]

Vlambeer Co-owner Now Owns 100% Of Company

Vlambeer is now wholly owned by one of the studio's founding pair of developers.

The founders and now former co-owners of prolific indie studio Vlambeer have announced only one of them will continue with the company. On X/Twitter this morning, Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail announced that Willem Nijman has bought out Ismail’s shares of the dormant entity and now controls one hundred percent of Vlambeer. 🚨 VIDEOGAME COMPANY ACQUISITION ALERT 🚨Big news: I now own 100% of…

[fraterrisus]

I hesitate to post this because the horse gets so fucking round so fucking quickly on this reading comprehension website, but this article (and Matt's blog post) about Tumblr's plans to move the backend of the service onto the same backend as WordPress is interesting:

I more or less believe Matt's two main points:

"You won’t even notice a difference from the outside."

"Running Tumblr on WordPress will make it easier to share our work across platforms."

If it's done correctly – say whatever you want about Matt's leadership, this will be an enormous and difficult undertaking – it could very well lay the groundwork for Tumblr to continue to run as a lower-cost + low-income side project without taking away more resources from WordPress than Automattic is willing to devote.

And that really is pretty much what all of the long-time users want: something that isn't distracting for the parent company, that can continue to exist without showing up on anyone's balance sheet as a large drain, and will occasionally benefit from small amounts of development.

In other words, if they pull this off, Tumblr won't change in the short term, and it won't have to change in the long-term.

[whateveradjunct]

“Starter Villain” in Development at Paramount and Maximum Effort

As noted in this Deadline article, which just dropped. Maximum Effort, for those who do not keep up with such things, is the production company owned by Ryan Reynolds. They’re lovely folks and I am of course delighted to be in business with them and with Paramount on this. I think it’s a good fit all around. Jesse Andrews is working on the script, and I’m a fan of his other work, which includes…

[nukirk]

I briefly mentioned in a previous post about the uncertainty of the future of my Tumblr profile(s).

That's because it's going to become WordPress. Sorta.

Basically, Automattic (the company that owes Tumblr now) is losing money in developing features for Tumblr and all the things that is currently on Tumblr isn't helping to break even. They already cut Tumblr staff, reducing it to a skeleton crew. Remember all the original Tumblr programming that the Tumblr staff tries to come up with? That's currently off the table.

Since I already use WordPress to run my websites outside of here, it's not a bad thing on an interface level. But the main idea on why I use(d) Tumblr is for the community aspect of it. They are still working on integrating Tumblr into the Fediverse, opening the Tumblr community to others, interacting with posts from other spots, making Tumblr an alternative to Elon Musk's site.

So good news... all the work you put into Tumblr won't disappear. Tumblr is what I like to call a "backbone" site, where it's a launch pad for a lot of memes and human creativity. The interface will change and you'll pretty much have an experience similar to WordPress.

The bad news? The "hell site" you love to hate and its uniqueness is slowly disappearing, all because the fan base here is just hard to please and monetized.

I should know. @thoughtremixer has close to 24K followers. But using it nowadays almost means nothing. I do notice the people that see me, but beyond that, anything that I post barely gets double digits.

I'm not saying "oh, we should support Tumblr and buy subscriptions". But I am saying that if you have a creator that you adore and they are elsewhere, make sure to follow them there. Some of us are trying to make ends meet by getting our content to be seen by where the eyeballs are at. It's why I haven't posted on Tumblr back when everything was functional.

So, if you have a creator on Tumblr that you love, follow them at least on some other network of their choice. Make the effort because Tumblr will not be enough now that resources will be spent on trying to get change Tumblr into something else.

[webdevelopments-post]

Top Reasons to Hire a Company that Develops WordPress Websites

Hiring a WordPress development company, whether for a startup or an established organisation, can have various financially lucrative long-term benefits. WordPress, without a doubt, improves the entire experience of website visitors. https://webowl.dev/blog/top-reasons-to-hire-a-company-that-develops-wordpress-websites/

[hjemmesidedesign]

Company Name

Hjemmeside Design Bureau

Establishment Date: 2019

URL

hjemmesidedesignbureau

Expertise

Website Design

WordPress Development

Website Development

Information Technology

Description

Hjemmeside Design Agency is a website design and development company in Denmark. Which owned and operated by Web Master EU is one of the leading digital agencies in Denmark, with a development center in Denmark and a client base across the UAE and Globe. We at the Hjemmeside Design agency are experts in creating a website design with a creative and modern website with local Danish aesthetics to the design. We are experts in providing website design, webshop and WordPress website development. We worked with various industries across Denmark and the world which allow us to combine our experience to create a unique website for your agency. 

[r2-d2-soon]

If anyone knows of companies looking for website design/development (particularly WordPress), I am looking at different work opportunities. I'm stuck doing support for a broken system and given unreasonable kpis. Also put in charge of manage global contract works which is not in my job description. I know HTML CSS, some Javascript and Php and mysql. Also have good communication, customer facing skills, but would rather just work on projects and get shit made than have to fix broken shit.

[shadowmaat]

It's only going to get worse, folks.

Mullenweg says that users might start with just a Tumblr blog but then, over time, want to expand into something larger — an e-commerce store, a more customizable site, a newsletter or a membership site — and Automattic could direct users to other products it offers that allow those possibilities, like WordPress.com or WooCommerce, and others. “I’m excited about that on-ramp as well as to bring a younger demographic and young people into WordPress,” Mullenweg noted.

It was never about "saving" tumblr, it was about driving more traffic to Automattic.

And yeah, that "younger demographic" thing comes up a couple of times. It's part of the base code of the internet: the "younger demographic" is the only one that matters. Which is stupid, since your "younger demographic" becomes your "older demographic" over time. AKA your long-time userbase. Why the hell would you want to alienate the people who've been with you forever in order to chase the youngers? "They have more disposable income" is a lie that needs to finally die.

Mullenweg is also severely disconnected from reality when it comes to "AI."

“For Tumblr…I think it can make our developers a lot more productive…the code could be checked by AI or tested by AI or something like that. So that’ll allow us to do a lot more with the same or fewer developers, which is really exciting. So maybe our pace of development can increase,” he said. Plus, AI can be a help in moderation, flagging things before they’re even reported by Tumblr users. In addition, AI and machine learning could make the Tumblr feed better and more personalized to end users. “You can tweak it and it can really learn the things you want to see and the friends you want to follow,” he said. The exec was also generally bullish on generative AI as a tool for artists, which may benefit the community that uses Tumblr, but didn’t note that Tumblr itself would build gen AI tools.

I feel like Staff is just as under threat as the rest of us with this. He's gonna try and save money by potentially cutting staff and relying on "AI" to handle coding checks and moderation. Yeah, because robomodding has worked so well in the past. /sarcasm

He also seems to have missed how much "AI" is loathed by artists. Like, yes, it can and has been used as a tool to help artists create their own unique works, but it's far, FAR more commonly used as a way to steal the work of others, tweak it, and regurgitate it as something "new" with no actual artistic changes made by the non-artist end user.

This is the future of tumblr. No wonder our feedback goes unanswered. It also seems I was right in guessing that being a long-time user is considered a bad thing: we're "old" and the only ones that matter are the "young."

Huh. I wonder if any of that plays into the under-20s believing the over-20s don't belong here.

ANYWAY! Now's a good time to mention that Pillowfort isn't owned by corporate sponsors and works well as a blogging platform. Dreamwidth is also out there, but reminds me more of Livejournal than tumblr in its mechanics.

Damn. I knew tumblr was taking a downward trend but I didn't realize we were already circling the drain.

[undeadorion-archive]

When I was first getting started with this web development thing, I found several people complaining that they had to learn new things. That you had to use some of your off-hours to keep up to date with changes in the industry.

Meanwhile give me something new to learn every few months and it's all

Between post-school burn out and being sick for way too long, I'd forgotten how good it feels just to LEARN.

Well, not learn exactly. But I love acquiring new skills that I can actually use. The excitement of OMG THIS IS SO USEFUL!

And what I'm learning right now is hopefully my ticket to a better fucking job. I'm just a part time Wordpress developer for a company stuck in the 00's when it comes to things on the internet and were convinced things needed to be compatible with internet explorer. INTERNET EXPLORER! Are you fucking kidding me?!

Once I'm able to build stuff with React, I'll be out of there in no time. Cause apparently once you know programming basics, learning new languages is a lot easier than those first few. And frameworks within languages you already know are even easier! And that's what I'm doing now. I absolutely love working in JavaScript, and React is an add on to that. It's what a lot of the big modern type sties are built with (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc). And I'm gonna build an application tracker because fuck if I can track what I've done on my own.

[anja-merret]

Introducing the co-founder of MaxiBlocks

Free WordPress page builder MaxiBlocks

I am Kyra Pieterse Co-Founder of Maxiblocks. I am originally from South Africa but now live in Lisbon (Portugal). I am what I like to call myself a slowmad. We have moved around a lot but tend to stay for at least a year in a country. I have lived in South Africa, Dubai, Malaysia, Vietnam, Spain, Malta and Berlin (Germany) I am a designer more than a developer, and I stopped coding many years ago.

The Journey Began

I have been a web designer since 1999, and my career began before WordPress. I started old school with Dreamweaver and Flash. My designs tend to be more interactive than most, and I think this is because of my Flash background. The web kind of became boring, so I hope to breathe some life back into web design.

I found WordPress in 2010 when I was living and freelancing in Vietnam. It was love at first use. Making my own custom themes was easy for me as I have some coding background, although they were simple themes.

The Need for “MaxiBlocks”

MaxiBlocks

Our first digital product (company) Is Divi Den. We started this almost 7 years ago. We have been very successful selling Divi Layouts.

We started MaxiBlocks out of our own frustration from our support. We have been forced to use CSS and code to make our layouts in Divi. When Gutenberg launched, we saw it as an opportunity to create our own solution. Building on top of Gutenberg has been hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. And it took much longer than we planned. The challenges are the slow pace of the core development and building on top of a moving object. Each update they make sets us back as we have to stop everything to fix it. But even with these challenges, I am very proud of the end result. We have made all these designs.

The full article of this profile can be found at WPFounders.

[w1770w]

Remade @jv 's post because it made every point that I wanted to share perfectly. He (completely understandably) turned off reblogs, but I wanted all the information out there in one place. (I didn't just screenshot it because I want this to be more easy to search for.)

The following text is from JV:

TLDR: most of the current staff is being moved to other automattic divisions and Tumblr will be run by an skeleton crew

Some clarity: Happiness -> Support T&S -> Trust & Safety Bumblr -> Product development, editorial, marketing etc.

The "reduction" don't affect Happiness or T&S because they weren't "Tumblr" to begin with, they are a different divisions within automattic that are cross-product (cover all the products from the company). So if automattic has (I have no idea of the real numbers numbers) 100 people working on T&S, maybe half of those were working on tumblr until now. But if tomorrow they decide to left only 10 of them working of tumblr, they don't need to move the other 40 anywhere: they are still in the same team, just looking at a different JIRA board every morning. Same with Happiness. So the fact that there are no changes in those divisions doesn't have to mean there won't be less people on them working on tumblr.

Technically, people are not being fired over this (though some of them had been, today), they will just be moved to other projects (WordPress, WooCom, Day One, etc).

The following excerpts are from @dualumina 's reblog:

For folks not incredibly tech/business savvy; this basically means the website will still exist, it will still be functional for the most part. However you may find that fun updates won't be as frequent, or full on stop occurring. Reports for harassment or bugs might be slow to reply, or you may receive no reply at all (from a human, automatic messages are still a thing) depending on the situation.

The wording states that the majority of the 139 staff in Bumblr will be moved to other projects. That means at max 69 people will stay while at least 70 will leave the project. That's at bare minimum cutting the team in half.

You should definitely save anything important just incase; less people means sometimes accidents will happen more frequently. Share your contact info with anyone you want to keep in contact with.

Prepare for the worst but hope for the best.