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Tom SmallTom Small
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Tom SmallTom Small
The theme is the guardrail

The theme is the guardrail

WordPress can now describe itself to machines. WordPress 7.0 landed back in May with AI infrastructure in core. There’s an AI Client, a Connectors screen where the provider keys live, and the Abilities API, which actually arrived back in 6.9. Abilities are how core, plugins and themes describe what...

Engineering
15d ago
We build by leaving things out

We build by leaving things out

Most of what makes a WordPress site good is what we choose to leave out of it. WordPress runs a large part of the web on a big promise: whatever you need, there’s a plugin for it. That promise is one of its greatest appeals, and its most costly trap. Almost everything that harms a WordPress site...

Engineering
1mo ago

Jul 2026

One of the 214 hand-drawn sheets of Inō’s map of Japan, and his team surveying Mitarai in 1806

Measure

In 1800 a retired sake brewer named Inō Tadataka set out to walk Japan’s coast. He spent 17 years and 35,000 km on foot, and died before the work was done. His team finished the first accurate map of Japan in 1821, and it stayed in use for a century.

Jun 2026

William Badcock, A Touch-stone for Gold and Silver Wares (1677)

Hallmark

The word hallmark comes from an actual hall, Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where since 1300 silver has been tested against the sterling standard and struck with the hall’s mark, so you could trust it without knowing the maker.

May 2026

Alan Kay: His Sketches, Piano, and Computer

Notes

A note can be a written record, a struck key, or the act of noticing, and each sharpens how we understand the world. A piano is an instrument, but also a technology built on the notes it makes possible.

Apr 2026

Photographs of a red cloth bound travel handbook from 1894. The book is open to show pages with maps and illustrations.

Change

A red cloth spine caught my eye in a Tokyo bookshop last week. A handbook for travellers in Japan, fourth edition, 1894. I was 132 years late, yet most of what it describes still stands.

Mar 2026

Screenshots from the development process of the new ON release notes page

Taking the temperature

You walk into a room and you can feel it. Whether there is energy or not. We describe someone as warm. We talk about things cooling down. Temperature is something we sense before we have words for it.

Feb 2026

Pixelised image of a horse running

Rethinking video, prototyping faster, and encoding brand logic

In Japanese, the character for hand is 手. Joined with the character for craft, it becomes 手仕事 (teshigoto), or handwork.

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