Funny how macOS search (both Finder and Spotlight) is so bad that I don’t even think of using it.

Imagine how bad AI would do if it couldn’t search properly.

Are there recent Mac apps that are trying to solve this?

Somebody should unleash AI agents on the WP trac backlog, have it track all steering decisions and see where we land. We sure could get a core committer skill out this 😅

Responded to @kasparsd:

A sidecar approach might work better but it would require polling for filesystem changes and parsing the cache files which do have the response headers in there.

Spent the Saturday afternoon exploring ways to add surrogate-key (also known as cache tags) support for Nginx fastcgi cache which is otherwise great with state-while-revalidate support, etc.

Considered creating an Nginx module but there don't appear to be any hookable events when the cache files are written. The idea would be too keep an index of tags mapped to cache files on disk and have a route for invalidating by tags.

Responded to @kasparsd:

I worked on an API for that a while back: https://github.com/wpelevator/encrypted-secrets

The Connectors screen in WP 7.0 would really benefit from encrypted options unless we want to expose those API keys to anyone with access to wp-admin/options.php

ChatGPT wouldn't do it, Claude wouldn't do it.

Eventually tried Perplexity and it was able to generate notes with correct code snippets from my WordPress course videos. Amazing since it didn't have to invent anything — just capture everything I said and include the relevant code snippets.

The trick was to create 1 FPS videos with full audio so that it still has access to full video contents and audio but with ~5% of the file size. Worked great.

Responded to @kasparsd:

To enable it, add this configuration to .vscode/launch.json file.

WordPress block development with breakpoint debugging for JS is a life-changer! So is PHP breakpoints, to be honest.

Instead of hunting for the correct file in the browser console, you just add breakpoints in VS Code and it automatically stops the JS executation at that point to show you the full state.

Responded to @cdevroe:

@cdevroe That is an excellent suggestion, thank you! I don’t use spaces and didn't think of that.

When can we reasonably expect all macOS apps to use the correct squircle radius?

I can't believe VSCode and Google Chrome are still different from the Finder or any of the built-in apps…

Responded to @kasparsd:

Here is the "Record Coding" automation that I built.

I can't believe I'm discovering the Apple Shortcuts just now.

In one click it can now get my computer ready for screen recording — it opens VS Code, web browser + recording app, and resizes the windows to fit a specific aspect ratio.

The app is bundled with every Mac and iPhone since 2021. Be sure to check out the included library of pre-built shortcuts and automations for inspiration.

Responded to @kasparsd:

Why Users Reach the Price but Don’t Buy

I analyzed multiple rrweb session recordings (36k+ events across several user sessions). These are clear, recurring behavioral patterns that explain why purchases stall near the end — even when traffic quality and checkout functionality are fine.

This is not a traffic problem.
This is late-funnel decision friction.

Can AI help optimize your landing pages and help drive sales from actual user session data?

We enabled user session recording using PostHog (which uses rrweb behind the scenes), and drove Meta ads to the page.

Then used AI to extract those 36k+ events into a single file (right from the browser console) and asked it to analyze the results.

Here is what it said:

Turns out that building a "Clear formatting" feature for the WordPress block editor is more difficult than I imagined.

Many blocks have the inner content as part of the `content` attribute but things get difficult with RichText, for example.

Do you have a solution for this?

Really great insight into image AI and how everything is just vector math at the end. https://chaos.social/@blinry/115816148248650239

New on blog: Notes on Umami Analytics https://kaspars.net/blog/umami-analytics

Trying to find an alternative to Screen Time for kids on macOS since it’s completely unreliable and the UX is terrible.

AdGuard/PiHole with a macos user profile that enforces DNS seems like one option. Need to be local and selfhosted.

Suggestions?

Add logging to my kitchen-sink WordPress plugin with handlers for error_log() and Query Monitor.

Nice to have info/debug level data while developing and warnings+ on PROD.

How are you handling this in your plugins?