Check 1, 2. Testing testing.
Does this thing still work?
Looks like it does. Sweet.
What’s up y’all, it’s been a while since my last newsletter.
April 24th of 2024 to be exact.
(After the submarine imploded but before UFOs became totally normal.)
There were a few reasons for that, so I thought I’d share a lil’ rundown and what’s next for The Lab Report.
Why the newsletter first fell off
At first, it was for personal reasons.
My wife and I had our wedding in June, and the couple of months leading up to it were honestly kinda hell.
Neither of us wanted a big traditional wedding. Our plan was to keep it small, fun and casual.
So we rented a huge Airbnb out in the country where we could host ~60 friends & family.
What we eventually learned though is that ‘casual’ weddings are actually an insane amount of work.
We had to take care of so many little random things like: water jugs for each table, garbage bins around the property, microphones (with backup batteries), speakers, cups, bar supplies for the bartender we hired etc.
In hindsight, it probably would’ve been worth hiring someone to help with all that stuff.
But with all that being said, even though having a wedding in general was never something I specifically dreamed of, it ended up being one of the best days ever.
I did also of course also have to build out a custom website for it.
You can check ‘er out here: bestweddingever.ca
It was built with Cwicly (RIP x2) & WS Form, laid out with Relume, animated with Motion.page, and hosted on Rocket.net.
Why the newsletter stayed off
Most of my content has revolved around WordPress.
It’s what I’ve used for countless years and powers a good chunk of the internet.
At some point last year though, it felt like the vibe had shifted.
It stopped being a fun place to be.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint when exactly that happened.
There was that whole Cwicly debacle which killed a lot of my motivation, but I don’t think that was fully it.
Honestly, it might’ve been triggered by Kevin Geary’s “Dear WordPress” video.
The video itself was spot on.
It was a perfect encapsulation of how I was starting to feel about WordPress.
When it really hit me though is when I realized that WordPress may never actually become the platform it deserves to be.
For a while, I had the confidence that it was heading in the right direction.
Primarily: a universal block editor, refreshed admin UI, better CMS capabilities.
But after going all-in on the block editor for a year or so, I couldn’t help but feel that it was completely botched.
It was supposed to be a fast & easy building experience – but it’s anything but.
(Try opening the block editor, looking at your Network tab, and seeing all the hundreds of requests being made if you have a few plugins installed).
It sometimes takes 30s to fully load, and never looks 100% consistent with the front-end.
And you just know the admin UX revamp won’t be done until 2037.
Most importantly – Core/leadership’s response to Kevin’s video felt eye-opening in all the wrong ways.
Almost as if they have no clue how agencies actually use WordPress.
It really feels like their core philosophy is stuck in 2005.
(Which I was shocked to find out was basically the last time they even updated it. So I guess I can’t blame them).
AND THEN you have all the Matt vs. WP Engine petty drama to top it all off.
Super cool, man. Gimme more!
What that means for me going forward
This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using WordPress.
Even though I’m not fully confident in its future, it’s still the best option available for building ‘no-code’ websites today.
And it’s propped up by a community that’s increasingly making Core’s philosophy irrelevant.
But here’s the thing: there are so many fun things happening in tech lately.
It’d be more enjoyable diving into the fun stuff vs. commenting on what Matt’s mom had for breakfast today.
So ultimately, this is me giving myself permission to make The Lab Report less of a ‘WordPress newsletter’ and more of a personal journal.
Focused more broadly around ‘building shit on the internet.’
Will there still be WordPress content? Of course. I spend way too many hours with it every day not to talk about it.
But it won’t be the whole schtick anymore.
That might mean there are some topics that you just have no interest in, but that’s okay.
You don’t have to open every email, and I’m not going to obsess over open rates, CTRs, unsubs etc.
Eventually I’m sure a theme will develop, but for now it’s time to go back to The Lab and play with stuff.
I’d love to have you stick around for the journey if you’re down for it.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. in the next couple of newsletters, I’m going to cover my plans for rebuilding a site that I bought for $1 that used to get 100k+ traffic /mth, and how you can use AI dev platforms to build whatever SaaS you can think of.
P.P.S. I resisted starting this newsletter back up, but Nicholas Arce said he’d start a newsletter if I continued mine – so here we are.
