Category: Link Dumps

Sometimes you bookmark things and then forget why. This week’s collection includes several of those mysteries.

Paul Oakenfold – Turn It Around Lyrics
Apparently I needed to know the exact lyrics to a Paul Oakenfold track. Electronic music lyrics are like finding a unicorn – rare, slightly magical, and you’re never quite sure if they’re real.

American Meteor Society
For tracking meteors and fireballs, because someone needs to keep tabs on space rocks. Their fireball reporting system is surprisingly comprehensive, and now I know where to go when something bright streaks across the sky.

AirTag 10-Year Battery
A case that gives your AirTag a decade-long battery life. It’s solving a problem I didn’t know I had, but now that I know it exists, I kind of want it. The internet: creating needs you never knew you needed.

Pebble Watches
Someone’s still making Pebble-compatible smartwatches, because apparently some of us refuse to let good design die. It’s like digital archaeology – preserving the best ideas from tech’s past for people who remember when smartwatches focused on being watches.

BUSY Bar
A productivity multi-tool device with an LED screen. It’s the physical manifestation of our collective need to optimize everything, including our desks. Sometimes productivity tools are just expensive ways to procrastinate.

The internet: where every niche has a website and every website has a niche.

Today’s collection is dedicated to the eternal struggle of making WordPress do what you want instead of what it thinks you want.

White Label Press
Building a better plugin ecosystem for WordPress. Their tagline is “Building the Best Possible Plugin Ecosystem, Together” which sounds suspiciously optimistic for anyone who’s dealt with WordPress plugins. Still, hope springs eternal.

Bricks Builder
Visual site builder for WordPress that promises to not be terrible. Having used various WordPress page builders, I appreciate the honesty in their marketing approach. Sometimes the best selling point is “we’re not Elementor.”

Breakdance
Another WordPress website builder, because apparently we needed more options in the “drag and drop until something works” category. The name suggests more fun than WordPress development usually involves.

Payload CMS
Headless CMS that claims to be fast and developer-friendly. It’s the kind of modern solution that makes you question why we’re still using WordPress for everything, then remember that client expectations are a powerful force.

Conversion Bridge
WordPress conversion tracking plugin for people who want to know if their website actually does anything useful. Analytics that don’t require a computer science degree to interpret are always welcome.

WordPress: it’s not the CMS we wanted, but it’s the one we deserve.

This week’s selection explores our ongoing experiment in making computers smarter while apparently making ourselves more dependent on them.

Automat
Some kind of automation platform with a mysteriously minimal website. The sparse design either suggests sophisticated simplicity or they haven’t figured out what they’re selling yet. Either way, the domain name is solid.

Goose – AI Agent
An open source AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions to actually install, execute, edit, and test code. It’s the kind of tool that either makes development amazingly efficient or creates spectacular new ways to break things. Probably both.

Home Assistant Voice Preview
Voice control for your smart home that doesn’t require sending your conversations to Amazon or Google. The privacy-focused approach is refreshing, even if talking to your house still feels slightly unhinged.

SponsorBlock
Browser extension that automatically skips YouTube sponsorship segments. It’s crowd-sourced ad blocking taken to its logical conclusion. The fact that this exists and works so well says something about both internet collaboration and our collective annoyance with native advertising.

AI: making our lives easier while making us question what “easier” actually means.

Today’s links are dedicated to the fine art of avoiding productivity through interactive entertainment.

Counter-Strike: Football
Someone built a multiplayer FPS game called “Counter-Strike: Football” and put it on GitHub. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and I’m honestly impressed by the commitment to this particular brand of chaos. Open source gaming at its most beautifully absurd.

Razer Cortex
Game booster software from Razer that promises to optimize your PC for gaming. It’s the digital equivalent of a spoiler on a Honda Civic – probably doesn’t do much, but it makes you feel faster. The placebo effect is strong with gaming software.

Virtual Desktop on Meta Quest
Stream your PC to VR headset because apparently we needed to make computing more isolating. The technology is genuinely impressive though – wireless PC gaming in VR is the kind of sci-fi stuff that still feels magical when it works.

Hardstyle Artist Rankings
Spotify data on the top 100 hardstyle artists, for when you need to know exactly where your favorite electronic music producers rank. The fact that someone compiled this data says something about both music fandom and data obsession in the internet age.

Gaming: the intersection of technology, art, and our collective inability to focus on important things.

This week’s collection is brought to you by my apparently masochistic tendency to bookmark web development tools while procrastinating on actual web development.

Web Designer Depot
A design blog that’s been around since the early days of the web, and somehow still relevant. Their articles range from “obvious things everyone should know” to “cutting-edge trends that’ll be passé in six months.” It’s the design equivalent of comfort food.

Linktopia
Editorial link building for SaaS startups. Because apparently even link building needs to be “editorial” now. The site is clean, the service sounds useful, and I probably bookmarked this during a 3 AM SEO research rabbit hole.

GenerateBlocks
WordPress blocks that don’t make you want to throw your computer out the window. Clean, fast, and actually useful – which puts it ahead of about 90% of WordPress plugins. Sometimes the best tools are the ones that just work without fanfare.

Rank Math
SEO plugin that claims to be better than Yoast. Having used both, I can confirm that SEO plugins are like horoscopes – they give you something to worry about, but you’re not entirely sure they’re helping.

YOURLS
Your Own URL Shortener. Because why let bit.ly have all the fun? Self-hosted link shortening for people who enjoy maintaining their own infrastructure instead of just using existing services like normal humans.

Web development: where every solution creates two new problems, but at least the problems are interesting.