Brandon

Brandon

@bmoore.me

#webDeveloper #WordPress #marketing #technology #SelfHosting #coffee #hiking #education #leadership #DigitalAutonomy #OpenToWork https://bmoore.me | https://wearespeak.com | https://deggl.com

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Last week I ordered @LittleCaesarsPizza online for the first time. The weird part is I was already sitting in their lobby when I did it. --- Photo by Terrance Barksdale on Pexels

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So the question is not only what role your website plays. It's this: what do your customers still believe about you that stopped being true a while ago, and how are are you actually correcting it (digitally and in IRL)?

#DigitalExperience #WebStrategy #CustomerExperience #BrandStrategy #DigitalStrategy #WebsiteDesign #UX

Last week I ordered @LittleCaesarsPizza online for the first time. The weird part is I was already sitting in their lobby when I did it. --- Photo by Terrance Barksdale on Pexels

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I had carried that mental model for thirty years and never once thought to check whether it was still true. It wasn't. They'd built something genuinely good, and I almost missed it because of a story I'd been telling myself since childhood.

This is the part that matters. Your customers are carrying assumptions about you too. What you do, what you don't, what you're for. Some of those assumptions are years out of date, and most people will never tell you they're holding them. They'll just quietly act on the old version of you.

Last week I ordered @LittleCaesarsPizza online for the first time. The weird part is I was already sitting in their lobby when I did it. --- Photo by Terrance Barksdale on Pexels

The team looked slammed and there was someone ahead of me in line, so I took a seat, pulled up their website, and ordered from a chair ten feet from the counter. It was one of the best online ordering experiences I've had anywhere. It rivaled Amazon.

I'll order online again sooner than I'd like to admit. What's interesting is the website wasn't the surprise. My assumption was. Growing up, Little Caesars was the hot-and-ready place: go in, grab it, leave. Ordering online wasn't part of the deal.

Red Hat published a piece last week framing #DigitalSovereignty not as a compliance requirement but as a control question: the ability to maintain ownership and oversight of your own technology path regardless of geopolitical shifts, market dynamics, or vendor terms.

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gradual and, honestly, easier than I expected. I captured the results of my journey under Deggl.com, a reference site I built cataloging privacy-respecting alternatives to common big tech tools. Tools are organized into three tiers depending on how much control you want to establish.

Red Hat published a piece last week framing #DigitalSovereignty not as a compliance requirement but as a control question: the ability to maintain ownership and oversight of your own technology path regardless of geopolitical shifts, market dynamics, or vendor terms.

It's a conversation that's been building for a while. The EU has been moving toward digital autonomy at the policy level for years. Organizations across EMEA, APAC, and beyond are treating sovereignty as a strategic priority rather than a checkbox.

It's a topic that has been on my mind at the individual level for about ten years. That's roughly when I started replacing the big tech apps and services I relied on daily with alternatives that don't depend on advertising-driven business models. Search. Email. Cloud storage. Maps. The process was

Yesterday I built an ecommerce website start to finish. Yes, 1 day for a full ecommerce website build. I started with only a domain name at 8 am. By 5pm I had built a fully functional ecommerce dropshipping website with products and a checkout process. I even ran a few errands with my kids midday.

The website is a project I chose to build for myself, but the timeline was a challenge just to see if I could do it. Here are the high-level details: - #WordPress website - #WooCommerce for the shopping cart - Checkout process with #WooPayments and #PayPal - #Dropshipping with #Spocket

I built something and published it this weekend. BookCx is a Chrome extension that helps you find the same book across reading platforms. See something on Amazon you want to add to Goodreads? Want to check if it is available on Libby before you buy it? BookCx surfaces the links so you do not have

to search manually on every platform. I built it using Claude Code. I am not a software engineer, but I had a clear vision for what I wanted, I knew how to give precise instructions, and I knew how to evaluate the output at each step. The result is a working, published Chrome extension.

One of the most interesting challenges I have solved in my career was focused on delivering emails. A marketing platform built around email was not delivering the results clients expected. Campaigns were going out. But a meaningful number of emails were landing in spam or being blocked before they

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ROI for clients. The fix involved custom scripts in Google Sheets, client outreach, working across technical capabilities, and updated DNS records. Within a few weeks, 97% of domains were fully compliant. Emails started landing in inboxes. The platform performed the way it was supposed to.

One of the most interesting challenges I have solved in my career was focused on delivering emails. A marketing platform built around email was not delivering the results clients expected. Campaigns were going out. But a meaningful number of emails were landing in spam or being blocked before they

ever reached an inbox. The root cause of the problem was authentication. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records were missing or misconfigured across approximately 40 client domains. Gmail and Outlook were beginning to enforce these standards more strictly, and the deliverability gap was directly eroding the

My friend Cody tried to get me interested in a reality TV show about two brothers digging holes on a Canadian island looking for buried treasure. I gave him a hard time about it when I started watching. Eventually it started to make sense. I am now at the end of season eleven, and I am not going to

admit how invested I am. What I did not expect was how often I found myself thinking about work while watching it. The way the team handles inherited history, unexpected setbacks, inconvenient data, and the kind of problems that require you to get genuinely uncomfortable before anything useful

happens — it kept connecting to things I have seen play out in organizations I have been part of. I wrote up the six things that stuck with me. No treasure hunting experience required. bmoore.me/what-a-reali... #leadership #business #work

bmoore.meWhat a Reality TV Show About Buried Treasure Taught Me About WorkThe Curse of Oak Island kept making me think about work. Not in a forced, everything-is-a-business-lesson kind of way. More like I kept noticing things on screen and thinking, yes, that. That is so…

A few things I did with hashtag#AI this week: Mocked up two rooms in my house that need to be refreshed. Created a custom WordPress plugin for a current project. Drafted copy for social and web content. Iterated on resumes and cover letters. Made a one-pager pricing sheet for a rummage sale. None

of it was AI-first. Every one of those tasks started somewhere else. An idea, a problem to solve, a conversation that sparked something, a decision about what I actually wanted. The AI did not show up with any of that. That is the part that does not get talked about enough. AI is genuinely

useful. It saves time and adds capability. But someone still has to understand the problem, have a point of view about the solution, and give it something to work with. Without that, you get slop. With it, you get something worth using. It is a powerful tool. It still needs a human.

I found a stash of mini DV tapes while cleaning out my workshop last weekend. Not lost, exactly. Not really forgotten, just tucked away with good intentions for about twenty years. I have spent a few evenings this week converting them to digital files before the tapes deteriorate any further.

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not seen in two decades. Our wedding ceremony (!). What strikes me most is how ordinary all of it looked at the time. Nobody was performing for the camera. We were just going places, doing things, having conversations, sharing life together. Nobody was thinking about what it would mean twenty

years later. But those people and those places shaped me in ways I am still discovering. I hope they would say something similar about the time we shared. There is something worth sitting with in that. The moments that matter most (both personally and professionally) rarely announce themselves.

I found a stash of mini DV tapes while cleaning out my workshop last weekend. Not lost, exactly. Not really forgotten, just tucked away with good intentions for about twenty years. I have spent a few evenings this week converting them to digital files before the tapes deteriorate any further.

And somewhere in that process, what started as a preservation project prompted some reflection. There are real gems in there. Christmases with family. Camping trips with friends who are now scattered across the country. Events from careers I have long since moved on from. People and places I have

Does anyone know how to get #Claude to stop using em-dashes? I have told it (repeatedly) to stop in the context of the conversation. It's also explicitly in the instructions: do not use em-dashes. It will stop for a few prompts, then it's right back to its old ways. #AI @anthropic.com

There is no direct migration path from Joomla 1.0 to WordPress. The content had to move through Joomla 1.5 first. Three platforms. Two migration phases. Nearly 7,000 articles and 8,000 media items dating back to 2004. Manual MySQL work. A third-party publishing plugin that stored content

wearespeak.comMigrating a Legacy News Archive to Wordpress - Speak - Wordpress website design and development, management, troubleshooting, and migration servicesHow a multi-phase CMS migration preserved 15 years of online journalism, solved platform security issues, and delivered a faster, more modern publishing experience for a national news organization.…

differently than Joomla's native architecture. A full redirect plan to protect years of search equity. Content freezes at critical points so the editorial team could keep publishing throughout. Six months from planning to launch. The site went live in January 2019 and is still running today — now

wearespeak.comMigrating a Legacy News Archive to Wordpress - Speak - Wordpress website design and development, management, troubleshooting, and migration servicesHow a multi-phase CMS migration preserved 15 years of online journalism, solved platform security issues, and delivered a faster, more modern publishing experience for a national news organization.…

I brewed #coffee in my Moka this morning without water. It makes a lot of smoke and smells horrible in case you're wondering. After 30 min of cleanup, I did finally get coffee.

Pretty bummed to hear about Fakespot shutting down in July. The only Fakespot alternative I can find is ReviewMeta (currently running slower than molasses). Are there others to consider?

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