Latest News & Tutorials From The Cushy Text Blog:

AI isn't bad, just like hobby dentistry isn't bad; it's fine if you know what you're doing. Well, perhaps that was a bad example for use in comparison, perhaps even deliberately so, but it got your attention, didn't it?

Most AI platforms won't use off-the-wall comparisons, tongue-in-cheek allusion and comedic metaphors because humor is, at worst dangerous if misunderstood and, at best, a waste of copy space if the reader doesn't appreciate it. And, sadly, more and more, I'm seeing a total absence of it embraced as the best possible quality for technical writing. Yuck!

Product managers are very analytical people who, by nature, make data-driven decisions; it's their default existence and why they're so very good at their jobs. But, this visceral avoidance of simple human conventions like mild playfulness may be killing trust and making your product slower to be picked up, and is a destructive over-correction for confusion that mostly only occurs in maladaptive product daydreams.

Now, that may be what you need; you know your audience, right? I mean, do you? Have you surveyed how happy people are with technical material? I'm just wondering out-loud so you do, too.

I love using AI to bulldoze through rote writing: this includes code as well as text; Gemini is one of the best coding and writing companions I've ever had. But, I use it to help assemble all of the ingredients into what I'm doing, not to make something more than the sum of it all.

And if you're leaving personality out of front-line support and documentation, and out of your video presentations, you're costing yourself conversions, I don't care what your steel-faced PM or designer says.

The SEO plugin did extremely well in the limited, but very thorough trials with both English and non-english sites, and grew around ten new configuration options in the process.

It's well-suited for light-to-medium production use. I want to talk about what it would need in order to run in reasonable time with limited configuration if someone had tens of thousands of pages in multiple languages. Here's what I think the plugin needs for the next major release:

Óscar Otero recently merged v3-dev into main which means while Lume 3 is still behind the --dev feature flag, it's all but a done deal. He expects to release Lume 3 sometime in May 2025.

Since it's basically feature complete, I've tagged in version 0.0.1 mostly for the benefit of plugin testing and for early adopters who have existing infima content they're looking to move over to Lume.

Here is a link to the new cushytext-theme repo; it will be turned into a proper template repository and listed in the Lume Theme registry once Lume 3 has been out for at least a week. No one should still be pulling from this site's repo (cushytext.deno.dev) for the theme itself, use the cushytext-theme repo.

And that language is, specifically, no cookies!

You can tell a lot about something by the way it avoids needing a cookie banner, and I'm tired of having fundamentally two tenable choices when it comes to making new things for the public to use:

• Force invasive analytics on people, or,

• Develop blindly without collecting much meaningful usage data.

Another option, please?

I just can't accept analytics still being a Kobayashi Maru for us little people so I went looking at alternatives and wow, PostHog really stood out as being primarily privacy respecting. In addition to that, it can record sessions, roll out canary releases, do your split tests and way more.

It's not just that it can do really amazing things, it's that it can do them without requiring you to implement a cookie banner.