Also, through it I discovered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin, which pushes your blog posts to the Internet Archive (something I’ve installed on the site now – so it’d be interesting to see how it works). Very cool. And there’s probably dead links all over this blog. Will report back.
As always, it was good to speak with Nathan and Michelle, and good to meet MarcBenzakein too!
I was in the third edition of the Dealgorithmed email, an email dedicated to the fun side of the web.
It’s not available online, so in my interview I shared a website I love (Cloudhiker), content I’m loving at the moment (Evercade) and waxed lyrical about some of the early Jackbox games from the early 00’s I wish came back – Acrophobia (which was a backronym generator for multiplayers) and Cosmic Consensus which only exists in this screenshot…
…but it was excellent. Imagine a Family Fortune style board game, where you could advance one, two or three squares depending if you picked the most/second/third most popular answer.
Anyway, hello if you came from that newsletter! I hope you enjoy your stay here, sign the Guestbook. 🙂
I’ve recently been playing through Quake again (the base game is on Steam) and I’ve really been enjoying it. The beauty however is how easy the game is to mod.
I remember how much I loved picking up CD’s full of total conversions. I remember a Marvel themed Quake TC, and a few other ones stuck out in my mind. Heck Team Fortress started life as a Quake Total Conversion.
I had a few maps that I made and edited a few textures in the 1990s. Usually with garish primary colours, that stood out from the actual game, but it was a formative experience, tinkering and playing with games. Something I still enjoy nowadays. Part of me has got me thinking whilst shooting Fiends, Shamblers and Ogres in the id classic has got me wanting to make a level. Just to dust off my chops.
So seeing it evolve 30 (yes, THIRTY) years later to what it’s become and the modding community getting it’s flowers is nice to see.
Now to find the big box version that I’ve got somewhere.
So last year I made a bunch of goals for 2025 – things I wanted to do in the year to try and grow me, my business and my health. I also introduced the bingo card feature, where I’d chalk of lines, corners or a full house should I achieve them.
That really helped as I achieved quite a lot in 2025. Here’s where I am:-
Get back into public speaking – Success 🎉: I spoke twice in 2025 – once as WPLDN, once at an evening MWUG meetup. It was good to finally get out there and share my knowledge on running a business, and I really enjoyed it.
The talk I gave was a realisation after Loopconf where I shared breakfast with a few folks, and I talked somebody’s ear off on how I run a business. I’m pretty much an open book (even talking about money, folks – you should talk about money1), and this was my talk.
Overall, it was pretty well received. I really enjoyed it and it was good to get good insights from folks on how they run their businesses. I’ve taken at least one point on board for my business.
Finally rebuild Winwar Media to my liking – Success🎉: The bingo card helped here as I was pushed to achieve this towards the end of 2025. In the end, the new site went live on 29th December 2025. Is it finished? No. Is it better than it was? Yes. Can I build and iterate things on top of it? Indeed I can.
Similarly, I did the same with this here site, being inspired by Loopconf to start blogging again. Now I can work on things and have a clear roadmap for this site, using a a Trello board to map things out, add features and making the site a bit of joy to navigate. That’s the hope, anyway.
Sing about my Work More – Success 🎉: Yes! I now think I can tick this off as a success as I’ve built up a case studies section on Dwi’n Rhys. I also turn the testimonials into Instagram content, which helps engagement and churning out social posts. Yay! Not quite AI slop!
Run a sub 30 minute 5k – Failure: I didn’t achieve this. I’m about 2 and a half minutes off this at the moment. I’ve had a couple of 1km’s under the 6 minute mark. I’m not going to focus on times, though, instead focusing on quantity this year (more in the personal goals for 2026).
It’s odd, I think my mind gets bored with some runs, and ones I can focus on, which are a bit hilly for example, I do better than ones that are quite boring. I thought I’d get a few fast times over the Christmas break, but turns out straight in and out runs are harder than more undulating park runs. As a beach child, I hate to say it but the sea gets boring.
Hit a weight loss goal – Failure: I haven’t weighed myself for an age, but I know I’m off this. A lot of bad habits have creeped back, as although I feel healthier than this time last year, I am still a little heavier than I like. I’ll look to improve this this year.
Update: I weighed myself this morning, and it confirmed my suspicion. I put on a bit of weight! I’m still way down, but yeah, up a bit.
Attend a Game Dev Meetup – Success 🎉: This was an achievement as I attended the Manchester Indie Game Dev Meetup in July. I’ve since not been back (not that there is anything wrong! Just the dates haven’t aligned). I look forward to attending next year.
Oddly, I also achieved a goal from 2024 – with me scoring 23 in a game of cricket. Funnily enough it was the first game in 2025 I achieved this, with a score of 24. My highest is now 31 (retired).
I hit two lines! As such, I treated myself to two of my “line” prizes, which was a pair of brand new pair of cricket trainers and a Strava subscription.
Onto this year, here are my goals for 2026.
Professional Goals
Weirdly, my goals for 2026, I struggled with thinking of professional goals for me this year. I even turned to everybody’s favourite ocean burning hallucinogenic tool – ChatGPT – to try and come up with ideas and it came up a bit short. Nevertheless, here’s what I’ve settled on.
Release another Paid Plugin or SAAS
It’s been a fair few years since I’ve released a paid WordPress plugin or SAAS, and now that I write this with a relatively long term runway, I can maybe focus on some more non web development projects. I was fortunate enough late last year to work on a paid plugin which gave me great insight into how I can build and market one.
So the hope is for 2026 I’ll release a paid plugin or a SAAS. I’ve got two ideas I can maybe look to explore, one paid plugin is pretty much half way there for a first draft, so I can’t imagine it being too much work to push it out. I’ve got a cheeky idea for a blog post to prepare for it, too.
Grow my WordPress newsletter to 50 subscribers
I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do this, but one thing I’ve seen on a number of my sites has been traffic has dropped from search engines over all my sites. I’m not seeing a drop in rankings, so I suspect it’s due to AI. Joy.
Nevertheless, I’m looking to grow communities around my sites. One such thing is my monthly WordPress newsletter. It gets a decent number of subscribers and open rates, but it is still stubbornly quite small, with only 22 (at the time of writing) I pushed it out a little bit and I’m now up to 28.
I will say, the quality of subscribers is quite something. Names I trust and enjoy listening to in the WordPress space. I must be doing something right. It’d be good to get it up to 50 subscribers by the end of the year. I’m not entirely sure how, so if you want a monthly dose of WordPress, the web and some other fun things, please, do subscribe. Thanks!
Finally get WP Email Capture updated to my liking
I’m fucking sick of Peadig and it breaking, so now that Winwar Media’s site is done, I want to get WP Email Capture off Peadig and onto my standard Kadence setup. I’m imaging as I don’t particularly want to change the design too much or it’s functionality it’ll be a lot quicker. We will see.
Be weird to actually thinking of three different professional tasks to do for the first time!
Personal Goals
First off, I want to go ahead and do something I swore this time last year I’d never do, and run a 10k. I ran a couple of properly timed 5k runs with medals and stuff, and I think most runners are secretly magpies and like collecting shiny things. I’ve ran a 7k once (around the lake near where my partner lived in Romania), so I’d be keen to try and get to double figures.
Similarly for double figures, I’d be keen to get to 50 parkruns this year. I’m currently on 282. I’m 50/50 on whether I achieve this, but it’s one parkrun every 2 weeks. As long as I maintain that, I think I’ll achieve it.
Finally I really want to release a video game on non-Pico 8 hardware. What that will be I’m not sure, but I really want to either focus on retro technology, or something like Godot for maybe pushing onto Steam? We’ll see. I have looked at potentially game jams like DOSEmber as there are DOS based languages on Lua. I have one game on the go that could tick this off, but it may be technically cheating myself. But it’ll tick off the square.
So, on to this year, here’s my bingo card for this year, adding on 3 potential “50 before I’m 50” items.
Overall, I’ve gotten very lucky. The middle square is quite a nice one as I’ve already got a 50 before I’m 50 booked in, and a second one I’m relatively sure of hitting, however I hope that doesn’t make me lazy, especially as two of them require me to be fit.
Nevertheless, those are my goals for 2026. What about yours? Leave them in the comments, and are you doing a bingo card this year? Let me know if so!
My rationale to this is that it’s like politics – the people who shut down talk about it have the most to lose. By being an open book I feel I can help people grow, but that’s by the by… ↩︎
It’s kind of funny that both the amount of subscribers and parkruns are both on 28 ↩︎
LLM’s I find are terrible at problem solving. They’re good at interpreting what people want to do, but it doesn’t really think about the box. I have an example I’ll probably talk on next week’s Now page, but will share it here.
I had a problem with some code in my game, in that I couldn’t get a hitbox (the yellow circle) to sit within the sprite. The problem was the rotation script I use pivots the sprite around the bottom right hand corner of the sprite, so whilst the hitbox remains in the correct place, the hitbox does not.
The LLM was rewriting my code, and getting nowhere fast. It was trying to change the pivot point but going nowhere. Confidently wrong as it hit the brick wall.
The solution? Don’t have a hitbox. Determine that a bullet is outside of the white circle, and if the colour of the pixel at the bullet’s x & y co-ordinate is not black, then determine a hit. This was applied and fixed.
Programming requires a different approach that is often found by taking a walk and thinking about the problem in a different way. There was a famous case with Wing Commander where a bug in some versions was a memory error that existed on the game exiting that caused a crash. The solution? Change the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”. Problem solved.
I feel these sort of bugs at the moment can only really be fixed with experience.
Ongoing Support
The second thing Ross mentioned was ongoing support. This is true – I’ve noticed this with Revive to Sky. I pushed an update that ticked the plugin over to 10+ Active installations in WordPress this week. That has meant I get a few more support requests over the weekend. When these occur, it can take a bit of debugging. I curiously asked an LLM for a solution for one of these, surprise surprise they were wrong.
Of course, this can lead to a period of of debugging and a back and forth. That does take skill. You can use LLMs for this – asking what an error means. But often a search on the internet throws up a solution quicker and easier. That’s a skill.
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight Ross’ post and add my 2 cents. Make a brew (it’s Brew Monday!) and go and read it.
