Automate Me

The automatic upgrader for WordPress plugin is nice. Install and it then does as the name says. As I teach things like blogging to undergraduates I remain stuck (bemused and muddled) by the ways in which the rapid pace of development and change is either invisible, or perhaps just part of the ether, for these students. Of course it could also be more simply that as I approach 50 things seem to happen much more quickly than when you’re 20! But to think that from when I first started blogging to today the systems would have the sophistication, infrastructure and so on that they do, well, it is up there with the early history of the printing press. A collective, shared, and distributed contribution to the tools and then the writing of the content itself, as well as a shift from something that is so foregrounded as an explicit technology (now install this via FTP, replace this file but not that one) to just ‘click here’ to upgrade and let’s get on with making stuff.