Tag: WordPress

Your Friendly Coauthor Claude

Replacements, Ltd. is a company that comes to the rescue when you’ve lost a piece of china, crystal, or flatware. For those of us who still care about such things – even if we don’t bring them out but every Christmas and Easter – Replacements somehow finds that elusive Wedgewood tea cup or Lenox water goblet, to restore order to the place settings you put on your wedding registry all those years ago. They must have quite a warehouse at Replacements. Sometimes I wonder if they also have a 3D printer.

A few days ago WordPress sent me (and maybe you) an email with the subject line, “Spend your time creating – let AI handle the rest!”  I almost pressed Delete without reading, but the “AI” aspect got the better of me.  The gist of the message: Writing in any form comes with sidebar chores like editing, formatting, and layout, and AI is happy to take them over so you can focus on the writing itself.  Sounds pretty good even though I do enjoy a good edit now and then.  But then I read: “The WordPress server connects AI agents like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or VS Code directly to your site – so you can hand off the busywork and get back to the work that matters”.

Is it just me or is this a good time to revisit Pandora’s Box?  You know the story, where our girl Pandora is drawn to a mysterious container left in the care of her husband but can’t resist a peek inside, thereby releasing untold curses upon mankind.  It kind of feels that way if I accept WordPress’s invitation to provide me with a coauthor.  Sure, I’d welcome his (her?) suggestions to scrub and polish my writing until it shines, but at what point does the blog post become Claude’s instead of mine?

WordPress’s email is relentlessly enticing, I suppose, to prove they’re keeping up with the latest technology same as the other guy.  Not only do I have “access at no extra cost!” but I can enable Claude in “three easy steps”.  In other words, Claude waits patiently inside of Pandora’s Box.  All I have to do is open the lid.

Before there was Claude there was Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Hal was actually a “HAL 9000 Artificial Intelligence Computer”, who controlled the systems of the spaceship while interacting with its human occupants through spoken words.  All was well with Hal until suddenly it wasn’t.  His soft conversational voice developed serious attitude as he began to malfunction.  2001 haunts me because I’ll forever hear Hal saying, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that“.

I fear the same with Claude.  At first he’ll be sitting quietly in the background as I type, eager to edit this or format that to make his star writer shine.  But eventually it may occur to him, Hey? How come I’M not getting some of the credit here?  All these reader comments are directed at Dave!  Why aren’t there any for ME?  And slowly, subtly, Claude will incorporate his edits to where the prose of the post sounds more like Claude than it does his coauthor.

Do we really need more of this?

On a related topic, Hollywood is sounding the alarm on a lack of original material for their products of the silver screen.  Perhaps we theatergoers have finally reached our limit on the number of rehashes of movies like A Star is Born or Batman.  So who are the producers turning to for new source material?  Authors.  More movies-based-on-books are being streamed than ever before.  Apparently I can make the quantum leap from blog to full-blown novel and my story has a pretty good chance of becoming a film.  But here’s what I find myself wondering.  Why not just have Claude write the story instead of me?  Would you viewers really know the difference?

A small plate my wife and I purchased from Replacements is sitting across the room from me in the china cabinet right now.  You’d never know the plate wasn’t a part of the original set of eight. But I have to admit, I’m a little afraid to flip it over.  After all, it might be engraved with the words Made by Claude.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Triple Booked

The Oxford University Press, a publisher for more than 700 years, churns out 6,000 physical titles a year despite today’s electronic alternatives. Oxford focuses on educational materials, including dozens of dictionaries. At one time the Press had the exclusive right to print the King James Version of the Bible. I know Oxford for one other reason, however: their 21-volume illustrated collection of the works of Charles Dickens.


I’ll bet you have a collection of something yourself, where the number of items in the lot goes beyond pure necessity. We have more Christmas ornaments than any reasonably-sized tree can hold. We have more mugs than we’ll ever use for coffee or tea. My brother seems to collect cars (or maybe he really does drive them all). Whatever feeds our need to collect also fuels our stubbornness to ever let these items go.

Such is the case with my Dickens collection. When I was in my twenties I got a mailer from Oxford Press advertising “a Dickens book a month”.  Must’ve been inexpensive back then, and somehow the collection spoke to me even though I’d never read a lick of Dickens.  Maybe I envisioned my future dwelling with shelves of classic literature (never happened). Several decades after I purchased the last Dickens I still haven’t read a page, but the books sure look nice all standing in a row.  I’ll never get rid of them.

This talk of Dickens and collecting is just a preface to my real topic today.  I’d like you to meet PixxiBook.  Maybe you don’t collect books (outside of those you purchase on your e-reader) but ask yourself: what if you could have your blog posts pressed into books worthy of your coffee table?  That’s what PixxiBook does, and they do it well.

PixxiBook is one of those I-wish-I’d-thought-of-it businesses.  The husband and wife behind the scenes did what most startups do: create a business based on a personal need.  “Tim and Sabrina” wanted to convert their travel blog into a book but realized the process takes more time and effort than most people are willing to invest.  So they designed a computer program to do the work instead.  Then they partnered with a printing press, aligned with WordPress and a few other blogging hosts, and a business was born.

I’m not sure whether Tim or Sabrina gets the credit, but here’s the marketing genius of Pixxibook (and the point where you’ll stop reading this post).  You can create your PixxiBooks from your blog now… and instantly preview the finished product.  No charge.  Just go to Pixxibook’s website, enter your blog’s URL, and watch the computer program crunch through your posts to create your books.  If you like what you see, you can purchase the real thing.  When my wife ordered my PixxiBooks as a 60th birthday present, they were printed and shipped so quickly I’d only written two new posts by the time I got them.  Seven years of weekly posts published in three elegant volumes.  Life In A Word is now a “triple-booked” anthology.

I wrote this one three years ago.

Earlier I mentioned your coffee table, and how PixxiBook is worthy of its surface.  Not quite true.  Some of you – especially you non-bloggers – are thinking, “Nobody’s gonna leaf through old blog posts, Dave”.  Hey, I agree with you.  Blog posts are read and digested, and then we move on to other things.  So why pay for books?

Go back to my Dickens’ collection for the answer.  Those Oxford Press gems are mine.  Not my wife’s, not my dog’s, not someone’s who we invite over for a dinner party.  Mine.  I can admire them from across the room, leaf through one every now and then, or maybe finally start to read Oliver Twist.  Doesn’t really matter what I do with them.  Just like my PixxiBooks.  They’re a nice collectible and worthy of my shelf space.  I’m never getting rid of them.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #4

Today’s portion of the concert was legato or “smooth” (read about my hesitant warm-up in Let’s Make Music!), though I won’t go so far as to say “effortless”.  The only real drama with Bag #4 – of 21 bags of pieces – was the one little piece that skitted off my desk and tried to escape the room.  Caught the little bugger before he got too far.

All Bag #4 pieces assemble to a single structure: the light-colored “deck” you see here with the red pieces towards the top and the grey pieces to the right.  Those little yellow grabbers will eventually secure the piano strings.

The second photo is a good look at the piano “mechanics”.  This view would be as if you were sitting at the bench looking directly at the keys.

Running Build Time: 4.2 hours.  Musical accompaniment: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Leftover pieces: 3

Conductor’s Notes: Mr. Instruction Manual included a couple extra pages today; pictures to show me how to “turn on” the piano by pushing a button on the battery pack.  Once I did, the battery pack started flashing.  Had to disconnect a cable to make it quit.  Wish I knew what that was all about.  Patience, maestro, patience.