Skip to content

Photo of Andrew Shell
Hi!, I’m Andrew Shell a Senior Web Engineer from Madison, WI.

I’m a software developer, writer, and community builder passionate about open-source technology and collaboration.

Welcome to my weblog! Here you’ll find my essays and quick updates. Check out my notes for technical documentation. You can also learn more about me and what I’m up to now.

Subscribe via RSS.

Recent Posts

Working on the RSS Cloud WordPress Plugin

I've been continuing to work on the modern testing infrastructure so I can make sure the RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress is up to date. The maintainer rightfully wants to keep it as simple as possible, so I want to respect his wishes. The default settings for PHPCS (linting)...

Continue reading


Defending the Open Web Is Not Enough

This article really gave me food for thought about what's required to support the open web. 77% of news publishers now focus on subscriptions. Independent journalists are fleeing to Substack. Podcasters signed 9-figure Spotify exclusives. Not because they opposed openness...

Continue reading


Learning Modern WordPress Plugin Development

I've been out of the WordPress plugin game for a while now. I closed my Nofollow Links plugin back in 2021 and haven't kept up since then. However, now I'm running WordPress again and looking to get back up to speed. Since I built and maintain the RssCloud Server and wanted to...

Continue reading


Testing Out WordLand

One of the reasons I migrated my site to WordPress was all of Dave Winer's evangelism. One of the things Dave has done is an external editor for WordPress called WordLand. I had tested it out briefly with a test site on WordPress.com, but now that my main site is on...

Continue reading


WordPress Migration

I just completed a major update to my website. Two things at once. I've moved my site from blog.andrewshell.org to andrewshell.org (dropping the subdomain) and migrated it from 11ty to WordPress. I put a lot of effort into setting up redirects, so everything should keep working...

Continue reading

See all essays → | See all notes → | Search →