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- The Airtable Acquisition Raises a Bigger Question: Do You Really Own the Software Your Business Runs On?
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- How to Update the Same Website Content on Multiple Pages at Once
- Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed in Google Search Console: What’s the Difference and How to Fix Each
- The Small Business Guide to Auditing Google Ads and Website Costs
- Do Professional Writers Still Need SEO in the Age of AI?
- Search Engine First vs. People First Content: Why Generic FAQ Dumps Harm Your SEO
- Looking for a Website Builder Without AI? Which One Should You Choose?
- Keyword Cannibalization: How to Find and Fix the Pages Stealing Your Own Google Traffic
- Why Great Content Gets Stuck on Page 8 (And How to Fix It)
- Why MySQL FULLTEXT Search Returns 0 Results (And How to Fix It)
- The Reality of Domain Speculation on New TLD Launches: Is It Still Worth It?
- The Hidden Domain Name Lock-In: Which Registrars Restrict Nameservers?
- Paying $10,000 a Month for SEO? Here’s How to Tell If You’re Getting Your Money’s Worth
- Introducing New WordPress Magazine Layouts in UltimateWB 9 (With Early Access)
- How to Fix the WordPress “Critical Error” on the Widgets Page After a PHP Upgrade
- The Hidden Risk of SaaS Website Builders: Lessons from the Recent Wix Outage
Categories
Category Archives: Technology in the News
Webflow’s 2026 Layoffs Exposed the SaaS Illusion
Ask David! question: What do you think of Webflow's layoffs, coming right after all the outages and bugs and price increases?
If you search "Webflow" on the UltimateWB blog, you get post after post on outages, bugs, restructuring plans and price increases, feature removals...and now this. First thought: Wow, what is going on at Webflow.
For years, the proprietary Webflow web development space operated on a beautiful, carefully manufactured illusion: We are in this together.
Webflow built an
... Continue readingThe 2026 Kadence WP Corporate Takeover: What Liquid Web’s Consolidation Means for Your WordPress Website
The standalone kadencewp.com domain is gone. So are learndash.com, givewp.com, and theeventscalendar.com.
On May 12, 2026, parent company Liquid Web executed a massive, aggressive corporate consolidation. Over the course of a single morning, they quietly retired the entire StellarWP software brand and folded years of prominent WordPress plugin acquisitions directly into the primary Liquid Web ecosystem. Independent product domains were abruptly killed and redirected to corporate landing pages, and long-standing standalone end-user license agreements (EULAs) were instantly swapped for
... Continue reading
Posted in Compare Website Builders, Technology in the News
Tagged bait-and-switch, client dashboard injection, EULA, events calendar price hike, Events Calendar Pro, feature-bloat, iconic, is wordpress free, Kadence, kadence takeover, learndash migration, liquid web corporate consolidation, lock-in, monopoly, ownership, restrict content pro, solidwp, stellarwp, stellarwp dissolution, supply chain security risks, third-party plugins, website ownership, WordPress, wordpress alternative, wordpress kirki customizer, wordpress monopoly, wordpress plugin acquisitions
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What Happened to Quora? Building a Q&A Site That Won’t Sell Out Your Users
Quora has become a cautionary tale for the modern developer. It is still technically online, but the platform has been hollowed out from the inside. What was once a destination for expertise has devolved into a cluttered space of bot-generated questions, AI-regurgitated answers, and an intrusive volume of ads that make the site nearly unreadable.
From a development and management perspective, this wasn’t an accident or the result of a hostile takeover. Despite raising hundreds of millions to stay independent,
... Continue reading
Posted in Ask David!, Business, Social Networking, Technology in the News
Tagged ad-farm, ai-scaling, avoid bot spam, building a Q&A site, community engagement, community moderation, digital autonomy, high-quality knowledge sharing, how to build a Q&A site, Q&A platform development, quora, Quora alternatives, Quora decline, scrapbooks app, seo, short-term revenue, social hub architect, social network, social network software, user retention, user-generated content, web development
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The $12,000 AI Employee: Productivity Boost or the Next Plugin Bloat?
Some companies are now spending over $1,000 per month per developer on AI tools.
That’s not a typo.
What started as a $20/month productivity boost - something like a single assistant helping write code or debug faster - has quietly evolved into a full-stack expense category. Multiple models. Multiple tools. Agent frameworks. Token-based billing. Usage caps.
Individually, each cost seems small.
Together, they’re starting to look a lot like something we’ve seen before.
The Justification: “It’s Cheap Compared to
... Continue readingSupply Chain “Risk” or Trust Advantage? Anthropic vs. the Pentagon
Being labeled a “supply chain risk” isn’t just bad PR for Anthropic - it has real, immediate consequences that can hurt the company on multiple levels.
1. It effectively cuts them off from government business
The U.S. government is one of the biggest buyers of advanced tech in the world.
Once a company is flagged as a supply chain risk:
- Federal agencies are discouraged - or outright blocked - from using its products
- Existing contracts can be paused, reduced,
Posted in AI, Technology in the News
Tagged ai, anthropic, blacklisted, department of defense, pentagon, pr, supply chain risk
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Pentagon Blacklists Anthropic: Inside the Military’s New AI Power Stack
The Pentagon just made one thing clear: control matters more than capability.
On May 1, 2026, the Department of Defense moved forward with a sweeping set of AI agreements - while cutting out one of its most prominent partners, Anthropic. In its place, a new coalition of eight tech companies is being integrated directly into the military’s most sensitive systems.
At stake isn’t just performance. It’s who gets to decide how these systems are used.
The New AI Stack
... Continue reading
Posted in AI, Technology in the News
Tagged ai, amazon web services, anthropic, aws, claude, Dario Amodei, department of defense, gemini, google, microsoft, mythos, Nvidia, OpenAI, oracle, pentagon, Reflection AI, spacex, supply chain risk, white house
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WordPress Kirki Customizer Takeover: The Automatic Bait-and-Switch Plugin Trend
The WordPress community is currently witnessing a troubling and "despicable" trend: the acquisition and subsequent "bloating" of popular, lightweight plugins. This isn't just a manual update issue - it is a systemic problem where sites are being fundamentally changed through automatic updates without the owner’s consent.
The recent crisis involving the Kirki Customizer framework and the historical "bait-and-switch" of WP User Avatar serve as a reminder in why the WordPress "plugin stack" model is a risky gamble for
... Continue reading
Posted in Compare Website Builders, Technology in the News, Website Security
Tagged auto-update, bloat, BuddyX, Droip, fatal errors, feature creep, Kirki Customizer, plugins, ProfilePress, Reign, security issues, security liability, slow website, Themeum, third-party plugins, website security, WordPress, WP User Avatar, XStore
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Beehiiv Website Editor Glitch: How to Fix Scattered Elements and Text
Are you logging into your Beehiiv account and finding your website elements scattered everywhere? There are many forum and Reddit comments on this, happening now. As of late April 2026, a significant number of users are reporting that the Beehiiv website editor is not displaying correctly, with text blocks and images appearing out of place across their entire layout.
What is Happening with the Beehiiv Editor?
This isn't just a minor lag. Creators are describing a total layout failure
... Continue reading
Posted in Compare Website Builders, Technology in the News
Tagged Beehiiv, Beehiiv alternatives, Beehiiv editor broken, Beehiiv editor display issues, Beehiiv elements everywhere, Beehiiv layout glitch, Beehiiv support, Beehiiv text scattered, Beehiiv website editor, fix Beehiiv website, hosted platform, saas, stable website builder, website control, website ownership
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How to Fix: WordPress Error Class ‘C_NextGen_Settings’ Not Found
If your WordPress site is currently down with the fatal error: Class 'C_NextGen_Settings' not found, as the saying goes, you are not alone.
Just a white screen, staring at you - not so much the "White Screen of Death" (WSoD) - you get a clue on what is causing it by the error message displayed:
Error thrown
Class 'C_NextGen_Settings' not found
On every single page. You cannot even login to your WordPress admin panel.
The formatting of the error
... Continue readingBeyond the Hype: The Systemic Security Risk in AI Agents
If you follow tech news, you might have heard about a "zero-click" flaw in Claude’s desktop app back in February. But as of April 2026, this story has evolved from a single app's problem into a systemic warning for the entire AI industry.
The Latest: The MCP SDK Flaw
Recent investigations have confirmed that the vulnerability isn't just a "bug" in one software version. It is built into the Model Context Protocol (MCP) SDK itself. This is the official
... Continue reading