Category: Uncategorized

  • Doja Cat hits where Lady Gaga misses

    Doja Cat hits where Lady Gaga misses

    I’ve written about Lady Gaga before – when The Fame launched I was pretty unimpressed, but also I was immature then and thought my tumblr-style ranting verbosity was good writing. I was cruel without even resorting to the then-de rigeur accusations of hermaphroditism.

    I’ll even admit that over the years I warmed to Gaga, her music matured and she’s definitely a treat on screen – American Horror Story Hotel was good in so many ways and she was definitely a big part of that, and then we were all rightly mesmerised by A Star is Born.

    But Dead Dance… is she joking? Her die-hard fans and even previously unimpressed people are just glazing her in internet comments. And I’m not being stingy, because the VMA performance of the same track affords her no extra credit.

    People can’t possibly be so impressed or easily-fooled by something so derivative. Never mind that it’s such an obvious grasp at Thriller – and, oh look at that, right before Halloween. Sorry Gaga, but Enid in Wednesday did your own song and dance better than you!

    Where’s the same adulation for an artist like Doja Cat who, while using a well known and trite sample, shocking outfits and wigs, and body-popping moves, blows Gaga out of the water in terms of ingenuity?

  • A simple PHP mailer plugin for WordPress sites and hosted Exchange accounts

    A simple PHP mailer plugin for WordPress sites and hosted Exchange accounts

    For some reason, it is prohibitively costly to enable a WordPress site to be able to send outgoing email via SMTP.

    Not only do you need to pay your email provider, but the makers of plugins also want annual subscriptions, and some mail providers restrict allowing web apps to authenticate via SMTP.

    Guided by Copilot in GitHub, I created a very lightweight plugin with a settings page, to store the username and password in the settings API as opposed to published code.

    It requires some lines to be added to wp_config.php and it reminded me to secure the access to that file.