DGW.LTD · RICH HOLMAN
Design, engineering and strategy for modern web systems.
I’m Rich. Twenty-five years building things on the web — accessible, shippable, and increasingly readable by language models as well as people.
Writing
Showing the working.
Thoughts and notes on building (mostly WordPress) websites, the agentic web and AI.
Fifty Years, Same Argument
Papanek in 1971. Seddon in 2008. The web, right now. One argument about who our systems actually serve – told in three parts.
The archive
Everything else, roughly in order.
Shipped
Markdown my words
Markdown for Agents and Statistics is now a WordPress.org plugin – pre-generated `.md` files served to AI crawlers via content negotiation, with stats on who's actually reading.
Critique
Press 1 for the schema
Accessibility errors on the top million home pages went up 10.1% this year – the first rise in six, with AI-assisted coding named as a cause – just as the industry rolls out WebMCP, a new way for AI agents to act on websites without anyone fixing what's underneath.
Experiment
The shadow copy was the wrong layer
On building two plugins to make content agent-readable, and discovering the fix was to delete them.
Thoughts
Draw me like one of your JSON files
Claude Design shipped an official sync tool this week for keeping a design system and its code in step. It's built for React; mine is theme.json and server-rendered PHP, so I built the bridge myself. But that's not the point – the tooling tried to get me to use a framework I didn't want or need.
Standard bearer
ATmosphere auto-themes its Bluesky publication card from theme.json. It couldn't read mine, because my colours are `light-dark()` and there's no single value to pull out.
Review
Do androids dream of robots.txt?
Cloudflare's agent-readiness scanner gave dgw.ltd nine red crosses. I fixed one of them – and I'd argue seven of the rest are someone else's idea of "ready"
Experiment
Local hero
A plugin that generates excerpts with a local Ollama model, then ships them to prod as one-way NDJSON syncs. No API key on production, no surprise £100 bill, and a dry-run before anything writes.
Essay
Pixel Pushing, Redux
Claude Design dropped on a Friday. I played. This site redesign is the result – some time over the weekend, £23.84, and a lot of thoughts about design systems, source of truth, and whether the tension between design and engineering has really gone anywhere.
Experiment
Narrator voice
I saw this post from Ben Goldacre a while back about enabling people to make radio shows. So I built it.