Richard MacManus

Wow… I voted yes. @evan@cosocial.ca

It turns out job-hunting and/or figuring out what's next in terms of an income...well it's more work than my previous day job! The bad news if you sometimes click on my links: Cybercultural isn't being updated as regularly now :( Sorry about that... The good news (depends on your interests tho) is that my personal website is rocking with new posts, new design, and more. If you're interested in the intersection of open web and AI, you might like to read my latest: https://ricmac.org/2026/03/11/webmcp-ai-agents-interact-website/

I experimented with WebMCP on my personal website, exposing two tools an AI assistant can call directly from the browser: searching an article and subscribing to my newsletter. It’s a small prototype, but it hints at how websites are fast becoming AI-interactive surfaces. https://ricmac.org/2026/03/11/webmcp-ai-agents-interact-website/ #WebAI #WebMCP #WordPress

As part of my #WebAI explorations, I've built an AI chatbot for my personal website called Ask Ricmac. Under the hood, it runs on a Cloudflare Workers backend that uses Vectorize, D1 and Workers AI. During development, I also used the WordPress MCP Adapter and Claude Desktop. In this post I explain how these pieces fit together and the role each one plays. https://ricmac.org/2026/03/06/building-ask-ricmac-my-first-experiment-in-the-web-ai-stack/

In the latest post in my web design history series, I look at Batman Forever, an influential 1995 website by @zeldman@front-end.social and friends. Also, later in the year HTML tables arrive, along with early visual design tools FrontPage and PageMill. https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-web-design/ #WebDesignHistory

Awesome! https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-new-share-button/

No surprises on which company is the focus of this article (the current owner of ReadWrite). Sadly, this cynical strategy of replacing human writers with AI will likely start happening to other well-known media publications too. Yet another reason to get behind indie web publishers and ethically aligned *human-centered* open social protocols like ActivityPub. https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/staff-journalists-sacked-and-misleadingly-replaced-with-ai-writers/

In 1993, web design didn't really exist — you couldn't even change the background color of your web page from grey. But Mosaic launched the first era of visual web design with the IMG tag, and soon after an MTV VJ (@adam@podcastindex.social) improbably created one of the first commercial websites. https://cybercultural.com/p/1993-mtv-internet/ #WebDesignHistory

Humour me with this poll. If you're a LinkedIn user, do you habitually put your hyperlinks in the first comment?

My final post for the year on @TheNewStack@hachyderm.io is a wrapup of the leading #webdev trends of 2024:

“The year in web development was characterized by a return to simpler ways of building a website or web application. Partly this was a reaction against the increasing complexity of JavaScript frameworks — especially React-based frameworks. Simpler options like Astro and Eleventy became more popular over 2024 […]” https://thenewstack.io/web-development-trends-in-2024-a-shift-back-to-simplicity/