It’s becoming increasingly clear that online retailers are losing out on billions of dollars in revenue because their websites don’t meet the needs of disabled shoppers. Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of disabled online customers click away from sites they find difficult to use, despite the total spending power of this market in the UK hitting £17.1bn [$23.3 billion USD].

This isn’t something that will just automatically improve as technology advances. In fact, the problem has become worse in recent years, as businesses shift to digital it exacerbates the difficulties that many people have.

It make take awhile but when I make a mistake I will eventually admit and correct the error of my ways. Half a decade ago, I turned my back on supporting niche websites and focused all my effort in creating a new multi-topic website which you now know as socPub. As counter-intuitive that it sounds, the more diverse and interesting topics we published under this website, our number of loyal visitors to the website decreased in numbers. I found this analysis to be alarming and discouraging.

Every year industry pundits predict data and analytics becoming more valuable the following year. But this doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict. There’s actually something much more interesting happening that’s going to change everything in the analytics world: the rise of a new hero, the software developer.

If the past is any indication of the future, then what we are seeing is a major transformation unfolding across every industry: a changing of the guard, so to speak, of the ones who are creating value from data.

The third feature release of Drupal 9 recently became available. New features and improvements in Drupal 9.3.0 include:

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively as I hide away in my home office for "me time". Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic changed all that with my day job requiring maximum telework which in turn transformed my creative personal space into a remote office that work owned eight hours a day. For my mental and physical health, once those work hours are up I have made the conscious decision to walk away from the computer. I now find it more necessary to find something else to do that doesn't involve screen time. This shift in priorities unfortunately reduced my writing time.