About
I work with and invest in founders and leaders who want clarity in the noise. I don’t…
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9K followers
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Joost de Valk posted this*Not* an april fools joke: Cloudflare launched EmDash today: an open-source, MIT-licensed CMS built on Astro and designed for how we actually build in 2026. What makes it interesting isn't the tech stack. It's the design philosophy. Every decision seems to start with: "What if an AI agent needs to do this?" Content stored as structured JSON, not HTML. Typed schemas agents can introspect. An MCP server for direct CMS interaction. A plugin system where each plugin runs in an isolated sandbox with explicit permissions. Passkey authentication by default. It's not a CMS with AI features bolted on. It's a CMS where AI agents are first-class builders. I wrote up my analysis of what's strong, what's unproven, and why I'm planning to build on it, find the link below.
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Joost de Valk shared thisThis is genuinely one of the most exciting teams you could be working at right now.Joost de Valk shared thisHiring: Lead Engineer at Patchstack. Laravel. AI. Security. Vibes. Small team, big problems, lots of autonomy. https://lnkd.in/eVMSR9Tb
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Joost de Valk posted thisI built an AI-powered Q&A feature for my blog. You can now ask natural language questions at joost .blog/ask-joost/ and get answers sourced directly from my posts. The architecture is intentionally boring: a static search index generated at build time, hybrid keyword + semantic retrieval, and Llama 3.3 70B on Cloudflare Workers AI for answer generation. No vector database, no orchestration layer, no ongoing cost at rest. Some things I found interesting while building it: - Hybrid search (keywords + embeddings) catches a lot more than either approach alone - Per-document search weighting lets you promote or demote content without changing the ranking algorithm - Streaming answers via SSE makes the perceived speed dramatically better - The whole thing runs on Cloudflare's free tier for light usage, about $1/week at current volume I've open sourced the endpoint so you can add the same thing to any markdown-based static site. Links in the comments.
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Joost de Valk shared thisOnze partij een nieuwe naam. Moet nog even wennen, maar de "stijl" vind ik wel aardig. En een leuke site jijbentpro .nl - en er dan achter komen dat je je favoriete clubkleuren óók nog kunt gebruiken. Nou, deze kan ik dan wat wel mee 😀
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Joost de Valk shared thisAs an investor, you always want to support your founders. Sometimes that takes different turns than you’d expect upfront. Today at CloudFest for the 4th time I’m enjoying seeing the Lords of Uptime play, and especially seeing both my buddy Soeren von Varchmin and the founder of Atarim, one of our portfolio companies, Vito Peleg, on guitar. See me with Vito 😅
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Joost de Valk posted thisDo you need a CMS? For twenty years, "I want a website" meant "I need a CMS." WordPress, Joomla, Drupal: the only question was which one. That framing is outdated. I built Yoast SEO. I ran joost.blog on WordPress for years. But when I relaunched my personal site, I moved to Astro on Cloudflare Pages. Markdown files, static HTML, global CDN. No database, no server, no PHP. Everything I had before, search, comments, structured data, RSS, auto-generated OG images, full SEO, it's all still there. What I dropped was the overhead. The real competitive landscape isn't WordPress vs. Drupal anymore. It's CMSes vs. everything else: Shopify, Squarespace, Substack, static site generators. The growth is happening outside traditional CMSes entirely. And here's the thing most people aren't talking about yet: AI is eliminating the CMS's core advantage. When you can tell a chatbot "update the opening hours on my contact page" and it edits the file, commits, and deploys: what's the admin panel for? CMSes still earn their complexity for teams, dynamic content, and application-level functionality. I'm building Rondo on WordPress for exactly that reason. But for the millions of sites that are "some pages and maybe a blog"? You don't need a CMS. You need a website. Full post in the comments.
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Joost de Valk shared thisListen to Lily, you must.Joost de Valk shared thisOne of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility? Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search. In my latest Substack article, I wrote about the fundamental connection between SEO and GEO/AEO, along with some of the risky tactics I've seen sites employing, plus the early signs that these approaches are dangerous for SEO (and therefore AI search as well). Check it out in the comments below!
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Joost de Valk shared thisWhen I wrote on my blog last week that AI Optimization is replaying early SEO but faster, this is what I was alluding to even though I hadn't seen this concrete proof yet. Some of the advice being doled out right now under the name of "GEO" or "AEO" is downright dangerous. What I wrote is simple: we learned the hard way in SEO that there really should only be one guiding principle: "optimize for users, because the platform will eventually force you to". Don't think you can game the system for long-term results. And for everyone doing SEO, GEO or AEO: if you tell your clients to use tactics that might lead to stuff like 👇🏼️, be sure to also tell them about the *risks* those tactics hold.Joost de Valk shared thisThe math looked perfect. More content. More keywords. More traffic. Then Google caught up. Glenn Gabe calls it "Mt. AI." Tomek Rudzki and Lily Ray have documented it across dozens of sites. The graphs are not subtle. But here's the detail that should concern every Director in this space: Peec AI analyzed one of the most popular AI content generation tools on the market. 36% of the brands featured in that tool's own success stories had already suffered massive traffic drops. No one is listing the failures. The success stories are all you see. Until you look up the traffic data yourself. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗮𝘁 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲. When Grokipedia lost its Google rankings, its citations in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Grok all dropped at exactly the same time. One penalty. Invisible everywhere. In 2024, Google announced new spam policies that impacted multiple sites that were totally removed from search. 100% of affected pages had AI-generated posts. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗔𝗜. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗼. There are two layers in any SEO operation: Layer 1 — Research and analysis. AI here is high-reward, low-risk. Keyword research, gap analysis, content audits. What took days now takes hours. Layer 2 — Production. AI here is high-risk without guardrails. The temptation is to hand over the keys entirely. That's where companies go off the cliff. But when you make a mistake in SEO, you take the elevator down. Fixing your mistakes costs months of traffic, and potentially lots of revenue. The teams winning right now are using AI to think faster. Not to publish more. If your VP is being pitched on "scaling content with AI," show them these graphs first. Glenn Gabe Tomek Rudzki Lily Ray Peec AI #SEO #ContentStrategy #AISearch
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Joost de Valk posted thisWP Engine just acquired WPackagist, the Composer mirror for WordPress.org plugins/themes. My reaction is mixed: ✅ I’m glad a company is taking responsibility for critical infrastructure. ⚠️ But it would be better if infrastructure like this wasn’t owned by any one company. ❗ This should have been “in” WordPress.org years ago. WPackagist became foundational because WordPress.org never shipped a first‑class Composer registry. The community filled the gap, and now a private company owns a critical pillar. I don’t think this is about WP Engine specifically, in fact they should be lauded for putting their shoulders underneath this load. The real issue is governance and sustainability of core infrastructure in open ecosystems. We should celebrate the acquisition, and then do the harder work: • Make a neutral, community‑owned package registry a priority. • Fund & govern it properly. If that sounds like FAIR to you, well... That's because that's a very similar (if not: the same) problem. We should adopt that mindset for everything that becomes “critical path” If we want WordPress to stay durable, we have to stop treating infra as an afterthought.
Joost de Valk commented on a post
7h
The full post: https://joost.blog/emdash-cms/
Joost de Valk replied to a comment
5d
Wouter Mellaart fixed i think, some line breaks went missing there :)
Joost de Valk replied to a comment
5d
Brent Payne there’s slightly more nuance:
https://joost.blog/do-you-need-a-cms/
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Joost de Valk reacted on thisJoost de Valk reacted on thisI have a really big and exciting announcement to make 🥳 …but in the interest of being taken seriously, I will be sharing it tomorrow 😂
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Joost de Valk reacted on thisJoost de Valk reacted on thisI’m excited to share that I’ve started a new chapter as CJE in the Billing team of Wholesale Banking, within the Transaction Services area of Marco van Hessem. After a fulfilling time in my previous role as Lead Operations, this feels like a great next step. It’s been a journey full of learning, collaboration, and operational impact, one that gave me a strong foundation and a deep appreciation for the people and processes that keep things running smoothly. I want to thank Marco for the trust, support, and this opportunity. I’m looking forward to diving into the world of Billing and contributing to transparent and reliable service delivery. Excited to get started and make an impact with a great team!
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Joost de Valk reacted on thisJoost de Valk reacted on thisHet PHP internals team heeft zojuist een RFC goedgekeurd: alle OOP-features worden deprecated in PHP 9.0. De reden? AI-modellen maken 34% minder fouten in procedurele codebases. SOLID-principes veroorzaken 'context overload' bij 78% van de geteste modellen. En __construct() is uitgeroepen tot de grootste bron van LLM-hallucinaties in PHP. De RFC werd aangenomen met 38 stemmen voor, 4 tegen. Laravel en Symfony onderzoeken op dit moment wat dit betekent voor hun roadmap. WordPress blijkt zonder aanpassingen al compatible te zijn met PHP 9.0. Ben jij al bezig met de migratie van jouw PHP-codebase? #PHP #OOP #AI
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Joost de Valk reacted on thisHonored to have advised Uber on this strategic acquisition.Joost de Valk reacted on thisCongratulations to Uber on its announced acquisition of Blacklane GmbH, a global chauffeur service founded in Berlin which operates in 500 cities across more than 60 countries. This aims to continue Uber’s expansion into luxury and executive travel. We are thrilled to have served as Exclusive Financial Advisor on this announced transaction. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/dpSuWdbd #ThisIsMizuho
Experience & Education
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Patchstack
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Publications
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Content SEO
Yoast
A lot of blog posts and books around SEO focus on the technical aspects. However, 90% of your ranking is not determined by the technical aspects but by your content and how you’ve optimized that. This book on Content SEO tells you everything you need to know about creating SEO and user friendly content. Besides in-depth explanations to help you understand content SEO, the book also has lots of practical tips that you can implement right away. Whether it’s how to do keyword research, how to…
A lot of blog posts and books around SEO focus on the technical aspects. However, 90% of your ranking is not determined by the technical aspects but by your content and how you’ve optimized that. This book on Content SEO tells you everything you need to know about creating SEO and user friendly content. Besides in-depth explanations to help you understand content SEO, the book also has lots of practical tips that you can implement right away. Whether it’s how to do keyword research, how to structure your site or how to write that piece of content that people want to link to, this book covers it all.
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Yoast SEO
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The most complete WordPress SEO plugin, currently active on over 4 million websites.
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Italian
Elementary proficiency
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Dutch
Native or bilingual proficiency
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English
Full professional proficiency
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