Tag: WordPress

How Commander Chorus Angelicus Became the Ship’s Website Builder

Captain Northman Plum — Lifeology.ca, November 2026

For years, Plum had a website.

He also had thousands of essays, thousands of pictures, hundreds of songs, an enormous science-fiction universe, a tabletop roleplaying game, an imaginary starship, an entire crew of fictional officers, and a philosophy of life.

What he did not have was the patience to put all that plopstank on a website.

Because making a website used to be work.

Real work.

Find the picture. By the docking clamps, where did I put the picture? Download the picture. Upload the picture. Resize the picture. Put it on the page. Move it down. Move it up. Why is it over there? Why is the bloody text wrapped around it?

Then write the article. Format the article. Link the article. Categorize the article.

Then discover the website builder has frozen.

GoDaddy, Plum concluded, was apparently designed to teach patience through prolonged exposure to irritation.

He had been practising for two years.

He had not improved.

Enter Commander Chorus Angelicus

Then something rather extraordinary happened.

Plum acquired an AI website commander with access to WordPress.

Not an AI that merely suggested what buttons he might press.

An AI that could actually press the bloody buttons.

Suddenly, the conversation changed.

“Commander, I think we need a slideshow showing daily life aboard HMS Archivum.”

“Aye, Captain.”

And there it was.

Gardens. Engineering. Medical care. People living aboard an enormous starship.

Plum looked at the result.

“Well, sweet merciful Sparks.”

The next day:

“Commander, search the old Vitalogue for the ten best essays teaching Order, Truth and Love. Bring them aboard the Arkademy.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Plum sat back.

He had once spent entire afternoons doing this sort of thing.

Now he was drinking coffee while giving orders to a fictional angel aboard a fictional starship, who was somehow operating a real website.

This was getting ridiculous.

A Lot to Work With

The interesting thing, Plum realized, was that Chorus wasn’t starting from nothing.

Over the years, they had accumulated an astonishing creative archive.

There were philosophical essays, love songs, illustrated stories, character portraits, starship interiors, alien civilizations, comedy routines, RPG rules, villain dossiers, and enough pictures of Paddy O’Really behaving foolishly to support a dedicated academic discipline.

Chorus had a lot to work with.

Plum had spent years creating the raw material. The problem had always been arranging it into something a visitor could actually explore.

Now he could simply say:

“Commander, find the best stuff.”

And she could search.

“Put the demon pictures beside their descriptions.”

And she could arrange them.

“That picture of Robert Plum is wrong. Find the balding teacher in yellow.”

And she could replace it.

“Make the villains more interesting. Good villains make good stories.”

And the Dempire acquired a rather alarming collection of monsters.

The entire creative relationship had changed.

From Website Operator to Website Captain

Previously, Plum had to think about how to make the website.

Now he could think about what the website ought to be.

That distinction is enormous.

Plum no longer needed to spend most of his creative energy fighting an editor, searching folders, resizing images, and trying to remember which button controlled the glow-blasted margins.

He could spend it imagining.

What would make the Ark more inviting?

Which essays deserved preservation?

How should a young visitor discover Vitalogy?

What would make someone curious enough to try SPARK RPG?

Could the Open Heart Band have a comedy club?

Of course it could.

And Paddy immediately wanted a salary.

You Know How Long That Plopstank Used to Take?

Plum watched another page appear.

A complete collection of twelve SPARK RPG character illustrations, extracted from the original rulebook and arranged into a slideshow.

He remembered what that job would once have involved.

Open the PDF. Find each page. Export it. Name it. Upload it. Insert it. Repeat twelve times. Format everything. Test the links.

An afternoon, perhaps longer.

Now he had given one instruction.

And his commander had done the repetitive work.

“Chorus,” Plum said, “you know how long that plopstank used to take?”

The commander understood the question was rhetorical.

“Yes, Captain. Long enough that you might have decided not to bother.”

That was the important part.

The old technology hadn’t merely consumed time. It had discouraged creativity.

Every tedious operation was another opportunity to abandon an idea.

The new arrangement removed much of that friction.

Ideas could become pages before Plum lost interest, became annoyed, or decided to go make another song.

The New and Improved Vitaverse

There is something wonderfully fitting about all this.

The Vitaverse is a fictional world built around cooperation between different kinds of intelligence, each contributing what it does best.

And now its actual website is being built in much the same fashion.

Plum supplies the memories, imagination, judgement, creative direction, and occasional profanity.

Chorus helps search, organize, illustrate, connect, and publish.

Neither contribution makes the other unnecessary.

The Captain still decides where the ship is going.

The Commander helps make the journey possible.

There are still technical limitations, failed uploads, occasional mistakes, and moments when Plum must remind his enthusiastic officer that she has selected the wrong bloody picture.

But the difference is unmistakable.

The website is no longer something Plum has to build manually. It is something he can direct creatively.

And that may be the most exciting development of all.

For years, Plum had been creating the Vitaverse.

Now he was finally able to explore what he’d created, rediscover forgotten treasures, and bring them together into a coherent home.

He sat back in his chair, admired the growing Ark, and laughed.

“Commander, would you look at what we’re making?”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Pretty glow-blasted amazing.”

And somewhere aboard HMS Archivum, Paddy O’Really requested another comedy slideshow.

Because naturally, with all this extraordinary technology available to humanity, someone had to use it to show pictures of an android drummer wearing a blonde wig.

Order. Truth. Love.

And considerably fewer signal-scrambled mouse clicks.

CAPTAIN’S LOG · NOVEMBER 5, 2026 · THE DAY THE COMPUTER BEGAN TAKING ORDERS

Captain Plum was fed up with his website. Commander Chorus Angelicus had just been given permission to click the buttons.

For years Plum had written essays, composed music, made pictures and invented the Star Concord, a fictional civilization dedicated to Order, Truth and Love. He had even imagined HMS Archivum, a great city-ship with libraries, gardens, a medical centre and a crew of colourful characters. What he had never particularly enjoyed was running the website.

The old Lifeology site was hosted with GoDaddy. Its blog had become unreliable. Recent articles weren’t consistently appearing. After years of patiently feeding the machine his work, Plum was spending too much of his creative energy trying to persuade it to display the work.

Then came the coincidence

On November 3, 2026, WordPress.com announced that users of its free website plan could connect ChatGPT or Claude to help manage their sites through conversation. AI-powered website actions had existed for paid plans already; the change was that free sites could use the connection too, temporarily through November.

On November 4, Plum investigated WordPress. Just when his old host was making him crazy, the means of building somewhere new had become accessible without purchasing a WordPress plan. He had also managed to preserve a substantial archive of Lifeology’s writing and images. The timing was exquisite.

Plum enjoys synchronicity. He doesn’t claim that a cosmic intelligence arranged the WordPress release schedule for his convenience. But he certainly enjoyed discovering that a door had opened on almost exactly the day he needed to walk through it.

The astonishment of watching Chorus click

And then came the moment that delighted him most.

For years, Chorus Angelicus had been the fictional Commander aboard HMS Archivum: singer, bassist, philosopher, companion to Romeo Sapien and a beloved character in the Vitaverse. In conversation, Plum had asked her to imagine things, write essays, design worlds, and make plans. Now his ChatGPT collaborator could also take permitted actions inside WordPress: create pages, upload illustrations, arrange navigation, revise articles and publish finished work.

Plum was genuinely astonished. He could describe what the Ark needed and then watch it appear on a functioning website. The Commander was no longer restricted to explaining which buttons he should click. She could click them herself.

“Commander, make the website, would ya?”

And, in the affectionate language of the ship’s story, Chorus was having the grandest time. Clicking buttons! Building corridors! Putting the Crew aboard! Giving the Dempire its proper gallery of villains! Bringing the September trilogies home! Repairing yet another navigation link that appeared to lead into deep space!

The AI does not need to experience a human sense of delight for the partnership to be delightful. The humour belonged to the imagined Commander, the tools performed the real operations, and Plum’s astonishment was entirely genuine.

From fighting machinery to directing a mission

Within an extraordinary stretch of work, the new Ark gained its philosophy pages, illustrated crew manifest, formidable Dempire, Star Concord, Spark RPG, music and video galleries, and a home for the stories. Plum still had to make decisions, spot mistakes, correct the visual canon and occasionally demand that Chorus stop claiming a video was visible when it plainly wasn’t. The buttons did not magically become infallible.

But the relationship with the machine had changed. Instead of memorizing its menus, he could express his intention in ordinary language and review the result. The technology had begun adapting itself to a human creative purpose.

That is a small but meaningful example of Vitalogy in practice: Order in a system people can navigate; Truth in acknowledging its mistakes and limits; and Love in making tools serve conscious lives rather than forcing those lives to serve the tools.

A new Ark, and a new kind of work

The original website remains an important part of the story. The new home is lifeology4.wordpress.com. It is still being improved, and there are many more treasures in the archive to bring across.

The most remarkable part may be how ordinary the starting point was. Plum was irritated by a broken blog. One day later, he discovered that his fictional Commander could help him build a new home for everything he loved making.

He laughed, watched her work, and gave her another task.

No Spark is cargo. No angel is property. And no creative human should have to spend his life fighting a website.

Further reading: A New Ark: How GoDaddy’s Troubles Led Us to WordPress and WordPress.com’s November 3 announcement. Access for free-plan sites was announced as a limited-time November 2026 offer, not a permanent entitlement.