Tidbits from Brian (Black Friday edition) - Issue #50
Living in a driverless future. 🚗
Last Halloween, I was running to get some food in the evening. I pulled up to a light, looked across, and there was a Waymo sitting next to me. No driver, and in the back seat, someone dressed as a polar bear. You can’t make this stuff up. 🐻❄️😂
Waymo launched its self-driving car program here in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area in 2018. Up until a few years ago, I would see maybe 1-2 Waymos per month. At that point, they were still a spectacle. People would drive very carefully when they got close, including me. The trust simply wasn’t there. But I also didn’t think much about it since I didn’t encounter them very often.
However, everything has changed recently. I can’t leave my home without seeing 2-3 Waymos per day. I’ve now driven alongside hundreds of Waymos. And they were just unleashed on the freeways this month. 🛣️ That’s right, we have self-driving cars here hopping on and off the freeway. The excitement and nervousness I used to get are now pretty much gone, and it’s becoming the new normal.
Next up is Tesla. They are launching their self-driving rental program here (they just got approval, first with a monitor). It’s like Turo, but the car comes to you. It seems like Arizona is one of the major testing grounds for these things, so I’ll let you know how it goes. 😅 Waymo is also launching in five new cities.
It’s still crazy to think how fast and far things have come. Growing up with dial-up internet and no cellphones, and now we have cars driving themselves around town, hopping on and off the freeway, and soon they will be leaving driveways on their own to pick people up. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Whether you like the idea of autonomous vehicles or not (I didn’t at first), they are probably coming to a city near you sooner than you think. Cities like mine are being used (as guinea pigs) to train the AI on thousands of data points every day, and this, in turn, makes it smarter and safer.
Black Friday deals on things I use 🏷️
Here are a few select deals on products and services I use and recommend checking out. 💥
Kinsta: There has never been a better time to migrate to better hosting. Get 50% off all hosting plans and free migration (Nov. 17 – Dec. 2).
Annual billing: 50% off in the first year.
Monthly billing: 50% off for the first 6 months.
First month free for Single 35k and WP 2 plans.
Existing clients can get 25% off or 3 months free when upgrading a plan.
Proton VPN: Up to 75% off, depending on the plan you choose (Oct. 27 – Nov. 30).
Snagit: 50% off (Dec. 1 – Dec. 2). This is what I use to take all of my screenshots. Discount code: CYBER50
InstaWP: 41% extra credits. Applies to purchases starting from $100 (Nov. 24 – Dec. 5). We utilize InstaWP every day for testing plugins/themes, sharing staging sites with clients to troubleshoot, etc. It’s an invaluable tool.
GeneratePress One: Save up to $50! This includes GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks (through Dec. 1). There is no better combination for performance when it comes to building and designing WordPress sites. And that’s why I use it on all of my sites.
Want to convert your existing site to GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, but don’t have the time? My friends at WP Boosters and OGAL Web Design can help.
WS Form: 30% off (Nov. 24 – Dec. 5). An excellent choice if you need more advanced workflows for your forms. We use WS Form on our ecommerce sites. Discount code: BF30
Mangools: 35% off all plans (Oct. 29 – Nov. 30). If you’re on a tight budget, Mangools is an excellent alternative to something like Ahrefs or Semrush.
Namecheap: Up to 97% off on domains (Nov. 21 – Dec. 5).
RightBlogger: 50% off the first year on new purchases and upgrades (Nov. 21 – Dec. 2).
If you’re bargain hunting, I compiled a larger list of Black Friday deals. Make sure to check it out.
You can also get 30% off new licenses and upgrades on our WordPress plugins (Perfmatters and Novashare) through Dec. 2nd. Discount code: BLACKFRIDAY
Updates ✍️
We pushed out a massive update this month for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin, something we’ve been working on behind the scenes for the past 6+ months.
You can now add code snippets in Perfmatters (PHP, CSS, JS, and HTML). We built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It uses a flat-file approach, which means it’s more secure and there are zero database calls on the front-end. In other words, it’s incredibly fast and won’t negatively impact page load times. ⚡
We took it a step further and made all the performance options you already use in Perfmatters available at the individual snippet level. Optimization features include loading snippets in a file or inline, minification, delay on user interaction, preloading, defer, async, and more. 🔥
Use our conditions builder to only load your code snippets where they are needed. 👷 There are an unlimited number of rules you can configure. Add includes, excludes, and even load by role or status (logged-in or logged-out).
It also has built-in error checking, meaning it’s not possible to break your site. If an error is detected with a snippet, it will automatically be deactivated. But we also have a robust Safe Mode just in case. 🦺 You can enable it via the settings, recovery URL, or a wp-config.php constant.
Note: This feature is currently in BETA. If you run into any issues, please reach out to us. We’re always eager to make improvements.
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Be careful with Amazon and Black Friday. Not everything is on sale, even though it might say 20-30% off. Use the free Keepa Chrome extension to view the price history for each product. You can even set notifications. It’s saved me quite a bit of money over the years.
Behind the complaints: The investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today. An intriguing read.
“Introducing iPhone pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone.” I literally have no words. 😂 A $150 sock seems like a strange move in today’s economy.
Brett and I use FaceTime a lot when we are working together. We both love using an app called SoundSource (highly recommend it). It’s basically an equalizer, so you can control the volume of music and apps separately. It has been really buggy since macOS Tahoe. But I can confirm their 5.8.10 update has resolved all the issues.
Amazon’s Starlink competitor is launching with the world’s fastest satellite internet antenna. 🛰️ I’m all for more competition. I hate my ISP.
Heads up, Spotify is planning a price increase for US subscribers.
WordPress
WordPress 6.9 is slated to be released next week. Carlo put together an in-depth list of all the changes/improvements. Here are a few that stand out:
Six new blocks: Accordion, term query, time to read, math, comment count, and comment link.
Block visibility control. I’ve actually needed this a few times.
PHP 8.5 support.
Commenting blocks with notes: This brings asynchronous collaboration to the editor. Pretty cool and a good first step towards a Google Doc alternative! 📝
Is an integration with WooCommerce and Wise coming soon? This would actually be pretty cool. Big fan of Wise.
Kinsta pushed out some awesome updates this month:
You can now access phpMyAdmin with a single click from the MyKinsta dashboard! It no longer requires a username/password. Sometimes it’s the little things. 👏
Speaking of logins, organizations can now manage access to the MyKinsta dashboard using single sign-on (SSO). This is great if your team is using a provider like Google Workspace.
The direct database manager has also been released out of beta. If you don’t like phpMyAdmin, you can now browse, query, and edit database contents directly within MyKinsta.
Marketing
Had a great chat with Lawrence on the WPBakery team! 🎙️ Some topics we discussed:
Content marketing and branding/visibility.
Is affiliate marketing more important now than ever?
How AI is shifting/changing the market.
Adobe is acquiring Semrush. This was kind of out of the blue. Seems to be purely an SEO/AI play for Adobe.
Performance
WordPress 6.9 to bring performance gains with fetchpriority support, increased inline CSS, and a new output buffer. Classic themes also benefit. For the first time, block styles will only be loaded when used. WP-Cron is also no longer spawned early, improving TTFB. ⚡
Introducing the Cloudways lightning stack – Up to 65% faster performance for dynamic websites. We work with a lot of Cloudways clients, so we’re excited to see more performance-focused options. If you’re hosting there, you might want to consider updating (after testing).
Check out this curated list of snippets to get web performance metrics as snippets on Chrome DevTools. 🔥 These are super handy, and now I’m obsessed with Chrome snippets.
Cloudflare published a post-mortem of the major outage that occurred on November 18, 2025.
Steve ran into a hosting issue when their plugin surpassed 5 MB. A friendly reminder that you usually get what you pay for when it comes to hosting. 🐌
PHP 8.5 was released on November 20th. Check out what’s new in PHP 8.5 in terms of performance, debugging, and operations. Many hosting providers are likely working to make this available. But I wouldn’t rush into a new PHP version over the holidays.
The European Commission wants browsers to manage cookie preferences instead of pop-ups on every website. I think everyone wants this to happen. Besides an instant UX improvement, this would also improve performance across the board. The cookie nightmare might be coming to an end. 🍪
Mohan Raj has put together an impressive post with WordPress hosting benchmarks that run 24/7, 365 days a year. Some interesting data points!
How quickly can Chrome parse HTML code? The difference between a MacBook and a mobile device is massive. This is why I’m always stressing the importance of HTML page size, and why it’s not always good to just inline everything.
We always love to see folks who write reviews of our Perfmatters plugin. WPBakery also published some TTFB stats with different page builders.
Why would a browser create a second connection to the same server, even though HTTP/2 can handle multiple requests on one connection? Matt answers it in this post.
GenerateBlocks is launching a carousel block. Kyle did a great overview of it. However, I’m torn on this. While I think users utilizing GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks will have faster sites (and some might migrate for this), I tested it, and the JS and CSS for the carousel is over 37 KB. 🤔
AI
Gemini 3 was released, and it’s amazing. 😮 My brother and I personally noticed some answers related to coding issues were significantly improved since the last model. ChatGPT 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 were also rolled out.
In a time where AI can generate code, design ideas, and occasionally plausible answers on demand, the need for human critical thinking is greater than ever.
Apple’s new Siri will be powered by Google Gemini. And just like that, Apple made up for years of lagging behind.
It begins. Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. 🚨
How to use AI via the terminal. Worth a watch if you prefer this type of workflow.
Replicate is joining Cloudflare. This will make tasks like running models on the edge much easier.
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋