Tidbits from Brian - Issue #25
I forgot how exhausting/stressful moving is. 🚚
Growing up as a PK (pastor’s kid), we moved around a lot and were never in one place for more than a few years. We bounced from state to state. At the time, it wasn’t fun, always leaving friends behind and starting new schools. But looking back now, it’s cool that I got to experience so many different places - from the start of the Mississippi River to a city on the Oregon Trail. 🛶🚵♂️
An opportunity came along to move earlier this month. I was hesitant at first, as I’ve been in the same spot now for 6+ years (the longest ever being in one place). But I decided to jump on it. So, if this newsletter is a little shorter than others, I apologize. I completely forgot how exhausting and stressful moving can be. For some reason, I thought it would be smart to do it during our business’s busiest time of the year. 😅
Also, I think I’m gonna need a bigger lamp. 💡
Updates ✍️
We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin since my last newsletter. Here are a few of the changes:
Added Delay JS quick exclusion for WPForms.
Script Manager UI style improvements and security updates to form submissions. 🔒
Added specification to lazyload exclusion to only skip the fetchpriority "high" attribute.
Added logic to strip whitespace from input row text fields.
Adjusted CDN Regex slightly for subdirectory formats.
Added Cornerstone request parameter to excluded page builders array.
Updated AJAX action names to prevent conflicts. 🔧
Updated missing image dimension function to better handle images prepped by third-party lazy loaders. 📐
Added Novashare discount link (one-time). This is an A/B test.
Fixed an issue where the database optimization process would not run correctly if selected toggles were not saved first.
Fixed an issue in MU Mode where core cookie constants were not set in a specific instance when checking for the current post ID. 🍪
We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin this month. Here are a few of the changes:
New Mastodon network for share/follow buttons. 🤳
New Threads network for follow buttons. 🧵
Updated Pinterest recommended image size in post meta options.
Fixed an issue where the share window call to action was printing twice when set to a custom string.
Fixed a PHP warning from meta.php that was showing up on the comment edit screen.
Updated the Novashare Migrator to work with the latest AJAX changes to the settings UI.
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Record every word you say. But it's OK, it's private by design. 🤔 It's scary how much people don't care about data privacy these days.
Google begins prompting users to create passwordless passkeys by default. Have you dove into passkeys yet?
According to Paul Krugman, we’ve beat inflation. If you exclude food, energy, housing, and cars. 🤦
Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal has been approved by UK regulators. This is big news if you’re an Xbox player.
IRS will pilot free, direct tax filing in 2024. This could get interesting.
WordPress
WordPress is never without its drama. They’ve reverted the live preview button plugins after developer backlash.
Forms are coming to WordPress core? This was news to me. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.
Love this question from Katie for those in the WordPress space. How do you describe what you do to your friends and family? Here’s my response.
Have to give a shout-out to Manoj, who wrote up a great review of our Novashare social sharing plugin.
As of WordPress 6.4, attachment pages for new WordPress installations are fully disabled. Best change in a long time!
Speaking of WordPress 6.4, check out Carlo’s in-depth dive into all the changes coming.
Fun fact: 51.4% of WordPress users run it in a non-English language. 🗺️ See the stats.
WordPress.com owner buys all-in-one messaging app Texts.com for $50M.
Preview WordPress core pull requests with Playground. This is pretty cool!
iThemes’ evolution to SolidWP is complete. I personally think this was a smart rebranding play. iThemes services and marketing was always a little confusing.
Performance
Cloudflare Turnstile is now generally available! We use this on our contact pages and love it. Fluent Forms has an easy integration.
High-Performance Order Storage is here with WooCommerce 8.2.0. ⚡
WordPress contributors speed up Twenty Twenty-Four default theme performance by 40%. I'm always happy to see things like this being worked on.
Kinsta has launched free static site hosting with a bunch of features in the roadmap for it. I’m sure they would appreciate an upvote if this is interesting to you.
Marketing
X has now removed link previews, which can be a little confusing. This tip from Alex might be a good thing to try.
Threads now has an edit button. Honestly, I’m impressed at how fast they are pushing out new features.
We use Fathom for analytics on all of our sites. They just released dynamic events. Meaning you can now send any events without having to create them inside Fathom.
Chrome plans to disable third-party cookies for 1% of users from Q1 2024 to facilitate testing, and then ramp up to 100% of users from Q3 2024.
I have three invite codes for Bluesky. First come, first serve.
bsky-social-myr45-wjuyf
bsky-social-vpppt-xbobs
bsky-social-o5pdb-l6uiv
Snagit 2024 is here! It’s still one of my most used apps. It comes with new features like highlighting your cursor, animating each click, and stitching multiple videos together.
Atlassian to acquire Loom for $975M. This makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re already in their ecosystem using Trello, Confluence, Jira, etc.
AI
Had a great chat with Matt Medeiros on The WP Minute podcast about the impact of AI on content marketing.
AI is hot right now. 🔥 I also joined the WP-Tonic podcast to discuss the same topic.
How does Adobe released Firefly 2 compare to Midjourney and DALL-E 3? Here’s an awesome thread.
Google’s AI-powered search experience can now generate images. You can sign up here. Check out my first creation.
Bitcoin (not financial advice)
An excellent report from Fidelity Digital Assets on why investors need to consider bitcoin separately from other digital assets.
Think no development is happening in the bitcoin space? Here’s a screenshot of 179 companies building on the lightning network.
Any computable function can be verified on bitcoin. Introducing BitVM. Wow, this is getting interesting.
The first mainnet release of Taproot Assets is here! Developers can now issue financial assets on-chain in a scalable manner.
Most bitcoin price charts show growth or volatility. Check out this chart, which lets you see both growth and volatility together.
There were some amazing presentations at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023. It's definitely worth a listen if you have time.
Strike users can now pay 0-value Lightning invoices. Epic!
Swan and Blockstream unveil a new collaborative custody service to allow users to retain control of their bitcoin while knowing that it is stored in a highly secure way.
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋