Tidbits from Brian - Issue #27
Happy 2024! 🥂
I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas (if you celebrate it)! 🎄 Can you believe that we’re already about to enter 2024? It feels like this year has flown by in the blink of an eye. Due to the holidays, I'm going to keep this intro short and dive right into the good stuff. There’s quite a bit that happened in December.
Updates ✍️
We pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
Added support for Social Snap to our Novashare migrator tool. We now support migrations from three different social plugins. And more are coming!
Added input placeholder values for text fields in the analytics settings section.
Updated Threads follow link UI behavior to expect a full URL instead of just a username to match other networks. If you have an existing Threads follow button placed on your site, you will need to update the link value.
Fixed an issue where click to post theme and CTA position settings could not be set to a default value at the block level if a global value was already set.
Added Perfmatters discount link to plugin settings UI for Novashare customers.
Fixed an issue where click to post inline styles would not print correctly in some cases.
It's always sad as a business owner to retire something, but it was time. 🙁
We've phased out active development on our WP Coupons plugin. This will allow us to dedicate more time to our Perfmatters and Novashare plugins. More info here.
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Roam is an interesting new service in the US that allows homebuyers to take over an existing mortgage rate when purchasing a house. 🏠
Mimestream got a big update this month! It’s still my favorite Gmail email client, which I use daily.
Amazon Prime Video is now going to show ads unless you pay extra to remove them. Boo!
If you’re moving to or within the US, Movemap is awesome. It’s a graphical map that overlays living costs, crime rates, school ratings, weather, etc., in each state.
Here is my Replay 2023. 27,294 minutes of music played, pretty much all synthwave. You can also listen to my Replay playlist.
The Light No Fire game looks amazing! I’m not a huge gamer, but looking forward to trying this one.
Don’t like the new rounded/floating tabs in the Chrome update? You can still revert back for the time being.
WordPress
Crew HRM is a new job board plugin for WordPress. It looks promising, and I love the design of their site. They are waiting to get repository approval (which is very backlogged at the moment).
Gravatar got more shiny updates. I feel like nothing changed with it for a decade, and now it’s getting a lot of attention. 💎
WPfounders celebrates the 100 interview mark with advice from WordPress founders. You can check out my interview.
I always appreciate Spencer Forman because he tells it how it is, no sugar coating. He had an interesting dialogue with Matt Mullenweg about the future of WordPress. And one with Syed Balkhi.
Starting on January 15th, 2024, Bricks is raising their prices. I think this makes sense. I always like helping clients using Bricks; they are doing some great stuff!
Pippin Williamson is someone I followed closely until he exited the space. I enjoyed this podcast from The WP Minute with him on life after WordPress, selling the business, and beer. 🍺
Our Perfmatters plugin came in 2nd place in the performance category for The WP Awards 2023. We appreciate everyone who voted!
If you build a lot of sites with GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, I recommend checking out Mike Oliver’s Website Builders Collective.
In case you missed it, State of the Word 2023. I chuckled when I heard Matt talking about changing admin notices to stop plugin developers from spamming. 😁 Looking forward to a unified notification system. I know folks are working on this.
The developer resources area on WordPress.org got a makeover. It’s looking good!
Performance
Cloudflare is upgrading to bigger, better, and cooler servers in 2024.
The mobile-friendly test tool and report are finally dead. 🪦
Happy to say the team over at BigScoots is doing an amazing job! Their WPO plan, in combination with our Perfmatters plugin, is a great option if you need serious performance. 🔥
Kinsta’s annual PHP benchmarks are out. While PHP 8.3 isn’t a huge jump over previous versions, it’s still a free boost. Clocking in at 13.42% faster than PHP 7.4 and 6.96% faster than PHP 8.2.
Would love to see more optimizations done at the browser level, for example, image optimization. Check this out! One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.
Some interesting stats. WordPress shares Core Web Vitals in 2023 and their impact on the web.
Kinsta is moving folks from C2 servers to C3D servers for free (where available). These things are powerful, handling 6x the resources and showing anywhere from 20% to 50% faster response times!
GoDaddy introduced PHP long-term support for their managed hosting customers. From a performance and developer perspective, I'm not a fan of this.
Marketing
Reddit got a makeover. New logo, colors, typeface, and more.
Google will turn off third-party tracking for Chrome users soon. 🍪 So what happens to affiliate programs? Short answer: nothing. The reason is that many of these are using first-party cookies. Affiliate has a good post with more info.
I have five invite codes for Bluesky. First come, first serve.
bsky-social-x2s2w-acdg2
bsky-social-kgokp-v5ppp
bsky-social-dt6eu-p7qyl
bsky-social-mfqug-cp4gd
bsky-social-m6vpj-zl6vb
AI
Microsoft Copilot is now available as a ChatGPT-like app on Android. You can also access it via their new dedicated website: copilot.microsoft.com
Bard got its biggest upgrade yet with Gemini for more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding, and more.
Bitcoin (not financial advice)
An interesting new peer-reviewed piece on bitcoin and its energy, environmental, and social impacts.
Another peer-reviewed piece on leveraging bitcoin miners as flexible load resources for power system stability and efficiency.
Google updates its crypto ad policy ahead of possible bitcoin ETF approvals.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey lead a $6.2 million investment round in a decentralized bitcoin mining pool (Ocean).
DEMAND has launched the world’s first Stratum v2 bitcoin mining pool.
Strike users can now send bitcoin, fiat, or stablecoins to other Lightning addresses. This is awesome!
River launched River Link. Text bitcoin to anyone, anywhere, any wallet. Pretty cool.
FASB has officially adopted Fair Value Accounting for bitcoin for fiscal years beginning after Dec 15, 2024. This is a big deal!
Check out what the team at zaprite is doing! Really cool stuff. Think Stripe, but for bitcoin. Self-custody and lightning with 0% transaction fees.
The Bitkey self-custody wallet is now available for pre-orders in 95+ countries across 6 continents.
Don’t think there is a lot happening in bitcoin? Check out this list of 70+ conferences and events for 2024.
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋