Tidbits from Brian - Issue #33
My mental health is deeply tied to the weather. 🌧️☀️
Over the course of my life, I’ve come to realize that my emotions are deeply tied to the weather.
When I graduated from University in Washington state, I sold all my big belongings on Craigslist and drove to Arizona without a job lined up. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. For those of you who don’t know, many areas in Washington state get rain around 50% of the year. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. The rain, the cold, the gloomy clouds.
My mood and overall mental health seem to go hand in hand with the weather. If it’s sunny and hot outside, I’m a happy person. Right now, it’s 101°F, and I’m working out on the patio. I do have a Lasko tower fan running. But I’m guessing most of you will still think I’m crazy! 😅🔥 I guess being born in the freezing Midwest probably also didn’t help. 🥶
I’ve been in Arizona for over a decade now and have loved every single minute. 🌵 If I don’t see rain or snow for the rest of my life, I’ll be a happy camper.
Does your mood and personality change a lot simply due to the weather?
Updates ✍️
We pushed out a big update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
Added new Minify JS and Minify CSS features along with options to exclude specific files from minification and clear generated minified files when necessary. A big reason we added this now (besides a number of requests) is that Cloudflare is deprecating their minification feature in August. ⚡
Minify JS and CSS in Perfmatters UI Updates: What was previously the Assets tab has now been replaced by three more specific tabs, JavaScript, CSS, and Code. The main Script Manager toggle has been moved to Tools. Additional subheaders have also been added throughout to help with organization. 🎨
Added new perfmatters_minify_js filter.
Added new perfmatters_minify_js_exclusions filter.
Added new perfmatters_minify_css filter.
Added new perfmatters_minify_css_exclusions filter.
Added a REST API exception for Independent Analytics.
Added additional request parameter for Divi to excluded page builders array.
Added built-in critical image exclusion for WPML flag images.
Added Delay JS quick exclusion for Grow for WordPress.
Updated used CSS function to generate a separate file for each post type archive instead of a single shared stylesheet.
Fixed an issue that was causing an incorrect root directory to be returned for some environments.
Fixed an issue with preload and lazyload parent exclusion filters that was preventing them from excluding images correctly in some cases.
In case you missed it, you can check out our first video in the Vitality series on time to first byte (TTFB). ⚡ Presentation slides are included in the video description.
In our next video in July, we’re taking a deep dive into Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)! Feel free to sign up or mark your calendar.
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Catching up on an old Criminal Minds episode, they mentioned the Mandela Effect and how masses of people share the same false memories. For example, in Star Wars, Darth Vader never said, “Luke, I am your father.” He actually said, “No, I am your father.” But strangely, that’s not how I remember it. The blog post above has so many examples. They are fun to share with your family and friends. 😆
Sometimes, I still have to physically mail something. I’ve used DocuPost a couple of times now. It’s a great service. Skip envelopes, stamps, etc. They’ve digitized the entire process for you. 📫
Ever wonder how much you’ve spent with Amazon over your account’s entire history? I shared the steps to find out. Warning, you may not want to know.
Spotify is increasing US prices again. It’s the second time this year. I moved to Apple Music a while back. It just made more financial sense for me and family.
Heads up, Snagit is transitioning to a subscription-only model in fall 2024.
The Ulysses app got a great little update where you can now link to any heading within a sheet or external sheet.
If you missed WWDC, here are a few things I’m excited about:
Apple will launch a standalone Passwords app in iOS 18 and macOS 15.
Apple Music no longer uses the internet to view downloaded/cached albums, showing local items immediately (source). 🎵
macOS 15 introduces support for Nested Virtualization (source). ☁️
Support for a lot more customization on the home screen (source).
iPhone is finally getting RCS support (source).
macOS 15 will let you mirror your iPhone. I think this will come in super handy for website debugging and testing (source).
Should you leave a little of your work unfinished to increase your motivation the next day? An interesting productivity hack.
if() statements coming to CSS? Woah, this could be really cool!
FHFA announces conditional approval of Freddie Mac pilot to purchase second mortgages. While this might come in handy for some, I think adding more debt options will end in disaster.
WordPress
One of my favorite services, which I’ve been using a lot lately, is InstaWP. It’s so handy for quickly testing things (even faster than local), taking screenshots, sharing with clients, etc. Vikas is doing an incredible job. 👏 In fact, they just passed 1 million sites after only 2 years.
Hostinger, a Lithuanian hosting provider, was profitable for the first time, 20 years after launching. I’ll give them one thing, that is consistency!
The WordPress 6.5.4 maintenance release fixed the auto-redirect issue after plugin activation. Thank goodness, that was quite annoying.
GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks are getting merged into a single license for both products called GeneratePress One. Honestly, this is a good thing. It’s confusing to explain to folks that they need both. This will make things easier going forward. 👍
There is room for us to find our fun again. James shares 11 reasons why the future of WordPress is bright.
The WordPress theme directory gets a refresh and is now powered by blocks.
I’m enjoying these WordPress speed build challenges that Jamie has been doing. Check out Gutenberg + block theme versus GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks.
Good news, Kinsta has removed the distinction on migration types. All migrations are now free! They also include free malware cleanup when you move a site over.
A story of software refactoring: Converging the post and site editors in WordPress.
If you’re still using polyfill on your site (you shouldn’t be), make sure you’re not loading it from cdn.polyfill.io. A Chinese company bought the domain and has been spreading malware across 100,000+ sites. 😨 Cloudflare has a quick temporary fix, and you can also use their hosted version.
Performance
Mega Menu is super popular. And by default, it uses Dashicons, which is not great for performance. Especially if you only need it for one or two icons. I put together a quick tutorial on how to disable dashicons while still using Mega Menu.
WP Engine has launched a new Performance Insights section in their user portal. This is pretty cool!
Chrome engineers used field performance data to improve Interaction to Next Paint times by 5%. An interesting read.
Elementor 3.22 has added a few performance updates:
Caching feature for widgets, which dramatically decreases memory usage and TTFB. You can enable this under the new performance tab.
Replaced the external waypoint.js library with native JavaScript, reducing memory use by 18 KB.
How deep is your DOM? This is one of the best posts I’ve read in a long time. He visualizes the performance impact of adding more DOM elements and nested trees.
Web Vitals Chrome extension v1.5.1 has been released with new INP debug data in the console logging.
In WordPress 6.6, an autoload warning will be added to the Site Health check in core. This is great news!
Speaking of autoload, if you need to clean this up, I highly recommend the free AAA Option Optimizer plugin from Joost de Valk. I ran it on an old and large site and got my autoloaded size down 78.87%. 🔥
I’m still learning new things every day! Just discovered there is a way in Chrome DevTools to view the uncompressed size of a file as well. Comes in handy.
When your blobs are out of control. Check out the size of these things! 😮
Use the "Navigation Type Distribution" tab of the CrUX Dashboard to check how often things are getting prerendered with the Speculation Rules API.
Have far down the rabbit hole do you go with debugging? Here’s a comprehensive guide to JavaScript performance analysis using Chrome DevTools. ⚡
Marketing
A friendly reminder that Universal Analytics shuts down everything on July 1st. All UA properties will be inaccessible. You can manually back up your data or use an alternative solution like Fathom, which has a migrator. We use Fathom on our sites.
We previously ran a niche site and used Mediavine to earn revenue. I can vouch for their great service! They just launched Journey, a new product for sites with traffic starting at around 10,000 monthly sessions. 💵
Meta releases Threads API for developers to build unique integrations. Buffer has already pushed out Threads support. Anticipate many tools and products to follow suit.
Slack has added new project management features, including a Kanban board! I gave them a try. It’s still pretty basic, but keeping my eyes on improvements going forward.
Gen Z ditches Google, turns to Reddit for product searches. I’m not Gen Z, but I’ve been doing this for years. Reddit gives me the worst of the worst about a product right off the bat.
AI
OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership to integrate ChatGPT into Apple experiences.
Looks like Gemini might soon just be part of Google Chrome. You can run it locally and offline. It’s also blazing fast! 🔥
Luma AI released a Sora-like AI video generator called Dream Machine. Check out some of the videos users have made.
Major labels are now suing AI tools Suno and Udio for alleged copyright infringement.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet was just released. It claims to outperform competitor models on key evaluations, at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus and one-fifth the cost.
What should you do with AI bots and /wp-admin crawlers? Serve them a 10 GB file. 🤣
Bitcoin (not financial advice)
Louisiana passes bill to defend bitcoin rights and ban CBDCs.
Introducing Ark v2, an update that improves liquidity for Ark Service Providers (ASPs) in the Ark payment system.
There is no second best. I really enjoyed this presentation from Jack Mallers at BTC Prague.
Burak is launching a new bitcoin-based layer-2 solution called Brollups. This solution aims to enhance bitcoin’s scalability and introduce new decentralized finance use cases without requiring a fork or a new token.
Vexl is a mobile app that gives users a simple, accessible, and safe way to trade bitcoin as it was intended, peer-to-peer and without KYC.
Nubank has partnered with Lightspark to bring the bitcoin lightning network to its platform and customers. Ironically, Warren Buffett, who hates bitcoin, is a major investor in Nubank.
Strike introduces buy bitcoin, global payments, and more to customers in the United Kingdom. They also introduced no-fee DCA!
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋